Cogs in the Classroom Factory: The Changing Identity of Academic Labor (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Cogs in the Classroom Factory: The Changing Identity of Academic Labor Gary Rhoades Cogs in the Classroom Factory: The Changing Identity of Academic Labor edited by Deborah M. Herman and Julie M. Schmid. Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Publishing Group, Praeger Publishers, 2003. 232 pp. $66.95. ISBN 0-89789-814-1. In Cogs in the Classroom Factory, Deborah M. Herman and Julie Schmid examine, "The Changing Identity of Academic Labor (p. 1) Although the origins of this edited volume lie in the organizing efforts of a graduate student employee union at the University of Iowa, the chapters address other academic institutions and workforces, including part-time and contingent faculty, faculty in Pennsylvania's state system of higher education, and faculty in a Canadian polytechnic university. The book is aptly titled given the roots of the authors' experience with the Campaign to Organize Graduate Students (COGS). Moreover, the metaphor of "classroom factories" points to the changing conditions of academic work with regard to instruction, and the sense that universities are becoming more corporate-like in their production processes. The book's chapters are consistently readable, accessible, and of good quality. The volume should be of much value to readers of varied interest. The most natural audience is those interested in academic labor, and in unions. More than that, and regardless of one's perspective on unions, the volume offers insight into important features of academic workplaces, graduate student activism, and restructuring. The book's first section addresses "A Widening Divide" between full-time, tenure track faculty and others. Although there are studies of part-time and contingent faculty in the U.S. (Finkelstein et al., 1998; Leslie and Gappa, 1993), and of their working conditions (Rhoades, 1998), what is largely lacking is an in-depth exploration of the meaning of these changes from the employees' perspective. Three chapters probe the social psychology of conflicting faculty identities, and connect them to issues of faculty organization in the changing political economy of the academy. Wesley Schumar and Jonathan T. Church offer an insider's view that captures the divide into a dual labor market. Their case reveals how the tenured class, which claims academic freedom, is complicit in the silencing of non-tenured faculty's voice and rights. Mike Burke and Joanne Naiman take us beyond the borders of the U.S. to trace conflicting identities and two-tier contracts in a Canadian polytechnic, in which the union participates in creating highly differentiated faculty working conditions. They detail how the union promotes "competitive" and "entrepreneurial" models of faculty work that undermine a collective model of union members. Finally, Joe Berry offers a brief, compelling view of part-time faculty member's lives by [End Page 477] attending in wonderful detail to the artifacts of the office he occupies. He walks us back through the life of the office as an archaeological site revealing transformations in faculty work; at the same time he offers a forward looking, concrete example of an alternative model for organizing contingent faculty. The next five chapters give us an invaluable view of the inner workings of graduate employee unions. Susan Roth Breitzer offers a story of the struggle to develop a labor consciousness among graduate employees at the University of Iowa. Retracing decisions about which union to affiliate with, as well as detailing strategies in COGS and the reaction of some students to their activities affords us great insight into factors that have shaped graduate employee organizing. Similarly, Richard Sullivan details the graduate employee union in the University of California System, at Santa Barbara. His insider's view captures the tensions between the graduate student local and the national union (the United Autoworkers) over the control and identity of the unit, and between different graduate employee units in the UC System. James Thompson discusses the challenges of and tensions between graduate employees at the University of Florida, who see themselves as an organizing union, and the parent union, which is more of a business union. Eric Dirnbach and Susan Chimonas discuss tactics and identity of graduate employees at NYU, adopting a purely bifurcated a view of identity (between student and professional versus worker). By contrast, in discussing the...