I dislike Stanley Fish’s blogging. For the most part, he comes across as a ridiculous Liebercrat blowhard, a more pedantic, less offensive version of Marty Peretz. But I’m genuinely impressed with what he wrote about Wisconsin, because not many people are willing to admit that they are embarrassed by their earlier beliefs:
In over 35 years of friendship and conversation, Walter Michaels and I have disagreed on only two things, and one of them was faculty and graduate student unionization. He has always been for and I had always been against. I say “had” because I recently flipped and what flipped me, pure and simple, was Wisconsin.
When I think about the reasons (too honorific a word) for my previous posture I become embarrassed. They are by and large the reasons rehearsed and apparently approved by Naomi Schaefer Riley in her recent op-ed piece “Why unions hurt higher education” (USA Today). The big reason was the feeling — hardly thought through sufficiently to be called a conviction — that someone with an advanced degree and scholarly publications should not be in the same category as factory workers with lunch boxes and hard hats. As Riley points out, even the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) used to be opposed to unionization because of “the commonly held belief that universities were not corporations and faculty were not employees.”
[….]If “universities are not corporations” ever was a good argument, it isn’t anymore because universities, always corporations in financial fact, become increasingly corporate in spirit every day; and if I and my colleagues are not employees, from whom do we receive salaries, promotions, equipment, offices, etc., and to whom are we responsible in the carrying out of our duties?
I have always been a supporter of unions in education, but Wisconsin had a similar effect on me. I went from being a passive supporter of these unions to being an active supporter. I’ve come to believe that if you’re in education, you should be aware that someday the conservatives will come for you. The only way you can hope to fight is by being part of something organized.
Jude
Welcome aboard the Cheesehead Union Express, brother. We’ve got room enough for everyone!
Really should spell-check before I hit “submit.”
Violet
And if you’re a police officer or a firefighter or any other unionized employee who is traditionally given a pass in the war being waged on unions, you should also know that once they’ve decimated all the other unions, they’ll come for you too. Maybe sooner.
Comrade DougJ
@Violet:
True.
BGinCHI
I’m a unionized higher ed tenured faculty member. It has its ups and downs, but the ups far outweigh the alternative. Universities certainly do operate more like corporations every day, and not just because they are run by Snidely Whiplash caricatures. Budgets for state schools have been slashed across the country, and that didn’t start with this downturn. It’s been going on for a couple of decades. States just do not want to pay for higher ed, and so tuition has to go up. To hold costs down administrations attempt to keep labor as cheap as possible.
All of this is relatively normal and familiar in most businesses, but higher ed does not churn out a product like General Mills or Ford does.
And so what the unions, or, better yet, collective faculties and staffs, do is something extremely important. They routinely protect the worst corporate ideas from ruining higher ed.
You want to see education only for those who can afford it? Or unqualified instruction and terrible learning conditions?
Then break the higher ed unions. Administration as corporate management will begin to deliver a product that will push us further and further away from educational excellence.
The Ancient Randonneur (formerly known as The Grand Panjandrum)
In the 80’s I almost fell for the “unions have become too powerful” argument. This of course was not the case. Union leadership had figured out how to work the system to the benefit of workers and the companies/organizations failed to think long term and look at the long term implications of the contracts they signed. It is not the fault of union leadership that they were better negotiators.
a hip hop artist from Idaho (fka Bella Q)
@Violet: I’ve come to believe that it will get to the point that if you’re not actively supporting the conservative fuckwaddery du jour, they will come for you. How soon, remains to be seen. Sigh.
slag
I had this feeling as well. For teachers unions, in particular. I always saw unions as weirdly anti-meritocratic, and my only basis for this impression was their collective emphasis on seniority. And, to some extent, that impression hasn’t gone away. But since I don’t see much meritocracy in the non-unionized world either, I say fuck it. Go unions! At least that’s something.
Linnaeus
As one who helped organize two (ultimately successful) unionization drives for academic student employees at two different institutions of higher education, I’m glad to see this change of heart by Fish. The main objection he once had (that people with advanced degrees weren’t “employees”) is very similar what I and my fellow unionists heard (and still hear sometimes) from students who opposed unionization; they usually said something along the lines of “well, we’re like apprentices.” But that doesn’t negate the conclusion that Fish comes to this time around; namely, that even in academia, you’re working for a wage paid to you by someone else and to whom you’re responsible in some way. I can see why this might seem more ambiguous in the case of a faculty member, but it is definitely not so in the case of an ASE.
Trentrunner
Stanley Fish is Exhibit A that a liberal arts education does not make you a good human being or even a decent citizen.
He’s gotta be pushing 70, and he’s only just fucking NOW realizing that maybe everyone doesn’t have the cushy working conditions of an academic “star”?
Sorry, but he’s always been a total dick. This latest just clinches it. And this is from a fellow professor. :)
Violet
@a hip hop artist from Idaho (fka Bella Q):
Never forget that having slaves worked out well for the plantation owners, paying in scrip worked out well for the mine owners and child labor worked out well for the factory owners. Of course the conservative owners will come for all of us. The more they own and control, the better it is for them.
BGinCHI
@Trentrunner: Until he went to UIC, where he was administration, he was at private schools (Duke, mostly). Latter institutions give you no perspective on this because you get no experience with organized labor. You’re well-paid and working conditions are generally good.
That he failed to empathize with his fellow humans isn’t a surprise when you remember that he’s a Miltonist.
Sad Iron
I’m a UW-System Prof. We were just granted the right to organize last year, but Walker’s moves have come before we could even take a vote on our campus. The union organizer is still stalking the halls, but we’re all asking, what’s the point? What could we even bargain for? The morale here is in the shitter. Sorry for the language.
Observer
Doug, you must have accidentally deleted the following fragment so I’ve added at the end for you.
Hermione Granger-Weasley
haha
at my uni the grad students ARE chattel slaves.
I have put together bookcases, babysat kids, and worked on one professors mountain cabin.
slag
@BGinCHI:
Haha!
MattR
If only the average conservative could grasp this.
BGinCHI
@Sad Iron: I’d say it should be just the opposite.
You all should be chomping at the collective bit to get organized and face down Walker and others who have NO interest in quality higher ed.
Why bother? Jesus, consider the alternative. Walker’s bullshit won’t last forever.
steve
I’m on the faculty of a state university (not in Wisconsin) and Fish’s editorial sums up how I’ve been feeling lately.
We’ve had two votes on faculty unionization twice in the last 25 years and I voted against it both times. It didn’t pass, largely because of the sorts of perceptions you describe: that we were scholars, not factory workers. We perceived the pro-union folks as non-scholars. We weren’t employees of the university, we WERE the university, blah blah blah.
After seeing what unfolded in Wisconsin, I wish I had voted for the union. Yeah, I’d have paid a bundle in union dues by now. But I wouldn’t be losing sleep over the prospect of spending my retirement in a homeless shelter if some crazy teabagger gets elected governor.
David in NY
I think that there is difference between unions of professionals (of one of which I am a member, although a local of the UAW, believe it or not) and other trades or industrial unions. Most workers have no ethical obligations to the widgets they turn out. But when you are not dealing with widgets, but rather with students or clients or the like, sometimes ordinary trade union norms do not exactly apply.
But otherwise, yes, go unions!
BGinCHI
@slag: Trust me, I’m a Shakespearean.
Linnaeus
@Sad Iron:
I understand why your morale and that of your colleagues would be low right now, but maintaing an organized presence would put all of you in a better position to not only fight Walker, but also play a role in correcting his policies when his time ends. Then you’ll have a functioning union ready to go instead of having to organize all over again.
The Moar You Know
@Linnaeus: Software engineers eat this argument up and come back for more, even while working 100-hour weeks and watching their marriages and families dissolve.
The lunatic cognitive dissonance involved in considering oneself “not being an employee” (in spite of having taxes withheld, going to the same place everyday to work, having to answer to a boss, and having a medical care and 401k plan) is mindblowing to me.
I’ve been working in this industry a LONG time. And even though I run my own company now, I’m the only person who works in it that I know of who is pro-unionization of the trade. As an owner, a union would frankly make my job easier. I would only have to negotiate once, instead of over and over and over again. My life is too short for that.
I wish that some of my fellow engineers would figure it out, but they never will, not even after every last single job in the trade is outsourced to someone on an H1-B visa.
BGinCHI
@steve: My dues are $15 a week, and it’s worth every penny.
Sad Iron
@BGinChi. In short, you’re right, and I think a vote will go forward anyway. It’s just the morale is so low, even though we’re all protesting, signing recall petitions, etc. Wisconsin salaries for Higher Ed are some of the lowest in the country, add in furlughs (3% cut), the new cuts, plus union dues…ouch. That said, you’re right.
Zifnab
@The Ancient Randonneur (formerly known as The Grand Panjandrum):
I don’t even know if that’s true. Personally, I think the unions were suffering from the same kind of corruption as their corporate counterparts. Unions had their fair share of embezzlement and fraud and malpractice.
I think a lot of the union bosses sold out their constituencies for the same country club perks that their management peers were getting. Unions bucked the idea of universal health care as far back as Truman, favoring corporate coverage instead. They were prone to all the worst sins of racism and sexism through the 60s and 70s. They fought immigration reform straight through the 90s. And those racist, sexist, anti-immigrant, pro-corporate tendencies caused them to back the wrong political horse over and over again, until the corporations finally killed them with “Free” trade.
Unions did a lot of stupid shit.
Linnaeus
@The Moar You Know:
Techno-libertarianism has long baffled me, given how it’s strongest in professions that owe the most to our government’s de facto industrial policy.
BGinCHI
@Sad Iron: The union dues will pay for themselves.
But I hear you. We have low salaries too, and are in the midst of a nasty contract re-negotiation.
It’s just so much more effective and comforting to be united in trying to protect your mission and your salary/working conditions.
Hang in there!
slag
@BGinCHI: I spent a term studying only Shakespeare and Milton. I had no idea what I was getting myself into. They were just two guys I wanted to learn more about so I chose those two subjects independently. Long story short: I’m a Shakespearean [non-professionally] as well.
David in NY
@The Moar You Know: Yeah, I’ve never understood why the software guys and their ilk haven’t formed unions. Is it really merely, “I’m smarter than those union guys”? Because if it is, they aren’t.
@Linnaeus: “Techno-libertarianism” — love the phrase. Not the actuality.
Bill Section 147
The “conservatives” will come for you.
That statement doesn’t need any qualifiers. Except to explain that by conservatives you are referring to the team that wears that uniform. They used to be a broad mix of traditionalists and minor-authoritarians but they are totalitarians now.
There used to be a level of decency and respect for community in what was once styled as conservative or even Republican.
Linnaeus
@Zifnab:
Yep, they did. In spite of that, though, they were and remain the best available check on plutocracy, even if they sometimes fail.
(I’m not saying you’re denying that, by the way.)
BGinCHI
@Zifnab: Agreed that corruption in organized labor is terrible and corrosive and needs to be cut out wherever possible.
But, you show me the damage done by a union or its management to the economy, to another country, to the working classes, and I’ll show you abuses a thousand times worse by corporate America.
To make any equivalence between union mistakes and corporate behavior is to ignore the scale of the damage and its consequences.
Sad Iron
@BGinChi and @Linnaeus. Thanks for your views and the support!
Steve in the ATL
I have always been opposed to unions, seeing them as antiquated, no longer necessary, and an impediment to high performance. In fact, a large part of my job involves keeping companies union-free. I have become radicalized, however, by the outrageous actions of these Koch-wing governors, and incredibly impressed by the good people of Wisconsin. And let me tell you, that last part is hard to admit for this Chicago native!
MattR
@David in NY:
I think you are close, but not quite there. It is actually “I’m smarter than those other software guys.” I think the idea of standardizing pay is anathema to most code monkeys who believe that they are more skilled than their coworkers.
Fucen Pneumatic Fuck Wrench Tarmal
@Sad Iron:
um, the principle?
think about the message it sends if you decide to not vote or not unionize, simply because of current conditions? when will the chance come again?
you will be held up as an example of why unions “have outlived their usefulness”
and how the smartest(theoretically) teachers don’t want a union, and reject everything about the union. not just, that you thought it was pointless.
seriously, how many people are making otherwise “pointless” gestures,to fight on behalf of something they believe in.
i would say its the least you can do, if not for yourselves, for others who can use even a symbolic nod.
Linnaeus
@David in NY:
Thank you; I will confess that it’s not original to me, and I would properly cite where I first read it (being an historian and all) if I could remember where that was.
Sad Iron
Oh, and it’s about time Fish said something nice about academics. He’s been Mr. Bites-the-hand-that-feeds-him ever since his colleagues never gave a crap about “Is There a Text in this Class?” and refused to bow to him instead of the French theorists. Overdue.
David in NY
@MattR: Ah, a sort of variant of the “I’m against taxing the rich because I intend to be rich myself someday!” position.
slag
@Sad Iron: I had a couple of your colleagues visiting recently, and I have a sense of where you’re coming from. My only advice is: Don’t get sad; get even. Not original, but still appropriate.
BGinCHI
@slag: I was snarking on that (mostly), cuz I do love Milton. A great place to visit, but I wouldn’t want to live there.
The Moar You Know
@David in NY: Yes. That’s all it is.
I’ve been in software engineering a good long time, but two things I frankly hope I never get used to is both their insufferable arrogance, more suited to French royalty than code monkeys, and their absolutely vicious and amoral backstabbing. Software engineers are assholes, plain and simple.
BGinCHI
@Steve in the ATL: Are you a lawyer?
Zifnab
@The Moar You Know:
The community just isn’t the same. Engineers are better paid, for one. They think just because they’re making twice what their blue collar contemporaries make that they’re ok. Even if they are working twice as long.
I had a lawyer friend brag about his six figure salary straight out of school. But the guy practically slept under his desk. Yeah, $200k / year sounds like a great deal until you realize that – at 100 hrs / week – its more like you’re just working two and a half jobs at $80k. Much less glamorous.
And jobs are fairly plentiful, unlike in the blue collar sector where they’ve dried up left and right. The work isn’t as physically taxing. Some of us work from home, so we rarely even see our co-workers. Comparatively, white collar is just a paradise by comparison.
It’s hard to justify more, even if we are getting screwed, just because we see everyone else so much worse off than us.
BGinCHI
@Sad Iron: He did teach people that it was OK not to drive Volvos, though.
MattR
@David in NY: Kinda like that. But if you could see the idiots I work with you would understand why my version is justified ;-)
Personally, I never saw much point in unionizing since my team consisted of me, my boss and three Canadian programmers.
a hip hop artist from Idaho (fka Bella Q)
@BGinCHI: I’m more Marlovian, myself, with all that it implies.
BGinCHI
@a hip hop artist from Idaho (fka Bella Q): Well for god’s sake don’t get stabbed in the eye with your own dagger.
David in NY
.@The Moar You Know: @MattR: It has seemed to me, from far outside, that what software engineers, code monkeys and their friends have gotten themselves is total lack of job security in a situation where that needn’t have been so. At least the ones I have known seem to have lost their jobs at the most inconvenient times. You’d think they might reflect on that, but I guess not (or maybe I don’t understand the actual work environment, which I don’t)
Steve in the ATL
@BGinCHI: Yes, I am a lawyer
David in NY
@Zifnab: When those lawyers were making 40K a year we used to say it was at $0.69 an hour. I managed to avoid it, be a unionized lawyer, and lived more or less happily almost ever after.
kth
Fish’s schtick is best understood as his ambition to be the John Milton of contrarianism. I.e., not just to stand out among his living peers, but to be the greatest contrarian that ever walked the earth. Something like
[…] I thence
Invoke thy aid to my
adventrouscontrarian song,That with no middle flight intends to soar
Above the Aonian mount, while it pursues
Things unattempted yet in
prose or rhymepunditry.numbskull
@slag: And you were well paid in brownie points. Quitcherbtichen and get back the salt mines!
a hip hop artist from Idaho (fka Bella Q)
@BGinCHI: It’s not as if we’re not lit geeks, or anything. She says, having taken 2 Milton seminars (the Paradises) and a seminar focused solely on the sonnets Shakespeare.
BGinCHI
@kth: Also, too, iconoclasm.
singfoom
@The Moar You Know: As a software engineer, I’ll own up to the arrogance. I think it happens as you design large systems. Most of us are control freaks (which is good for the job), but I have to object to the amorality.
I’ve been on large teams, small teams, medium teams, and while I’ve met some Project Managers that would rather stab me in the face than speak to me like a human being, most other engineers have been nice people.
Obviously your mileage may vary, but still. Perhaps we can remove the amorality from the broad brush?
I’ve always thought unions in my profession would be good, but I don’t know how you would handle radically different skill levels, or even skillsets within a union context.
@David in NY:
There’s a bit of job insecurity, but that’s nothing that knowing multiple tech stacks/languages can’t fix.
Zifnab
@Linnaeus:
Oh, absolutely. I’m just noting that unions weren’t doing as well, in the 80s, as they liked to think. A lot of the groundwork of their demise was laid back then.
@BGinCHI:
For a time, the unions and the corporations were working hand-in-hand. Once the unions collapsed, all their power went to the corporations, who just kept on keeping on.
I’m saying it was the consumer culture and the general greed that made unions and corporations allies. Even to this day, the auto-workers union has been opposed to raising CAFE standards on vehicles, for instance.
Unions have to be with the progressive movement. They can’t just ally when its convenient and turn on the progressives the moment management dangles a fist full of quarters in their faces.
Barb (formerly Gex)
@The Ancient Randonneur (formerly known as The Grand Panjandrum): It’s not the fault of the unions that the management doesn’t have the corporations’ interest in mind either. Meaning, the contracts only went bad because management works for the short term, not the long term, yet they made long term commitments. I tend to think the management class got exactly what they wanted out of this.
HyperIon
@slag wrote:
What is more anti-meritocratic than tenure?
Lay low and suck up when necessary, get tenured, then hang on as an associate prof for life. And no pesky union dues!
Barb (formerly Gex)
@steve: Welcome to the wait to buy insurance until you need it club. Christ.
I mean, I don’t know what else to say to the “oh wait, this is going to affect me?!?!” crowd.
lou
@The Moar You Know: You might be describing my BIL to a tee. he works, it seems like, 15 hours a day, six to seven days a week. sometimes it’s all night because he has to communicate with the Indian contingent of the company he works for. Every other U.S. software engineer was laid off but him when the company offshored his division. His salary has not increased one dime in six years. I think he’s gotten one vacation in three years.
But who does he vote for? Republicans, of course. Who does he listen to? Rush Limbaugh, of course. The disconnect is mind-boggling.
Barb (formerly Gex)
@Linnaeus: They’d also be the people most affected if every goddamn algorithm could become intellectual property, but they’re all sure they’re the next Google or some shit.
HyperIon
@kth wrote:
good one.
but then you got a little too crazy. ;0
BGinCHI
@HyperIon: How are the grapes? Are they sour?
I know many useless tenured profs who ought to retire, but they are very much the minority.
And you don’t get tenure by sucking up. You’re thinking of people who get MBAs and go into business.
Barb (formerly Gex)
@HyperIon: I hear they just hand out tenure via lottery. No merit involved!
RalfW
Fixt.
.
Linnaeus
@Zifnab:
I don’t agree – and pardon me if I’m misreading you – with the apparent “unions/progressive” dichotomy that you’re drawing here. If you look at the progressive (or, if you prefer, liberal) movement in the United States in its totality, especially after World War II, it’s hard not to come to the conclusion that labor has been a key component of it all along.
There have been divisions and fissures along the way, both on specific issues and in a broader cultural sense. But unions are not alone in having those differences with progressive partners. That’s the challenge when your political movement encompasses such a broad swath of people.
Trevor B
I am a graduate student in the Montana school systems, we have been trying to unionize, and the university lawyer recently made the statement that “we are not employees but students and cannot therefore unionize” seems like similar crap to me.
slag
@HyperIon: I hear that, but I question the premise. Time alone does not get one tenure. Or at least, that’s what my tenure-track friends tell me. That said, I recognize the tenure system isn’t entirely meritocratic. It’s just that the areas in which it isn’t meritocratic aren’t necessarily systematized or even always obvious to the average observer, really.
gnomedad
@The Moar You Know:
Serious question: you don’t think being unionized would make you less competitive?
Linnaeus
@Barb (formerly Gex):
*laugh* But seriously, your statement hints at something I’ve been thinking about re: techno-libertarianism in IT communities. I think the other reasons stated in this thread make sense (supreme confidence in one’s own intelligence, etc.), but I think that the image of the buccaneering pioneer of the 1960s and 70s is still very resonant in IT professions. And even those entrepreneurs were able to do what they did in part because of a underlying structure that was government subsidized. But that part of the story tends to get ignored and we’re left with a “great man” version of the history of IT in the late 20th century.
pk
If you are a woman, conservatives will come after you.
If you are a non-white minority, conservatives will come after you.
If you are gay,conservatives will come after you.
If you are poor, the conservatives will come after you.
The only people not on the list are the super rich.
I don’t know who this guy is, but if he hasn’t figured this out by now then he is not fit to teach.
Linnaeus
@Trevor B:
That is almost always the first response of a university when its ASEs begin a unionization drive.
t1
I am a longtime union supporter.
The fact that Stanley Fish now agrees with me makes me question my beliefs.
JPL
I mentioned this before and it is worth mentioning again. I worked for a major computer company years ago and those that actually fixed the hardware were paid less. Because they could unionize the company made sure they were well paid. Without unions, even non-union companies would pay less.
Barb (formerly Gex)
@Linnaeus: I honestly have never understood this. What if the only public domain search technology was sequential search? Computing would literally grind to a halt.
Marc
Wow, that leads to quite a dilemma. After idiocies like his Palin review I decided that the opposite of whatever Fish believed was likely to be true. This has been reliable. Now I am in doubt…
ppcli
Like a lot of other people here, I’ve used Professor Poisson as a time-saving device. (Ever since his jaw-droppingly dumb and disingenuous defence of the Social Text editors after the Sokal Hoax, though I started evolving in that direction much earlier, in the reader response theory days.) Can’t spare the time to figure out what to believe? Read Fish and believe the opposite. Like Bill Kristol on foreign policy.
Now I may have to make up my own mind. I’ll never get work done.
mzrad
Wisconsin encouraged me to check out _Norma Rae_ from the library to see it in full for the first time. While it’s true that unions aren’t perfect and they can be tools for inefficiency and graft, their foundational concept is pure. Personally, I found _Norma Rae_ both moving and inspiring. Love that scene when they kick her out of the factory and this little skinny woman just stares down one manager to get him out of her way.
Did Fish really write that bit about not seeing how his PhD self could possibly be in the same category as a factory worker? He must not have ever been a graduate student. Seriously, if not for university libraries, some of these people would never sell a single book. *Out of touch*!
HyperIon
@BGinCHI ask: @HyperIon: How are the grapes? Are they sour?
Well, I got tenure and I didn’t suck up. I’m in the private sector now. And I don’t regret leaving a tenured position. I’ll spare you the gory details. ;=)
I agree that most faculty are not coasters. Similarly I think that most teachers (at any level) do a more than adequate job.
But I think that it is unwise to evaluate a college professor early in his/her career and make a decision about essentially a lifetime appointment. People change over their work lives. Some (not all, not even many) really wind down and coast. I believe there should be a mechanism for dealing with folks who have checked out. It really hurts the morale of a department to have to carry dead weight. And I observed the same thing at NIH.
The original argument for tenure was for protecting unpopular speech in academia. I don’t see much need for that now…certainly not in the chemistry department.
tkogrumpy
@Trevor B: What, you never heard of the student union
tkogrumpy
@Trevor B: What, you never heard of the student union.
tkogrumpy
@David in NY: I get the impression you have not spent a lot of time interacting with line workers.all the ones I interacted with cared quite a bit about the widgets they were responsible for.
Barb (formerly Gex)
@mzrad: I’ve always had a problem with the conservative impulse to declare that if some system experiences flaws (unions, welfare) that it is better to scrap the 98% that works than to tolerate the 2% that is less than optimal. I mean, these are human beings we’re dealing with.
But it is right in line with their preference to punish.
Linnaeus
@mzrad:
Fish’s (former) perception is probably more common than you think, even among graduate students. There’s still some classism in academia, even among normally progressive people.
Barb (formerly Gex)
@HyperIon: And if you were in political science, public policy, economics, etc. it still wouldn’t be important to protect your unpopular ideas.
Unless you work at a school that is only comprised of the hard sciences, and even then there still can be unpopular ideas.
Holy shit, the more I think about that last comment, the more my mind gets blown. You must live in some strange world where controversy is very rare indeed that you are so blase about the idea of protecting unpopular ideas in academia.
Jason
@HyperIon: What’s interesting is the power and importance of the review system in a situation such as mine – APSCUF contractualizes so much of our assessment and interaction that I ended up producing a pretty magnificent paper trail for a first-year TT who spent much of that year on the dissertation and its aftermath. (I don’t dispute I’m lucky, of course.) The process and information of compiling your reviews becomes so public, so transparent, that I don’t know how anybody keeps a deficiency (“Your excellent student evals are mitigated somewhat by your tendency to kill threads on political blogs of medium size”) private.
In this union job I’ve got so many built-in protections – and annoying constraints – that I’m not very worried about outside forces training their guns on us. That happened with the HR 177, the law that let them do random “hearings” on liberal indoctrination on PA campuses; that was such a fiasco I think even true believers were chastened, and as we now see they went all 1st principles on us anyway and just slashed budgets.
But there’s such a mania for keeping every minute of office time accounted, every email preserved, that it’s hard to understand the tradeoff between keeping the coasters honest and having certain prerogatives traditionally associated with programs of “higher value.” Having to prep and teach 3 FYC classes a semester would burn out anybody, I guess; we don’t have grad students to build our cabins. But I might be interested if a little devil on my shoulder gave me the option. Just for kicks.
The Raven
There is something very wrong with hominid political thinking in the USA, that it has not yet assimilated this insight of not even the last century, but the century before that.
Croak!
Brother Shotgun of Sweet Reason
Let me know when engineers can be unionized. My colleagues look on it as if it were the plague. When I tell them my brother in the Writer’s Guild walked out on the Daily News their heads just spin.
Meanwhile, our “employee-owned” managers just cut our vacation time permanently by 3 days. You’d think we would figure out we’re nothing but highly-educated wage slaves, but no.
Brother Shotgun of Sweet Reason
@The Moar You Know:
Gee, Civil Engineers are like, civil. Thanks for the warning, I’ll watch my back.
The Raven
It’s instructive in the discussion of unionizing engineers to consider why free/open source software (FOSS) has not taken over the world. It has an enormous cost advantage, and is technically sound, and some business models have been developed.
These seem to me some of the reasons:
1. Many software engineers who develop FOSS are unwilling to engage human interaction as part of their design process.
2. Many software engineers who develop FOSS have great difficulty forming formal organizations, even when it would enormously benefit them.
3. Many software engineers who develop FOSS are unwilling to support other software engineers, or artists, in their attempts to make a living from their work. It’s very striking: I’ve seen so many software professionals argue that writers and artists “should” work for free that it no longer surprises me.
The groups and FOSS projects which do manage to overcome these difficulties are the successful ones.
Hmmm.
Maybe this has some broader applicability.
rikryah
better late than never. nothing like the cold, hard truth to bitchslap you into reality.