WILL TEACH FOR FOOD: ACADEMIC LABOR IN CRISIS reviewed by Laurie Ouellette Editor: Cary Nelson Year: 1997 Publisher: University of Minnesota Press Price: $19.95 US

Last September, Gary Trudeau's Doonesbury offered a particularly sardonic commentary on the sorry state of academic employment. In the comic strip, an administrator is amazed to learn that Walden College's finances are in the black again. "How's this possible?" he asks the business manager. The answer: "Tuition hikes plus getting rid of tenure." "Amazing . . . and we can still attract competent faculty?" "Trust me, sir, it's a buyer's market," replies the manager, as the dean heads out in a pickup truck to hire the academic equivalent of day workers. While most people don't think of professors as laborers in the traditional sense, Trudeau's scenario is on the mark, says Cary Nelson, self-professed "tenured radical" and editor of Will Teach for Food, a recent collection of essays addressing the labor crisis in higher education. Downsizing, draconian cutbacks, and the adoption of a bottom-line mentality similar to the one that runs Corporate America are increasingly the norm at many colleges, adds Nelson. When coupled with the glut of Ph.D.s currently on the job market, the acceleration of these market forces spells trouble — not only for the freedom of speech associated with tenure, but for basic amenities like a living wage, job security, and health benefits. The brilliance of Will Teach for Food, which features contributions by graduate students as well as labor organizers and sympathetic professors, is that it exposes the vicious circle that academic labor has come to represent. As several essays point out, the move away from tenure track positions has coincided with a greater reliance on cheaper options like part-time and adjunct faculty and graduate student teaching, the motor that runs low-level undergraduate courses at many universities. If graduate student admissions are high, it is mostly to meet this teaching need, say contributors. Some critics estimate that as few as one in ten graduate students will be able to secure a full-time teaching job, particularly in competitive fields like English (the odds are not as grim in the sciences). The majority can look forward to a future of part-time or adjunct work that pays even less than most TAs earn in graduate school — without the benefits. "Gypsy academics," who must work at several institutions at once, are already a growing segment of the academic workforce.

info nuggets from this book: * According to the U.S. Department of Education, the percentage of faculty members holding part-time positions has risen from 22 percent in 1970 to nearly 45 percent in 1992. * In English Departments, the number of Ph.D.s awarded in 1995 rose to 1,080 from 943 in 1994. The number of tenure-track jobs fell to 234 from 249 the year before. * The pay rate for part-time faculty, graduate students and adjunct faculty in the humanities ranges from $1,000 to $3,000 per course.

From this perspective, it isn't such a stretch to see what many Ivy Tower professionals have in common with poorly-paid service and temporary workers. As a Ph.D. candidate myself, who taught four courses in three different states this past academic year for a grand total of $8,900, I've found the financial anxiety to be much greater than any number of less "prestigious" jobs I've had over the years, including waitress and telemarketer. So what's the solution? Collective bargaining, a movement that's already underfoot at campuses across the land, say contributors. Graduate employees have already unionized at a number of universities (including the University of Massachusetts, where I'm getting my degree). After years of being treated like disposable workers, part-time faculty at Rutgers have made significant gains for adjuncts by negotiating better contracts and some job security. Building bridges to other university employees is also essential. Graduate students — themselves trying to organize — were among the most outspoken critics when Yale's inhumane treatment of its service and clerical workers came to light last year. But as Yale's union busting tactics made perfectly clear, some universities — even select, learned institutions like Yale — are opting to play hardball when faced with such challenges. (The opening essays of Will Teach for Food provide a detailed dossier of the activities at Yale, including the graduate students' grade strike.) Undergraduates and full-time faculty also need to become aware of and sympathetic to the plight of part-time and graduate employees. As Kathy Newman, a graduate student at Yale, points out, heavy dependence on graduate teaching, coupled with the dismal job market, has turned graduate school into something like a "Teach for America" program. While many TAs are gifted and dedicated teachers, the quality of undergraduate education is bound to suffer as this trend continues. Until university administrators get honest, tenured professors to come out of "denial," and co-eds and their parents get wise to the situation, little is likely to change. As Barbara Ehrenreich puts it in her foreword, the "bandit approach" to management that has seized the corporations is doubly inadequate when it comes to the nonprofit service sector, especially universities. Perhaps it is possible to "downsize, exploit your workers, and still produce a perfectly fine widget," but when you mistreat service workers, including graduate students and part-time faculty, you get a different product. Anyone who cares about higher education will find Will Teach for Food a ruthless but hopeful look at what's going on there, and what might be done. N.B: Will Teach for Food is available on the Web in paperback from amazon.com. Read more Work reviews! Laurie Ouellette writes about media and popular culture when she's not busy teaching and working on her doctoral dissertation. © 1997 Tripod, Inc. All Rights Reserved.