At 08:35 AM 8/20/2002 -0700, Devine, James wrote: >[was: [PEN-L:29647] Plastic Tower Re: Noam Chomsky and Hyperbolic >comparisons] > >It's my impression that the metaphor "the ivory tower" has always referred >to only the elite professors at elite research-oriented universities, who >were most cut off from "reality." It's true that that kind of ivory tower >is being eroded, in that more & more of the profs. are working for >business. Perhaps being cut off from "reality" can be a good thing...
The academic labor market has also seen an immense growth in non-standard work - mostly part-time contingent faculty, but with some innovative variations (Northeastern a while back pioneered the three-year full-time professorship - I'm not sure if or how this worked out). The AAUP reports that, currently, 43% of faculty are part-time, and that over half are non-tenure track (http://www.aaup.org/Issues/part-time/index.htm). Almost no part-timers receive benefits, and the pay is a fraction of that full professors receive for the same work. Due to the departmental structure of most colleges and universities, U.S. courts have long classified faculty as pseudo-managerial and made it illegal for them to unionize at private institutions (state laws usually allow faculty at public schools to unionize, though). However, since most departments exclude part-timers from departmental bureaucracies, this has become a new sector for organizing campaigns. I remember when the part-timers at Emerson College won a union vote by an overwhelming margin, it came out that over 70% of Emerson's faculty was part-time, which is just incredible. (As an aside note - undergraduate resident assistants at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst recently won the first undergrad union in the country, joining the UAW.) All of this is totally at odds with a generalized notion of the "ivory tower." Although I'm sure such a thing exists, it's not the experience of most higher ed. faculty. The academic underclass is rapidly becoming a majority, if it isn't already. ------Ben
