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Use This Book
Reclaiming the Ivory Tower: Organizing Adjuncts to Change Higher Education.
Joe Berry. New York: Monthly Review Press, 2005.
Reviewed by Elizabeth Hoffman
In April 2007, just days before what would have been the largest higher education strike in this country’s history, the California Faculty Association (CFA), the union representing the 23,000 faculty, coaches, librarians, and counselors of the California State University system, reached agreement with the statewide CSU administration. The agreement came after two years of struggle that had culminated in a 94 percent strike vote by the faculty. The slogan on the T-shirts and posters was “I don’t want to strike but I will,” a message that expressed not only the faculty’s reluctance to walk out in the first-ever such job action in the CSU system, but also the faculty’s growing sense that such an action was necessary to protect the future of the university.
A turning point in the contract campaign occurred when CFA officers went to a meeting of the Los Angeles County Federation of Labor to ask for strike sanction. The Los Angeles County Federation of Labor has more than 800,000 members from some 350 different unions, many of whom work harder and earn less than CSU faculty. Sitting at the meeting, I wondered how sympathetic this audience would be to the plight of college professors. However, Lillian Taiz, vice president and incoming president of the CFA, spoke about the fight to demand administrative accountability for public funds, stop the rapid increases in student tuition, and protect access to high-quality higher education. She asked how many in the audience had sent a family member to a CSU campus or hoped to do so. Hands went up all over the hall, followed by someone yelling out, “Heck, don’t make them wait—let’s sanction their strike right now,” followed by a standing ovation. The solidarity that night is something I will never forget.
That evening made me think back to an earlier turning point in CFA’s contract fight: the publication of Joe Berry’s book Reclaiming the Ivory Tower: Organizing Adjuncts to Change Higher Education and its impact on CFA lecturers. Lecturers, who have temporary or contingent appointments, make up 54 percent of the CSU faculty and do at least 60 percent of the teaching in the system. Lecturers are fortunate to be part of a system that has collective bargaining and fortunate to be part of a union that gains strength from its size and its affiliations with the Service Employees International Union, the American Association of University Professors, the National Education Association, and the California Teachers Association.
Despite the advantages of being included in a strong union, CSU lecturers never forget the temporary nature of their appointments. Most lecturers, including me, had trouble even saying the word “strike” out loud. This changed, due in part to Joe Berry, who spent two days with CFA lecturers at a statewide planning meeting after Reclaiming the Ivory Tower was published in 2005. Some of us already knew Berry as a nationally recognized leader in faculty organizing for his work with the Coalition of Contingent Academic Labor and the North American Alliance for Fair Employment, but for most of the CFA lecturers this meeting was the first opportunity to hear Berry’s compelling account of why higher education must change, why contingent faculty must be part of that change, and how collective action is the antidote to the fear and fatalism that are obstacles to building any social justice movement. While acknowledging our always precarious status, Berry reminded us that lecturers in the CSU system have made more progress in the contingent struggle than faculty anywhere else in the country and have a responsibility to speak out.
Reclaiming the Ivory Tower is in large part a handbook that helps contingent faculty organize and build power to make change, even if the first step is creating Berry’s famous “committee of two.” The book is dense with specific tactics for effective organizing but is also about coalition building both inside and outside of faculty groups. Berry understands that fighting back against the “casualization of the faculty workforce” is not just the job of contingent faculty but will take the support and resources of all faculty and of allies outside the ivory tower. As Berry points out, this casualization is the cutting edge of corporatization in higher education, whose proponents view tenure as an outdated privilege that can no longer be accommodated, and the trends are clear: only one-third of faculty in higher education are now tenured or on tenure lines.
Berry’s book is more than an organizing handbook and should be read by more than just contingent faculty. He reminds us why tenure matters and how the attack on it is accelerating:
historically the special case for academic tenure has been that the freedom to search for and speak the truth as one sees it (academic freedom) is not possible except under conditions of tenure-like job security. If one is afraid of being fired, one will, naturally, tend to watch one’s tongue. Since it is not in the public interest to have students taught by people who are afraid to speak the truth as they see it, tenure has been seen as a public good. Now that most teachers in higher education have neither tenure nor the prospect of ever getting it, administrators and trustees have won a great victory. They have much greater flexibility to hire and fire as program and enrollment demands, and the faculty as a whole is less able to set the terms of its own work. So, as tenured faculty retire, many of their jobs are converted into non-tenured contingent ones.
Berry makes clear throughout his book that the attack on faculty is about power, not about building excellence in higher education or improving access and opportunity for students. The creation of an increasingly powerless faculty undermines both excellence and the university’s essential role in society. Berry’s use in the title of the term “ivory tower,” commonly employed as a dismissive reference to an irrelevant relic from the past, is deliberate. It is precisely what has stood the test of time in the university—seeking truth—that Berry argues is worth protecting. Berry believes that the most marginalized faculty sometimes see most clearly what has been lost, and they must be part of the defense of what is threatened. But, he argues, contingent faculty can’t do this alone, and the struggle demands an active alliance among all faculty and with students and the society outside higher education, building the “broadest unity possible,” which, Berry reminds us, “is the only source of our power to change anything.” The contingent faculty in the CSU system rose to the challenge in our recent labor battle. In January 2007, lecturer representatives from all twenty-three campuses signed pledges committing to vote for a strike and posted a message to that effect with a group picture on the CFA Web site at http://www.calfac.org/ lecturers.html. Lecturers and tenure-track faculty were united in their commitment to a contract that was fair to all. John Travis, the CFA president who led us through the campaign, made a pledge that there would be no contract settlement unless the contract addressed lecturer issues. CFA’s “Unite to Win” campaign resulted in a contract that protects lecturer job security and gives priority to increasing the number and percentage of tenure-track faculty—an increase that is not at the expense of incumbent lecturers and gives lecturers serious consideration for permanent positions. It’s a great start toward reclaiming the ivory tower.
Elizabeth Hoffman is a lecturer in the English department and project leader of the Faculty Center for Professional Development at the California State University–Long Beach. She is associate vice president–lecturers of the California Faculty Association and an AAUP Council member representing District I. Her e-mail address is ehoffman@csulb.edu.
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