Thursday, June 12, 2008

Reclaiming the Ivory Tower: An Interview with Joe Berry

I recently finished Joe Berry’s book Reclaiming the Ivory Tower.  It was a great piece of writing, and it was all about my favorite subject: adjuncts.  Unlike most books about adjuncts, Joe’s offers practical advice to adjuncts for action and activism.  I wanted to know more and sought an interview with Joe.  Fortunately, he agreed.

In Reclaiming the Ivory Tower, you indicate that the number one hurdle that keeps adjuncts from organizing is fear.  After pointing this out, you urge adjuncts to overcome their fear and be active, to work towards building their union.  What have you found to be the most effective arguments to convince people to step past their fear and get active?

The single biggest factor in helping people (me included) in overcoming fear is the observed presence of others doing the same thing and winning something, or at least surviving to fight another day.  This also helps to fight fear’s evil twin, fatalism, which is very strong these days in the absence of a strong obvious mass movement.  Seeing real life struggle by someone you know is much more useful than any magic bullet of what one activist can say to a fearful potential recruit.

It also means that who talks to a person matters a lot because they can point to meaningful shared experiences in a context of some trust and security.  It is also important to ask people to do something small that will get them into the collective struggle and from those relationships, they lose a bit more fear and gain a bit more hope and courage.  We need to remember that where we talk matters too.  Some people really won’t talk freely at work, and this is understandable at this stage.  Remember too that people can change and the person too scared to act today may be willing to do something next month or next semester.  Don’t write anyone off permanently.

You suggest building alliances with clerical and secretarial unions.  If people are just starting out in organizing, do you suggest they work horizontally—that is, with individual secretaries and office workers—or vertically, by starting with officers of the clerical union?

That is all tactical.  If one has an existing good relationship with someone and you sense they are sympathetic, start there.  There is never any substitute for building on existing personal relationships.  Remember the security issue.  Talk to them when and where it is safe and comfortable for them.  They have bosses too, in some cases the very same person as us.

If support staff (and consider all of them, not just clericals,—security people can be a huge help, as can AP’s and trades and service folks too) have a union, go to them as soon as you have a functioning committee.  I suggest approaching the elected leader first rather than the staff person (business agent, staff rep or whatever).  Find the local president, chief steward or whoever is the leader of the union on the campus and then ask to talk with them off the clock privately.  In my experience, they have nearly always been helpful and in some situations crucial.  The classic story is Yale where the blue collar workers, especially the food service folks, organized first and then helped both the clericals and the grad employees to organize, up to and including respecting their picket lines when they struck (and giving them office space).  There have been whole books about this wonderful alliance.  ("On Strike for Respect” and “Will Teach for Food” are two.) I wish I could say that faculty unions have been this reliable in their solidarity.

I also need to add that often the support staff are people of color and most contingent faculty are white.  We need to be sensitive to the fact that these folks have an employment, and life, history that is shaped by the still pervasive racism, even white supremacy, in US society and even in most “liberal” colleges and universities.  On the other hand, alliances with these folks, when done on the basis of equality and solidarity, can really help us, and them.  Getting to know support staff in this context is a great way for many contingent faculty to get more comfortable with the idea that we are really workers and part of the working class and that can be a prideful thing to be.

How do you persuade faculty who are scared or nervous about the press to generate positive stories in the press?

The quick answer is to do it together, never alone.  Do collective actions that draw press then all talk to the reporter together.  One gimmick some have used is to publicly give the boss a “report card” on how they treat contingent faculty, and do a press release before.  There are many ideas along these lines on the websites of campus equity weeks past; check out http://www.campusequityweek.org and look at the archives of past years too.  People have done street theater, mascots (the “freeway flyer—the academic fowl” dressed up as a chicken in a mortar board and robes), research reports that you release to the press, and many other things.  People can be as anonymous as they need to be.  This is one area where outside organizers and affiliations with larger unions can be very helpful.

What are some of the most effective Web-based organizing campaigns you have seen?

First, the web is a useful tool, not a substitute for person to person talk and the relationships that this builds.  Email and the web can be a mistake if it gets people in front of their computers rather than face to face or on the phone, at least.  I know of no successful primarily web-based organizing campaigns.

That said, our folks, as a general rule, will read and are internet literate, so it is foolish to not use these tools.  Even an early organizing committee should do a simple website with interactive capabilities and then advertise it.  Email can be good for notifying and reminding people of things that have already been discussed or as a way to send around documents for committee approvals.  But don’t overdo it.  This is an area that is very much in flux, especially the security aspect since technically the boss owns the institution’s network.  I suggest getting personal email addresses ASAP from as many folks as possible and getting the website on an independent server.  Web newsletters can be good.

What are you currently researching?

I am continuing to follow the contingent faculty movement as much as I can.  I also currently have a couple of research contracts.  One is to help edit the updating of the national directory of faculty bargaining agents and contracts in the US for the National Center for the Study of Collective Bargaining in Higher Educations and the Professions.  The other contract is for AFT and their FACE (Faculty and College Excellence) initiative, through Keystone Research Center in PA, to look at how much it would cost in one state (PA) to get to 75% of classes taught by tenured and tenure track faculty and to raise the remaining contingents up to economic parity.  I am also doing a book chapter on academic freedom for contingents post-9/11.  I have no shortage of projects.  I just finished, with my colleagues Helena Worthen and Beverly Stewart, a booklet “Access to Unemployment Benefits for Contingent Faculty” which was published by Chicago COCAL with assistance from NEA, AAUP and NEA.  It is for sale hard copy or free download at http://www.chicagococal.org.

What is some of the more interesting adjunct research you know of like?

First, I really think we need strategy writing and that is the hardest to get people to write and discuss.  A set of strategy papers from COCAL VI 2004 are still up on the web.  After that, I like well done case studies and personal stories.  These can give people ideas that move them to action.  We need, of course, contract and conditions comparisons and other stuff people can use in bargaining and organizing.  We also need songs, fiction etc., though that probably is not what you mean as research.  In general, more research is not what I think we need.  We need more organizing.  There is a library full of books and articles about us (though we did not write most of it).  What we need is an organizing movement, not more research.  If anyone had already done a book length strategy piece on organizing us, I would not have written “Reclaiming the Ivory Tower,” but no one had.  At least that is my excuse.

As you indicate in RIT, academics love to read, write, and publish their issues instead of actually acting on them.  You urge adjuncts to organize, to form committees even if there are only two members.  At such a size, where do you suggest an adjunct committee focus their resources?

At that early stage, the committee of two has two jobs.  One is to decide on an issue or action to start to take, even if only an open letter.  Second, they need to find other folks.  You always need to be doing both: starting to act like a union and building the union, which are very much interconnected.  Beyond that, it is all tactical and what ever they can do is better than the nothing that would be otherwise.

For adjuncts wanting to organize, what are some of the most important resources people tend to overlook?

People often forget that among our group are nearly every skill imaginable, if only we can find them.  People also sometimes forget that there is a movement out there with some experience to draw upon.  We are not alone.  Get on the COCAL listserv, ADJ-L, go to COCAL confernces, ask for help, contact people who are organized in your area, call your university labor education program.

What is the greatest hurdle that new adjunct organizers should not ignore?

Keep doing something, no matter how little, and keep trying to involve other people.  If you keep moving, we can’t lose in the long run.  We only lose when we quit.  (And the boss never quits.)

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