Will Teach for Food: Academic Labor in Crisis

Will Teach For Food: Academic Labor in Crisis

Edited by Cary Nelson. Cultural Politics, v. 12, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997, 308 pp., $49.95

ERNST BENJAMIN

WILL TEACH FOR FOOD EXPLORES THE "dark underside of academic employment." Though partly focused on the Yale "grade strike" of 1996-97, the essays explore a larger problem. In Cary Nelson's words: "Higher education as a whole has become structurally dependent on a pool of cheap labor to teach its lower-level courses."

The scope of the problem is clear in the following numbers taken from a 1995 U.S. Department of Education survey of academic staff. Of the 1,165,000 staff members who do faculty work, 561,000 (48 percent) are full-time faculty, 387,000 (33.2 percent) are part-time faculty, and 217,000 (18.6 percent) are graduate assistants. The 48 percent of full-time faculty reported in the survey include about 14 percent who are not on the tenure track. There remain only some 34 percent of all those doing faculty work who are on the tenure track, including about 25 percent who have tenure and 9 percent who are probationary for tenure. Yale's dependence on non-tenure-track instruction is therefore not unique; it reflects a problem that is even more evident at community colleges, where nearly twothirds of faculty members teach at hourly rates and without benefits.

If Yale's graduate teaching assistants are not privileged students, or in the words of Peter Brooks, "the blessed of the earth," but rather exploited employees, then whose graduate teaching assistants are not? But what does it mean to argue that Yale's teaching assistants are exploited? The economic claims, that stipends of roughly $10,000 were $2,000 below the New Haven poverty line and did not cover family medical benefits, certainly point to a need for remediation. But the claimed exploitation, as well as the related argument by Cary Nelson and Michael Berube that those who refuse to recognize the graduate assistants as employees act in "bad faith," depend on the further proposition that Yale's policy toward its graduate assistants is driven by employment rather than educational considerations.

Berube buttresses this argument by quoting an unexpected source, the conservative New Criterion: "graduate students at Yale, like graduate students almost everywhere, are exploited as cheap labor." The simple fact that teaching assistants are underpaid does not in itself make them exploited employees, any more than the fact that their work subsidizes their educational costs suffices to define them exclusively as students. Moreover, the claim of exploitation is not sufficiently demonstrated, even by the painful evidence provided in two informative essays by leaders of Yale's Graduate Employees and Students Organization (GESO), who argue that many individual faculty members fail in their responsibilities to their students. Nor does Stephen Watts's persuasive deconstruction of the argument that graduate assistants enjoy the benefits of apprenticeship support the claim of exploitation.

The crucial argument appears in Berube's excerpt from the New Criterion: "For graduate students, teaching has become more and more a form of financial aid instead of a genuine apprenticeship; for universities, graduate students have become more and more like a pool of migrant workers." Ironically, it is precisely the increasing use of work as financial aid that has led to the exploitation.

The requirement that graduate students do more teaching than is necessary for their own professional development transforms these students into employees. Excessive teaching by graduate assistants does not contribute to their education, as Watts observes, because "the learning curve diminishes as a graduate student teaches the same cluster of courses for the umpteenth time." Underpayment of these employees as a mechanism to offset the costs of undergraduate education completes the transformation of the subsidized graduate student into the exploited employee. Those many academics who have long opposed part-time and evening graduate programs on the grounds that students need full-time immersion in their student experience cannot, in good faith, defend a requirement that graduate assistants earn their way with excessive teaching loads that do not further their education and, indeed, leave inadequate time for their studies.

Many faculty members who profess to respect the concerns of graduate assistants reject GESO's right to unionize and especially to withhold grades. The grade strike at Yale was a poor tactic. It exacerbated a conflict between graduate assistants and undergraduate students that is especially well documented in Kathy Newman's essay on the symbolic representations of graduate assistants. It yielded the moral high ground by seeming to victimize the undergraduates and to confirm the alleged indifference of unions to academic values. It finds little defense even in this collection. And it failed.

Nonetheless, condemnation of the grade strike on other than tactical grounds requires an alternative remedy for what even the New Criterion terms a "scandal" that educationally shortchanges both the graduate and the undergraduate students. Moreover, how is a grade strike different from any other strike? Tellingly, a National Labor Relations Board administrative law judge denied legal protection to participants in the grade strike not because they were students or because they harmed their undergraduate students. Rather, he held that the teaching assistants who had tried to moderate the impact of their action on undergraduates by continuing such work as providing "letters of evaluation and recommendations for the students they taught" thereby participated in a "partial" strike, which, unlike a full strike, is legally unprotected.

Any strike would have inconvenienced undergraduate students and denied work to the university employer. Despite this, employees have, or should have, the right to organize and strike. What truly distinguishes the graduate assistants from typical employees is that their most serious grievances are academic, not economic. Ideally, the best graduate student union would negotiate itself out of existence by restoring the university's commitment to full-time graduate education. In practice, negotiations focused expressly on such academic concerns would be ruled outside the scope of bargaining for graduate unions, as they are for faculty unions. Moreover, graduate assistants, like faculty members, have turned toward unionization precisely because universities have allowed economic priorities to displace academic ones.

Many of the essays in this volume emphasize the role of fiscal constraints in shaping an academic underclass, though they rightly question Yale's claim of penury, and many call for broad faculty organizing and even larger coalitions of university employees. Many university employees, including some at Yale and those faculty who depend primarily on part-time appointments for their livelihoods, are economically exploited. But the most compelling arguments for organizing faculty, as for graduate assistants, are professional and educational.

The essay by Andrew Ross concludes with such a call for organizing directed at broad academic issues, but he seems unaware of the extent to which faculty organizations already exist and pursue this effort. Stanley Aronowitz provides a corrective on the extent of organizing. Moreover, although he understates the extent of both faculty job actions and bargaining on professional issues, he rightly emphasizes the need for faculty organizations to focus on the integration of academic and community concerns.

Linda Pratt and Karen Thompson also document both the economic exploitation and the academic cost resulting from the abuse of part-time faculty. They recognize that the solution lies in organizing to improve the terms of part-time faculty employment. This would diminish the excessive reliance on such faculty members, ensure that they have the support essential to professional performance, and reduce the tendency of these undercompensated positions to lower compensation for all faculty. Not least, organizing can diminish those divisions among faculty that impair collegiality and weaken academic governance.

The academic underclass is increasing dramatically: over the past twenty years the number of graduate assistants has increased by 35 percent, part-time faculty by 103 percent, and nontenure-track faculty by 92 percent. Overall, full-time faculty increased by only 27 percent. The expansion of the underclass is fueled by fiscal constraints and promotes economic inequity. Yet Will Teach for Food, despite its title, shows that the most serious problems are educational and professional, and that the organization of academic employees is essential not only to achieve economic equity but also to ensure educational quality for future generations.

Ernst Benjamin is AA UP director of research and associate general secretary.

Copyright American Association of University Professors Nov/Dec 1998
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