Product Description

The increasing corporatization of education has served to expose the university as a business—and one with a highly stratified division of labor. In Chalk Lines editor Randy Martin presents twelve essays that confront current challenges facing the academic workforce in U.S. colleges and universities and demonstrate how, like chalk lines, divisions between employees may be creatively redrawn.
While tracing the socioeconomic conditions that have led to the present labor situation on campuses, the contributors consider such topics as the political implications of managerialism and the conceptual status of academic labor.
They examine the trend toward restructuring and downsizing, the particular plight of the adjunct professor, the growing emphasis on vocational training in the classroom, and union organizing among university faculty, staff, and graduate students. Placing such issues within the context of the history of labor movements as well as governmental initiatives to train a workforce capable of competing in the global economy, Chalk Lines explores how universities have attempted to remake themselves in the image of the corporate sector. Originally published as an issue of Social Text, this expanded volume, which includes four new essays, offers a broad view of academic labor in the United States.
With its important, timely contribution to debates concerning the future of higher education, Chalk Lines will interest a wide array of academics, administrators, policymakers, and others invested in the state—and fate—of academia.

Contributors. Stanley Aronowitz, Jan Currie, Zelda F. Gamson, Emily Hacker, Stefano Harney, Randy Martin, Bart Meyers, David Montgomery, Frederick Moten, Christopher Newfield, Gary Rhoades, Sheila Slaughter, Jeremy Smith, Vincent Tirelli, William Vaughn, Lesley Vidovich, Ira Yankwitt

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #592135 in Books
• Published on: 1999-02
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 328 pages

Review
"Chalk Lines is a powerful analysis and indictment of the emerging corporate university. It illuminates the crisis of academic labor by placing it in the context of global economic change. Everyone concerned with higher education should read this book and reflect on it deeply." (Cary Nelson, coauthor of Academic Keywords: A Devil's Dictionary for Higher Education.)

From the Back Cover
“Chalk Lines is a powerful analysis and indictment of the emerging corporate university. It illuminates the crisis of academic labor by placing it in the context of global economic change. Everyone concerned with higher education should read this book and reflect on it deeply.”—Cary Nelson, coauthor of Academic Keywords: A Devil’s Dictionary for Higher Education

Customer Reviews

Poignant anecdotes, few detailed case studie or solutions
Martin's anthology considers an academy where fiscal crises are normalized, exploitative labor practices proliferate, and the dream of universal access to higher education seems ever more remote. The contributors examine why, in a time of prosperity, we have abrogated a vital social contract. Many agree that the crisis stems from a facile ideology of "selective excellence," championed by the Reagan, Bush, and Clinton administrations, that adopts the corporate management triumvirate of downsizing, reengineering, and endless strategic planning. In the face of this bureaucratic onslaught, higher education in America may have lost its soul.

The guilty heroes of this tale-guilty because some have promoted these changes and most have acquiesced to them-are the embattled professoriate, who confront a decline in real salaries, demographically- and legislatively-mandated increases in workload, and a savage labor market where many toil in a permanent underclass of part-time adjunct labor. But are things really this bleak, and are the politicians and administrators so villainous? Sadly, the twelve essays in this volume document a strong case that the "politics of work" in contemporary higher education are deplorable indeed.

The critique is covincing, but the book is marred by the absence of detailed case studies and by the lack of a clear or compelling vision of how the defeats higher education has faced might be reversed.

Best Overall Look at Academic Labor and Politics
This book is so interesting for me because it has a variety of essays that investigate the changes in Academic Labor -- the deprofessionalization, the adjunctification, the proletarianization -- and it explores the social, political, and economic implications of these transformations. It has essays on Academic Capitalism, Labor Organizing, and on what these changes in work relations mean for those of us in the Academy and for labor organizing, in general. Several of the authors are well known to many (David Montgomery, Stanley Aronowitz, Sheila Slaughter, more.). It describes both the big picture of the academy and the society (i.e., research funding, social stratification) and it also describes some specifics on the organizing that is going on among part-timers and graduate teaching employees. It is a useful book for labor organizers, teachers, and people thinking of going into university teaching. I highly recommend it!