Higher education and unions
While I was finishing my Ph.D. I took a job as an adjunct
professor at a small, state-run college. The experience was a lesson in
humility. Most of the time, fancy graduate degree or not, I was treated like a
cog in a machine--and a suspicious cog at that. When friends asked me about it,
I would say, "It feels a little bit like working in a university and a little
bit like working at Hardee's." (I'd done both.)
In the name of standardization, the legislature wrote the
course descriptions, and my job was to download the appropriate description
from the college's website and insert it into my syllabus. I got the feeling
that the state legislature would have preferred to download my lectures
directly into my mouth as well.
With the large-scale withdrawal of state funding from many
public colleges and universities--and the successful state-level efforts
to undermine the rights of public employees--two recent op-ed pieces shed some
light on my now-thankfully-past situation. In a conversation with Walter Benn
Michaels about unionization in higher education, Stanley Fish writes
that for many years, he opposed unionization on the basis that faculty members
are not workers in the same sense as people working in factories. But he's
since changed his mind:
