PROFESSORS WITHOUT PICKET SIGNS (II)(FN1): WHERE IS THE PROFESSORATE WHEN IT'S NEEDED THE MOST?
| AUTHOR: | JAMES OTTAVIO CASTAGNERA |
| TITLE: | PROFESSORS WITHOUT PICKET SIGNS (II)(FN1): WHERE IS THE PROFESSORATE WHEN IT'S NEEDED THE MOST? |
| SOURCE: | Labor Law Journal 52 no3 157-65 Fall 2001 |
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The Middle Ages are not an era I used to think about very often. Five years ago this changed. During the first lunch meeting of many I was to have with the chief negotiator for my university's chapter of the American Association of University Professors (AAUP)--whose collective agreement I had been hired to administer and negotiate for the administration--he outlined the genesis of the modern college. Professors, it seems, initially recruited their own students, taught their classes, and collected their fees. When this became too troublesome, they hired administrators to find the students and collect the tuition. Down the centuries, the support staff grew in size and complexity until voila, the modern megaversity of post-World War II America.
The moral of this allegorical tale is that "you can eliminate the security department and you'll have an unsafe university; you can eliminate the facilities department, and you'll have a dirty campus. But eliminate the faculty, and you don't have a university anymore."
This made sense to me at the time (or was it the single-malt Scotch the chief negotiator and I sampled together?). Today, though, I wonder, especially when I learn such facts as, "About 40 percent of Yale's teaching is now done by graduate students ... and 30 percent by adjunct faculty"(FN2) The University of Phoenix (UP), the nation's leading for-profit college, employs a tiny full-time faculty at the home office, which pumps out courses and curricula to the thousands of part-timers who staff UP's classrooms across the country. Where is the venerable centrality of the faculty in these models? What was once a reality is fast becoming an ideal which the AAUP fights to foster and preserve.
Collective bargaining is at the core of the AAUP's fight for faculty centrality. Nevertheless, faculty members seldom share any sense of solidarity with blue-collar employees and grad student unions on their campuses. To the contrary, they tend to line up with the administration when their teaching assistants or the school's cafeteria workers seek to organize.(FN3)
Universities for their part commonly espouse such civic virtues as diversity and social justice, yet quickly oppose union organizing on their own campuses.(FN4) In an earlier article published in THE LABOR LAW JOURNAL(FN5) I argued for labor-management cooperation between faculty unions and administrators on college campuses, but I argued for it in the context of collective bargaining and cooperative problem solving. Today, what we are witnessing is faculty members aligned with administration as managers allied with managers, confirming the rightness of the U.S. Supreme Court's Yeshiva decision. Perhaps, even more accurately, when we see faculty aligned with administrators to thwart the aspirations of blue-collar workers and teaching assistants on campuses, we are witnessing entrepreneurial professionals protecting their own interests, where they feel no sense of shared community with the institution's 'grunt workers.'
In a recent article in CHANGE Magazine(FN6) I contended that higher education must act as a counterweight to corporate global power and must reach out globally to help lift up the wretched of the earth.
This article extends that thesis. It contends that faculty members, in order to protect their own historically-central status in the university and to compel their institutions to rise to the challenge of fulfilling this historic opportunity to champion justice in the global arena, must rekindle the sense of community and shared responsibility, once a hallmark of most college campuses, but which globalization and professionalization have eroded and placed in mortal danger.(FN7)
Let's begin with a brief retrospective on professorial activism in the 1950s and 1960s.
The Middle Ages are not an era I used to think about very often. Five years ago this changed. During the first lunch meeting of many I was to have with the chief negotiator for my university's chapter of the American Association of University Professors (AAUP)--whose collective agreement I had been hired to administer and negotiate for the administration--he outlined the genesis of the modern college. Professors, it seems, initially recruited their own students, taught their classes, and collected their fees. When this became too troublesome, they hired administrators to find the students and collect the tuition. Down the centuries, the support staff grew in size and complexity until voila, the modern megaversity of post-World War II America.
The moral of this allegorical tale is that "you can eliminate the security department and you'll have an unsafe university; you can eliminate the facilities department, and you'll have a dirty campus. But eliminate the faculty, and you don't have a university anymore."
This made sense to me at the time (or was it the single-malt Scotch the chief negotiator and I sampled together?). Today, though, I wonder, especially when I learn such facts as, "About 40 percent of Yale's teaching is now done by graduate students ... and 30 percent by adjunct faculty"(FN2) The University of Phoenix (UP), the nation's leading for-profit college, employs a tiny full-time faculty at the home office, which pumps out courses and curricula to the thousands of part-timers who staff UP's classrooms across the country. Where is the venerable centrality of the faculty in these models? What was once a reality is fast becoming an ideal which the AAUP fights to foster and preserve.
Collective bargaining is at the core of the AAUP's fight for faculty centrality. Nevertheless, faculty members seldom share any sense of solidarity with blue-collar employees and grad student unions on their campuses. To the contrary, they tend to line up with the administration when their teaching assistants or the school's cafeteria workers seek to organize.(FN3)
Universities for their part commonly espouse such civic virtues as diversity and social justice, yet quickly oppose union organizing on their own campuses.(FN4) In an earlier article published in THE LABOR LAW JOURNAL(FN5) I argued for labor-management cooperation between faculty unions and administrators on college campuses, but I argued for it in the context of collective bargaining and cooperative problem solving. Today, what we are witnessing is faculty members aligned with administration as managers allied with managers, confirming the rightness of the U.S. Supreme Court's Yeshiva decision. Perhaps, even more accurately, when we see faculty aligned with administrators to thwart the aspirations of blue-collar workers and teaching assistants on campuses, we are witnessing entrepreneurial professionals protecting their own interests, where they feel no sense of shared community with the institution's 'grunt workers.'
In a recent article in CHANGE Magazine(FN6) I contended that higher education must act as a counterweight to corporate global power and must reach out globally to help lift up the wretched of the earth.
This article extends that thesis. It contends that faculty members, in order to protect their own historically-central status in the university and to compel their institutions to rise to the challenge of fulfilling this historic opportunity to champion justice in the global arena, must rekindle the sense of community and shared responsibility, once a hallmark of most college campuses, but which globalization and professionalization have eroded and placed in mortal danger.(FN7)
Let's begin with a brief retrospective on professorial activism in the 1950s and 1960s.
1. PROFESSORIAL ACTIVISM IN THE FIFTIES AND SIXTIES
The pivotal professorial personality on academe's left during the 1950s was C. Wright Mills. A strapping young genius out of Dallas, he came to Columbia University by way of graduate school at the University of Wisconsin. As much a journalist as a sociologist, he facilitated the intellectual transition from the discredited Marxism of the 1930s to the New Left of the 1960s. In such seminal works as The Power Elite,(FN8) Mills crafted a powerful critique of capitalism at a time when post-war prosperity was at its peak. An example:
The pivotal professorial personality on academe's left during the 1950s was C. Wright Mills. A strapping young genius out of Dallas, he came to Columbia University by way of graduate school at the University of Wisconsin. As much a journalist as a sociologist, he facilitated the intellectual transition from the discredited Marxism of the 1930s to the New Left of the 1960s. In such seminal works as The Power Elite,(FN8) Mills crafted a powerful critique of capitalism at a time when post-war prosperity was at its peak. An example:
The power elite is composed of men whose positions enable them to transcend the ordinary environments of ordinary men and women; they are in positions to make decisions having major consequences ... They rule the big corporations. They run the machinery of state and claim its prerogatives. They direct the military establishment. They occupy the strategic command posts of the social structure, in which are now centered the effective means of the power and the wealth and the celebrity which they enjoy.
****
The men of the higher circles are not representative men; their high position is not a result of moral virtue; their fabulous success is not firmly connected with meritorious ability. Those who sit in the seats of the high and the mighty are selected and formed by the means of power, the sources of wealth, the mechanics of celebrity, which prevail in their society.... They are not men shaped by nationally responsible parties that debate openly and clearly the issues this nation now so unintelligently confronts. They are not men held in responsible check by a plurality of responsible organizations which connect debating publics with the pinnacles of decision. Commanders of power unequaled in human history, they have succeeded within the American system of organized irresponsibility.(FN9)
Mills, in seeking a solution to the problems he perceived, placed his faith in the emerging nations of the Third World and in organized labor.(FN10)
Though Mills died of heart disease at age 46 in 1962, he succeeded in recasting the image of the college professor.
Though Mills died of heart disease at age 46 in 1962, he succeeded in recasting the image of the college professor.
A man of fierce physical and intellectual presence, Mills was remembered by his friends... first and foremost for his energy and combativeness. Academics were expected to be genteel and solicitous of their colleagues; most professors at Columbia wore the academic uniform of tweed jacket, flannel slacks, and bow ties. But Mills seemed determined to provoke and antagonize his colleagues. He dressed as a lumberjack -- in khaki pants, flannel shirts, and combat boots -- and would arrive for class from his house in the country (which he had built himself) astride his BMW motorcycle. His style, body language, and pronouncements seemed calculated to rebuke the more polished world around him; he was from the real world, his manner seemed to say, as the others in academe were not.(FN11)
Mills exited stage-left at a time when the professorate and their students were just awakening to the power of their institutions. In the words of Harvard economist J. K. Galbraith, writing in 1967:
As the trade unions retreat, more or less permanently, into the shadows, a rapidly growing body of educators and research scientists emerges. This group connects at the edges with scientists and engineers within the technostructure and with civil servants, journalists, writers and artists outside.... They stand in relation to the industrial system much as did the banking and financial community to the earlier stages of industrial development. Then capital was decisive, and a vast network of banks, savings banks, insurance companies, brokerage houses and investment bankers came into existence to mobilize savings and thus to meet the need. In the mature corporation the decisive factor of production... is the supply of qualified talent. A similar complex of educational institutions has similarly come into being to supply this need.(FN12)
The year that Mills died, Tom Hayden became president of the Students for a Democratic Society. SDS was the largest of a flock of leftist student organizations which included the DuBois Clubs, the May 2nd Movement, and the Young Socialist Alliance. First achieving national prominence during the Berkeley Free Speech movement in 1964, SDS went on to take the lead in the anti-draft program beginning in September 1965. By 1968 the student anti-war movement had fractured into many splinters, some like the Weathermen being avowedly violent in their tactics.(FN13) In 1969 the Skolnick Report to the National Commission on the Causes and Prevention of Violence would write, "Student activism during the 1960's appears... to have unprecedented qualities. Compared to earlier activism, that of the 1960's involves more students and engages them more continuously, is more widely distributed on campuses throughout the country, is more militant, is more hostile to established authority and institutions ... and has been more sustained."(FN14)
More important to my purpose is that members of the faculty often joined or sympathized with students. The Skolnick Report blamed this on the fragmentation of the "megaversity," where specialized faculty in a seller's market felt no loyalty to their particular institutions. "Only a few universities, such as Harvard and Chicago, have traditions of sufficient prestige to assure the loyalty of their faculties ... Studies of student activists indicate that they have close ties to faculty; activists are not unknown and anonymous faces in the classroom."(FN15)
By the end of the decade of the sixties, the professorate and the student left were parting company, as the violent and anti-intellectual turn increasingly alienated their professorial supporters. As Nathan Glazer recently recalled, "When I came to Berkeley, in 1963, I still thought of myself as a man of the left, and for the first few months of the free-speech issue, I was on the side of the free-speech people. The students I was closest to were people who believed in organizing. But there came a time when I felt that the push against institutional authority was simply excessive."(FN16) For Paul Goodman, whose writings--notably Growing Up Absurd, which first brought him national attention in 1960--and activism had won him the title "the Joan of Arc of the Free Student Movement,"(FN17) that time came while he was trying to teach a graduate seminar on professionalism in 1969. "He hoped to teach the difference between careerism and fidelity to a professional calling. To his astonishment the class rejected the notion that there was such a thing as a true profession. All decisions were made by the power structure. Professionals were merely peer groups formed to delude the public and make money."(FN18) Recalled Goodman, "Suddenly I realized that they did not really believe that there was a nature of things. Somehow all functions could be reduced to interpersonal relations and power. There was no knowledge, only the sociology of knowledge.... Then I knew that I could not get through to them."(FN19)
While the student movement of the sixties still had its most violent scenes to play in the early seventies--notably the Kent State shooting in May 1970--many of the most activist and sympathetic faculty, like Goodman and Glazer, were turning away.
More important to my purpose is that members of the faculty often joined or sympathized with students. The Skolnick Report blamed this on the fragmentation of the "megaversity," where specialized faculty in a seller's market felt no loyalty to their particular institutions. "Only a few universities, such as Harvard and Chicago, have traditions of sufficient prestige to assure the loyalty of their faculties ... Studies of student activists indicate that they have close ties to faculty; activists are not unknown and anonymous faces in the classroom."(FN15)
By the end of the decade of the sixties, the professorate and the student left were parting company, as the violent and anti-intellectual turn increasingly alienated their professorial supporters. As Nathan Glazer recently recalled, "When I came to Berkeley, in 1963, I still thought of myself as a man of the left, and for the first few months of the free-speech issue, I was on the side of the free-speech people. The students I was closest to were people who believed in organizing. But there came a time when I felt that the push against institutional authority was simply excessive."(FN16) For Paul Goodman, whose writings--notably Growing Up Absurd, which first brought him national attention in 1960--and activism had won him the title "the Joan of Arc of the Free Student Movement,"(FN17) that time came while he was trying to teach a graduate seminar on professionalism in 1969. "He hoped to teach the difference between careerism and fidelity to a professional calling. To his astonishment the class rejected the notion that there was such a thing as a true profession. All decisions were made by the power structure. Professionals were merely peer groups formed to delude the public and make money."(FN18) Recalled Goodman, "Suddenly I realized that they did not really believe that there was a nature of things. Somehow all functions could be reduced to interpersonal relations and power. There was no knowledge, only the sociology of knowledge.... Then I knew that I could not get through to them."(FN19)
While the student movement of the sixties still had its most violent scenes to play in the early seventies--notably the Kent State shooting in May 1970--many of the most activist and sympathetic faculty, like Goodman and Glazer, were turning away.
2. FACULTY UNIONISM IN THE 1970S AND THE YESHIVA DECISION
Concurrent with the anti-war activism on college campuses from around 1965 into the early to mid-1970s, faculty at some 350 colleges and universities sought to unionize and enter into collective bargaining relationships with their institutions.(FN20) In many instances these faculties were responding to new enabling legislation at the state level allowing for collective bargaining at public institutions of higher learning.(FN21) This decade--roughly 1965 to 1974--has been labeled "the faculty bargaining movement."(FN22) The movement was not confined to public institutions, but was apparent on private campuses too. Even sectarian schools, such as St. John's University in New York and Catholic University in Washington suffered strikes.(FN23)
Sometimes the links between the student movement and the faculty bargaining movement during the 1960s seem compelling. For example, San Francisco State College endured both a student strike centered upon the school's Black Studies Department and the level of African-American student enrollment(FN24) and a faculty organizing strike.(FN25)
The unions most strongly interested in organizing faculty were the American Association of University Professors (AAUP), the National Education Association (NEA) and the American Federation of Teachers (AFT). The NEA and AAUP also view themselves as professional organizations, while the AFT--an affiliate of the AFL-CIO--is more purely and exclusively a labor union.
Strikes by faculty unions were relatively rare.(FN26) Several explanations leap to mind: faculty aversion to the heightened level of student violence during this time period, as noted above; legislative restraints on picketing and work stoppages by public employees,(FN27) and the relatively high level of conflict aversion one encounters generally in academia. "[I]n the first decade of the faculty bargaining movement, there [were] only five strikes recorded in four-year institutions. In addition there [were] only twenty-five to thirty strikes in two year institutions," noted contemporary observers.(FN28) They added, "Given the fact that there have been approximately 500 two-year and 150 four-year agreements negotiated over a ten-year period, the level of strike activity can be considered low."(FN29)
Another source reported 200 collective bargaining elections on four-year campuses between 1970 and 1977, with 75 percent of them resulting in union victories.(FN30) This source suggested that the causes of the proliferation of faculty organizing efforts included:
* Permissive governments, i.e., enabling legislation
* Desire for higher wages and benefits
* Desire for more influence in campus governance
* Fear of a teacher surplus
* Public support for higher education
* Union activism and competition for new members.(FN31)
Whatever the causes, those halcyon days were about to end. In 1980 the U.S. Supreme Court decided the Yeshiva University case.(FN32) The 5-4 decision held that the faculty of certain schools at Yeshiva exercised sufficient influence and control over university policy to be deemed "managers" under the National Labor Relations Act.(FN33) The decision effectively ended union organizing of faculties on private college and university campuses. Furthermore, numerous private institutions withdrew recognition from existing faculty unions, many of which were decertified as collective bargaining agents in subsequent litigation before the National Labor Relations Board and the courts.
Thus, while unions continue to represent faculty at numerous public institutions of higher learning (and even at a few private schools, such as my own Rider University, where I administer the collective agreement on behalf of the administration), it is fair to state that, as the early seventies saw the withdrawal of most faculty from support of the student movements of the time, the early eighties marked the end of the collective bargaining movement among faculty.
Concurrent with the anti-war activism on college campuses from around 1965 into the early to mid-1970s, faculty at some 350 colleges and universities sought to unionize and enter into collective bargaining relationships with their institutions.(FN20) In many instances these faculties were responding to new enabling legislation at the state level allowing for collective bargaining at public institutions of higher learning.(FN21) This decade--roughly 1965 to 1974--has been labeled "the faculty bargaining movement."(FN22) The movement was not confined to public institutions, but was apparent on private campuses too. Even sectarian schools, such as St. John's University in New York and Catholic University in Washington suffered strikes.(FN23)
Sometimes the links between the student movement and the faculty bargaining movement during the 1960s seem compelling. For example, San Francisco State College endured both a student strike centered upon the school's Black Studies Department and the level of African-American student enrollment(FN24) and a faculty organizing strike.(FN25)
The unions most strongly interested in organizing faculty were the American Association of University Professors (AAUP), the National Education Association (NEA) and the American Federation of Teachers (AFT). The NEA and AAUP also view themselves as professional organizations, while the AFT--an affiliate of the AFL-CIO--is more purely and exclusively a labor union.
Strikes by faculty unions were relatively rare.(FN26) Several explanations leap to mind: faculty aversion to the heightened level of student violence during this time period, as noted above; legislative restraints on picketing and work stoppages by public employees,(FN27) and the relatively high level of conflict aversion one encounters generally in academia. "[I]n the first decade of the faculty bargaining movement, there [were] only five strikes recorded in four-year institutions. In addition there [were] only twenty-five to thirty strikes in two year institutions," noted contemporary observers.(FN28) They added, "Given the fact that there have been approximately 500 two-year and 150 four-year agreements negotiated over a ten-year period, the level of strike activity can be considered low."(FN29)
Another source reported 200 collective bargaining elections on four-year campuses between 1970 and 1977, with 75 percent of them resulting in union victories.(FN30) This source suggested that the causes of the proliferation of faculty organizing efforts included:
* Permissive governments, i.e., enabling legislation
* Desire for higher wages and benefits
* Desire for more influence in campus governance
* Fear of a teacher surplus
* Public support for higher education
* Union activism and competition for new members.(FN31)
Whatever the causes, those halcyon days were about to end. In 1980 the U.S. Supreme Court decided the Yeshiva University case.(FN32) The 5-4 decision held that the faculty of certain schools at Yeshiva exercised sufficient influence and control over university policy to be deemed "managers" under the National Labor Relations Act.(FN33) The decision effectively ended union organizing of faculties on private college and university campuses. Furthermore, numerous private institutions withdrew recognition from existing faculty unions, many of which were decertified as collective bargaining agents in subsequent litigation before the National Labor Relations Board and the courts.
Thus, while unions continue to represent faculty at numerous public institutions of higher learning (and even at a few private schools, such as my own Rider University, where I administer the collective agreement on behalf of the administration), it is fair to state that, as the early seventies saw the withdrawal of most faculty from support of the student movements of the time, the early eighties marked the end of the collective bargaining movement among faculty.
3. THE 1980S AND 1990S: PROFESSIONALISM AND PROFITS
As the collective bargaining movement lost momentum under the weight of the Yeshiva decision, the student movements of the six-ties and early seventies gave way to student interest in careers and jobs. These changes reflected the mood of a country which elected Ronald Reagan for two terms. One of the conservative Republican's first acts was to 'bust' the air traffic controllers' union in 1981. Private employers took their cue from the White House and began breaking strikes by hiring replacement workers, a practice which has always been legal under the National Labor Relations Act, but which was rarely successful in the days when organized labor held key U.S. industries in an iron grip.
As M&A (i.e., mergers and acquisitions), junk bonds, and LBOs (i.e., leveraged buyouts) entered the jargon of the American news media and even the middle class investor, enrollments in law and business schools were on the rise. This new student passion for professionalism soon permeated the professorate as well. This process proceeded apace, so that at the close of the century, President Arthur Levine of the Columbia University Teachers College could include among his "9 Inevitable Changes" for higher education, "Faculty members will become increasingly independent of colleges and universities."(FN34) As early as 1990 Harvard's Robert Reich(FN35) sniffed this change on the wind. In what I view as a seminal work equal to The Power Elite, he observed,
As the collective bargaining movement lost momentum under the weight of the Yeshiva decision, the student movements of the six-ties and early seventies gave way to student interest in careers and jobs. These changes reflected the mood of a country which elected Ronald Reagan for two terms. One of the conservative Republican's first acts was to 'bust' the air traffic controllers' union in 1981. Private employers took their cue from the White House and began breaking strikes by hiring replacement workers, a practice which has always been legal under the National Labor Relations Act, but which was rarely successful in the days when organized labor held key U.S. industries in an iron grip.
As M&A (i.e., mergers and acquisitions), junk bonds, and LBOs (i.e., leveraged buyouts) entered the jargon of the American news media and even the middle class investor, enrollments in law and business schools were on the rise. This new student passion for professionalism soon permeated the professorate as well. This process proceeded apace, so that at the close of the century, President Arthur Levine of the Columbia University Teachers College could include among his "9 Inevitable Changes" for higher education, "Faculty members will become increasingly independent of colleges and universities."(FN34) As early as 1990 Harvard's Robert Reich(FN35) sniffed this change on the wind. In what I view as a seminal work equal to The Power Elite, he observed,
Unlike the boats of routine producers and in-person servers..., the vessel containing America's symbolic analysts is rising. Worldwide demand for their insights is growing as the ease and speed of communicating them steadily increases.... Among symbolic analysts in the middle range are American scientists and researchers who are busily selling their discoveries to global enterprise webs. They are not limited to American customers. If the strategic brokers in General Motors' headquarters refuse to pay a high price for a new means of making high-strength ceramic engines dreamed up by a team of engineers affiliated with Carnegie-Mellon University in Pittsburgh, the strategic brokers of Honda or Mercedes-Benz are likely to be more than willing.(FN36)
Even at [my little] University, union leaders occasionally have complained out loud about the difficulty of attracting faculty to union social events. Absent members' attachment, they have observed ala Reich and Levine, is to their professions and their consulting practices and not to the University community or the faculty union.
Concurrent with this trend toward full-time faculty disengagement from their campus communities has been the increased use of adjuncts and the on-slaught of for-profit competition in higher education. These two trends have been powerfully melded by the highly-profitable University of Phoenix. "In 1997, for example, the University of Phoenix had 45 full-time faculty... and 4500 adjuncts, or ratio of one to 100. In short, at the University of Phoenix, the adjunct IS the faculty." (emphasis in original)(FN37)
This, of course, is not true of all faculty.... Even at Harvard, when last spring students conducted a sit-in to protest sub-standard wages for the university's custodial workers, some 400 faculty reportedly signed the students' petition.(FN38) When a disgruntled corporation filed a "slap suit" against a researcher at Cornell's school of labor relations, who had the temerity to criticize the company's unfair labor practices in print and before a Congressional committee, 500 faculty signed a petition in her support.(FN39) In fact, many faculty at Rider and elsewhere remain dedicated to their institutions, their unions and their commitments to a better world.
Nor are all institutions employing adjunct faculty as a contingent workforce at the same numbers and levels of exploitation. At Rider, for example, longtime, high-performing adjuncts can achieve employment security and employee benefits, while some even attain full-time, tenure-track status.(FN40)
Furthermore, I am neither arguing for a return to the student activism of the sixties or for a revival of the faculty collective bargaining movement of the seventies. Neither disruptive campus activism nor the professionalism and disengagement of the 1980s and 1990s are the appropriate place for faculty to be.
Concurrent with this trend toward full-time faculty disengagement from their campus communities has been the increased use of adjuncts and the on-slaught of for-profit competition in higher education. These two trends have been powerfully melded by the highly-profitable University of Phoenix. "In 1997, for example, the University of Phoenix had 45 full-time faculty... and 4500 adjuncts, or ratio of one to 100. In short, at the University of Phoenix, the adjunct IS the faculty." (emphasis in original)(FN37)
This, of course, is not true of all faculty.... Even at Harvard, when last spring students conducted a sit-in to protest sub-standard wages for the university's custodial workers, some 400 faculty reportedly signed the students' petition.(FN38) When a disgruntled corporation filed a "slap suit" against a researcher at Cornell's school of labor relations, who had the temerity to criticize the company's unfair labor practices in print and before a Congressional committee, 500 faculty signed a petition in her support.(FN39) In fact, many faculty at Rider and elsewhere remain dedicated to their institutions, their unions and their commitments to a better world.
Nor are all institutions employing adjunct faculty as a contingent workforce at the same numbers and levels of exploitation. At Rider, for example, longtime, high-performing adjuncts can achieve employment security and employee benefits, while some even attain full-time, tenure-track status.(FN40)
Furthermore, I am neither arguing for a return to the student activism of the sixties or for a revival of the faculty collective bargaining movement of the seventies. Neither disruptive campus activism nor the professionalism and disengagement of the 1980s and 1990s are the appropriate place for faculty to be.
4. A CALL FOR A BALANCED APPROACH BY UNIVERSITY FACULTY TO THE SOCIAL INJUSTICES OF THE 21ST CENTURY
The socio-political pendulum swings on college campuses as everywhere in our society. The activism of the sixties and seventies gave way to disenchantment, disengagement and a quest for profits in the eighties and nineties. But many of the world's great religions counsel a quest for balance,(FN41) i.e., balance between reflection and action, between passion and reason, between engagement and withdrawal into the ivory tower and between looking inward and reaching outward.
President Levine has listed "9 Inevitable Changes" in higher education.(FN42) They are:
* More numerous and diverse providers
* Grouping into three basic types of institutions ("brick" universities; "click" universities, i.e., distance education; and "brick and click" hybrids)
* Students, not institutions, set the agenda
* A shift from teaching to learning
* Traditional functions become unbundled (i.e., faculty research and service are less institution-centered)
* Concurrently, faculty members become increasingly independent
* Degrees wither in importance
* Individuals have education "passports"
* Dollars follow students more than they follow educators.
Some of these changes are well advanced already. Some may seem to be desirable, even to those who most wish to cling to higher education's oldest traditions, which clearly are threatened by many, if not all, of these trends.
Nevertheless, at least some of these changes seem to me to be highly undesirable. In this article I have focused on two, which are closely related: the unbundling of the traditional faculty functions of teaching, service and research, and the increasing independence of faculty. I believe they are undesirable because they sap the traditional university of its power to play a significant role in the cause of social justice.
Recently, former Notre Dame President Theodore M. Hesburgh complained that college presidents no longer speak out on important political and social issues. "When I was a college president, I often spoke out on national issues, even when they didn't pertain to academic life," he recalls. He suggests that today's presidents are more concerned with raising funds--"tak[ing] Voltaire's advice to cultivate their own gardens"--and presiding over "institutions that have grown much more complex and bureaucratic."(FN43)
Understandably, colleges and universities are striving to survive in the face of increased competition by raising more and more funds, competing for grants, and wooing corporate partners. These skills, perhaps more so than academic achievements, are valued in presidential candidates, while trustees and administrators are increasingly cautious about offending major donors and corporate joint-venturers.(FN44) Combine this with the drift of faculty away from their campus communities into global professionalism, and it's little wonder that Father Hesburgh failed to find the traditional institutional spokespersons weighing in on issues of national importance.
If I am not advocating either a return to the campus activist of the sixties or the collective bargaining movement of the seventies, what solution am I proposing? To answer that obvious question, let me return to Robert Reich's The Work of Nations. In it Reich suggests
The socio-political pendulum swings on college campuses as everywhere in our society. The activism of the sixties and seventies gave way to disenchantment, disengagement and a quest for profits in the eighties and nineties. But many of the world's great religions counsel a quest for balance,(FN41) i.e., balance between reflection and action, between passion and reason, between engagement and withdrawal into the ivory tower and between looking inward and reaching outward.
President Levine has listed "9 Inevitable Changes" in higher education.(FN42) They are:
* More numerous and diverse providers
* Grouping into three basic types of institutions ("brick" universities; "click" universities, i.e., distance education; and "brick and click" hybrids)
* Students, not institutions, set the agenda
* A shift from teaching to learning
* Traditional functions become unbundled (i.e., faculty research and service are less institution-centered)
* Concurrently, faculty members become increasingly independent
* Degrees wither in importance
* Individuals have education "passports"
* Dollars follow students more than they follow educators.
Some of these changes are well advanced already. Some may seem to be desirable, even to those who most wish to cling to higher education's oldest traditions, which clearly are threatened by many, if not all, of these trends.
Nevertheless, at least some of these changes seem to me to be highly undesirable. In this article I have focused on two, which are closely related: the unbundling of the traditional faculty functions of teaching, service and research, and the increasing independence of faculty. I believe they are undesirable because they sap the traditional university of its power to play a significant role in the cause of social justice.
Recently, former Notre Dame President Theodore M. Hesburgh complained that college presidents no longer speak out on important political and social issues. "When I was a college president, I often spoke out on national issues, even when they didn't pertain to academic life," he recalls. He suggests that today's presidents are more concerned with raising funds--"tak[ing] Voltaire's advice to cultivate their own gardens"--and presiding over "institutions that have grown much more complex and bureaucratic."(FN43)
Understandably, colleges and universities are striving to survive in the face of increased competition by raising more and more funds, competing for grants, and wooing corporate partners. These skills, perhaps more so than academic achievements, are valued in presidential candidates, while trustees and administrators are increasingly cautious about offending major donors and corporate joint-venturers.(FN44) Combine this with the drift of faculty away from their campus communities into global professionalism, and it's little wonder that Father Hesburgh failed to find the traditional institutional spokespersons weighing in on issues of national importance.
If I am not advocating either a return to the campus activist of the sixties or the collective bargaining movement of the seventies, what solution am I proposing? To answer that obvious question, let me return to Robert Reich's The Work of Nations. In it Reich suggests
Distinguished from the rest of the population by their global linkages, good schools, comfortable lifestyles, excellent health care, and abundance of security guards, symbolic analysts will complete their secession from the union. The townships and urban enclaves where they reside, and the symbolic-analytic zones where they work, will bear no resemblance to the rest of America; nor will there be any direct connections between the two.... The remainder of the American population, growing gradually poorer, will feel powerless to alter any of these trends.(FN45)
Substitute "faculty" for Reich's "symbolic analysts" and "campuses" for his "townships an urban enclaves," and his observations fit higher education as characterized by Levine's nine inevitable trends. But Reich poses a second scenario:
There is also the possibility that symbolic analysts will decide that they have a responsibility to improve the well-being of their compatriots, regardless of any personal gain. A new patriotism would thus be born, founded less upon economic self-interest than upon loyalty to the nation.
What do we owe one another as members of the same society who no longer inhabit the same economy? The answer will depend on how strongly we feel that we are, in fact, members of the same society.
Loyalty to place -- to one's city or region or nation [or campus] -- used to correspond more naturally with economic self-interest.(FN46)
"The question," Reich contends, "is whether the habits of citizenship are sufficiently strong to withstand the centrifugal forces of the new global economy."(FN47)
Between 1950 and the early 1970s, the American economy as a whole began to exemplify this principle. Labor, business and the broader public, through its elected representative, tacitly cooperated to promote high-volume production; the resulting efficiencies of scale generated high profits; some of the profits were reinvested to create even vaster scale, and some were returned to production workers and mid-level managers in the form of higher wages and benefits. As a result, large numbers of Americans entered the middle class, ready to consume the output of this burgeoning system.
But as the borders of cities, states, [campuses], and even nations no longer come to signify special domains of economic independence, Tocqueville's principle of enlightened self-interest is less compelling.(FN48)
It is this sense of enlightened self-interest which faculty must be encouraged to rekindle itself on our campuses. The cooperation I espoused in Professors Without Picket Signs (I)(FN49) must be nurtured and then employed, first, to insure justice for all members of the campus community and, second, to reach out to better the circumstances of the wretched of the earth. This, then, will be the balanced approach that sets its course between the disruptive and destructive campus activism of the sixties (which the professorate rightly rejected) and the profiteering professionalism that threatens to atomize faculties and campus communities today.
This is my proposal, and my challenge, to the professorate in this new century.
ADDED MATERIAL
This is my proposal, and my challenge, to the professorate in this new century.
ADDED MATERIAL
FOOTNOTES
1 See James Ottavio Castagnera, "Professors Without Picket Signs: A Yeshiva/Electromation Analysis of Labor Relations on the Private University Campus," Labor Law Journal (1996) at 755-65. His views in the current article do not necessarily represent those of his university or any of his colleagues there.
2 Kim Phillips-Fein, "Yale Bites Unions for God, Country and the Ruling Class," THE NATION, July 2, 2001, at 12.
3 See Ibid. and Jane Manners, "Joe Hill Goes to Harvard," THE NATION, July 2, 2001, at 15.
4 Ibid.
5 See James Ottavio Castagnera, "Professors Without Picket Signs," supra, note 1.
6 See James Ottavio Castagnera, "The Role of Higher Education in the 21st Century: Collaborator or Counterweight?" CHANGE MAGAZINE, September/October 2001.
7 In another recent contribution to this publication, my co-authors and I demonstrated how a training program for union leaders at St. Joseph's University in Philadelphia might be adapted to the needs of the labor movement in Hungary, as an example of how American higher education might champion justice in the global arena. See Castagnera, Fine & Toth, "American and Hungarian Labor Decline: Similar Challenges, Worlds Apart, Same Solution?" LABOR LAW JOURNAL (Spring 2001) at 50-64.
8 C. Wright Mills, The Power Elite (London: Oxford University Press, 1956).
9 Ibid. at 3-4 and 361 (1969 paperback reprint).
10 David Halberstam, The Fifties at 531.
11 Ibid. at 527.
12 John Kenneth Galbraith, The New Industrial State 282 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin 1967).
13 William L. O'Neill, Coming Apart: An Informal History of America in the 1960's 286-95 (N.Y.: Quadrangle/The New York Times Book Co. 1971).
14 Jerome H. Skolnick, The Politics of Protest 87 (N.Y.: Ballantine Books, 1969).
15 Ibid. at 117.
16 "60's Intellectuals in Their Own Words," THE CHRONICLE OF HIGHER EDUCATION, September 15, 2000, at B 14.
17 Theodore L. Gross (ed.), Representative Men: Cult Heroes of Our Time 81 (N.Y.: The Free Press 1970).
18 O'Neill, op. cit., note 14, at 257.
19 Ibid.
20 James P. Begin, Theodore Settle, & Paula Alexander, Academics on Strike (N.J.: Rutgers University 1975), Preface.
21 Ibid. at 1.
22 Ibid; see also Edward P. Kelly, Jr., Special Report #2 (Washington, D.C.: Academic Collective Bargaining Information Service, February 1975) and Robert K. Carr & Daniel K. Van Eyck, Collective Bargaining Comes to the Campus (Washington, D.C.: American Council on Education 1973).
23 Begin et al., op. cit., note 21.
24 O'Neill, op. cit., note 14, at 190.
25 Begin et al., op. cit., note 21, at 1.
26 Ibid.
27 Patrick J. Cihon & James Ottavio Castagnera, Employment and Labor Law (West Legal Studies in Business, 4th edition 2002) at 649 observes, "Most state public sector labor relations statutes prohibit strikes by public employees."
28 Begin et al., op. cit., note 21 at 2.
29 Ibid.
30 Dan L. Adler, Governance and Collective Bargaining in Four-Year Institutions 1970-1977 ACBIS Monograph # 3, 1977) at 5.
31 Ibid.
32 NLRB v. Yeshiva University, 444 U.S. 672 (1980).
33 As I point out in an earlier article in this Journal (see "Professor Without Picket Signs [l]", op. cit., note 1 at ftn. 9), "The act expressly excludes 'supervisors,' who are defined as individuals 'having authority, in the interest of the employer, to hire, transfer, suspend, lay off, recall, promote, discharge, assign, reward, or discipline other employees, or responsibility to direct them, or to adjust their grievances, or effectively to recommend such action, if in connection with the foregoing the exercise of such authority is not of a merely routine or clerical nature, but requires the use of independent judgment." 29 U.S.C. 152(11). Managerial employees are not similarly excluded from the act's coverage by express provision, but have been held to be implicitly excluded. National Labor Relations Board v. Textron, 416 U.S. 267 (1974)."
34 Arthur E. Levine, "The Future of Colleges: 9 Inevitable Changes," THE CHRONICLE OF HIGHER EDUCATION, October 27, 2000, at B 10.
35 Following his stint as U.S. Labor Secretary, Professor Reich relocated to Brandeis University.
36 Robert B. Reich, The Work of Nations: Preparing Ourselves for 21ST Century Capitalism 219 (N.Y.: Alfred A. Knopf 1991).
37 Frank Newman, "Merit and Accountability in Higher Education," Collective Bargaining and Accountability in Higher Education: A Report Card 34 (N.Y.: Baruch College 1999).
38 Andrew Brownstein, "Student Activists Are Making Noise, but Is Anybody Listening?" THE CHRONICLE OF HIGHER EDUCATION, August 3, 2001, at A38.
39 Julianne Basinger, "500 Academics Sign Petition Protesting Lawsuit Against Cornell U. Professor," THE CHRONICLE OF HIGHER EDUCATION, March 20, 1998, at A14.
40 See Phyllis M. Frakt and James Ottavio Castagnera, "Making Adjunct Faculty Part of the Family," AAHE BULLETIN, September 2000, at 6-8; reprinted with permission in ADJUNCT ADVOCATE, Nov.-Dec. 2000, at 26-27; MATRIX MAGAZINE, Nov.-Dec. 2000, at 21, and ADJUNCT INFO, Spring 2001, at 2-4.
41 See, generally, James Thornton, A Field Guide to the Soul (N.Y.: Bell Tower, 1999); Fritjof Capra, The Tao of Physics (N.Y.: Bantam Books 2nd ed. 1988).
42 Arthur E. Levine, op. cit., note 35.
43 Theodore M. Hesburgh, "Where Are College Presidents' Voices on Important Public Issues?" THE CHRONICLE OF HIGHER EDUCATION, February 2, 2001, at B20.
44 See, e.g., Peter Monaghan, "A Journal Article Is Expunged and Its Authors Cry Foul. They say university caved in to the corporation they criticized," THE CHRONICLE OF HIGHER EDUCATION, December 8, 2000, at A-14.
45 Reich, op. cit., note 37, at 302-03.
46 Ibid. at 303.
47 Ibid. at 304.
48 Ibid.
49 Castagnera, op. cit., note 1.
1 See James Ottavio Castagnera, "Professors Without Picket Signs: A Yeshiva/Electromation Analysis of Labor Relations on the Private University Campus," Labor Law Journal (1996) at 755-65. His views in the current article do not necessarily represent those of his university or any of his colleagues there.
2 Kim Phillips-Fein, "Yale Bites Unions for God, Country and the Ruling Class," THE NATION, July 2, 2001, at 12.
3 See Ibid. and Jane Manners, "Joe Hill Goes to Harvard," THE NATION, July 2, 2001, at 15.
4 Ibid.
5 See James Ottavio Castagnera, "Professors Without Picket Signs," supra, note 1.
6 See James Ottavio Castagnera, "The Role of Higher Education in the 21st Century: Collaborator or Counterweight?" CHANGE MAGAZINE, September/October 2001.
7 In another recent contribution to this publication, my co-authors and I demonstrated how a training program for union leaders at St. Joseph's University in Philadelphia might be adapted to the needs of the labor movement in Hungary, as an example of how American higher education might champion justice in the global arena. See Castagnera, Fine & Toth, "American and Hungarian Labor Decline: Similar Challenges, Worlds Apart, Same Solution?" LABOR LAW JOURNAL (Spring 2001) at 50-64.
8 C. Wright Mills, The Power Elite (London: Oxford University Press, 1956).
9 Ibid. at 3-4 and 361 (1969 paperback reprint).
10 David Halberstam, The Fifties at 531.
11 Ibid. at 527.
12 John Kenneth Galbraith, The New Industrial State 282 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin 1967).
13 William L. O'Neill, Coming Apart: An Informal History of America in the 1960's 286-95 (N.Y.: Quadrangle/The New York Times Book Co. 1971).
14 Jerome H. Skolnick, The Politics of Protest 87 (N.Y.: Ballantine Books, 1969).
15 Ibid. at 117.
16 "60's Intellectuals in Their Own Words," THE CHRONICLE OF HIGHER EDUCATION, September 15, 2000, at B 14.
17 Theodore L. Gross (ed.), Representative Men: Cult Heroes of Our Time 81 (N.Y.: The Free Press 1970).
18 O'Neill, op. cit., note 14, at 257.
19 Ibid.
20 James P. Begin, Theodore Settle, & Paula Alexander, Academics on Strike (N.J.: Rutgers University 1975), Preface.
21 Ibid. at 1.
22 Ibid; see also Edward P. Kelly, Jr., Special Report #2 (Washington, D.C.: Academic Collective Bargaining Information Service, February 1975) and Robert K. Carr & Daniel K. Van Eyck, Collective Bargaining Comes to the Campus (Washington, D.C.: American Council on Education 1973).
23 Begin et al., op. cit., note 21.
24 O'Neill, op. cit., note 14, at 190.
25 Begin et al., op. cit., note 21, at 1.
26 Ibid.
27 Patrick J. Cihon & James Ottavio Castagnera, Employment and Labor Law (West Legal Studies in Business, 4th edition 2002) at 649 observes, "Most state public sector labor relations statutes prohibit strikes by public employees."
28 Begin et al., op. cit., note 21 at 2.
29 Ibid.
30 Dan L. Adler, Governance and Collective Bargaining in Four-Year Institutions 1970-1977 ACBIS Monograph # 3, 1977) at 5.
31 Ibid.
32 NLRB v. Yeshiva University, 444 U.S. 672 (1980).
33 As I point out in an earlier article in this Journal (see "Professor Without Picket Signs [l]", op. cit., note 1 at ftn. 9), "The act expressly excludes 'supervisors,' who are defined as individuals 'having authority, in the interest of the employer, to hire, transfer, suspend, lay off, recall, promote, discharge, assign, reward, or discipline other employees, or responsibility to direct them, or to adjust their grievances, or effectively to recommend such action, if in connection with the foregoing the exercise of such authority is not of a merely routine or clerical nature, but requires the use of independent judgment." 29 U.S.C. 152(11). Managerial employees are not similarly excluded from the act's coverage by express provision, but have been held to be implicitly excluded. National Labor Relations Board v. Textron, 416 U.S. 267 (1974)."
34 Arthur E. Levine, "The Future of Colleges: 9 Inevitable Changes," THE CHRONICLE OF HIGHER EDUCATION, October 27, 2000, at B 10.
35 Following his stint as U.S. Labor Secretary, Professor Reich relocated to Brandeis University.
36 Robert B. Reich, The Work of Nations: Preparing Ourselves for 21ST Century Capitalism 219 (N.Y.: Alfred A. Knopf 1991).
37 Frank Newman, "Merit and Accountability in Higher Education," Collective Bargaining and Accountability in Higher Education: A Report Card 34 (N.Y.: Baruch College 1999).
38 Andrew Brownstein, "Student Activists Are Making Noise, but Is Anybody Listening?" THE CHRONICLE OF HIGHER EDUCATION, August 3, 2001, at A38.
39 Julianne Basinger, "500 Academics Sign Petition Protesting Lawsuit Against Cornell U. Professor," THE CHRONICLE OF HIGHER EDUCATION, March 20, 1998, at A14.
40 See Phyllis M. Frakt and James Ottavio Castagnera, "Making Adjunct Faculty Part of the Family," AAHE BULLETIN, September 2000, at 6-8; reprinted with permission in ADJUNCT ADVOCATE, Nov.-Dec. 2000, at 26-27; MATRIX MAGAZINE, Nov.-Dec. 2000, at 21, and ADJUNCT INFO, Spring 2001, at 2-4.
41 See, generally, James Thornton, A Field Guide to the Soul (N.Y.: Bell Tower, 1999); Fritjof Capra, The Tao of Physics (N.Y.: Bantam Books 2nd ed. 1988).
42 Arthur E. Levine, op. cit., note 35.
43 Theodore M. Hesburgh, "Where Are College Presidents' Voices on Important Public Issues?" THE CHRONICLE OF HIGHER EDUCATION, February 2, 2001, at B20.
44 See, e.g., Peter Monaghan, "A Journal Article Is Expunged and Its Authors Cry Foul. They say university caved in to the corporation they criticized," THE CHRONICLE OF HIGHER EDUCATION, December 8, 2000, at A-14.
45 Reich, op. cit., note 37, at 302-03.
46 Ibid. at 303.
47 Ibid. at 304.
48 Ibid.
49 Castagnera, op. cit., note 1.
Source: Labor Law Journal, Fall2001, Vol. 52 Issue 3, p157, 9p
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