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Title: Will Teach for Food: Academic Labor in Crisis (Cultural Politics, Vol 12) by Cary Nelson, Barbara Ehrenreich ISBN: 0816630348 Publisher: Univ of Minnesota Pr (Txt) Pub. Date: April, 1997 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $19.95 Amazon Price(USD): $19.95

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Average Customer Rating: 4

Rating: 4
Summary: Lux et veritas revisited
Comment: A certain elite university boasts (literally) an endowment of $5.7 billion (yes, billion with a B)--or did as of Tuesday, 16 September; you should add a million or two per day to get the approximate sum on the day you read this. On that same date the university announced that it will embark on a $1 billion (with a B) program to renovate the buildings on its campus. Yet just eighteen months ago, this same anonymous university--by far the biggest employer in one of the most economically depressed cities in the nation--engaged in a no-holds-barred campaign to break the two unions that represent its nonacademic labor force. And just before that, the university crushed the latest effort by the graduate students' union, which was seeking, before anything else, simply to get the university to admit the self-evident truth that teaching assistants are employees and that, as such, they have the right to bargain collectively.

This institution fosters an extreme but not atypical example of the condition described in this book's subtitle. The academic labor force in the United States, from the celebrated professor to the undervalued custodian, faces an unprecedented crisis, a crisis deftly delineated in the seventeen essays of this book, roughly half of which focus on the labor struggles at the above-unnamed (but named in the book) elite university. That struggle brought support from labor's allies nationwide, but in the end it did little to change the workers' status from what frighteningly parallels--as Stephen Watt puts it in the book's most poignant metaphor--that of miners trapped in a "company town," where the perverted law of supply and demand means that the company supplies the work, so the company can demand whatever conditions are to its liking.

The book does not pretend to bipartisanship, and at times polemic detracts from persuasiveness. But the best of the essays--like Watt's, Kathy Newman's, and particularly Michael Bérubé's--back up their rousing calls to collective action with coolly logical evidence and solidly ordered argument. This is an important book for anyone who is concerned with the state of labor and/or higher education; these days, who can afford not to be?

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