Brings together essays by tenure-track faculty, adjuncts, and graduate employees from a variety of disciplines and geographical regions in an analysis of the changing identity of academic labor. The essays included suggest alternatives for responding to the ongoing erosion of tenure and academic freedom and reshaping the academic workplace. Contributors discuss the impact of today's casualized academic job market on faculty's self-perception, political action, and responses to the changing nature of higher education. The essays included in this collection address a number of topics, including: today's academic labor situation from an educational history perspective, the development of an academic worker identity via the build-up to a strike, the graduate-employee union movement, unionization as a social justice movement, faculty unionization and workplace solidarity, the potential culture clash between professional and blue-collar unions, the faculty's complicity in the creation of a two-tiered job system, and the othering of adjunct and non-tenure-track faculty. By focusing on the state of the academic job system on their campuses, the contributors to this volume suggest some alternatives for responding to the ongoing erosion of tenure and academic freedom in higher education and reshaping the academic workplace.

Labor studies scholars and working-class historians have long worked at the crossroads of academia and activism. The essays in this collection examine the challenges and opportunities for engaged scholarship in the United States and abroad. A diverse roster of contributors discuss how participation in current labor and social struggles guides their campus and community organizing, public history initiatives, teaching, mentoring, and other activities. They also explore the role of research and scholarship in social change, while acknowledging that intellectual labor complements but never replaces collective action and movement building. Contributors: Kristen Anderson, Daniel E. Atkinson, James R. Barrett, Susan Roth Breitzer, Susan Chandler, Sam Davies, Dennis Deslippe, Eric Fure-Slocum, Colin Gordon, Michael Innis-Jiménez, Stephanie Luce, Joseph A. McCartin, John W. McKerley, Matthew M. Mettler, Stephen Meyer, David Montgomery, Kim E. Nielsen, Peter Rachleff, Ralph Scharnau, Jennifer Sherer, Shelton Stromquist, Emily E. LB. Twarog, and John Williams-Searle.

We have long been encouraged to look to education, especially higher education, for the solution to social problems, particularly as a way out of poverty for the talented and the hard working. But in its appointed role as the path to upward mobility that makes inequality more acceptable, higher education is faltering these days. As funds for public institutions are cut and tuition costs soar everywhere; as for-profit education races into the breach; and as student debt grows wildly; the comfortable future once promised to those willing to study hard has begun to fade from sight. So now is a good time to take a more serious look at the ways class structures higher education and the ways teachers can bring it into focus in the classroom. In recent decades, scholarly work and pedagogical practice in higher education have paid increasing attention to issues of race, class, gender, and sexuality.But among these four terms of analysis -- and clearly they are interrelated -- class is often an afterthought, and work that does examine class and higher education tends to focus only on admissions, on who is in the college classroom, not on what happens there. Class and the College Classroom offers a broader look at the connections between college teaching and social class.It collects and reprints twenty essays originally published in Radical Teacher, a journal that has been a leader in the field of critical pedagogy since 1975. This wide-ranging and insightful volume addresses the interests, concerns, and pedagogical needs of teachers committed to social justice and provides them with new tools for thinking and teaching about class.

Dirty Knowledge explores the failure of traditional conceptions of academic freedom in the age of neoliberalism. While examining and rejecting the increasing tendency to view academic freedom as a form of free speech, Julia Schleck highlights the problem of basing academic freedom on employment protections like tenure at a time when such protections are being actively eliminated through neoliberalism’s preference for gig labor. The argument traditionally made for such protections is that they help produce knowledge “for the public good” through the protected isolation of the Ivory Tower, where “pure” knowledge is sought and disseminated. In contrast, Dirty Knowledge insists that academic knowledge production is and has always been “dirty,” deeply involved in the debates of its time and increasingly permeated by outside interests whose financial and material support provides some research programs with significant advantages over others. Schleck argues for a new vision of the university’s role in society as one of the most important forums for contending views of what exactly constitutes a societal “good,” warning that the intellectual monoculture encouraged by neoliberalism poses a serious danger to our collective futures and insisting on deliberate, material support for faculty research and teaching that runs counter to neoliberal values.

In the story of "Nicholas Mickelby: Shadow at Lighthouse Point," D. P. Walton put a lot of his curiosity and independence into Nicholas, the main character. Nicholas roams the continent with his family. His dad, an event coordinator, travels abroad during the year as he takes Nicholas, Sis, Mrs. Mickelby, and Fern - their Scottish Collie to many different places. There are plenty of opportunities for adventure in Crescent City. The Shadow, a tall, scary lighthouse watchman, keeps them running. Hidden treasure, caves, and a kite fair are just some of the excitement. Nicholas, with his summer time friends, Jason and Isaak, spy and search for the truth. It is fun, yet scary, in an exciting chase from thieves, bullies, and an old, mean, Mrs. Rumble, a grouchy neighbor, right to the fiery climax! Watch for Nicholas's next adventure, "Stranded on Dolphin Island!"

“What makes the modern university different from any other corporation?” asked Columbia’s Andrew Delbanco recently in the New York Times. “There is more and more reason to think: less and less,” he answered. In this provocative book, Frank Donoghue shows how this growing corporate culture of higher education threatens its most fundamental values by erasing one of its defining features: the tenured professor. Taking a clear-eyed look at American higher education over the last twenty years, Donoghue outlines a web of forces—social, political, and institutional—dismantling the professoriate. Today, fewer than 30 percent of college and university teachers are tenured or on tenure tracks, and signs point to a future where professors will disappear. Why? What will universities look like without professors? Who will teach? Why should it matter? The fate of the professor, Donoghue shows, has always been tied to that of the liberal arts —with the humanities at its core. The rise to prominence of the American university has been defined by the strength of the humanities and by the central role of the autonomous, tenured professor who can be both scholar and teacher. Yet in today’s market-driven, rank- and ratings-obsessed world of higher education, corporate logic prevails: faculties are to be managed for optimal efficiency, productivity, and competitive advantage; casual armies of adjuncts and graduate students now fill the demand for teachers. Bypassing the distractions of the culture wars and other “crises,” Donoghue sheds light on the structural changes in higher education—the rise of community colleges and for-profit universities, the frenzied pursuit of prestige everywhere, the brutally competitive realities facing new Ph.D.s —that threaten the survival of professors as we’ve known them. There are no quick fixes in The Last Professors; rather, Donoghue offers his fellow teachers and scholars an essential field guide to making their way in a world that no longer has room for their dreams. First published in 2008, "The Last Professors" have largely had its arguments borne out in the interim, as the percentage of courses taught by tenured professors continues to dwindle. This new edition includes a substantial Preface that elaborates on recent developments and offers tough but productive analysis that will be crucial for today's academics to heed.

A foundational figure in modern labor history, David Montgomery both redefined and reoriented the field. This collection of Montgomery’s most important published and unpublished articles and essays draws from the historian’s entire five-decade career. Taken together, the writings trace the development of Montgomery’s distinct voice and approach while providing a crucial window into an era that changed the ways scholars and the public understood working people’s place in American history. Three overarching themes and methods emerge from these essays: that class provided a rich reservoir of ideas and strategies for workers to build movements aimed at claiming their democratic rights; that capital endured with the power to manage the contours of economic life and the capacities of the state but that workers repeatedly and creatively mounted challenges to the terms of life and work dictated by capital; and that Montgomery’s method grounded his gritty empiricism and the conceptual richness of his analysis in the intimate social relations of production and of community, neighborhood, and family life.