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From the Editor: The New Academic Labor System
Lawrence Hanley
What is academic labor? Professors, after all, engage in a lot of different kinds of work: grading papers, participating in curriculum committees, writing book and literature reviews, leading online discussions, conducting research. While all these tasks involve work, some of them—especially those associated with teaching—often seem more like "labor" than others. Alternatively, what is an academic laborer? Lately, the number and kind of academic appointments have been proliferating: tenured full professors, term-appointment assistant professors, part-time faculty, graduate students, lecturers. For that matter, what about all those nonfaculty workers central to academic work: online course designers, technicians, administrative assistants, coordinators, counselors, and others. Whether and how "academic labor" might encompass all of these workers, this nominal exercise underscores one important fact about contemporary academia: over the past several decades, the whole idea of academic work has become much less straightforward and much more complicated.
A primary engine of this change has been the tremendous shift from full-time faculty employment to part-time employment, and likewise from tenure-track to non-tenure-track appointments. For a growing majority, academic employment has become increasingly "contingent." Politicians and pundits may bad-mouth faculty tenure, but the reality is that the typical professor in today's academy has poor pay, radical job insecurity, and diminished job benefits. As Gwendolyn Bradley explains in her article, this new "academic labor system" poses serious challenges to the core of the academic profession—faculty governance, faculty autonomy, and academic freedom. As John Hess describes it, the vicissitudes of the new academic labor system have given rise to a whole new professional identity: the entrepreneurial adjunct. Contingent faculty, according to Hess, are increasingly being asked to work and imagine themselves as subcontractors and free agents. Teaching becomes more like piecework as faculty slide down the job ladder from professionals to employees.
Steven Cahn offers a short course in reprofessionalizing teaching, the neglected sibling of our other, more celebrated professional labor—research. The ongoing deterioration of professional work conditions creates, however, a spur, as Daniel Julius points out in his essay, to unionization. But, as activists have discovered, the new academic labor system produces a workforce so fugitive, fragmented, and mobile as to baffle most organizing efforts. Julie Schmid suggests that we look to the high-tech sector, where contingent, contract employment is even more typical. She urges academic unionists to move away from place-based approaches to organizing and embrace new ways of creating cyber-communities and worker collectivities. Michelle Glaros examines how, in preparing the "digital workers" of the new economy, our own labor stands to become increasingly less academic. The high-tech industry is also famous for introducing the "cubicle" as a new form of professional workspace. And, in his essay, Terry Caesar speculates on the fateful transition from faculty office to faculty cubicle.
Finally, the essays by Philip Altbach and JoAnn Moody engage with two keywords in the new academic lexicon: competition and diversity. Altbach dissects the costs and benefits of the seemingly ubiquitous current ambition to stake a claim to the title "world-class university." Moody offers some very helpful advice on how to retain women and minority faculty within universities, world class and otherwise.
Is the new academic labor system here to stay? None of the essays in this issue promises to solve the riddles, inequities, and absurdities of our changing work conditions. Still, each offers at the very least some significant resources for change.
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