I was reading yet another piece about Republican efforts to demonize college professors– in this case, by targeting Labor Studies professors– and thinking about why the right-wing hates teachers so much (“Groups Investigating E-Mails of Professors in Michigan and Wisconsin Produce No Evidence of Wrongdoing“). Luckily, this particular witch hunt has so far failed to find anything that might be used to drum up the sorts of fear and anger that have made the right-wing so effective in recent years.

At one level, this is very straightforward hardball politics, similar to the ongoing efforts to restrict voter registration. If  you can demonize government officials, you can by extension make it easier to destroy the last real bastion…

The  ongoing consolidation of the online higher education system, especially in the for-profit sector, is one of the most important developments in the last twenty years.  Yet, like the emergence of the internet in the early to mid 1990′s, it remains almost completely invisible in the mainstream– I am tempted to say lamestream– media.  I think it’s under-reported even in the education media.

There’s a lot to be concerned about the emerging online system– arguably, the most transformative development of the internet so far– yet the emergence of the new institutions seems to be happening without much public discussion, much less scrutiny.  The discussion that is going on,…

It’s a bleak Labor Day in every sense. The economy’s in a mess, and our so-called Democratic president has prepared us for his big speech on jobs–  no doubt it’ll be a catalog of concessions to capital– by abandoning updates to the EPA. More and more, Obama just seems like another in a long line of liberal cowards too ready to believe the ever-present whining of the rich. “No we can’t!” “No we can’t!”

Of course they can.  Obama chose to ignore all the wealth squirreled away, and the potential for green technology to jump-start the economy, and the (obvious) popularity of investing in clean water and air and better health and preventing disease. I…

I read a piece this morning about the U.S. public education system (“How to Do the Right Thing in a System That is Wrong?”) that compares teachers’ positions in today’s system to the citizens under the regimes of the former Soviet Union.  Setting aside the hyperbole (so far, we don’t have an educational secret police) the author’s rallying call makes a lot of sense: “Do the right thing, America. Protest. Stand up and stand against your state’s annual orgy of standardized testing.”

What’s so striking about this piece is its timidity and its apparent ignorance of history.  The writer, Marion Brady, seems to assume that the defeat of organized resistance is complete, and that “citizen groups… petitions… speeches……

I’m the last person– give my history in the tenure system– to argue that tenure is fine just as it is. It is not. In my book, I argue that the current systems of ranks and tenure ought to be replaced with a strong union and a seniority system with teeth. We all ought to be able to work ourselves into positions of relative comfort and security, and I think this relative comfort and security ought to come earlier rather than later. That’s the greater good, in a nutshell.

A reformed academia begins with a reformed society that funds a national pension system as well as a national health care system. We won’t be able to get those things, of course,…

There’s quite a lot of discussion about crisis in my book, both in terms of the two historical crises (the Great Depression and World War II) that had such a profound effect on the teaching of English, and in terms of the contemporary crisis, which I argue is less about pedagogy than it is about institutional power. Academics have allowed others to control our professional lives.

There’s not a fundamental crisis in funding, or in the market for English majors, or the use of part time labor, or the rising costs of tuition. (See this “Redesigning Today’s Graduate Classroom” for a recent example of these misconceptions.) The crisis is symptomatic of working people in academia who no longer…