University Against Itself

As universities increasingly rely on contingent labour for almost every aspect of their operations, academic organizing is routinely understood, by organizers and observers alike, as a reaction to commercial pressures and corporate-style university management. Over the last decade, the rise of an academic labour movement has been analyzed in a variety of publications dealing with the struggles of teaching assistants, the unionization of adjuncts and the disappearance of the tenure-track professor. In assessing the GSOC strike, contributors to this volume draw on that literature and on published profiles of corporatization in higher education. But, as they also make quite clear, the strike was a new chapter in this history. It involved, from the outset, factors that had not been replicated elsewhere as well as outcomes that could not be easily predicted. The essays in this book, written by people either involved in the strike (graduate students, faculty, organizers) or who are nationally recognized writers on academic labour, offers lessons on what the GSOC strike says about the current role of the university in public life, and how the pressure for universities to realign themselves along the lines of private corporations has broad implications for the future of higher education.