Morehouse and the Academic Labor Movement

BY ANDREW J. DOUGLAS Reposted from the Morehouse Newsroom with permission from the author. Once upon a time a Morehouse professor tried to unionize the faculty. Walter Chivers, the current namesake of the school’s cafeteria, was a professor of sociology at Morehouse College from 1925 until his retirement in 1968. He was also a labor…

Has your organi-zing lost its zing?

BY CAPRICE LAWLESS Bread-bakers depend on the dough’s rest, during which time the yeast rises. The peasant farmer uses winter to carve wood or nail things together. Pickle-makers know it as the cure; those passing hours as the cucumber mysteriously turns pickle. Whatever. Hallmark-Channel-ey platitudes don’t play on the edgy, 24/7 adjunct reality show no…

Adjunct Survival Workshop: An AAUPportunity for chapter-building

Colorado’s Community College System (CCCS) continues to pay 75% of its faculty (the so-called “adjuncts”) poverty-level wages. To help our hard-working peers make ends meet this semester, our Front Range Community College AAUP chapter is hosting the first-ever Adjunct Survival Workshop. This event will simultaneously help our peers save hundreds of dollars this year, give…

From “Awfulizing” to Organizing

Yesterday I posted an entry about the AAUP Colorado Conference’s efforts to organize part-time community college faculty, who represent the overwhelming majority of community college teachers in that state.  Central to these efforts has been the work of Caprice Lawless, President of the Front Range Community College AAUP Chapter and Vice-President for Community Colleges of…

A is for Adjunct: Resources for Organizing the Contingent Faculty Majority

This is a guest post by David Kociemba, a contributor to the recent September-October issue of Academe. Kociemba is the president of the Affiliated Faculty of Emerson College AAUP chapter and the chair of the AAUP’s Committee on Contingency and the Profession.  Getting adjunct faculty organized for the first time feels like a daunting task—finding resources, dodging soul-sapping negativity…

Reflections on Cleveland State’s Unionization Experience 20 Years Later

This is a guest post by Rick Perloff, a professor in the communication department at Cleveland State University. His article, “Organizing Cleveland State,” appears in the newest issue of Academe and goes into greater detail about the unionization campaign at CSU. It was the unlikeliest of stories at the most improbable of institutions. Cleveland State University, a bricks-and-mortar,…