Category Archives: The Corporate University

Inaugural issue revisited: Workplace: A Journal for Academic Labor

ICES is returning to the archive and rolling out back issues in OJS format! We begin with the inaugural issue and its core theme, “Organizing Our Asses Off.” Issue #2 will soon follow. We encourage readers and supporters of Workplace and Critical Education to revisit these now classic back issues for a sense of accomplishment and frustration over the past 15 years of academic labor. Please keep the ideas and manuscripts rolling in!

Thanks for the continuing interest in Workplace and Critical Education,

Stephen Petrina & E. Wayne Ross, co-Editors
Institute for Critical Education Studies (ICES)
University of British Columbia

Workplace: A Journal for Academic Labor
No 1 (1998): Organizing Our Asses Off
Table of Contents
http://ojs.library.ubc.ca/index.php/workplace/issue/view/182236

Articles
——–
Foreword: The Institution as False Horizon
Marc Bousquet

What Hath English Wrought: The Corporate University’s Fast Food
Discipline
Cary Nelson

Unionizing Against Cutbacks
Paul Lauter

What is an “Organization like the MLA”? From Gentleman’s Club to
Professional Association
Stephen Watt

The Future of an Illusion
Christian Gregory

Resistance is Fruitful: Coalition-Building in Ontario
Vicky Smallman

This Old House: Renovating the House of Labor at City University of New
York
Barbara Bowen

Jobless Higher Ed: An Interview with Stanley Aronowitz
Stanley Aronowitz, Andrew Long

Life of Labor: Personal Criticism
——–
Looking Forward in Anger
Barbara White

Performing Shakespeare: Writing and Literacy on the Job
Leo Parascondola

The Good Professors of Szechuan
Gregory Meyerson

Forum: Organizing Our Asses Off
——–
Cannibals, Star Trek, and Egg Timers: Ten Years of Student Employee
Organizing at the University of California
Kate Burns, Anthony M. Navarrete

Critical Year
Edward Fox, Curtis Anderson

What’s Next? Organizing After the COGS Union Affiliation Vote
Julie Marie Schmid

7,500 Down, 200,000 To Go: Organizing the City University of New York
Eric Marshall

Unions, Universities, and the State of Texas
Ray Watkins, Kirsten Christensen

Organizing Democracy: A Response
Karen Thompson

Beyond the Campus Gates: The Personal Is Still Political
Vincent Tirelli

Institutional Memory and Changing Membership: How Can We Learn from What We
Don’t Recall?
Alan Kalish

Field Reports
——–
Report on the 1997 MLA Convention
Mark Kelley

Report on the “Changing Graduate Education” Conference
Alan Kalish

Book Reviews
——–
Review of Michael Denning’s The Cultural Front: The Laboring of American
Culture in the Twentieth Century
Derek Nystrom

Review of Staughton Lynd’s Living Inside Our Hope
Paul Murphy

“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.

The Cost of Knowledge: Researchers taking a stand against Elsevier

Academics have protested against Elsevier’s business practices for years with little effect. The main objections are these:

They charge exorbitantly high prices for their journals.
They sell journals in very large “bundles,” so libraries must buy a large set with many unwanted journals, or none at all. Elsevier thus makes huge profits by exploiting their essential titles, at the expense of other journals.
They support measures such as SOPA, PIPA and the Research Works Act, that aim to restrict the free exchange of information.

Sign the petition here.

Workplace: A Journal for Academic Labor: CFP—Academic Mobbing

Workplace: A Journal for Academic Labor

www.workplace-gsc.com

CFP: Academic Mobbing

Special Issue of Workplace 2012
Editors: Stephen Petrina & Wayne Ross

Editors of Workplace are accepting manuscripts for a theme issue on Academic Mobbing. Academic mobbing is defined by the Chronicle of Higher Education (11 June 2009) as: “a form of bullying in which members of a department gang up to isolate or humiliate a colleague.” The Chronicle continues:

If rumors are circulating about the target’s supposed misdeeds, if the target is excluded from meetings or not named to committees, or if people are saying the target needs to be punished formally “to be taught a lesson,” it’s likely that mobbing is under way.

As Joan Friedenberg eloquently notes in The Anatomy of an Academic Mobbing, the toll taken is excessive. Building on a long history of both analysis and neglect in academia, Workplace is interested in a range of scholarship on this practice, including theoretical frameworks, legal analyses, resistance narratives, reports from the trenches, and labor policy reviews. We invite manuscripts that address, among other foci:

Effects of academic mobbing
History of academic mobbing
Sociology and ethnography of the practices of an academic mob
Social psychology of the academic mob leader or boss
Academic mobbing factions (fact + fiction) or short stories
Legal defense for academic mob victims and threats (e.g., Protectable
political affiliation, race, religion)
Gender norms of an academic mob
Neo-McCarthyism and academic mobbing
Your story…

Contributions for Workplace should be 4000-6000 words in length and should conform to APA or MLA style.

If interested in co-editing or authoring, please contact Stephen Petrina (Stephen.petrina@ubc.ca) or Wayne Ross (wayne.ross@ubc.ca). This issue will ideally launch in September 2012.

To Know is Not Enough: Activist Scholarship, Social Change & The Corporate University

The Rouge Forum @ AERA 2012

Free Interactive Conference Open to All

To Know is Not Enough:

Activist Scholarship, Social Change & The Corporate University

www.RougeForumConference.org

Friday April 13, 2012

University of British Columbia,

Robson Square Campus

HSBC Hall

Vancouver, BC

The theme for the 2012 annual meeting of the American Education Research Association is “Non Satis Scire: To Know Is Not Enough.” It is laudable that AERA is promoting “the use of research to improve education and serve the public good” rather than the mere accumulation of research knowledge, but The Rouge Forum is interested in exploring what it means for scholars, and educators in general, to move beyond “knowing” to the pursuit of activist agendas for social change.

What happens when teachers and other academics connect reason to power and power to resistance?
How can academic work (in universities and other learning environments) support local and global resistance to global neoliberal capitalism?
How do we respond to the obstacles and threats faced as activist scholars?

The Rouge Forum @ AERA will bring together world-renowned scholars, teachers, community organizers, and other activists to discuss these questions and others related to activist scholarship, social change, academic freedom, and work in the corporate university as part of a one-day interactive conference at the Robson Square Campus of University of British Columbia in downtown Vancouver.

What is the Rouge Forum?

The Rouge Forum is a group of educators, students, and parents seeking a democratic society. We are both research and action oriented. We want to learn about equality, democracy and social justice as we simultaneously struggle to bring into practice our present understanding of what that is. We seek to build a caring inclusive community that understands that an injury to one is an injury to all. At the same time, our caring community is going to need to deal decisively with an opposition that is sometimes ruthless. RougeForum.com

THE ASSAULT ON UNIVERSITIES: A MANIFESTO FOR RESISTANCE

The UK White Paper on universities that was published in June contains yet more proposals that will embed the market ever deeper into our educational system through the entrance of private providers and the extension of a logic of financialisation. The deadline for submissions is 20 September and we encourage you to make a response (http://bit.ly/jpLET3).

We would also like to let you know that the manifesto has now been published in a book, ‘The Assault on Universities: A Manifesto for Resistance’ (Pluto Press) which contains a series of short essays identifying the consequences of the reforms as well as possible alternatives. We are sure you will find it both stimulating and useful in your response to the attacks on higher education.

Details of the book are at: http://bit.ly/lKgYdE

You can also use the book and manifesto as the focus for a meeting, debate or other form of campaign activity where you work.

We would be delighted to help arrange a meeting on your campus and to build up a head of steam against the government’s disastrous reforms.

No university is immune and there will certainly be a good audience for a lively and topical meeting.

Please don’t hesitate to contact us: hemanifesto@gmail.com (or d.freedman@gold.ac.uk if you have trouble accessing gmail).

Red scare at Georgia university

Inside Higher Ed: The Would-Be Provost Who Quoted Marx

“In the university, the higher up the hierarchical structure, the more one has decision-making power and the further one is from the actual ‘work’ (discovering and disseminating knowledge).”

Timothy J. L. Chandler, the co-author of a 1998 journal article with that quote about university hierarchies, is going to stay a step closer to actual work. On Thursday, he announced that he is turning down the position of provost at Kennesaw State University — in part because of furor set off in the local area over the article, which applies class analysis and several times cites Marx.