As universities increasingly rely on contingent labour for almost every aspect of their operations, academic organizing is routinely understood, by organizers and observers alike, as a reaction to commercial pressures and corporate-style university management. Over the last decade, the rise of an academic labour movement has been analyzed in a variety of publications dealing with the struggles of teaching assistants, the unionization of adjuncts and the disappearance of the tenure-track professor. In assessing the GSOC strike, contributors to this volume draw on that literature and on published profiles of corporatization in higher education. But, as they also make quite clear, the strike was a new chapter in this history. It involved, from the outset, factors that had not been replicated elsewhere as well as outcomes that could not be easily predicted. The essays in this book, written by people either involved in the strike (graduate students, faculty, organizers) or who are nationally recognized writers on academic labour, offers lessons on what the GSOC strike says about the current role of the university in public life, and how the pressure for universities to realign themselves along the lines of private corporations has broad implications for the future of higher education.

Table of Contents

IntroductionPart I: Corporate University?Ashley Dawson & Penny Lewis - NYC: Academic Labor Town?; Ellen Schrecker - Academic Freedom in the Age of Casualization; Mary Nolan - A Leadership University for the Twenty-first Century? Corporate Administration, Contingent labor, and the Erosion of Faculty Rights; Christopher Newfield & Greg Grandin - Building a Statue of Smoke: The NYU Trustees, Finance Culture, and the Demotion of Intellectual Labor; Stephen Duncombe & Sarah Nash - ICE From the Ashes of FIRE: NYU and the Economy of Culture in New York City; Adam Green, The High Cost of Learning: Tuition, Educational Aid, and the New Economics of Prestige in Higher Education; Micki McGee - Blue Team, Gray Team: Some Varieties of the Contingent Faculty ExperiencePart II: GSOC StrikeUnions at NYU, 1971-2007Susan Valentine - The Administration Strikes Back: Union Busting at NYU; Steve Fletcher - "Bad News for Academic Labor? Lessons in Media Strategy from the GSOC Strike; Maggie Clinton, Miabi Chatterji, Sherene Seikaly, Natasha Lightfoot, Naomi Schiller - "If Not Now, When? Lessons Learned from GSOC's 2005-6 Strike"; Jeff Goodwin - faculty; Andrew Cornell - Undergraduate Participation in Campus Labor Coalitions: Lessons from the NYU Strike; Matthew Osypowski (with Adam Graham Silverman) - Operation Class-movePart III: Lessons for the FutureThe State of the Academic Labor Movement: A Roundtable with Stanley Aronowitz, Barbara Bowen and Ed Ott, Moderated by Kitty Krupat; Andrew Ross - Global U; Monika Krause & Michael Palm - Activists into organizers! How to Work with Your Colleagues and Build Power in Graduate School; Gordon Lafer - Sorely Needed: A Corporate Campaign for the Corporate University; Cary Nelson - Graduate Employee Unionization and the Future of Academic Labor

Prizes

Lessons for what a graduate strike has for the corporatization of higher education.

Reviews

"It studies NYU specifically and universities in general, offering a solid reassessment of corporate growth in higher education, while exploring how to fight for better universities through collective action. Blessedly free of jargon and unforgiving in its critique, this book speaks powerfully to any faculty member interested in retaining academic freedom, shared governance, dignity on the job, or just the job itself... thought-provoking." Academe "[A] set of thoughtful reflections by strike proponents about the corporate university... The University Against Itself is at its best precisely when the authors capture the continuing tension between the academic and corporate characteristics of the emerging corporate academy." The Industrial and Labor Relations Review, Jan 2009