Tell me and I forget. Teach me and I remember. Involve me and I learn. Benjamin Franklin

Wednesday, April 30, 2014

The Ivory Cage and the Ghosts of Academe: Labor and Struggle in the Edu-Factory

Truthout | News Analysis  Wednesday, 30 April 2014 

By Max Haiven

Recognition of the deteriorating state of academic labor in anglophone universities on both sides of the Atlantic is at an all-time high. Thanks to the tireless work of precarious university employees and their representative organizations (from formal trade unions to informal collectives, from lobby groups to activist knowledge-production outfits and blogs), the story of the exploited adjunct, the glut of hopeless doctoral candidates, and the legions of overworked teaching assistants have graced the pages of many fine books and journals and many leading newspapers and periodicals. Indeed, these stories have become a regular feature of publications like the Chronicle of Higher Education and Times Higher Education supplement and increasingly appear on the agenda at large scholarly gatherings, including the Modern Language Association. Even lawmakers are taking notice. Protests are becoming more emphatic and militant. We are amidst a great thaw, where the taboo topic of academic exploitation, once privatized and blamed on "failed" individual scholars, is being rendered unavoidable and recognized as a systemic and pervasive problem. More accurately, the university's most vulnerable academic workers are fighting back against the "externalization" of the crisis of higher education onto their shoulders: the downloading of a systemic and structural crisis onto the lonely, precarious individual.

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