[lbo-talk] seems 99% sure

Alan Rudy alan.rudy at gmail.com
Thu Sep 1 14:06:33 PDT 2011


Did I menton that it appears the department has elected me to the Faculty Senate? ;-) A

On Thu, Sep 1, 2011 at 5:06 PM, Alan Rudy <alan.rudy at gmail.com> wrote:


> The court session last Friday was really interesting… the (quite
> conservative) judge got pretty irked pretty fast and, within an hour and a
> half called the lawyers into his chambers for a three hour engagement… We
> are now enjoined from a work stoppage but can picket and hold rallies, etc…
> until twenty days after the two sides finish their work with the
> State-appointed Fact Finder, who is - by some accounts - finding more facts
> on our side… however, the Fact Finder's findings are not binding and 60 days
> after the end of negotiations recent laws passed allow the admin to impose
> on us whatever they've been pushing for. At the same time, the judge
> effectively forced the admin to allow us to shift our co-pays from 5/10 to
> 10/20 thereby resolving the main "Oh my goodness, the health plan they want
> is so expensive it'll break the university to pay for it!" argument just as
> the Faculty Association had long said it would. Some other minor things
> were resolved in our general favor but many many sticking points remain.
>
> The very best thing that came from all of this has been how many
> connections, affiliations and associations have been built. In addition to
> the FA's strength, great numbers of local businesses dependent on university
> salaries have rallied to our side and when we couldn't picket the faculty
> union at Ferris State coordinated with the grad student union at UofM and
> undergrads here and they picketed for us for a day. Had we been able to
> continue to picket deliveries to and construction on campus would pretty
> much have ground to a halt. Local newspapers have sought to write in
> "balanced" fashion but usually start with problems tied to the admin's
> stances, and the student paper - to pretty much everyone's surprise -
> appears to be able to see through the fog: "They like us, they really like
> us!"
>
> What's clear most of all is that CMU is definitely a test case and winning
> here is what conservatives really want so that they can build momentum
> crushing faculty and teachers across the state.
>
> I think it is very important to note that this is not a Research I
> university… where Wojtek and Joanna's descriptions clearly hold - there's
> not been a peep of support from MSU or faculty at UofM that I know of.
> These battles are not and can not be initially won at Research I schools,
> they can and may be won "below" those lofty heights in places where students
> matter a great deal more than cost recovery from external grants and patent
> licensing and technology transfer.
>
> As always,
>
> Alan
>
> On Thu, Sep 1, 2011 at 4:45 PM, <123hop at comcast.net> wrote:
>
>> This has been the trend since the eighties. I was at U.C. Berkeley since
>> this "rationalization" of the university started to happen. Greatly aided by
>> the gradual withholding of public funds from the universities.
>>
>> But "academic entrepreneur" is much to polite a name for it.
>>
>> Joanna
>>
>> ----- Original Message -----
>> From: "Wojtek S" <wsoko52 at gmail.com>
>>
>> Any new development here?
>>
>> While we are at this, it seems that universities increasingly turn
>> into sweatshops in which academic entrepreneur characters attract
>> paying clients and hire cognitariat i.e. workers (such as junior
>> faculty or grad students) producing intellectual commodity for these
>> clients. Such academic entrepreneur characters not only benefit
>> financially from these arrangements, but also seem to become very
>> influential within the university system, while the cognitariat works
>> for very little if anything at all. It seems that both academic
>> entrepreneurs and university administration is happy with this
>> division of intellectual labor and does everything they can to keep
>> the cognitariat in its place in that system.
>
>

-- ********************************************************* Alan P. Rudy Assistant Professor Sociology, Anthropology and Social Work Central Michigan University 124 Anspach Hall Mt Pleasant, MI 48858 517-881-6319



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