Cogs in the Classroom Factory The Changing Identity of Academic Labor

Subjects:

• Education » Higher Education
• Economics » Labor Relations

Awards:

• Academic Essentials-Education Academia September 2003

Reviews:

• By focusing on the state of the academic job system on their campuses, the contributors to this volume suggest some alternatives for responding to the ongoing erosioin of tenure and academic freedom in higher education and reshaping the academic workplace.
  —Sociological Abstracts December 2006
• The book's chapters are consistently readable, accessible, and of good quality. The volume should be of much value to readers of varied interest. The most natural audience is those interested in academic labor, and in unions. More than that, and regardless of one's perspective on unions, the volume offers insight into important features of academic workplaces, graduate student activism, and restructuring....[C]ogs in the Classroom Factory is an excellent contribution to the literature, with rich insights into the details of graduate employee and contingent faculty organizing and work. It is essential reading for anyone interested in the restructuring of academic work, for its focus on the identities of employees and their unions addresses a key factor in organizing academic work in the 21st century workplace.
  —The Journal of Higher Education July/August 2005
• The energy evident in the struggles documented in this volume, as well as the fact that higher education is now one of the most heavily unionized sectors in the United States, argues that academics are increasingly identifying and organizing as workers, not only for better working conditions but also for better universities. For researchers interested in the new labor movement in higher education, this collection is a valuable new addition.
  —Work and Occupations February 2005
• How do you take weak-willed academic suck-ups and turn them into militant union members in less than a year? It is in answering this question that Cogs makes its most useful contribution....While the answers vary, and there is obviously no formula, the richness of the book is it's ability to place the concrete details of campaign stories in the context of this theoretical question of how unions transform the consciousness of their members....[t]hese essays should prove valuable to organizers of a wide range of professional workers. Labor educators preparing to teach organizing skills to academic unionists- or teaching credit classes to graduate students- will also find this book useful.
  —Labor Studies Journal Summer 2004
• Cogs in the Classroom Factory will be of interest to those in academe, particularly those at large universities, who are interested in organizing their ranks to achieve greater rights, benefits, and democracy in the workplace-graduate employees, adjunct faculty, tenured and not-yet-tenured full-time faculty, and union organizers
  —NEA Higher Education Journal Winter 2004
• This book combines valuable case studies with useful and suggestive analysis of the contemporary process of academic restructuring....this book is a powerful tonic for those days where you feel worn down by the grind and resigned to the inevitability of the changes we confront.
  —CAUT Bulletin

• Endorsement From Caroline Waldron Merithew, Visiting Assistant Professor, Industrial and Labor Relations, Cornell University: Cogs in the Classroom Factory offers a view of the university from the bottom-up-a place where academic workers' struggles provide an alternative to the top-down corporate model now creeping into many administrations. An engaging and important read!
• Endorsement From Philo Hutcheson, author of A Professional Professoriate: Unionization, Bureaucratization, and the AAUP,
  Associate Professor of Educational Policy Studies, Georgia State University: This work underscores the fact that faculty unionization is not a simple reaction against working conditions, but reflects deep commitment to working in the academic world as a shared, intellectual pursuit and not as an enterprising capital venture for administrators and senior faculty members. Academic labor is a reality, not a neologism created by frustrated trade unionists, and that reality begs for definition by all members of the professoriate.
• Endorsement From Cary Nelson, co-author of Academic Keywords: A Devil's Dictionary for Higher Education
  Professor of English, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign: The hottest issue on campus is the effort by graduate students and faculty to return control of academia to the workers who actually care about teaching and research.Cogs in the Classroom Factory is the first book to give us a riveting series of on-the-ground reports from this ongoing struggle. If you want to know what it's like to fight for change in higher education, you should read this book.

Table of Contents:

• Foreword: Preserving Our Independence, Acting Together by David Montgomery
• Introduction: The Changing Identity of Academic Labor by Julie M. Schmid and Deborah M. Herman
• A New Divide: Faculty and Others
• Above and Below; Mapping Social Positions within the Academy by Wesley Shumar and Jonathan T. Church
• Dueling Identities and Faculty Unions: A Canadian Case Study by Mike Burke and Joanne Naiman
• In a Leftover Office in Chicago by Joe Berry
• A New Generation, Charting New Waters
• More Than Academic: Labor Consciousness and the Rise of UE Local 896-COGS by Susan Roth Breitzer
• Pyrrhic Victory at UC Santa Barbara: The Struggle for Labor's New Identity by Richard Sullivan
• Unfinished Chapters: Institutional Alliances and Changing Identities in a Graduate Employee Union by James Thompson
• New Tactics, Old Battlegrounds
• Shutting Down the Academic Factory: Developing Worker Identity in Graduate Unions by Eric Dirnbach and Susan Chimonas
• Are You Now or Have You Ever Been an Employee?: Contesting Grad Labor in the Academy by William Vaughn
• The Politics of Constructing Dissent: The Rhetorical Construction of Faculty Union Membership by Darla S. Williams
• Afterword: Classroom, Lab, Factory Floor: Common Labor Struggles by Carl Rosen
• Index