Fitting the evidence into a conversation on unions and US higher ed (Take one)
A response to “[All] Update on petition for election to form a union”
Part one: Setting the stage
I imagined this write, first, as an open letter to President Jay Coogan (who composed the email to which I am responding), and later, as an open letter to my coworkers at Minneapolis College of Art and Design — the ones who educate more and administrate less. By end, I have drafted and redrafted in various tones and with three distinct audiences in mind. Medium readers and writers, I imagined you, too, into this conversation, as it is a conversation of global and transhistorical significance. This conversation is, at core, about whose labor will be worth how much, and even before that, who is empowered to decide such things. It is a conversation as vital in higher ed as it is in industrial sectors and the other service sectors of today.
What follows, and what felt most correct to me at the end of this US Labor Day of 2016, is a response that sticks closely to the text of Mr. Coogan’s original email. I have intended to unpack that letter — respectfully but also systematically — and to add meaning in when Mr. Coogan’s own linguistic choices appear, to me, to privilege diplomacy over accuracy.
A note on diplomacy, to be fair: diplomatic speakers are constrained by social norms, norms which are situated in particular historic, political-economic, and cultural contexts, and which (despite particularities) often privilege vagueness over concreteness. Diplomatic discourse, in many cases, functions to de-escalate tensions (class, cultural, etc.) rather than to communicate that which we might label, colloquially, as substance. I am not inventing this, even while I know I sound smug. So many scholars now study public diplomacy, in fact, that in 2008 Bruce Gregory suggested the emergence of a dedicated, academic discipline. I, for my part, include this note in an attempt at empathy. I do want to see from where Mr. Coogan stands.
While I aspire to empathize, however, this is not an emotive write. And I would like to encourage Mr. Coogan to follow my lead. Mr. Coogan yesterday composed a second, personal plea to faculty in which he hoped aloud that we will forego unionization. Let me tell you a secret: nostalgia-dependent letters suggesting that unions threaten what is really only fictional unification, a kind of cross-class discursive unification made possible by US ideologues who continually deny real class divisions and/or tie economic success directly and entirely to hard work such that we hesitate to admit even to ourselves when we are exploited… The sentiments in such letters warm my heart. They do.
As I read these letters, I imagine a world other than that in which I live, a world in which we are identically positioned in our access to capital and equally committed to all of our common interests. Sometimes, as I read these present-day, class-blind writes, I am made to recall the similarly worded visions of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century utopian socialists: Claude Henri de Rouvroy, Comte de Saint Simon, François-Charles Fourier... I laugh, quietly, to myself while pushing from my mind platitudes like “what goes around comes around.”
Mr. Coogan, your letters do make me like you. They make me want to sit next to you at a dinner party where I will request more and prettier pictures. You are a nice guy. A smart guy. A diplomatic guy. And a good Minnesotan, even if an East Coast transplant. This letter is not about those things that make you likable.
Instead, what sits uncomfortably in my guts each time I reread your letters is the idea that I make a living (for you, and for other non-educators who have viable, long-term incomes via MCAD) by teaching adults to show rather than tell me their arguments. I make a living by encouraging adults to ask compelling questions, to seek out answers, and to present to me their evidence and evidence-based conclusions. Can I ask of you what I ask of my students, please?
I ask that you show me, show us, the (inflation-adjusted) shifts in wages, benefits, and more at MCAD in recent decades. That you contextualize and then justify these shifts. And I ask for far greater transparency at MCAD from this day forward. You write repeatedly of past practices that are collaborative. You say nothing of the outcomes of those collaborations.
I ask because ours is a world in which capital rather than feel-goodness feeds us (and our children) and pays for our accidents. Capital and not friendship frees us to pursue our passions, as thinkers as well as doers. I was born too late to take tenure for granted. I would like, however, to arrive at the US middle class some day. In the past ten days, you have reached out twice to me, to us, but you have offered us only discourse — the kind that is filled with sentiment and yet remarkably empty of evidence. And in any case, it is hard to eat discourse.
Finally, there are themes I will reference in the second and third parts of this essay that deserve more space than I have allotted. My early drafts came off as even more scattered than this still-failed attempt at efficiency. Achieving class and race diversity of administrators, faculty, and students in US arts institutes, for example, demands immediate investment of our time as well as money, no matter how tight fisted we are. (We have 700 students and a fifty million dollar endowment, to be clear.) Strategies for teaching rigorous courses to students who now take more (legal) drugs for coping than any generation before them, likewise, require our brains in addition to our actions. We cannot proceed as we are.
I continue to believe in MCAD, in what MCAD can become. And I will do my best to fill in the holes I have left gaping here with future writes. I will do so, too, with my actions. As importantly, and to all readers, I invite your comments, critiques, and wisdom. Like Mr. Coogan, I left a larger university for MCAD because, like Mr. Coogan, “I was excited about the intimate size.” You know: big fish, small pond, at a moment when institutions of higher ed need to adapt or risk falling by the wayside. I really do worry that higher ed might go P2P someday if we cannot figure this out.
And so, may we all, as soon as possible, be big fish in small ponds, fish that are paid justly for our labors, and who, as a result, arrive at a future in which the use values of our educations (formal, informal, whatever they may be) match or even surpass the exchange values of those educations.
Part two: Fitting the data in
The numbers I have inserted before each quotation indicate both chronological order of the selections as well as … yes, I succumbed to pressures for (despite the tackiness of) listicles. For that, I apologize. I was vying for reader-friendliness in this lengthy write.
On August 29, 2016, Mr. Coogan wrote,
1. “I would like to share a few thoughts about union representation with the broader community, as faculty unionization would impact all of us and the education we provide at MCAD.”
Let me begin by attempting to show rather than tell the ways in which unionization might “impact all of us.”
Jordan Yadoo wrote the following “QuickTake” for Bloomberg one year ago:
Union workers earn about $200 more per week on average than non-union workers, and have better retirement pay and health insurance. These compensation premiums hold up even after controlling for factors like age and education. Studies have shown that unions also help raise pay for non-union workers by setting a higher prevailing wage. This has caused some economists to link today’s wage stagnation, broadening income inequality and lack of economic mobility to the decline in unions. Critics of unionization say that the inflated salaries of union members come at the expense of fewer overall jobs, and that the outsized pensions and benefits of public-sector union employees have drained state budgets. They say that seniority-based raises and work rules often outlined in union contracts hamper productivity and protect incompetent employees. Supporters counter that unions build workplace trust and transparency to reduce employee turnover and enhance performance. And unions help shrink the gender wage gap. In 2014, women who were union members made an average of 89 percent of men’s earnings, while women not represented by a union made 82 percent.
You can find this passage as well as a “reference shelf” of further reading material here.
Yadoo sums up what is now a decades long, national debate about the impacts (actual as well as predicted) of unionization in the US. Using the OECD statistics here, I can sum up what is now a decades long decline in union membership in the US. With 11 percent of Americans now unionized, a decline of fifty percent since 1983, we are the least organized of those OECD countries which permit unionization.
Synthesizing the above: A) statistical evidence affirms positive correlations among unionization, wages, and benefits, B) nevertheless, conservative websites like The Heritage Foundation invest heavily in anti-scientific fear mongering (see Yadoo’s citation) while perpetuating anti-empirical, Hayekian beliefs about trickle-down economics, and C) unions are out of style in gringolandia right now.
So what is the potential impact of unionization at MCAD? I offer the following and invite others to this conversation:
A) US as well as global evidence suggest higher wages and better benefits, even after PATCO. B) A quick dig into the archives of The Heritage Foundation suggests that think tanks for the radical right with hundreds of millions of dollars in assets, the kinds of organizations that are funded in large part by old, rich, white guys whose interests are not my own, will seek new ways for inspiring anti-union moral panics. C) Given that we are a campus of just over 700 students with a student to faculty ratio of 10:1 (our data) or 13:1 (US News’ data), unionization is likely to remain out of fashion. We are important to ourselves, yes, but we are not very big.
2. “The MCAD administration has long been committed to working collaboratively with adjunct and full-time faculty on issues of importance to all of us. In our view MCAD can best address issues, including matters such as governance, compensation, and professional opportunities, without the involvement of a union.”
I will ask at point 5, as I have in the intro, for details from past collaborative practices. Let me focus here on the “our” of “in our view.”
Former RISD president, Roger Mandle, told a MinnPost journalist just after Mr. Coogan was hired to MCAD: “Among my former peers, Jay is perhaps the most important contributor to modern art and design school administrative practice and to clarity about the mission of these institutions in the 21st century.” I include this to convince you Mr. Coogan is a good administrator. My point here is not about that. It is, rather, the following:
I am concerned that my interests in my fiscal well-being run in direct opposition to the interests of the administrators, no matter how good those administrators might be, and I would like to be shown that this is not so. I ask not for collaboration but for the opportunity to believe, rightly or wrongly, that I am treated justly.
I know, for example, that Mr Coogan’s annual earnings are (this is self-proclaimed and before bonuses and benefits, and I admit here I am borrowing from Minnesota Monthly, using 2012 numbers) at least fourteen times my own. I do not mind. No doubt he is worth fourteen times what I am worth to MCAD. Mandle suggests this is so. But what is Mr. Coogan’s worth in relation to the worths of Ernesto and Francisco in the cafeteria? Or in relation to Paulie who is cleaning the bathrooms by 7am when I show up on Fridays to prep my morning lectures?
MCAD contracted 902 individuals for employment during the 2013–2014 academic year, and spent 11,426,712 USD (42.4% of the budget that year) on salaries and benefits, according to MCAD’s 990. Can we know, please, what percentage of that goes to educators and janitors and cafeteria workers and what percentage of that goes to administrators? And can we know to what extent these were determined “collaboratively”?
Perhaps I have lived in Mexico for too many years. There my friends and neighbors do not feign sameness as they do here, they do not feign (or believe?) that they are all of the same class. De hecho, many of my neighbors drive cars and clean houses for Mexico City’s affluent class; they would have to be stripped of all sensory abilities to not notice the ways in which their own daily lives are radically different from those of their employers. Further, in Mexico there is (at least among the working classes) no shared cultural understanding that it is inappropriate to ask another human being how much he/she/they earns.
Ours is a global capitalist economy and thus we can assume we are each earning or extracting capital from somewhere. In Mexico, my neighbors lack the notion that their earnings are somehow indicative of their value. Their earnings are, instead, and this is reinforced by empirical reality every single day, indicative of the class into which they were born, the quality of (and the number of years of) education that class position afforded them, the social networks they have created because of, or sometimes despite, that class position. This is what frees them to ask questions about money.
I will not ask for personal information, but I do ask for transparency. Especially when confronted with statements assuring me that “the MCAD administration has long been committed to working … on issues of importance to us all.” Mr. Coogan has a vision in which MCAD admin addresses community issues collaboratively and without a union. I have a vision in which I am provided access to the kinds of information that will protect me from being exploited.
3. “We believe that both you and MCAD will be best served if we continue to work directly with one another rather than negotiating through a third party.”
Are your lawyers not, already, a third party?
4. “…As president of MCAD my highest obligation, and that of all our employees, is to serve the best interests of our students. I have concerns that seeking to meet faculty needs by negotiating a single contract through collective bargaining with SEIU, rather than working directly, cooperatively and continuously with the MCAD faculty, may prevent me, and the college, from fulfilling that obligation.”
Current business model: MCAD 990 for the academic year of 2013–2014 indicates that we, the MCAD community if you will, draw 26,396,593 USD in program services revenue. My internet sleuthing leads me to believe that “program services revenue” at an institution of higher ed is made up of tuition, rents, and other fees and services directed at the consumer class (ie students) (section VIII 2g). Please, please let me know if I am mistaken. Until then, I will work with my stated understanding:
If we earn 26,396,593 USD from our students, or from organizations including the government that subsidize our students’ educational costs, then we are drawing 94.6 percent of our total annual revenue (26,396,593 divided by 27,890,066 in 2013–2014) thusly.
If we would like to remain in business, then yes, it is undoubtedly “our highest obligation … to serve the best interests of our students.” They pay 94.6 percent of all that we are. Related to this, we must work to sustain competitive rates, while simultaneously, just like for profit entities, we must do our best to fetishize our product (ie the education we sell). (Insert: I asked for transparency. I am dying to know what percentage of our annual expenditures go to marketing, not to criticize, but as an indicator of the current state of higher ed in the US.)
I get neoliberal capitalism, Mr. Coogan, and I get that nonprofits must function like for profits to succeed in 2016. But that working with a union may prevent you from fulfilling your (our) obligation to students, like much of this email, rings hollow.
You see, I ghost write a whole lot of blogs and newsletters for CEOs in the US for profit sector, and an increasingly popular subject is that of retaining top talent. This means I do a lot of research on how best to retain top talent. You know what all of that research indicates? Let me quote a former me, one to which I sold the rights:
“Without going all Google,” I started saying, long before “workplace culture” was a household concept. The question was, how do you retain top talent without transforming your offices to an adult Disney World (yeah, I know this is a bad metaphor this week, but it’ll return to being a good metaphor next week), and the answer was simple, really. As simple as: you look for cultural fits between you and your employees, beginning in the hiring process, and then you invest in salaries rather than gimmicks… In summary, in 2016, you get what you pay for. And what must get said just after that is: we pay in salaries (and benefits). We do not pay in coolness of an office space.
I might add that we also do not pay in workshops (see point 6). If you can show me, Mr. Coogan, that our students are uninterested in the quality as well as diversity of their professors, that when they pay what currently totals 44,582 USD in tuition, rent, and other fees to MCAD each year they are unconcerned with who you are putting into the classroom and for how long that instructor will maintain a relationship with their institution, I of course will change my mind. My experiences in my own classrooms (at NU, at SAIC, and now at MCAD) suggest this is not so.
5. “Our history at MCAD has generally been characterized by our preference for a direct and cooperative approach.”
Can I ask for evidence of this cooperative approach? More importantly, can I ask for the outcomes of this cooperative approach? Can I ask, as I did in the introduction, for concrete evidence of better pay and increased benefits for faculty as the cost of living in Minneapolis has increased?
6. “There have been only a few meetings of the Faculty Senate where issues of faculty concern have arisen and that I have been asked to address… Adjunct and full-time faculty have historically had a strong voice through the Faculty Senate to bring focus to issues of faculty concern. We have worked collegially…”
My evidence here is anecdotal. To set the stage: On October 26, 2015, I walked out of a 2.5 hour morning lecture and into my (shared) office to check email. I had been up late refining my lecture the night before, and thus I was tired. As I always am after lecture, I was also famished.
“Check email and roll out,” I thought to myself on this day. But that isn’t what happened. I found in my email a message from my Faculty Senate representative that seemed, at best, sloppy and, in its disregard for my schedule, even offensive. It was the kind of message that necessitates reply, no matter how much one has crammed, already, into a day, lest it fester then breed until I wake up one day to find such emails have become normative.
Here is an extract from the message:
Hi fellow Adjuncts,
As the semester has flown past us all, I wanted to finally reach out as your senate representative and ask is there anything you want me to bring to the Senate’s attention? We have a meeting tonight and I wanted to get a good list for 2nd semester so your needs can be a solidified priority.
Right now myself, Pseudonym 1, and Pseudonym 2 are working on options for what sort of things we can do for adjuncts within a tight budget. I suggested “$10.00 parking cards for each adjunct!”, but when the numbers add up it is more than the Senate’s budget for the entire year. Since Money is such an issue, we are looking at something along the lines of workshops or what sorts of resources do we need? Do we need grant writing help? Do we need career advice? etc.
Is there anything specific you would want to have offered if we had a workshop for adjuncts — or other low to no cost options that would make your life better?
Why is Mr. Coogan not hearing faculty concerns? My immediate thought is that this is because we are already overworked and underpaid, our representatives included.
My second thought, and I mean here to criticize the system rather than the individual, is that this is because the overworked representative reaches out to me hours before Faculty Senate meetings to tell me that I cannot ask for anything that costs ten dollars or more, but please, is there anything specific, I “would want to have offered”?
This person in this position then suggests that further training might be what I and others like me — a group of individuals who are already worried they over-invested in their educations given the returns on those educations — could use to improve our lives.
I was tired this day, and so I was bratty in my reply, but I continue to believe in what I said. Statement of our times: Dear children born into the neoliberal present, you can’t ask for money. Want a workshop?
Fast forward eleven months: It is cute when administrators assure us they had no idea we had concerns, cuter still when those admin are worth fourteen times as much as we are. I am an anthropologist by training, and mine is a field in which, if one wants meaningful data, one will work her tail off to see from where others stand. Will she mess this up more times than she cares to admit? Sure. But she will continue to work her tail off, for that is her methodology.
When she sees poverty, she will interrogate that poverty: in what ways are the individuals with whom she works empowered and disempowered? How are (cómo son) their daily lives? And why are they so damn poor? (This is the part where she reads a whole lot of history and political economic theory.) Unlike the voyeuristic tourists who see “noble savages” everywhere, at no point will she say, “But they are happy in their poverty” then pretend we are all the same.
7. “…Directly working together will not be lawful if the union is elected to represent the faculty. In that event, I will be limited to working through the union which will be dealing on your behalf only as a collective, not as individuals.”
At this point, I am left thinking:
1. I am not paid at a rate that affords me the time to work directly with you. I am selecting, Mr. Coogan, from a set of two: union representation or no representation. I will return to this thinking in my conclusion.
2. I have been an individual at MCAD. I have not found that position to be advantageous.
You other the union here, Mr. Coogan, make this Us (those of us at MCAD) versus Them (SEIU). In your second letter, not cited here, you went still further, hinting without a citation that SEIU has not been particularly successful in organizing institutions of higher ed. (I laughed and thought of Tom Geoghegan’s now-classic write on labor in the US, Which Side Are You On? Trying to Be for Labor When It’s Flat on It’s Back.)
I would like very much to see your sources regarding SEIU. And then I would like to hear your thoughts on who might be better suited to represent me, given my inability to represent myself. In doing so I would like you to remember, too, the problems with MCAD’s current system of faculty representation and/or attempts at faculty empowerment (see anecdote in section 6).
8. “It seems like this comes down to a matter of trust. Do you trust that we can continue to, [sic] to work directly and cooperatively together — especially to resolve concerns you may have without bringing a third party in and being limited by the rules that may drastically change our community and culture?”
And thus we arrive at the crux of Mr. Coogan’s letters: “I am a nice guy. Do you trust me to resolve your ‘concerns’?”
If you have met Mr. Coogan, you are likely to agree that he is personable. He is humble when introduced. He smiles often in public. And I was sincere, above, when I noted that he is the kind of person I like to get seated next to at dinner parties. But capitalism is not an institution of trust.
My earnings and absence of a health care plan in this country do not communicate trust. My contingency at MCAD does not communicate trust. Or rather, that trust feels increasingly one-sided:
I am trusted to show up on time, to bring material worthy of my students — material that is rigorous but not uncomfortable and also entertaining, because ours is the age of college study as consumerist practice (though these are for another write).
I am trusted to forgive my employers their inability to pay me at a rate that allows me to live above the poverty line in this country.
Related, I am trusted to see as just/fair contemporary practices in the distribution of resources, practices by which a growing number of educational administrators are made millionaires at the same time that educators are increasingly casualized, left to scrape by at rates that can work out to below the minimum wage (and definitely below the earnings of a good bartender). In the words of Marc Bousquet
Higher education has played a crucial, innovative role in the new order of the global workplace, trading on the willingness of most of us to discount our labor-time in exchange for a little dignity and partial autonomy. It isn’t just faculty work that’s being spoiled; most people’s work is being ruined in similar ways.
Please, please, look for the time to read Bousquet’s 2012 write “We Work” which I am citing here.
I am not ill-informed. I study political economy for a living and have a strong sense of the evolution of that (now global) political economy. I can tell you how we got here. But I cannot tell you that I think “here” is fair. Trust, the trust you request, in a capitalist system has only ever been one sided. This is reaffirmed, I suspect, by the fact that you have not once received an email from a faculty member asking that you trust him/her/them. Correct me, of course, if I am mistaken. (I will then quickly dash off an email to you, requesting that you trust me to establish a Mexico City-based MCAD study abroad program.)
In short: I sign a contract that protects your access to my labor. This contract establishes a price for my labor to which we have both agreed. But I enter into that agreement, knowing there is no chance of barter: “exchange between employers and workers is … fundamentally dissimilar (‘asymmetrical’)” (wrote Don Kalb using William Reddy in 1997). I must sell my labor to survive. You can employ me or not, just as you please (Ibid).
But let me comment here that I did attempt to barter, the first time I was offered a position at MCAD. I was told that pay rates are fixed. Never mind my years of experience in the classroom at more rigorous academic institutions. Never mind my higher rates of pay at both of those institutions. Never mind my overwhelmingly positive course evaluations and a teaching philosophy that reeked of hyper-investment in my students. For ours is an asymmetrical relationship. I chose not to come to MCAD that year. That I am here now is explained somewhere in something else by Marc Bousquet.
Part three: En fin, for now
I might have written an email to Mr. Coogan, one which read, simply, “please show me, convince me using the kinds of evidence and evidence-based conclusions which pass peer-review, that it is not in my best interest to unionize.” I may still compose this email.
I came to MCAD because I wanted to be somewhere where the admin could afford to take risks (real ones, not the hey-we-got-a-new-computer-lab marketing ploy ones) in educational praxis. I wanted to be somewhere not bogged down in tradition, not paralyzed by overdependence on the kinds of givers who fear social change.
This last clause does not mean I am anti-private sector funding; I am, in contrast, in this there-are-far-too-many-individuals-with-way-too-much-money-and-our-governments-do-a-shit-job-of-redistribution moment, very much in favor of taking money from the private sector. And I am appalled, sickened even, by the percentage of MCAD annual revenues which come from student tuition. So yes, we need donors, many more of them who are able to give at much higher rates. But we must bring them on board without losing the ability to piss them off. If we fail, we risk becoming one more institution at the feet of whoever is best able to pay.
Did you know that the fine for getting caught with a cell phone on the trading floor of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange in 2004 was 10,000 USD? That was because traders adapt to change at about the same rate as major donors do, much of the time. While Friedrich Hayek believed we needed the rich to hyper consume and thereby drive innovation for new gadgets, innovation in practice comes from all over the class map. When it is hindered by those at the top, this is often the result of fear. I think of this as the “I don’t know if [insert change here] will benefit me or not, and I’m already winning, so why mess with the rules?” mantra. More simply, this can also get called the “I don’t need your change” (IDNYC) mantra. Which is a double entendre, it is true.
There are other mantras, that are even more insidious, and which shape our willingness to take risks. These shape, too, our confidence in demanding what is right. They cloud our understandings of our worths and the worths of others. Miya Tokumitsu wrote an article in 2014 and then an entire book in 2015 about the “Do What You Love” (DWYL) mantra, for example. And then there are other, much older mantras (academics might prefer the word ideologies) that function in the same way. “Pull Yourself Up by the Bootstraps” and “We Are All One” are grounded, interestingly, in opposite understandings of the relationship between individualism and success, and yet, these are equally effective in sustaining the contemporary social order.
At the end of this long write, a write that is also a request for better information from the MCAD admin, I arrive at what is indisputable. The persistence of race and class inequalities in this country — empirical evidence for which takes the form of chronic poverty, child malnutrition and incarceration rates which do not equally affect the rich and the poor, do not equally affect white families and families of color, along with so many other indicators (ask the NAACP, ask the BLM organizers and organized) — puts the lie to the “bootstraps” ideology, just as it does to ideologies of multiculturalism and unification, of cross-class collaboration. It puts the lie to all those stories we tell ourselves so that we may continue to do nothing radical.
Big Labor didn’t fix these things when it was at its biggest, and I really like thinking with David Harvey’s work on neoliberalism (cited below in book form), when I think about why. That and Paul Geoghegan’s work which I referenced above (and cite below). I think, too and frequently, with Fred Hampton. This stated, the data I find (excluding studies that are not scientifically sound) suggest I am better off unionized than not. That data suggest that we are all better off unionized than not, and even the non-unionized win when others in their industries are organized.
Late last night I laid in bed and thought: why did I do the research? I’m not paid to do the research. Mr. Coogan is paid to do the research, or somebody like him. My key point, in fact, needs to be that I am not even paid at a rate which frees me to invest time and energy in the kind of collaborative, collegial, direct work on issues that are in my best interest, as is MCAD’s current practice.
And this, Mr. Coogan, my inability to protect myself from what are systemic downward pressures on my wages and benefits, is why unions exist. This, and also because history has shown you are far more likely to hear my concerns when I am speaking as one of many, rather than alone.
I compose this message as a white girl who spends most of her time in Mexico City. There are countless reasons for living in Mexico City right now, but chief among them is the fact that I can transform my cultural capital (ie waaay too many years of higher ed) into middle class earnings there in a way that I have been unable here. This fall I flew home to the Twin Cities and landed in a conversation that is, as I wrote in the beginning, at core about whose labor will be worth how much, and even before that, it is about who is empowered to decide such things.
MCAD admin have acted as capitalists, rather than colleagues, from the beginning of this “conversation.” They lawyered up (funding sources unclear) and adopted a discourse that is as cliched and disrespectful as it is incorrect (riddled with warnings of future animosity, crooked unions, forced strikes, and still greater insecurities).
They now play at being the friends who will save us from ourselves and the crooked union. They offer us the opportunity to trust them in a political-economic climate that suggests we should absolutely-not-under-any-conditions trust them. And all the while they fail to find the numbers that would empower us to make an informed decision. I can only assume that this is because the numbers do not make their case. And so, very soon, when faced with the choice between union representation and faux-collaboration, I will choose the union. I do not know what unions can do for me in 2016. But I have so very little to lose.
I continue to think that MCAD can be the university I imagine. I will hint at how’s and why’s in later writes, though these are conversations in which we must all play a part. How will we feed and house ourselves, and will we have health insurance, not semester by semester but the kind that is ongoing, seems, to me, where we begin those conversations, even while I am aware that education transformation must be, necessarily, a multi-pronged and multi-pathed process.
PS It seems fitting, and sure I am going for slightly sardonic, too, to conclude by thanking my parents, given that they feed and house me while in the US so that I can afford to adjunct at MCAD. It seems fitting, as well, to thank all of the adjunct lovers in this country, along with the lovers of other underpaid faculty, who are able to subsidize their partners’ existences. Finally, to those faculty members teaching too many courses at too many different institutions simultaneously (or working too many jobs) and living on too little money, I give you my heart. It is on the backs of others, by the better-paid labor of those others, or through the acceptance of our own exploitation, that we, all of us in this country, are able to sustain our system of higher ed in the present.
Additional Links
The Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System (IPEDS): http://nces.ed.gov/ipeds/
Delta Cost Project: http://www.deltacostproject.org/
Additional Reading
di Leonardo, Micaela. 1998. Exotics at Home: Anthropologies, Others, and American Modernity. Chicago: University of Chicago Press
Harvey, David. 2007. A Brief History of Neoliberalism. New York: Oxford University Press
