Perhaps, to enter into this talk, I should mention the origins of the title. The term “cozy catastrophe” is used to describe a subgenre of science fiction novels, written in the mid-twentieth century. Exemplified by the work of John Wyndham, this work imagined any number of catastrophes that killed millions, but nonetheless, left the protagonists of the novel relatively unscathed. Those individuals would then go on to build some kind of future, attempting rectify the conditions that created the catastrophe in the first place. That gap, the space between catastrophe and roughing it in the wilderness, struck me as somehow apt to describe how the transformation of public college education is narrated. To give a concrete example, in the middle of my time as a graduate student at the University of California, Irvine, the president of the system described the schools as an enormous graveyard. That catastrophist language can be seen not only at the top of the system, but in the language of the day to day activism of those who operate within the university system, primarily in the form of the blogs and other publications of countless graduate and undergraduate activists. Our system of ‘education’ is in ‘crisis’ and is about to reach the level of catastrophe.
At the same time, the vast majority
of us producing this writing remain in the system with some relative
comfort. This applies not only to the
tenured faculty, who have job security and access to benefits, but to most of
us who participate in the academic side of daily university life. It certainly applies
to life as an adjunct as well. Our troubles, as real as they are, rarely fit
comfortably into the narrative of catastrophe, and instead are defined by the
grey reality that Leon Trotsky argued constituted middle class life. We look for better employment, worry about
paying for insurance and our school loans, and fret over our lack of a
meaningful retirement fund. Most of us
are concerned about the kind of education that we are providing, and feel a keen
sense of regret about the corner cutting that frequently occurs while teaching
in multiple institutions without access to offices or many other
resources. These are real concerns, but
the language of crisis does little to help us understand those issues. At best, the language creates an excitement
absent from those grey reality of daily life, and inspires us to become active
in the politics of our campus. At worst, and more often, it creates the logic
for inaction, to keep our noses down and focused on the next day.
However, the language certainly
captures something of the intensity of the transformation. As Wendy Brown notes in her 2015 talk on the topic,
the university is undergoing a substantial transformation in its governance
structure. Moving from what she calls
the corporate structure of the university that existed through most of the 20th
century, the university has broken away from the previous system of shared
faculty governance and has become a system that reflects the processes of neoliberalization
and financialization. That system now
shifts the system of governance away from the disciplinary concerns of its
faculty members and gives that control to a wide array of administrators, who
govern the university based on a variety of matrixes that classify and
individuate faculty members, and judge their worth on grants, rankings systems,
and other markers of excellence. The
system moves from the holistic, vertically integrated structure of corporate capitalism
into the fragmented, market driven system of the present. At the other end of
the system, the one that Brown leaves unremarked, is a vast collection of
adjuncts, who take the unwanted work off the hands of the financialized tenured
faculty, and more significantly, give the university a workforce that no longer
has the kinds of economic and academic protection that were promised under the
guise of ‘shared governance.’
In
that sense, our positions as adjuncts are a key linchpin in the reshaping of
the governance structures of the university.
We provide the flexible, and instrumentalized labor that allows for the
small grouping of the neoliberal professoriate to escape from the dreary labor
of introductory classes, and more significantly, we provide a labor force that
is even more flexible because of our relative precarity. In a sense, the new precariat is an updated,
and far less disciplined version of Marx’s old concept of the mobile army of
the unemployed. For ourselves, these
years are frequently experienced as a kind of waiting room, a space to make a
living and to remain within the academic setting as we try to apply for other
jobs, jobs that are increasingly unavailable, but nonetheless often define the
horizons of our professional life. To
look at the system from this perspective, we find ourselves examining the
system that Brown describes, but a system that looks radically different than
the system of self-marketing and self-promotion that she describes in her talk. Instead, we find a process that does not
emphasize excellence, but is defined by checking off boxes, filling competency
requirements, and moving students through conversations that they frequently
see as distractions to their real educational goals. More often than not, we represent the effort
to continue the hollowed-out functions of a liberal arts education, the old
belief in a broadly educated citizenry.
We are the grey apparatus that allows for excellence, but is excluded
from that possibility ourselves.
The experience of being an adjunct
at a community college only intensifies that process. Like most community colleges within the
California system, Irvine Valley College is designed to move students from its
hallways to the hallways of the California State University or University of
California systems. That matrix becomes
the most significant instrument of measurement for the success of the college,
and Irvine Valley College features it prominently in its advertisements. Just as significantly, the college reminds
its students of this goal every day, through a myriad of posters offering
advice on how to transfer to a variety of universities. In addition, Irvine Valley College promises
to streamline finishing at the transfer institutions, offering to check the
boxes off any number of university requirements. This is particularly true of the classes that
I teach, introductory writing classes. These
classes are largely seen by my students as a somewhat tedious hurdle to jump
over, and are looked upon with little enthusiasm. This, obviously, is not very surprising, but
is nonetheless important to restate because it provides a concrete, if banal, example
of the tension between the instrumentalization of college requirements and the
complex and recursive process of learning to write. Our students are continually presented the
intellectual work of the university as a series of hoops to jump through, and
the unsurprising result is that the students frequently view the work as a
distraction to other concerns.
The mirror image of that situation
is ours as adjuncts. We are disconnected
from the communities and institutional histories that define our workplaces,
and are only tenuously tied to the institutions themselves through temporary
offices, and our classrooms. Most of us
our committed to our students, but are limited in our commitments by our
fragmented complex of workplaces. It’s
something I find myself thinking about quite a bit, while waiting for class in
the adjunct office at IVC. It’s clear
from the imagery of the office space that there is a long running struggle
within the college. The office is
festooned with satirical images of the college administration, and points to efforts
on the part of the faculty to both unionize and protect its academic freedoms. They also point to a series of far more
basic, if still significant, struggles, the need for classrooms free of ants,
simple cleanliness, and other necessities.
We also have a faculty union that is in communication with us, at least
on email. But my knowledge of the
struggles of the institution don’t move much beyond my recognition of the
traces of the struggle. Despite my
substantial involvement in the graduate student union at UCI, I haven’t taken
the trouble of contacting my union representatives, or gotten a sense of how
the union works. I don’t even really
know most of my ostensible colleagues beyond the vague recollection of a few
faces and short conversations. My primary
engagement with the college remains with my 20-50 students, and doesn’t
substantially go beyond this.
Nothing that I’ve said is terribly
shocking, and has been regularly reported on in the pages of the Journal of
Higher Education along with a variety of other publications. It’s been discussed in the academic blogs of
Chris Newfield, amongst others, and has been extensively discussed on the blogs
and other informal publications of adjunct faculty members. The explosion of adjuncts has been seen as
the mirror image of the explosion of upper administration in the fight against
the privatization of public education.
Within this context, not only can the adjunct speak, but has a polyphony
of voices. Those voices are not central
to the conversation about the transformation of the education system, but it
would be a substantial exaggeration to say that they have been ignored. Instead, they have been an ongoing thread of
marginalia that enters the mainstream of academic conversation through
irritated responses on the part of tenured faculty and administrators, through
apologies with those with academic security, and through informally distributed
articles that catch the attention of larger media. Frequently marked as abject,
the voice of the adjunct has been significant, while certainly not central,
point of conversation within academic life.
If the construction of a voice was the main point of political
intervention to transform the marginalized existence of adjunct life, that
intervention would have already occurred.
The issue is probably apparent to
most of you. Adjuncts have voices, often
quite eloquent ones, but we have very little social power within our
institutions, and the reasons for that are quite simple. We are disconnected
from the meaningful social relationships of academic life, and are just as
disconnected from each other’s lives.
Perhaps, at a more powerful level, we are given very little incentive to
be invested in the futurity of the institutions that we work at. We are, after all, supposed to be in the
process of looking for jobs, of grasping for the ring of a tenured track
position, or some sort of work somewhere else.
In this sense, our very alienation precludes us from being able to
maintain an investment in the defense of the public university, a university
not only accessible to all, but committed to a critical engagement with the
world. Such an investment would, by
necessity, need to be both collective and move beyond the concern of the
classroom, and involve thinking about the larger context of the educational process. In this sense, the terms ‘crisis’ and
‘catastrophe’ obfuscate the problem, which is tied to this very successful
process of hollowing out, instrumentalizing, and restructuring the
university. The terms ‘crisis’ and ‘catastrophe’ imply
systems out of control and moments full of meaning, where we find ourselves in
an opposite situation, one in which we are structurally encouraged to disinvest
and not to find meaning. In short, we
find ourselves in the opposite condition of the tenured faculty, not a part of
a collapsing system of governance, but the alienated, disconnected labor of the
new system.
To change that, we must in some way
transform our relationship to these institutions, but the creation of the forms
of collectivity to enact that transformation are daunting for the very reasons
they are needed. Organization takes
time, intellectual and emotional labor, and above all, a long-term investment
in the process, all of which are difficult to create amongst us. Despite our exclusion from the forms of
excellence that defines the neoliberal professorate, an exclusion we share with
our tenured colleagues at the community college level, we are still shaped by
the individualizing disciplinary processes that define them. We, after all, continue to look for an
entrance into tenured work, we attempt to publish, and establish ourselves as
worthy scholars. Our labor intensely
depends on one another, but that social aspect of our labor is occluded from
us, and is difficult to build upon.
However,
we have a pair of obvious forms of organizations to try to develop this form of
deliberate collectivity. The first is
the professional organizations that we can still join. We have a space to discuss these issues
within the MLA, and we can call upon that body to contribute to our
struggles. The first of those
possibilities should not be ignored.
After all, we have the space to discuss these issues at the conference,
and more significantly, to meet each other and reduce the isolation and
alienation of our workplaces. These
aren’t insignificant factors, but if we think about the possibility of seeing
these professional associations as a place to push a struggle forward, I’m
considerably more pessimistic. At the
more immediate level, I’m skeptical of the ability to get the clear majority of
these organizations to sign on to such an engagement. While there are certainly a significant
minority of tenured faculty members who are willing to contribute to such a
struggle, I have not seen this commitment on the part of most tenured faculty. As we have seen, tenured faculty often
attempt to protect their own professional status through defending the
distinction between themselves and adjuncts, either through inaction or through
defenses of the system in the face of attempts on the part of precarious
faculty to organize. Tenured faculty
have largely remained outside the fights for more rights on the part of
precarious faculty, and have, on occasion, defended the systems that divest precarious
faculty of rights. However, even if it
were possible to get such a commitment on the part of professional bodies, I’m
equally skeptical of the efficacy of such bodies to affect change. After all, their power primarily lies in the
now gutted structure of faculty governance, and has less and less impact on the
university.
The
next obvious form of organization is forming a union, and this will take a bit
longer to discuss because it is a more complex issue. The possibilities of the project are
significant. After all, forming a union
gives the workers the possibility of negotiating the conditions of their
employment at the bargaining table with management, and gives those workers an
ability to draw on the larger resources and expertise of a union
structure. Not surprisingly, there has
been some real effort to begin this process, with attempts to organize at several
institutions including the University of Minnesota. Indeed, as I already noted, my own current
employer has a relatively long standing contract that benefits both tenured and
adjunct faculty. Moreover, a few unions
have seen entering the academic sphere as a real opportunity to increase their
numbers and strength. This work has
played a role in improving our condition as workers, and such struggles can be
used to fight for the public university as some of the struggles of the UC grad
student union and the Chicago Teachers’ Union has shown. While these fights have been uphill ones,
both examples show that a contract fight can be used to create alliances in
defense of a public education.
However,
there are some real downsides to this process as well. The most immediate downside is the
often-brutal fights that are involved in creating a union. Our current system for recognizing and
creating unions heavily favors employers and the creation of unions often takes
years and even decades. Certainly, this
has been the case at the University of Minnesota and the fight to organize the
UC system took even longer. Once that
rather arduous task is completed, our entire system of contract negotiation is
designed to facilitate contracts that are concerned with the economic concerns
of employees as stakeholders, rather than to meaningfully transform the social
relations of the industry where they work.
Both the initial NLRA and the additional restrictions placed on unions
by the Taft-Hartley Act place emphasis on the sole control of the workplace
remaining in the hands of management. This
restriction often places unions in the position of trying to gain as much as
they can within the neoliberal strictures of the workplace, rather than
challenging the structures of that economic system. Indeed, most unions are both unaware of and
are uninterested in challenging such systems, comfortable with living within
the decaying system of business welfare capitalism and the long dead labor
peace.
That
situation places us in a bit of quandary.
The most obvious interventions into the system have significant
drawbacks to them, and are structurally difficult to create and/or implement. Furthermore, the effective privatization of
the college and university structure has translated into a withdrawal of the
always precarious public support for such institutions. Moreover, we are likely
to see a withdrawal of federal funds from the public education system for at
least the next four years.
Unfortunately, the democratic alternative has shown little interest in
supporting liberal arts education, either.
It’s a situation in which I don’t see any easy solution, and is most
likely going to be defined by a series of defensive responses to a multitude of
attacks on the system of public education.
The question is then, how to build forms of cooperation and solidarity
within a system that is designed to make us, as students, faculty, and staff,
think of ourselves within the logic of the market. Despite its problems, I see the formation of
unions as a significant force within that process, but it’s a process that will
involve challenges to the logic of the international unions as much as the
university. In addition, there needs to
be pressure put upon professional organizations to demand more institutional
support for those who teach an increasingly large portion of the classes, and
would demand a transformation of those organizations, as well. In each case, we need to recreate those
institutions to deal with the present, a lengthy process that is impossible to imagine,
at present, a final form.
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