Truthout | News Analysis Wednesday, 30 April 2014
By Max Haiven
Recognition of the deteriorating state
of academic labor in anglophone universities on both sides of the
Atlantic is at an all-time high. Thanks to the tireless work of
precarious university employees and their representative organizations (from formal trade unions to informal collectives, from lobby groups to activist knowledge-production outfits and blogs), the story of the exploited adjunct, the glut of hopeless doctoral candidates, and the legions of overworked teaching assistants have graced the pages of many fine books and journals and many leading newspapers and periodicals. Indeed, these stories have become a regular feature of publications like the Chronicle of Higher Education and Times Higher Education supplement and increasingly appear on the agenda at large scholarly gatherings, including the Modern Language Association. Even lawmakers are taking notice. Protests are becoming more emphatic and militant.
We are amidst a great thaw, where the taboo topic of academic
exploitation, once privatized and blamed on "failed" individual
scholars, is being rendered unavoidable and recognized as a systemic and
pervasive problem. More accurately, the university's most vulnerable
academic workers are fighting back against the "externalization" of the
crisis of higher education onto their shoulders: the downloading of a systemic and structural crisis onto the lonely, precarious individual.
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