thanks, Duncan; this is most helpful and constructive, as is looking
into what has been done already through WSF, as Jon suggests. maybe we
can get something started through this list in terms of action, if
people on the list are interested (with all the political caveats i
spelled out before). cheers,
saed
Duncan Fuller wrote:
>
> A summary from the anarchist’s list (just saw this Chris!!) – some
> great stuff. And, with obvious ironies, apologies, but I can’t resist
> (isn’t that the problem…??) maybe these are relevant…
>
> http://www.blackwell-synergy.com/doi/pdf/10.1111/j.1467-8330.2007.00542.x
>
> Radical Theory/Critical Praxis: Making a Difference Beyond the Academy?
>
> http://www.praxis-epress.org/availablebooks/radicaltheorycriticalpraxis.html
>
> The Academics Guide to Publishing -
> http://www.sagepub.co.uk/booksProdDesc.nav?prodId=Book226599&currTree=Subjects&level1=P00OR
> <http://www.sagepub.co.uk/booksProdDesc.nav?prodId=Book226599&currTree=Subjects&level1=P00OR>
>
> http://www.amazon.com/Academics-Guide-Publishing-Rob-Kitchin/dp/1412900832
>
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> *From:* Angela Jancius [mailto:[log in to unmask]]
> *Sent:* 19 November 2007 00:53
> *To:* Ben Passmore; heroux; chaines; jessecohn; Hilary Parsons Dick;
> ldxar1; Gail Chester; mp; Michael Rynkiewich; brianmaiden;
> naomi.schiller; lara sheets; robbinsr; mrock; littl1al; duncan.fuller;
> L.Maxey; Tom Slater; mjleaf; broca; Rachel Signer; f.hicks;
> james.igoe; Josiah Heyman; Crystal Fortwangler; Sam Beck; lilliott;
> vincent.lyon-callo; larajiuk; edseljoe; susan mazur
> *Subject:* Battling the Neoliberalization of University Life: A List
> of Strategies
>
> My sincere thanks to all who responded to my query. The tips that you sent
> were wonderful, and really quite inspiring. Below is an initial
> compilation, divided under the six subheadings of: "On Unions and
> Organizing," "On Faculty Rank," "On Bureaucracy and Governance," "On
> Teaching," "On Student Tuition, Fees and Support," and "General Advice." A
> shorter top ten list will be published in the January 2008 edition of
> Anthropology News. I can already imagine that it will be difficult to edit
> down the expanded list of strategies that are included below. The
> below list has no copyright or individual authorship and you should feel
> free to distribute it widely, to post it to wiki sites and blogs, to
> invite
> your friends and students to expand upon it, and of course to encourage
> your departments and colleagues to implement its contents.
>
> Angela Jancius
>
>
>
>
> **Battling the Neoliberalization of University Life: A List of
> Strategies**
>
>
> **On Unions and Organizing:**
>
> * The No. 1 way is faculty unionization. Unionize tenure-track faculty,
> adjunct faculty and graduate students who teach. Your efforts will not be
> effective if adjunct and graduate teaching staff are not organized.
>
> * Resist the destruction of solidarities (e.g. see David Harvey, The
> History
> of Neoliberalism).
>
> * Support unity. As an adjunct instructor and a graduate student, I
> can tell
> you that management is WELL AWARE of the contempt that most full-time
> faculty has toward us part-timers. During contract negotiations, I've
> also
> heard GA's and adjuncts undercut the contracts of the full-timers.
>
> Management disciplines full-timers with the knowledge that they can be
>
> replaced instantly by the army of the underemployed.
>
> * Invite part-time and adjunct faculty, as well as support staff and
> research staff, to departmental meetings. Make the minutes available
> to the
> entire community.
>
> * Join professional organizations that will lobby in opposition to the
> lobbyists for privatization: NEA higher education organizations, AAUP,
> AFT.
> Pay your dues or be prepared to be sold out.
>
> * Participate in faculty governance and advocate strongly for resolutions
> and policies that promote an academic community built on shared values and
> scholarship instead of a corporatized institution built on
> entrepreneurship
> and external overhead.
>
> * Form parallel autonomous institutions that meet people's needs in a
> collective, non-hierarchical fashion. At my old school, SUNY-Binghamton,
> the campus was served by an excellent bus system that was owned and
> run by a
> collective of the drivers, funded by student fees.
>
>
> **On Faculty Rank:**
>
> * Reject the implementation of "benchmarks" or any other form of
> "standards"
> for merit raises or promotions that are predicated on quantified output.
> Rather, draw upon such ideas as those of Ernest Boyer (Scholarship
> Reconsidered) [http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2007/10/02/wcu]
>
> * Reject merit raises all together and rather spread the total raises due
> the entire faculty of a department evenly to all faculty.
>
> * When 65% of the professoriate is part-time, why have tenured
> positions at
> all?
>
> * Refuse to sell ourselves as "stars" to highest bidding institutions.
> This
> reproduces the neoliberal self-made "man," reinforcing gender and class
> hierarchies within the academy.
>
> * Don't refer to enthusiastic younger members of faculty as "junior"
> scholars. It annoys them intensely and makes them feel small.
>
> * Allow complete transparency, re: salaries paid to all faculty in all
> departments.
>
> * Identify and monitor the behavior all 'frumps' (formerly radical
> upwardly
> mobile professors).
>
> * Use the growing 'sustainability consensus' discourse to push for a
> democratization of academia - as sustainability centrally implies
> participation.
>
>
> **On Bureaucracy and Governance:**
>
> * Expose and oppose corporate control of academia.
>
> * Resist the process of turning universities into institutions of
> management
> rather than places of "higher learning" by refusing to accept
> administrative
> positions that are newly created and not really necessary for "learning."
>
> * The university can be run by the faculty, but the faculty must
> organize in
> constant vigilance. Professors could collectively attend administration
> meetings and repeat the demand, week after week, to stop the metastasized
> growth of bureaucratic bosses. Use the saved funds to create more
> professor
> positions, course offerings, and library books, and to establish student
> scholarships grants. The heart of the university is here, not in creating
> ever more layers of office managers to govern this and that for a bottom
> line value that is set by the new MBA bosses.
>
> * Rip up parking lots. Implode student housing. Stop all construction
> projects not related to safety. Make students get gym memberships
> elsewhere.
>
> * Demand accountability for the university practices in hiring faculty,
> labor, etc. in the construction of new campuses abroad (i.e. NYU's global
> expansion to Abu Dhabi).
>
> * Resist the temptation to outsource to private companies, especially big
> non-local multinationals, tasks which the university could do by itself.
>
>
> **On Curriculum:**
>
> * Resist the neoliberal transformation of the curriculum (there is an
> excellent article--chapter 6--by Aihwa Ong in Neoliberalism as Exception:
> Mutations in Citizenship and Sovereignty. Durham: Duke University Press,
> 2006.)
>
> * Restore a system whereby intellectual inquiry is valued for its own
> sake,
> and not just seen as a means toward increasing capitalist productivity. If
> the government's current proposal to fund all research on the basis of
> "relevance" were carried out, it would be the end of virtually all
> Humanities research as we know it.
>
> * Resist the homogenization of university studies that is taking place all
> over Europe. Anthropology, in order to survive, is being asked to
> demonstrate demand from the job market. And its courses are oriented
> towards
> market demands.
>
> * Avoid strict degree completion deadlines. Returning students bring
> valuable professional experience, but they also need the time to balance
> professional, work and personal responsibilities.
>
> * Make research findings and publications freely and publicly
> accessible on
> the web.
>
>
> **On Teaching:**
>
> * Teach students about neoliberalization (its history, its impacts on
> individuals, etc.). They are the ones who can stop it.
>
> * As teachers, we have a unique opportunity to relate the material we
> teach
> to the everyday lives of our students. Hold seminars on campus on the
> impact of neoliberalism on campus life and learning. Use critical
> pedagogy -
> encourage critical thinking
>
> * Create a course that studies the University as an anthropological
> project.
>
> * Link with activists, community groups, etc., beyond the academy. Carry
> out critical (including participatory) research. Develop more experience
> based learning courses, including internships and community service
> learning
> programs.
>
> * Make the world your classroom. Teach in parks, bars, restaurants, homes,
> online.
>
> * Offer courses on weekends, evenings, and on-line, so that working
> students
> and students with child and eldercare responsibilities can take
> courses/make
> progress on degrees.
>
> * Encourage team-teaching.
>
> * Conduct and assess instructor evaluations in a manner that reflects that
> students are scholars, not consumers.
>
> * Avoid grade inflation. In a context of grade inflation, instructors that
> seek to honestly assess performance find themselves at a disadvantage,
> especially if they are adjunct staff.
>
> * Develop undergraduate programs that pay particular attention to
> non-anthropology majors, since they are the ones that fill your large
> classes. Increase the pressure for small classes for introductory courses.
>
> * Make classes last as long as they need to be. Stop with the
> micronization
> and fetishization of time. Some days I have a lot to say, some days not so
> much. Some days students need to practice and drill, and other times one
> profound sentence might do it.
>
> * Quit giving standardized tests and grades. Pass/Fail. Get rid of
> students
> who don't want to be there. Tell them to come back when they know what
> they
> are there for. If we stop treating students like cash cows, maybe they
> will
> actually appreciate learning.
>
> * Assign primary texts instead of textbooks.
>
> * Make your students do the work - have them explain concepts to each
> other.
> Have them create materials they think are useful. Grade them for effort
> rather than results - they are there to learn.
>
> * Spend less time preparing, and more time getting to know your
> students and
> their individual needs.
>
>
>
> **On Student Tuition, Fees and Support:**
>
> * Don't use standardized testing as a measure to determine student
> admissions or funding.
>
> * Make applying for college more affordable. Applying to graduate programs
> is increasingly expensive. Transcripts (often in duplicate) are required
> from each school. The cost of transcripts is inflated (averaging
> $5-$10 per
> order, for regular mail). Applications fees are $50-$95 per school.
> GRE fees
> increase by roughly $10 per year (and this test should be banned, anyway,
> since it only tests your ability to learn test-taking strategies, not true
> knowledge or ability to succeed in a program).
>
> * Use course packets, blackboard pdfs and next-to-last edition
> textbooks in
> introductory courses to decrease student book costs.
>
> * Fund all students who are admitted into your program equally. Since
> Thatcher (and Reagan), efforts to turn higher education into a vocational
> finishing school for industry have been much more systematic and blatant.
> Under this model, if you're funded you get money to live off, to pay fees,
> and to attend conferences etc. If you're not funded, you get nothing
> and you
> have to pay fees. So one person has masses of help, while another is
> hindered and must struggle. This is one of the central ideological
> maxims of
> capitalism.
>
> * Do not permit university programs to let graduate student instructors
> teach without compensation, merely for the experience of it or for credit.
>
> * Do not burden Ph.D. candidates and recent Ph.D.s with the heaviest
> teaching loads. The abusive practice of using younger scholars as
> workhorses keeps a new generation from reaching its potential, in
> scholarship and in practice.
>
> * Pay health care benefits and tuition fees for graduate students, if
> possible.
>
> **General Advice:**
>
> * Be a happy person. Stop with the bitterness.
>
>
> --
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Salvatore Engel-Di Mauro
Department of Geography, SUNY New Paltz
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Senior Editor
Capitalism Nature Socialism: A Journal of Ecosocialism
Editor
ACME: An international e-journal for critical geographies
http://www.acme-journal.org/
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