A review of Teaching Defiance: Stories and Strategies for Activist Educators
by Kristen Kennedy
Calls for change—from student attitudes toward the subjects we teach to the conditions under which adjunct faculty labor—are familiar topics around the water cooler in academe. Rarely, though, do our calls come with specific directions for mapping out the means of achieving those desired ends. But two recent books take on the challenges of both. The first, Teaching Defiance: Stories and Strategies for Activist Educators (Jossey-Bass, 305 pp.), by Australian educator Michael Newman, is an impassioned argument for change with a few forays into general procedures for getting there, while the second, Ernst Benjamin and Michael Mauer’s Academic Collective Bargaining (MLA, 410 pp.), delivers an exquisitely practical guide to collective representation in higher education.
In Teaching Defiance, Newman makes no bones about his business here:
“As must already be obvious, this book is a polemic. I will put a case. I will take sides. I will argue that activist educators should teach people to make up their own minds and take control of their own lives. I will argue that we should teach ourselves and others to be defiant.”
Newman goes about this project by making a distinction between two terms that anchor the book: rebelliousness, which “is more a state of mind than of action” and its better half, defiance, which “is more thoughtful than rebelliousness.”
The path to defiance is paved with stories, and Newman invokes storytelling to illustrate what makes effective action. For example, the story of Rosa Parks serves as a model of the kind of spontaneous emotional force that defines productive rebellion. Add purpose to rebelliousness and you’ll get defiance, which is essentially the same thing as nonviolent resistance. If the name Ghandi just came to mind, then you’re on Newman’s path. The Indian activist is invoked several times in Newman’s book as an example of just about every virtue necessary for political change. A former colleague’s decision to commit suicide rather than suffer with AIDS is another more poignant one, and it’s when Newman writes about his less famous friends that the message he’s taking to the streets and classrooms touches on the inspirational. Writing about his colleague’s planned suicide, Newman concludes that in this case suicide was “an act of defiance in the face of an unwanted future.”
Newman is at his most helpful in Chapters 8 and 9, where he outlines the steps and strategies of effective negotiation. It’s not rocket science, but it should be required reading for anyone entering salary negotiations. That’s not to say, however, that Newman’s prescription for affecting change is dogmatically practical. Throughout he draws on the work of Michel Foucault and Jürgen Habermas, as well as Paulo Freire, for their help in explaining how power and language operate in complex organizations and does so in a lucid, helpful way, eventually closing with a chapter valuing the emotional exigence of defiance and choice: love, hate, and even violence are appropriate and, when necessary, can be used to motivate others in situations of injustice. Ultimately, Newman tries to inspire readers by stories of others, the famous and the unknown soldier of the everyday, who made choices and took risks in word and action. And this is ultimately the message the book leaves us with: act on principles to create a more just world.
Readers should know that much of Newman’s experience and his strategies for teaching defiance come from his work in adult education, specifically as a trainer for the Australian Trade Union Training Authority, so the book falls squarely in the category of management-training manifesto, a sort of Pedagogy of the Oppressed for the industrial workplace. Appropriately it bears all the hallmarks of that genre: clearly organized, laced with anecdote and acronym, and lined with so many common sense platitudes as to border on the absurd. To wit: “Stories can make us laugh or cry. They can inspire or depress us,” and in the chapter “Teaching about Action,” he observes, “violent action is physically dangerous.”
Anyone who’s survived a corporate training seminar will nevertheless appreciate Newman’s take on such standard workshop topics as negotiating power, communicating with hostile audiences, problem solving, and even how to run an effective meeting, because he’s essentially on our side. Rather than touting organizational policy on “managing up” or understanding one’s place in the corporate food chain, Newman is all about listening to anger and frustration, organizing it with a purpose, and recognizing moments that signal a time for change.
And deep organizational change is precisely the purview of Benjamin and Mauer’s Academic Collective Bargaining. Published by the collaborative efforts of the MLA and the AAUP, the twenty-seven essays in this edited collection are, among many other things, an admission that when it comes to the hiring of both part- and full-time contingent faculty, there may be no turning the tide. The most recent numbers from the AAUP verify that contingent faculty now make up 65 percent “of all faculty members in degree-granting institutions.”
As you’d expect, the MLA’s interpretation of employment trends is a dire one, with academic freedom heading the list of causalities inflicted by hiring temporary faculty to staff America’s classrooms. They open with a brief history of the problem, outlining how specific long-range factors, e.g., a period of inflation in the 70s leading to a decline in faculty salaries, have shaped academic culture, and by extension, collective bargaining practices.
This backdrop helps establish our current context of rapid “commercial growth” in higher education, which serves as a “barometer for and a victim of the most troubling tendencies of American society as a whole.” The proliferation of educational options and demand for “student choice,” they compare to “the growth of the American mall, whose attractions range from familiar department stores to specialized boutiques . . . . Commercial growth has been a hallmark of recent American experience, and higher education has shared that growth and exemplified its variety.” The increase in contingent faculty is a byproduct of this larger economic trend as institutions compete for paying customers with a labor pool that can be summoned to work or terminated on demand.
While the economic conditions and ethical consequences of these trends are well known to their audience, their goals here are not to join the chorus in the collective lament for tenure-track dreams deferred. Rather, we find a comprehensive and much needed history of how collective bargaining has, in many cases, dramatically improved job security, salaries, and even participation in shared governance for many, with the greatest economic gains going to faculty in community colleges. Between the history of bargaining in general and specific cases of faculty unionizing—the good, the bad, and the ugly—this is ultimately “a primer on faculty organizing” that defines key terms, e.g., the difference between collective bargaining and shared governance and what it means to live in a state that offers workers “comprehensive enabling legislation,” outlines procedures for forming a union, and explores the conditions under which unionizing may or may not be the best course of action.
In doing so, they provide more than a few eye-opening facts, namely a very important one about how the legal protections of the National Labor Relations Act do not extend to full-time faculty at private universities. Courtesy of the Supreme Court’s NLRB v. Yeshiva University decision, the increasing pool of full-time nontenure-track faculty members currently working at private institutions have no procedures or protections to certify a union under federal law. While most faculty members at public institutions are protected under the National Labor Relations Act, over “one-third of the states are currently without enabling legislation (that is, a statutory framework for unionization)” that would guide them in bargaining. The reasoning behind the ruling hinged on the Court’s interpretation of faculty as “managerial employees.”
Anyone working as a contingent faculty member—part- or full-time—in the U.S. today will find the definition of your status as “managerial,” as in having absolute academic authority, an almost laughable, uninformed proposition. And that’s one of many points the editors score throughout: many of us do not know what our rights are (or aren’t) under current employment law because, for a variety of reasons, we’ve never had to find out, or if we’re lucky, somebody already tread that ground for us. But as the section on specific bargaining cases evinces, the ground may be rising up to meet us; as the number of temporary faculty increases, so too do the obstacles that prevent collective bargaining at institutions where it’s most needed.
Granted this isn’t the kind of thing you want to read before signing on to teach another course, and it’s probably not the type of reading you’ll keep on the nightstand, but if the phrase “temporary” describes your status at the institution(s) where you work, then this is the kind of book you’ll want to keep in your library—or at least in the closet with the fire extinguisher and flashlight batteries—because you never know when you might need it and the chances are good that you will.
