BY JONATHAN REES

I wouldn’t normally post here in order to send you somewhere else, but in the is case I’m going to make an exception. In an earlier form, this article at Hybrid Pedagogy was the paper I gave at the AAUP’s annual meeting last June. It’s chock full of good AAUP-ish issues that I drum on often in this space, like technology and the threat it poses to academic freedom.  Here’s a taste:

The late labor historian David Montgomery wrote famously about workers’ control in America during the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. “At times the story involved little more than silent and opaque resistance to the demands and innovations of employers,” he suggested in 1979. “At other times, workers in skilled crafts adopted and fought to enforce collective work rules through which they regulated human relations on the job and wrestled with the chronic menace of unemployment.” When I first read those words, I was in graduate school. I never thought they’d actually apply to me. Now, I believe that the working class in academia at all levels of employment are beginning to move from the first set of times that Montgomery described to the second.

To read the rest, click here.