Organizing Professionals: Academic Employees Negotiating a New Academy

by Gary Rhoades

Overview

Amidst unprecedented levels of union organizing in higher education, Gary Rhoades combines the perspectives of a scholar and labor movement activist and leader to provide a comprehensive analysis of organizing campaigns and collective bargaining agreements for faculty (contingent and tenure-track), graduate students, and postdoc employees. Academic employees are organizing and negotiating for respect for workers, their work, and the public value of higher education. Rhoades analyzes how academic employees are shifting the imbalance of power between labor and management, reducing the internal professional stratification between segments of the academic workforce, and intersecting workplace issues with broader issues of equality, public value, and social justice, and in the process organizing and negotiating for a new, more progressive academy.    
 

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781978844247
Publisher:	Rutgers University Press
Publication date:	04/15/2025
Pages:	288
Product dimensions:	6.12(w) x 9.25(h) x 1.20(d)
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

GARY RHOADES is a professor of higher education at the University of Arizona, Tucson. He served as the president of the Association for the Study of Higher Education in 2004 and was the general secretary of the American Association of University Professors from 2009 to 2011. He is the author of Managed Professionals: Unionized Faculty and Restructuring Academic Labor (1998) and coauthor with Sheila Slaughter of American Capitalism and the New Economy: Markets, State, and Higher Education (2009).

Table of Contents

Chapter 1: Now is the Time
Chapter 2: A Critical Juncture and Distinctive Dynamism
 
Section 1: From the Margins to the Center: Contingent Academic Employees Organizing and Negotiating a New Academy
Chapter 3: Bread and Roses, and a Labor-Based Conception of Quality: A New Faculty Majority Organizing a New Academy
Chapter 4: Embedding Bread and Roses and Labor-Based Quality in Part-time Only Bargaining Units
Chapter 5: Graduate Student and Postdoc Employees: More Than Would-Be Apprentice Organizing and Negotiating New Contingency in an Old Academy
 
Section 2: Faculty Negotiating Retrenchment and Technology Amidst Management's Austerity Agenda
Chapter 6: Challenging Management’s Austerity Practices: Organizing Amidst and Negotiating Furloughs
Chapter 7: Negotiating Management’s Austerity Practices: Retrenchment for Financial Exigency and Other Reasons in the Contracts
Chapter 8: Protections and Possibilities in Negotiating a Progressive Academy Amidst New Circuits of Production
Chapter 9: Organizing and Negotiating for Respect and Public Purpose: Toward a New Progressive Normal

Acknowledgments
Bibliography
Index

1 Now Is the Time 1
2 A Critical Juncture and a Distinctive Dynamism 12
Part I From the Margins to the Center: Contingent
Academic Employees Organizing
and
Negotiating a New Academy
35
3 Bread and Roses,
and a Labor-Based
Conception
of Quality: A New Faculty Majority Organizing
a New Academy
39
4 Negotiating Bread and Roses
and Labor-Based
Quality
into Part-Time-
Only
and Combined Bargaining Unit Contracts 62
5 More than Would-Be
Apprentices: Graduate
Student and Postdoc
Employees Organizing
and Negotiating amid New Forms of
Contingency in an Aging, Changing Academy
87
Part II Faculty Negotiating Retrenchment and Technology
amid Management’s Austerity Agenda 119
6 Challenging Management’s Austerity Practices:
Organizing
amid and Negotiating Furloughs 123
7 Negotiating Management’s Austerity Practices: Retrenchment
for Financial Exigency and Other Reasons in the Contracts 144
8 Protections and Possibilities in Negotiating a Progressive
Academy
amid New Circuits
of Production 168
9 Organizing
and Negotiating for Respect
and Public Purpose: Toward
a New Progressive Normal 191
Acknowledgments
215
Notes 219
References 243
Index 000