Cogs in the Classroom Factory: The Changing Identity of Academic Labor

Introduces the reader to the academic union movement and describes the conflicts and challenges inherent in this professional unionism among full-time faculty, part-time faculty, and graduate-employees on campuses across the United States and Canada. Contributors discuss the impact of today’s casualized academic job market on faculty’s self-perception, political action, and responses to the changing nature of higher education. The essays included in this collection address a number of topics, including: today’s academic labor situation from an educational history perspective, the development of an academic worker identity via the build-up to a strike, the graduate-employee union movement, unionization as a social justice movement, faculty unionization and workplace solidarity, the potential culture clash between professional and blue-collar unions, the faculty’s complicity in the creation of a two-tiered job system, and the othering of adjunct and non-tenure-track faculty. By focusing on the state of the academic job system on their campuses, the contributors to this volume suggest some alternatives for responding to the ongoing erosion of tenure and academic freedom in higher education and reshaping the academic workplace.