Category Archives: Composition

You may already know Phillip Dine’s work. According to his official biography, he “covered the labor beat for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch for two decades. “ Among his many achievements are two Pulitzer Prize nominations; more recently he won the 2007 National Press Club Edwin Hood Award for Diplomatic Correspondence and the 2007 Society of Professional Journalists Dateline Award for Investigative Reporting.

His first book, published this year, is called, State of the Unions: How Labor Can Strengthen the Middle Class, Improve Our Economy, and Regain Political Influence. Dine believes that unions need to play a more important role in the U.S. “What’s lacking,” he has written, “is not relevance but rather a way for labor to strengthen itself…” I was curious about Dine’s thoughts on labor and higher education and sent him a series of questions via his publicist. His answers were somethings brief– he has got to be a busy man!–but provocative nonetheless.

_________________________________________________________________

RW: Do you think higher education largely reproduces or challenges class structures in the United States? Has this changed as union membership has decreased? Would it change again if union membership rose?

PD: Higher education largely perpetuates class structure in this country, and that has not changed much as union levels have decreased. Why? Because unlike in countries such as France and Italy, labor in the United States never has challenged the class structure or the economic system. Rather, unions seek to increase the pie and provide a place at the table for their members. They aim to make the system work better and be more fair, rather than trying to dismantle it. There have been a few threads in the labor movement that have leveled more fundamental questions about the class system over the years, but they generally been short-lived. Ironically, the stronger unions are, the better the current system works, because it meets the aspirations of a broader segment of the population.

RW: Do you believe that the union movement in general has an interest in seeing higher education unionized?

PD: Clearly the union movement is interested in seeking higher education — academics, staff, even students — unionized, for the same rationale it wants other sectors of society organized. Moreover, doing so in the education sector would have even a broader impact, given the influence educators have and students will eventually have.

RW: How do you see the role of unionization in American Higher Education? Do professors need unions? If so, why? Professionals often resist unions because they are so vested in individual systems of merit. How can unions begin to change these entrenched attitudes, particularly in higher education?

PD: Complex questions. On one hand, academia doesn’t lend itself to what at times can be the lowest-common denominator, mass-production approach of unions whose emphasis can be on protecting workers who need it rather than rewarding those who merit it. At the same time, the problems created by administrators who are incompetent or worse can sometimes require that professors have some built-in recourse or collective clout to stand up for their rights. There already is pressure for unions to back off their tough stand against merit pay in secondary education, and the questions that poses are not dissimilar to those you raise here.

RW: Some researchers estimate that more than 60% of all university teachers are adjuncts. How might unions help to alleviate this situation?

PD: Good luck. This is happening in various forms in a host of industries or economic sectors, including two-tier structures for journalists. But unions might have more success in education, because the balance of power hasn’t shifted as much and the employers aren’t as profit-driven.

RW: Online proprietary schools are the fastest growing sector of higher education in the United States today, yet many have argued that they represent the ‘Wall-Martization” of the university. Do you see parallels between the rise of Wall-Mart and the more recent rise of proprietary schools such as Phoenix and DeVry? Is it possible for unions to be organized at online proprietary schools?

PD: There are definite parallels. The diffusion of personnel and impersonality of interaction involved here make organizing all the more challenging.

Most of the players in this market are for-profit institutions that are problematic not only for the quality of education they offer but also for their aggressive support of education less as a public good than as a private initiative and saleable commodity, defined in this case through providing a service to the military in return for a considerable profit. And as this sector of higher education grows, it will not only become more privatized but also more instrumentalized, largely defined as a credentializing factory designed to serve the needs of the military, thus falling into the trap of confusing training with a broad-based education. Catering to the educational needs of the military makes it all the more difficult to offer educational programs that would challenge militarized notions of identity, knowledge, values, ideas, social relations, and visions.

Henry A. Giroux, Inside Higher Education, August 7

I couldn’t agree with Giroux more, in many senses, but I also feel his positions on the military and the university has a built in class bias. It’s really a sin of omission rather than commission. I think this impact of this militarized, credentializing factory education system is going to be blunted at the high status research institutions where Giroux has spent his career.

Or, rather, it will be blunted for the privileged professors who work at these institutions and for their equally privileged students. It will be most sharply
felt at the lower ends of the educational hierarchy, in the community colleges and the online schools. That won’t change until the privileges rooted in the educational hierarchy change.

People sign up in droves for online classes and community colleges because these ‘instrumentalized’ credentials are real capital that can be successfully invested. They sign up because they don’t have access to the liberals arts education system. Perhaps they have been told that they are not “college material,” because they did poorly on a standardized test. Or perhaps they are put off by the risks of the debt needed to get a degree.

There are alternatives, of course. Wealthy research institutions could, for example, create a system of cheap, online education, staffed by tenured professors and specifically designed to meet the needs of these students. They would provide instrumental capital as well as the liberal arts education championed by Giroux. That won’t happen until the privileged professors turn their attention to getting their own houses in order.