Category Archives: Writing

Cary Nelson, president of the American Association of University Professors, has written an important piece in the Chronicle of Higher Edification this week (The AAUP: A View from the Top“). At the heart of the essay isn’t the long litany of complaints about about Higher Education. That’s familiar territory. The heart of the piece is his call to reinvigorate the academic union movement:

Over more than a generation, too many campus unions have lost sight of their larger social mission to focus instead on narrow self-interest, seeking job security and salary increases only for their own members and ignoring not only the abuse of other campus workers but also the multiple political and economic challenges to higher education. A more democratic and progressive form of unionization—built on the sort of engaged faculty membership the AAUP has advocated—would look out for the welfare of all members of the university community.

I’ve seen this work both ways. The union I worked with in graduate school, the Texas State Employees Union, had a wide view of the job of organizing. We weren’t simply trying to get people to join, although that was certainly important, and we weren’t simply working to materially improve the working conditions of graduate students and other state employees, although we had a lot of success in those areas. We had to work on creating a larger vision of reform, a progressive context, for our goals.

Perhaps because we were working in a so-called right to work state, we thought of our work practically, politically, and culturally. If we marched on the capital (as we did each year) we were fighting for tuition waivers and lower work loads for social workers, but we also had a strong Gay Pride presence, and often enough anti-war groups. When I moved to Illinois, however, I was disappointed at the narrowly legalistic focus of the academic unions.

Don’t get me wrong, these unions were doing a lot of good work; as bad as things are in Illinois Higher Education now, they would be much worse without the unions, especially the University Professionals of Illinois. But the unions had become mired in all of the details of what amounts to an ongoing war of attrition with an administration– several administrations–that think it can kill the union by wearing it down and outliving it. The death of a thousand cuts.

Many union members– some happily and some unhappily– see this war as the sole function of a union. The price of this narrow focus is a membership that no longer sees the forest for the trees. The union can’t take a strong position against imperial war, or even on an issue like national health care, without (it believes) alienating its more conservative members. It can’t even defend members victimized by the inevitable pettiness of academic infighting, for fear of creating insurmountable internal divisions.

Nelson seems to be honestly admitting to the very sort of thing in the AAUP. “Unlike our Canadian counterpart, the Canadian Association of University Teachers,” Nelson writes, “which regularly issues findings objecting to faculty-committee actions, the AAUP typically focuses on process, rather than substance, and lets bad faculty decisions stand.” I think that his call for a more open discussion of “academic freedom, tenure, and shared-governance practices” is a welcome breath of fresh air.

The American commitment to class mobility through education has always sketchy, despite the myths that cluster around the idea of the American Dream. There have been times that we got serious; the post WWII GI Bill is one example. The Obama administration, too, while perhaps too preoccupied with other issues, has made an effort to strengthen access and pledged to do more.

Usually, though, we are more interested in funding and promoting the already-successful than the could-be-successful. We routinely fund public schools through local school districts, so the wealthiest neighborhoods have the best schools. The top of the educational hierarchy– the Ivy league and the like– is rich beyond belief while the bottom tiers muddle along.

In so-called hard economic times the muddling quickly goes from bad to worse as the recent California cuts demonstrated. In hard times, too, American Capitalist Culture reflexively squeezes anyone less materially privileged and so restricts mobility. I wonder how much could be saved if the California administration decided that no would get paid more than $90,000 until the crisis abated?

More importantly, hard times provide an opportunity to permanently redefine institutions. Too often, this too means less access. In this case, though, the new, more restrictive ideas of access can too easily become the norm, outlasting the crisis by many years. That’s why Chancellor Daniel L. Klaich’s trial balloon, suggesting that Nevada’s community colleges restrict enrollment, is worth watching.

The recent flap over errors in the APA Style manual has pushed me into pulling a Seinfeld and coining a new term: Cubicle Sourcing. You heard it here first, the day after Thanksgiving, 2009. Cubicle Sourcing is the opposite of Crowd Sourcing, of course.

Crowd Sourcing, Wikipedia reminds us, is “a neologism for the act of taking tasks traditionally performed by an employee or contractor, and outsourcing them to a group (crowd) of people or community in the form of an open call.” Cubicle Sourcing, then, is my neologism for taking a task that ought be done by a community, and assigning it to a team of isolated copywriters and editors.

APA, in other words, did everything backwards; they used Cubicle Sourcing, and then when the text was released, incorporated the errors that were inevitably found in a series of errata and, in the end, another printing. They should have put the 5th edition up on the web and issued a call to their community of users for corrections, updates and clarifications.

In-house editors can watch for inconsistencies, moderate disputes, and so on. All of the major style manuals should be converted to Wikis edited by communities of users. Every two or three years– more often if times warrant– they could produce a by-demand print version. The old, private property/author model– Cubicle Sourcing– is inflexible, too slow to change, and prone to error.