CFP: Working In, and Against, the Neo-Liberal State: Global Perspectives on K-12 Teacher Unions

Call for Papers:Working In, and Against, the Neo-Liberal State: Global Perspectives on K-12 Teacher Unions

Special Issue for Workplace: A Journal for Academic Labor

The neo-liberal restructuring of national education systems is a global phenomenon and represents a major threat to the possibility of a democratic, public education committed to meeting the needs of working class and oppressed groups. Teacher unions, across the world, despite all the attacks on them, represent perhaps the most formidable obstacle to neo-liberal restructuring. Teachers remain highly unionized and although they have suffered many setbacks in recent years, their collective organizations generally remain robust.

Despite the significance and importance of teacher unions they remain largely under-researched. Mainstream academic literature on school sector education policy often ignores teacher unions, even in cases where scholars are critical of the market orientation of neo-liberal reforms. Two recent exceptions to this tradition are the contributions of Compton and Weiner (2008) and Stevenson et al (2007). The strength of Compton and Weiner’s excellent volume is the breadth of international perspectives. However, individual chapters are largely short ‘vignettes’, and the aim is to offer fairly brief and readable accounts, rather than detailed and scholarly analysis. Stevenson et al offer a series of traditional scholarly articles, although the emphasis is largely on the Anglophone nations (UK, North America, Australasia), and the collection fails to capture the full breadth required of an international perspective. In both cases, and quite understandably, these contributions were not able to take account of the seismic developments in the world capitalist economy since Autumn 08 in particular. These developments have significant implications for the future of neo-liberalism, for the development of education policy in nation states and for the policies and practices of teacher unions. There is now a strong case for an analysis of teacher unionism that is detailed, scholarly, international and able to take account of current developments.

This special section of Workplace will focus on the ways in which teacher unions in the K-12 sector are challenging the neo-liberal restructuring of school education systems in a range of global contexts. Neo-liberalism’s reach is global. Its impact on the restructuring of public education systems shares many common characteristics wherever it manifests itself. That said, it also plays out differently in different national and local contexts. This collection of papers will seek to assess how teacher unions are challenging the trajectory of neo-liberal reform in a number of different national contexts. By drawing on contributors from all the major world continents it will seek to highlight the points of contact and departure in the apparently different ways in which teacher unions interface with the neo-liberal agenda. It will also ensure that analyses seek to reflect recent developments in the global capitalist economy, and the extent to which this represents threat or opportunity for organized teacher movements.

Compton, M. and Weiner, L. (2008) The Global Assault on Teachers, Teaching and their Unions, London: Palgrave.

Stevenson, H. et al (2007) Changes in Teachers’ Work and the Challengs Facing Teacher Unions. International Electronic Journal of Leadership for Learning. Volume 11.

Submissions
Contributions to Workplace should be 4000-6000 words in length and should conform to MLA style. If you are interested, please submit an abstract via Word attachment to Howard Stevenson (hstevenson@lincoln.ac.uk) by 31st July 2009. Completed articles will be due via email on 28th December 2009. All papers will be blind peer-reviewed.

Rouge Forum Conference 2009—Education, Empire, Economy & Ethics at a Crossroads (conference schedule)

The schedule for the Rouge Forum Conference 2009—Education, Empire, Economy & Ethics at a Crossroads—is now online. Check out the great speakers, sessions and events for the meeting at Eastern Michigan University, May 15-17.

Check out all the details for the conference at RougeForumConference.org

Call for Manuscripts: Academic Labor and Law

CFP: Academic Labor and Law
Special Section of Workplace: A Journal for Academic Labor
Workplace Blog

Guest Editor: Jennifer Wingard, University of Houston

[Note: Articles on Academic Labor and Law issues in contexts beyond the USA are welcomed]

The historical connections between legislation, the courts, and the academy have been complex and multi-layered. This has been evident from early federal economic policies, such as the Morell Act and the GI Bill, through national and state legislation that protected student and faculty rights, such as the First Amendment and affirmative action clauses. These connections continue into our current moment of state and national efforts to define the work of the university, such as The Academic Bill of Rights and court cases regarding distance learning. The question, then, becomes whether and to what extent the impact of legislation and litigation reveals or masks the shifting mission of the academy. Have these shifts been primarily economic, with scarcities of funding leading many to want to legislate what is considered a university education, how it should be financed, and who should benefit from it? Are the shifts primarily ideological, with political interests working to change access, funding, and the intellectual project of higher education? Or are the shifts a combination of both political and economic influences? One thing does become clear from these discussions: at their core, the legal battles surrounding higher education are about the changing nature of the university –the use of managerial/corporate language; the desire to professionalize students rather than liberally educate them; the need to create transparent structures of evaluation for both students and faculty; and the attempt to define the types of knowledge produced and disseminated in the classroom. These are changes for which faculty, students, administrators, as well as citizens who feel they have a stake in higher education, seek legal redress. This special section of Workplace aims to explore the ways in which legislation and court cases impact the work of students, professors, contingent faculty, and graduate students in the university. Potential topics include but are not limited to:

* Academic Freedom for students and/or faculty
o Horowitz’s Academic Bill of Rights
o Missouri’s Emily Booker Intellectual Diversity Act
o First Amendment court cases concerning faculty and student’s rights to freely express themselves in the classroom and on campuses
o Facebook/Myspace/Blog court cases
o Current legislative and budgetary “attacks” on area studies (i.e. Queer Studies in Georgia, Women’s Studies in Florida)
* Affirmative Action
o The implementation of state and university diversity initiatives in the 1970s
o The current repeal of affirmative action law across the country
* Benefits, including Health Benefits, Domestic Partner Benefits
o How universities in states with same-sex marriage bans deal with domestic partner benefits
* Collective Bargaining
o The recent rulings at NYU and Brown about the status of graduate students as employees
o State anti-unionization measures and how they impact contingent faculty
* Copyright/Intellectual Property
o In Distance Learning
o In corporate sponsored science research
o In government sponsored research
* Disability Rights and Higher Education
o How the ADA impacts the university
* Sexual Harassment and Consensual Relationships
o How diversity laws and sexual harassment policies impact the university
* Tenure
o The Bennington Case
o Post 9/11 court cases

Contributions for Workplace should be 4000-6000 words in length and should conform to MLA style. If interested, please send an abstract via word attachment to Jennifer Wingard (jwingard@central.uh.edu) by Friday, May 22, 2009. Completed essays will be due via email by Monday, August 24, 2009.

Update on Rouge Forum 2009: Education, Empire, Economy, & Ethics at a Crossroads

Update on Rouge Forum 2009

Education, Empire, Economy, & Ethics at a Crossroads
May 15-17, 2009
Eastern Michigan University
Ypsilanti, MI

(Ypsilanti is located in southeast Michigan, 15 minutes from the Detroit Metropolitan Airport, 35 miles west of Detroit, and 8 miles east of Ann Arbor, which is home to the University of Michigan.)

Keynote Speakers/Performances:

Staughton Lynd has agreed to be a keynote speaker at the conference. Staughton Lynd is a legendary peace and civil rights activist, historian, lawyer, and organizer. Lynd directed the Mississippi Freedom Schools in the summer of 1964, taught history at Yale University and Spellman College and has been an organizer and worker rights attorney in Youngstown, OH for over thirty years. His books include Rank and File, Lucasville, and the recently published memoir Stepping Stones.

Greg Queen, 2008 recipient of the NCSS Defense of Academic Freedom Award will also provide a keynote address and we expect to identify another keynote speaker soon.

We anticipate an exciting "Adventures in Live Art" public performance from artist Billy X. Curmano. Curmano will also conduct a workshop at the conference ("Changing Culture with Art: Creativity of the people, for the people and the planet").

As you can see, the conference is shaping up well and promises to be an excellent experience by providing a space to examine, critique, and outline future directions in response to the dismal times we currently face. We have a number of great proposals already and will be accepting more for another few weeks.

REMEMBER: One of the main reasons people have cited for coming to previous conferences is the friendship and collegiality they have discovered in a group that draws together many different views, all of them critical and incisive—people worth meeting again and again.

There is still time to submit proposals for presentations/performances (deadline March 15).

For more details visit the conference web site or email conference coordinator Joe Bishop (joe.bishop@emich.edu).

Changing Universities: Governance, Relevance, Performance

CALL FOR PAPERS
International Conference on
Changing Universities: Governance, Relevance, Performance
29 September – 2 October 2009
Istanbul, Turkey

Over the last couple of decades or so, higher education systems and, in particular, universities have become, notably in Europe as well as elsewhere, targets of attention and debate for change and reform. A host of external factors have been at play in shaping the discourses and actions with regard to changing universities. Within Europe, for example, policy statements such as the Bologna Accord, the Berlin Communiqué and the Lisbon Declaration have called for major reforms and re-orientations in higher education as a part of the broader vision of creating a European knowledge society. This has also been linked with expectations that universities should serve as engines of economic growth and national as well as regional competitiveness in the global marketplace. Concerns have therefore been expressed with regard to the relationships of universities with their external environments and the society at large. Business representatives have been demanding closer university-industry ties and research more relevant to their needs. Likewise, pressures have been mounting on providing education that is more responsive to the needs of the labour market. State authorities have joined in endorsing these demands. Moreover, these kinds of pressures have been coming at a time when public funding has been increasingly constrained and universities have been guided towards obtaining other sources of funds, leading, in some countries at least, to the encouragement of privately funded institutions. Concomitantly, there has been a greater concern with resource allocation to and within universities as well as their efficient use, resulting also in a broader discourse on and ensuing polices with respect to issues about accountability.

Altogether these kinds of pressures have resulted in the introduction of new policies and reform initiatives in the last two decades or so, though their timing, scale and pace has been variant across countries. National and organizational level governance systems have been altered, in some cases a number of times. New evaluation schemes have been introduced for assessing organizational, departmental and individual performance. Funding systems have been revisited, quite often in ways that not only attempt to make them performance-based but also to promote and encourage the acquisition of external funds. That these kinds of changes and the responses to them have and are being played out in institutionalized organizational fields has motivated not only practical but also academic interest in their implementation and outcomes. Likewise, that they have been internationally widespread, quite often with some reference to and justification based on North American models has generated debate around convergence as opposed to divergence sustained in many ways.

The above issues have been addressed for the last year or so within a project entitled MEHEM (Mapping European Higher Education Models), funded by the European Union and carried out by scholars from Sabanci University (Turkey), Oxford University (UK), University of Siena (Italy) and Uppsala University (Sweden) together with collaborators from Germany, France and Spain. The Istanbul Conference is organized as a part of this project and aims to bring together researchers from a broader range of institutions and countries with interests in the changes that have been taking place over the last couple of decades at universities, nationally, regionally and internationally. Papers are invited therefore on the following topics, though not exclusively limited to them, as submissions pertaining to related themes will also be considered:

• Changes in government regulation of higher education fields and universities.
• Changes in the composition of organizational level governing bodies and the selection of university leaders
• Changes in funding, particularly the degree to which market solutions is being introduced.
• Changes in the selection and promotion of faculty.
• The changing nature of university-industry relationships and their implications for the structuring and administration of universities.
• The implications of the increasing use of evaluations and rankings for higher education and universities.
• The implications of the changes that have been taking place on the structure of higher education fields and the role of universities with respect to the construction of national and international elites.

Both conceptual and empirical papers are invited. Empirical papers could be case studies of individual or a small number of organizations as well as larger scale quantitative investigations. Comparative research would be particularly welcome. One additional aim of the conference is to provide a platform for the production of an edited book.

Abstracts of around 500 words should be submitted through the MEHEM website (www.mehem.org) latest by 31 May 2009. Authors will be notified about acceptance latest by the end of June. Some funds are available to cover travel and lodging expenses. Please do indicate any needs for funding when submitting your abstract.

Organizers
Behlül Üsdiken, Sabanci University, Turkey
Lars Engwall, Uppsala University, Sweden
Carmelo Mazza, Grenoble EM, France
Paolo Quattrone, University of Oxford, UK
Angelo Riccaboni, University of Siena, Italy

See also this cfp here.

Learn about Comparative Critiques of the Neoliberal University

PhD students and researchers are welcome to apply for admission to our PhD
summer course on the topic of Comparative Critiques of the Neoliberal University.

More information about this course is found at: www.sv.uio.no/oss/courses2009.html

The full course outline is found here: www.sv.uio.no/oss/slaughter.html

Course objectives:
Given global market failures, the time is right to reconsider universities‚ relation to the market. Market fundamentalism assumes that universities must act entrepreneurially on a variety of fronts because a successful nation must have a technically educated workforce, science that emphasizes patents, spin off companies that create high technology products, which in turn create high paying jobs and a prosperous citizenry. Governments are expected to invest in science and engineering; students and their families are expected to pay more for higher education that will give graduates an advantage in the knowledge economy.
These relatively unexamined 'win-win' assumptions have guided policies and practices in neoliberal states and trading blocks.
This course will re-examine these policies and look at how they have played out in practices in countries around the world, with emphasis on the classic policy questions: who benefits, who pays? The course will focus to some degree on the United States because it is so highly marketized, and provides rich lessons about the problems of academic capitalism. However, readings will also cover the European Union, as well as specific European countries, and higher education in global context. The course will contribute to students‚ understanding of current policies and stimulate creative approaches to future policy development.

Location for the course is: Faculty of Social Sciences, University of Oslo, Norway
Time period: 27 - 31 July 2009.

Course lecturer is: Sheila Slaughter, Louise McBee Professor of Higher
Education, Institute of Higher Education, University of Georgia, USA

Dreaming of public universities for the public

“Many of us who labour in the university do so because we believe (or hope) that it is somehow different than working for exploitative corporations. In the US, the ideal that citizens should receive free education – further extended through land-grant initiatives of the late 1800s that granted states federally controlled land for the express purpose of building universities to give access to and teach all citizens practical arts and the classics – allows us to believe that public universities are indeed for the public, and based on the mission of providing knowledge and resources for the public good. However, even those of us organizing during the strike quickly realized that mantras of ‘Keep the University of Minnesota Public’ were misguided as the University of Minnesota and most public institutions have never really been public and have systematically excluded groups. A liberal arts education, even in the paradigm of land-grant institutions, has always been defined as the knowledge of elites, thus we cannot continue thinking about the university as an idealistic space, or that there is something that we nostalgically want to return to. We cannot continue to fetishize the roles of students and faculty as pursuers of knowledge when it is clear that knowledge has a price and is marketed as a product. Clearly, we must redefine the space of the university, our labour, and the relations between workers. These are the parameters to build solidarity: all as workers differently situated in the same economic/factory system.”

- quote from:
Amy Pason “We Are All Workers: A Class Analysis of University Labour Strikes”, Ephemera, volume 8, number 3 (august 2008) (pdf file for article),
- an article in the new issue (8.3) of ephemera: theory & politics in organization entitled 'University, Failed' -- just released at www.ephemeraweb.org.
Quote:
This issue is a call to discussion regarding the modern university, and what we seek to achieve with it is to highlight the discussions already taking place within the university, and to spurn on some new ones. Yet, as the entrance to today's Humboldt University tells us, such interpretation is not enough. What counts is change. Such change cannot, we believe, be achieved solely by the university itself. This insight creates huge challenges for other issues and interventions regarding the university of tomorrow: to open the discussion to other shareholders and constituencies within the knowledge factory, to pave ground for other residuals, where a university may take place.
Where are these places? And what do 'the people' – the students, the politicians, the medias, the immigrants, the elderly, the people – want with the university? Underneath the seductive toasts and touching speeches that the university enjoys again and again, unmistakable signs of mistrust secrete. A dialogue about this mistrust (which dwells well, also, within the university itself) may be what lies ahead, meshed up with the ongoing grand failure of the university.
Journal’s special issue site; download the whole special issue.