Category Archives: Labor

“Against Obedience” by Susan Ohanian (New issue of Critical Education)

Critical Education has just published its latest issue at http://ojs.library.ubc.ca/index.php/criticaled. We invite you to review the Table of Contents here and then visit our web site to review articles and items of interest.

Thanks for the continuing interest in our work,

Stephen Petrina
Sandra Mathison
E. Wayne Ross
Co-Editors, Critical Education
Institute for Critical Education Studies
University of British Columbia

Critical Education
Vol 3, No 9 (2012)
Table of Contents
http://ojs.library.ubc.ca/index.php/criticaled/issue/view/182380

Articles
——–
Against Obedience
Susan Ohanian

Abstract

This article was originally delivered as the Second Annual Adam Renner Education for Social Justice Lecture at the Rouge Forum’s Occupy Educaton! Class Conscious Pedagogies and Social Change Conference held at Miami University in Oxford, OH, June 22-24, 2012. Starting with a personal journey in learning that political activism isn’t as scary as many teachers believe, the article highlights the highly political nature of press coverage of Race to the Top and the Common Core State Standards initiative, zeroing in on the quisling nature of teacher union and professional organization antics to keep a seat at the political table. Questioning the silence on critical issues of higher education providers of educational products to consumers—aka professors—the author insists that whining isn’t the same as doing. The article concludes with several points on how educators can take action.

Workplace Issue #20 – “The New Academic Manners, Managers, and Spaces”

Workplace: A Journal for Academic Labor has just published its latest issue at http://ojs.library.ubc.ca/index.php/workplace/issue/current

We are extremely pleased to announce the launch of Workplace Issue #20, “The New Academic Manners, Managers, and Spaces.” This issue includes key conceptual and empirical analyses of

the creation and avoidance of unions in academic and business workplaces (Vincent Serravallo)
the new critiquette, impartial response to Bruno Latour and Jacques Ranciere’s critique of critique (Stephen Petrina)
the two-culture model of the modern university in full light of the crystal, neural university (Sean Sturm, Stephen Turner)
alternative narratives of accountability in response to neo-liberal practices of government (Sandra Mathison)
vertical versus horizontal structures of governance (Rune Kvist Olsen)
teachers in nomadic spaces and Deleuzian approaches to curricular practice (Tobey Steeves)

We invite you to review the Table of Contents for articles and items of interest.

Thanks for the continuing interest in Workplace (we welcome new manuscripts here and Critical Education),

Stephen Petrina & E. Wayne Ross, co-Editors
Workplace: A Journal for Academic Labor
Institute for Critical Education Studies
https://blogs.ubc.ca/ices
https://blogs.ubc.ca/workplace

CFP: Graduate Studies and the Academic Labor Market

Call for Papers:
Graduate Studies and the Academic Labor Market

Special Issue of Workplace: A Journal for Academic Labor 2012
Guest Editors: Bradley J. Porfilio, Julie A. Gorlewski, and Shelley J. Jensen

Workplace invites and authors to submit papers for a special issue on Graduate Studies and the Academic Labor Market. What are the futures of the academic labor market for graduate students? Or more to the point, is there a future in academic labor for graduate students? Even a casual glance at The Chronicle of Higher Education and, in Canada, at the CAUT Bulletin and University Affairs, suggests a shrinking job market for PhDs. In some disciplines, academic careers have all but disappeared. Post-PhDs are increasingly tracked or streamed into adjunct and sessional appointments, most of which are dead-end and even on full time bases may amount to less than $25,000 per year. This “income” is oftten typically annulled by student loan payments; indeed, the income to debt ratio for post-PhDs adds to a heavy burden of anxiety. We readily romanticize the life of the intellectual, but – more and more – this life does not put food on the table. Food banks are becoming more and more common on university grounds and the lines are not limited to students.

What is the nature of this phenomenon in higher education?
What do these trends mean for the future of education and learning beyond mere technical training?
How do economic hardships affect scholarly pursuits?
How might graduate students reclaim their futures in the professoriate?
What roles exist for the scholar activist – both novice and veteran?
What other questions we should be asking?

The editors request abstracts for papers by September 15, 2012, with full drafts due by December 15, 2012.

For more information and due dates contact Brad Porfilio (porfilio16@aol.com)

Post-Secondary Faculty Support BC Teachers

Please consider signing and circulating a petition for post-secondary support of BC teachers / BCTF
http://www.thepetitionsite.com/1/support-bc-teachers-bctf-2012/

Thank you,

Sandra Mathison, Stephen Petrina & E. Wayne Ross
University of British Columbia
Faculty of Education

Institute for Critical Education Studies
https://blogs.ubc.ca/ices/
https://blogs.ubc.ca/workplace/

WAKE UP, NLRB! CHICAGO GRAD STUDENT EMPLOYEES RALLY

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

WAKE UP, NLRB! CHICAGO GRAD STUDENT EMPLOYEES RALLY
TO WAKE THE NLRB FROM ITS COMA,
HELP IT RECOGNIZE THAT GRAD LABOR COUNTS!

Chicago, IL, December 13, 2011 — Today at noon, Chicago-area graduate students and their supporters will demonstrate outside the Chicago branch office of the National Labor Relations Board (209 S. LaSalle St.) and present a petition calling on the NLRB to wake from its coma of inaction and recognize private university graduate student teaching and research assistants as employees with a legal right to unionize and collectively bargain.

The rally, organized by Graduate Students United, the graduate employee union at the University of Chicago, and the national Grad Labor Counts! campaign, will feature a dramatic skit in which the NLRB is presented as a comatose hospital patient to reflect its record of inaction and danger of imminent demise. The Grad Labor Counts! campaign has been endorsed by the 1.4 million-strong American Federation of Teachers and the 70,000-member American Association of University Professors.

“We’re calling for for urgent medical attention to the ailing patient from President Obama and Congress, who have the power to restore the NLRB by appointing a new member in 2012,” explained Dasha Polzik, a member of Graduate Students United and an organizer of the Grad Labor Counts! campaign.

“We’re also calling on the NLRB to wake from its coma and issue a ruling on a case that has sat before it since April 2010 concerning the employee status of graduate students at private universities,” added Greg Goodman, another GSU member. Graduate student teaching and research assistants were first recognized as employees by a unanimous NLRB ruling in 2000, and then stripped of their employee status by a later Bush-era ruling in 2004.

Representatives from Grad Labor Counts! will deliver a petition with over 2,700 signatures from across the country calling on the NLRB to rule on the case and recognize graduate student teaching and research assistants at private universities as employees. Details on the Grad Labor Counts! campaign and petition are available at http://gradlaborcounts.org.

Contacts:

Maddy Elfenbein (madeleine.elfenbein@gmail.com)
646-206-5154
Samuel Brody (sam.brody@gmail.com)
917-748-4146

Graduate Students United (AFT-AAUP) at the University of Chicago
http://uchicagogsu.org
# # #

What is Capitalism Hiding?

What is Capitalism Hiding?

By Bertell Ollman

What exactly is it about capitalism that our rulers are trying to hide? The short list would have to include: (1) that the most apt label for our society-because it brings into focus how our society works (particularly in production, an area of life that most of the other labels ignore or obscure), for whom it works better, for whom it works worse, and its potential for change—is “capitalism”; (2) that the real rulers of this society are those who own the means of production, distribution and exchange, and reap the bulk of the surplus; (3) that the Government, whatever democratic foreplay goes on, serves their interests, hence is their Government and not ours; (4) that we, the rest of us who don’t live on profit, rent or interest, are workers (whether we are willing to admit it or not), because we are forced to seek work in order to live; (5) that the conditions of life and work for us workers are bad and likely to get much worse-while the wealth of the capitalists keeps growing; (6) that a qualitatively better life, a more humane, just, free, democratic, egalitarian and ecologically rational way of organizing society can be developed; (7) that those who benefit from the present order of society have consistently lied to us about all of the above; and (8) that once workers—in the broad sense of the term—break through these lies and half-truths, they/we can win.

Now the best way for the capitalists to hide all of these facts is to hide the first one, that our’s is a capitalist society, because once people learn this all of the facts that follow become easier to see and to grasp. In his book, In Praise of Folly, Erasmus tells the story of a man watching a play who all at once jumps onto the stage and tears the masks off of the actors to reveal who they really are. If you think of Marx as this man and the capitalists as the actors, you can begin to understand both what Marx does and why the capitalists are not too pleased with him for doing it.

From How to Take an Exam and Remake the World by Bertell Ollman (2001, Black Rose Books)

CFP: Tensions at Work for Tenured & Tenure Stream Faculty in the Neoliberal Academy (Workplace: A Journal for Academic Labor)

Call for Papers:
In/stability, In/security & In/visibility:
Tensions at Work for Tenured & Tenure Stream Faculty in the Neoliberal Academy

Special Issue of Workplace: A Journal for Academic Labor 2011
Guest Editors: Kaela Jubas & Colleen Kawalilak

For this special issue of Workplace, we invite submissions from individuals working in tenured or tenure stream positions. The question at the core is how neoliberalism is apparent, experienced, and felt in the context of that work. For senior faculty, how has the scope and practice of work evolved, to what effect, and to what detriment? For junior faculty, how are aspirations and expectations for academic work being (un)met? For faculty at the intermediate stage of their academic careers, how is work being seen and practiced differently? For all faculty members, how are changes at work relating to life and identity more broadly? Empirical research, analysis of policy, programmatic and curricular changes, personal reflections, and critical and exploratory essays on points of tensions within this shifting landscape will be featured.

The social, cultural, and individual repercussions of neoliberal policies and practices have been well explored and documented. In this journal alone, recent volumes have focused on the shift from tenure stream faculty to contingent and part-time faculty, the creep of commercial and philanthropic bodies into so-called public education, and the turn away from individual and social development toward commercial viability to legitimate teaching and scholarship. Less frequently explored is how neoliberalism is affecting members of the academy who, until recently, have had the benefits of stability, security, and voice – faculty members in tenured or tenure stream positions. Although these academics continue to enjoy relative privilege in the neoliberal academy and in society-at-large, they too share in experiencing the drawbacks of neoliberalism in their work and personal lives. Expectations that staff will “do more with less,” forego salary increases that keep pace with inflation, secure outside funding for research, and adopt a hyper-competitive mindset, all while exposing themselves to new forms of surveillance to check compliance, are as present in the academy as they are in any other workplace.

Abstracts can be forwarded by e-mail in Word or similar format to Kaela Jubas (kjubas@ucalgary.ca), and are due by January 15, 2012. Authors will be notified about their submissions by February 15, 2012. Full articles should be 4000-6000 words in length and conform to APA 6^th edition, and will be due by May 15, 2012.

Call for Manuscripts: “Marxism and Education: International Perspectives on Education for Revolution”

CALL FOR MANUSCRIPTS

Special Issue of Cultural Logic

http://clogic.eserver.org/

“Marxism and Education: International Perspectives on Education for Revolution”

Issue Editors: Rich Gibson & E. Wayne Ross

FOCUS OF THE SPECIAL ISSUE

The core issue of our time is the reality of the promise of perpetual war and escalating color-coded inequality met by the potential of a mass, activist, class-conscious movement to transform both daily life and the system of capitalism itself. In this context, schools in the empires of the world are the centripetal organizing points of much of life. While the claim of capitalist schooling is, in the classics, education, “leading out,” the reality is that schools are segregated illusion factories, in some cases human munition factories. Rather than leading out, they encapsulate.

Mainstream educational and social research typically ignores, disconnects, the ineluctable relationships of what is in fact capitalist schooling, class war, imperialist war, and the development of varying forms of corporate states around the world.

At issue, of course, is: What to do?

The long view, either in philosophy or social practice is revolution as things must change, and they will.

Connecting the long view to what must also be a long slog necessarily involves a careful look at existing local, national, and international conditions; working out tactics and strategies that all can understand, none taken apart from a grand strategy of equality and justice.

GUIDELINES

The editors are seeking manuscripts that explore education for revolution and are informed by Marxist perspectives. We are particularly interested in manuscripts that explore and examine:

local/regional contexts and educational activism linked to global anti-capitalist movements;
broad foundational and historical themes related to education and revolution (e.g., philosophy, social movements, community organizing, literacy, popular education, etc.); and
organizational and practitioner perspectives.

The editors are also interested in reviews of books, film, and other media related to education for revolution.

Article manuscripts should be approximately 5,000-10,000 words in length (20-40 pages), although we will consider manuscripts of varying lengths. The editors prefer that manuscripts be prepared using either APA or Chicago styles. Manuscripts should be submitted as email attachments (Microsoft Word or RTF) to the both editors: rgibson@pipeline.com and wayne.ross@ubc.ca.

Authors interested in submitting manuscripts should email manuscript title and a brief description to the editors by December 1, 2011. Final manuscripts are due April 1, 2012.

ABOUT CULTURAL LOGIC

Cultural Logic, which has been online since 1997, is a non-profit, peer-reviewed, interdisciplinary journal that publishes essays, interviews, poetry, and reviews (books, films, and other media) by writers working in the Marxist tradition.

Greek universities in danger

To the international academic community

Greek Universities in Danger

In the last few years, a wave of ‘reforms’ within the European Union and throughout the world has subjected Higher Education to the logic of the market. Higher Education has increasingly been transformed from a public good and a civil right to a commodity for the wealthy. The self-government of Universities and the autonomy of academic processes are also being eroded. The processes of knowledge production and acquisition, as well as the working conditions of the academic community, are now governed by the principles of the private sector, from which Universities are obliged to seek funds.

Greece is possibly the only European Union country where attempts to implement these ‘reforms’ have so far failed. Important factors in this failure are the intense opposition of Greek society as well as the Greek Constitution, according to which Higher Education is provided exclusively by public, fully self-governed and state-funded institutions.

According to the existing institutional framework for the functioning of Universities, itself the result of academic and student struggles before and after the military dictatorship (1967-1974), universities govern themselves through bodies elected by the academic community. Although this institutional framework has contributed enormously to the development of Higher Education in Greece, insufficient funding and suffocating state control, as well as certain unlawful and unprofessional practices by the academic community, have rendered Higher Education reform necessary.

The current government has now hastily attempted a radical reform of Higher Education. On the pretext of the improvement of the ‘quality of education’ and its harmonization with ‘international academic standards’, the government is promoting the principles of ‘reciprocity’ in Higher Education. At the same time, it is drastically decreasing public funding for education (up to 50% decrease) which is already amongst the lowest in the European Union. New appointments of teaching staff will follow a ratio 1:10 to the retirement of existing staff members. This will have devastating results in the academic teaching process as well as in the progress of scientific knowledge.

The government proposals seek to bypass the constitutional obligations of the state towards public Universities and abolish their academic character.

The self-government of Universities will be circumvented, with the current elected governing bodies replaced by appointed ‘Councils’ who will not be accountable to the academic community.
The future of Universities located on the periphery, as well as of University departments dedicated to ‘non-commercial’ scientific fields, looks gloomy.

Academic staff will no longer be regarded as public functionaries. The existing national payscale is to be abolished and replaced by individualized, ‘productivity’ related payscales, while insecure employment is to become the norm for lower rank employees.

Higher Education will be transformed into ‘training’ and, along with research, gradually submitted to market forces.
The government proposals have been rejected by the Greek academic community. The Council of Vice-Chancellors and the Senates of almost all Universities have publicly called the government to withdraw the proposals and have suggested alternative proposals which can more effectively deal with the problems of Greek Universities. Despite this, the government proceeds with promoting its proposals, in confrontation with the entire academic community.

We appeal to our colleagues from the international academic community, who have experienced the consequences of similar reforms, to support us in our struggle to defend education as a public good. We fight, together with our British, French, Dutch, Italian, Spanish and other colleagues, for the respect of the academic tradition of the European universitas in current conditions.

We ask you to send electronically the appeal below, signed with your name and indicating your academic status and institutional affiliation, to the Initiative of Greek Academics (europeanuniversitas1@gmail.com). The support of the international academic community will prove invaluable for the upcoming developments not only in Greek Universities but in respect to European Higher Education as a whole.

Initiative of Greek academics

To: europeanuniversitas1@gmail.com

Subject: Defending Higher Education in Greece

Defending Higher Education in Greece

We, the undersigned, express our support for Greek academics who oppose the Higher Education reform proposed by the government, which hinders the research and teaching potential of Greek Universities.

Any process aiming to improve the institutional frame of Higher Education has to decisively take into account the positions of the academic community. We understand that the vast majority of the Senates of Greek Universities, the Council of Vice-Chancellors of Greek Universities, as well as the local organisations of University teachers have publicly expressed their opposition to government proposals.

We ask the Greek Prime Minister, Mr. Giorgos Papandreou, and the Minister of Education, Life-Long Learning and Religions, Ms. Anna Diamantopoulou

(a) not to proceed with voting the law, as the direction it has taken has proven devastating for Higher Education wherever it was implemented

(b) to start a real dialogue with the Senates of Universities aiming towards an institutional frame that will safeguard the constitutionally protected self-government of Universities and the public funding of Higher Education, and will respect the principles of European academic traditions regarding the public functioning of Universities.

http://supportgreekacademia.wordpress.com