Marc Bousquet: The United States of Alabama
[Marc Bousquet is the author of How the University Works: Higher Education and the Low-Wage Nation.]
Many who learn that the University of Alabama-Birmingham (UAB) amputated a $650,000 state appropriation, not to mention a flow of grant money, just to rid itself of a labor center (and Glenn Feldman, the accomplished historian who directed it) will focus on regional differences. One early commenter to Peter Schmidt's report for The Chronicle blamed "Dixie" culture, saying that this is what happens to someone who "bucks the system in that part of the country. The more the South changes, the more it remain the same."
As a veteran of the Southern-gothic, All the Kings Men style politics of one right-to-work state university with close administrator connections to UAB, I guess my first impulse was at least similar: I can still remember the liberation I felt when I left my tenured position at the scandal-ridden University of Louisville (UL), where concerned faculty were run out of town for questioning the wall-to-wall administrative solidarity that protected a dean embezzling his federal grants, a scheme of extreme work-study that has turned thousands of students into the serfs of UPS, and claims of "research 1" status for a campus with a six-year graduation rate hovering around 30 percent.
As just one small instance of my own experience: the aforementioned embezzling dean tried to shut down the academic labor journal I founded (then being edited by one of my graduate students and my friend and colleague Wayne Ross, one of the many who left UL—in his case moving on to Canada's answer to Cal-Berkeley, the University of British Columbia). That little act of nastiness wasn't even one of the 30-plus official faculty complaints about that one individual that the UL administrative Borg was covering up. But what drove us away was in most cases not one act; there were dozens of acts that each dissenter experienced, some raising to the level of grievable offenses, others just making life hard....
Read entire article at CHE
Many who learn that the University of Alabama-Birmingham (UAB) amputated a $650,000 state appropriation, not to mention a flow of grant money, just to rid itself of a labor center (and Glenn Feldman, the accomplished historian who directed it) will focus on regional differences. One early commenter to Peter Schmidt's report for The Chronicle blamed "Dixie" culture, saying that this is what happens to someone who "bucks the system in that part of the country. The more the South changes, the more it remain the same."
As a veteran of the Southern-gothic, All the Kings Men style politics of one right-to-work state university with close administrator connections to UAB, I guess my first impulse was at least similar: I can still remember the liberation I felt when I left my tenured position at the scandal-ridden University of Louisville (UL), where concerned faculty were run out of town for questioning the wall-to-wall administrative solidarity that protected a dean embezzling his federal grants, a scheme of extreme work-study that has turned thousands of students into the serfs of UPS, and claims of "research 1" status for a campus with a six-year graduation rate hovering around 30 percent.
As just one small instance of my own experience: the aforementioned embezzling dean tried to shut down the academic labor journal I founded (then being edited by one of my graduate students and my friend and colleague Wayne Ross, one of the many who left UL—in his case moving on to Canada's answer to Cal-Berkeley, the University of British Columbia). That little act of nastiness wasn't even one of the 30-plus official faculty complaints about that one individual that the UL administrative Borg was covering up. But what drove us away was in most cases not one act; there were dozens of acts that each dissenter experienced, some raising to the level of grievable offenses, others just making life hard....