A Review of Steal This University
by Vicki Urquhart
History professors Benjamin Johnson and Kevin Mattson, and union representative Patrick Kavanagh, provide an insider’s look at the academic labor movement in Steal This University. Labor activists all, they speak with one voice to warn of the imminent demise of the professoriate and the simultaneous rise of the corporate university. “The use of part-time hires, including graduate student teachers and postdocs, has grown and grown for the last several decades,” writes Johnson. “A majority of those who now teach in the nation’s colleges and universities are paid poorly, have little or no job security, few or no retirement or health benefits, only the weakest of free-speech protections, and no long-term relationship or commitment to a university community” (p. 61).
If you’ve ever wondered how higher education has changed since you were a student, you’ll be interested in the essays anthologized here, but stakeholders in the academic labor movement, adjunct faculty, labor activists, and university leadership, are the primary audience. Personal accounts from current and former adjuncts, graduate students, and professors reveal more than moderate discontent with low wages and lack of benefits; they speak of the dehumanizing affects of a system that exploits academic labor and shortchanges students. Their stories are serious business, and there is no doubt that Johnson, Mattson, and Kavanagh have a pro-union bias. Nonetheless, each essay is presented with respect for the reader’s position, whatever that might be, and the contributor’s personal experience.
As if lawyers preparing to face a jury, Johnson, Mattson, and Kavanagh organized Steal This University into three sections with distinct purposes. The first section, The Rise of the Corporate University, explores the changing world of academia and contains essays that underscore the scope of the problem. “The Drain-O of Higher Education,” for instance, contains figures from the Department of Education National Center for Education Statistics that support the claim that the percentage of part-time faculty from 1972 to the end of the century has doubled. Not surprisingly, given the background of the editors, this section also includes significant exploration of historical and sociological approaches that might explain the changes in the academic world.
Ana Marie Cox’s piece relating the dramatic success of the for-profit University of Phoenix is fascinating, and Denise Tanguay offers a respectable critique of merit pay systems, but the most compelling of these background essays is David Noble’s “Digital Diploma Mills.” This essay examines the perils of an ever-increasing reliance on distance learning. He cites the events of 1997, when UCLA became the first university to mandate the use of computer telecommunications technology in the delivery of higher education, as pivotal. That same year, students and full-time faculty of York University, in Canada, voted against a similar technology initiative, and the York faculty became the first to gain formal contractual protection against such university actions. According to Noble, ever since these events, the interests of university administrators and their commercial partners has run smack into the interests of students and teachers, and there is no middle ground. In Noble’s assessment, over the last two decades, a change in social perception “has resulted in the systematic conversion of intellectual activity into intellectual capital and, hence, intellectual property” (p. 34). This thinking, exemplified by university production and marketing of copyright videos, courseware, CD-ROMs, and Web sites, has brought major change to academia, he concludes.
The second section, Laboring Within, offers personal accounts of living with the devastating fallout of the corporate influence. In these essays, we hear from a new generation of scholars who can’t find full-time employment or make a living wage to support themselves and their families. Given no alternative but to work as part-timers, they view themselves as workers, nothing more or less, contends Kevin Mattson in “How I Became a Worker.” Mattson believes his one-year adjunct experience typifies the plight of today’s graduate students and long-time adjuncts. He observes that, among other ills, job security is an oxymoron and adjuncts are intentionally isolated from one another. Mattson calls for adjuncts to embrace the label “worker” and to join with other workers to effect change in our institutions of higher education.
The final section, Organizing, focuses on what adjuncts, labor organizers, or both, have done and can do about changing the current academic system. It also reveals that change has not and will not come easily. These essays dramatically relate how careers and lives have been irrevocably altered as a consequence of actively participating in labor organizing efforts. The essays also contain blueprints for what to do and what to avoid. For example, Lisa Jessups’s essay, “The Campaign for Union Rights at NYU,” details the nuts and bolts of organizing, the legal issues involved, various roles of faculty, administration, and union representatives during a campaign. Other essays revisit the union drives at Minnesota, the Boston-area efforts of the Coalition of Contingent Academic Labor, and the struggle of the California Faculty Association to better the conditions of its members.
The stated goal of Steal This University “is to make a new entry into the debate about the future of higher education in America and what role the academic labor movement has in shaping this debate” (p. 7). The editors are true to their mission, offering us a divergent collection of essays. Yet, there is an ominous tone. They would have us believe that the loss is far greater than it first seems and the danger far more insidious. Whether you support, oppose, or are neutral toward labor unions, you need to read this book. They make a logical and rational case for acting now.
