LEAKED: Union-Busting memo at Columbia University & the Academic Freedom case there

An internal memo from the Provost, Alan Brinkley, to top administrators outlines his plans to implement union-busting tactics that would have the university not merely emulate the strategies of private corporations, but in fact go far beyond them.  What Brinkley has proposed calls for retaliatory actions against union supporters that would be illegal under the National Labor Relations Act.

But the BIGGER story is how this plays into the whole ongoing issue of academic freedom at Columbia and elsewhere, and how this is linked to the corporatization of higher education. . .

The joke is that we keep getting told that universities are a hotbed of liberalism.  The point is made in a recent article in The Nation that while it may be true that university faculty tend to vote Democratic (duh, what else would you expect? They are, after all, the brains of the university) university administrations have moved closer and closer to their corporate sponsors and money-bags alumni who accrue "symbolic capital" (i.e. a spurious patina of cultural legitimacy) by giving money.

Alan Brinkley has always been at pains in his public pronouncements to maintain that the university regards graduate students as "apprentices, not employees," and that therefore the whole idea of a union is inapplicable.

But the realities of graduate student education are well summarized by Jennifer Washburn in the above mentioned Nation article:

A generation ago, when these students could look forward to full-time careers in academia, their years of training, heavy teaching loads and low pay were tolerable. Now they increasingly feel exploited: Most are acutely aware that their chances of finding a secure full-time position in academia are slim. Worse, they know that by allowing universities to exploit their cheap labor, they are helping to eliminate the very full-time positions for which they are purportedly being trained. Today, roughly 50 percent of the faculty in higher education teach on a part-time, contingent basis. A remarkable 60 percent of all new faculty appointments are "off the tenure track," meaning that professors are ineligible for tenure and have only short-term contracts.

In Alan Brinkley's recent memo, however, he really gives the game away by adopting precisely the corporate labor-relations model he would so piously deny.  

Although for those of us who are graduate students at Columbia, this "revelation" is nothing new:

Around three years back, the union demanded an election.  The university opposed this, but the National Labor Relations Board ruled in our favor.  Immediately, the administration changed their tune: "We too want an election," they  now said, "in the spirit of democracy!  And we are confident that the majority of graduate students will reject the idea of collective bargaining."

So we had our vote.  Immediately afterwards, in a move that would have made Kenneth Blackwell blush, the University's law firm sued to have the ballots impounded and destroyed.  Our votes were never counted.

Washburn concludes her article by linking the corporatization of higher education to another exceedingly important issue: the assault on academic freedom.

Ironically, although conservatives continue to see liberalism as the bogeyman, the rise of a corporate labor model in higher education may pose a far greater risk to academic freedom and free speech. Historically, let's not forget, the leaders of the academic freedom movement recognized that the only way to prevent corporate trustees and other outside interest groups from violating the free speech rights of their professors was to establish a system of faculty self-governance, peer review and long-term job security. Otherwise, any professor who voiced unconventional or unpopular views was extremely vulnerable to getting fired.

As many of  you might have heard, Columbia University has also recently been at the center of an academic freedom case.  Un-coincidentally, those who are attacking professorial autonomy are leaning heavily on threats to the university's fund-raising amongst its rich alumni, as well as working to have federal funding cut via HR3077.

Perhaps I'll write a diary giving an insider's account on what has been going on that front, if there is sufficient interest.

In the meantime, here is a link  to a very balanced and excellent analysis by Jonathan Cole, a professor and former administrator at Columbia University of what is at stake in this case.

[By the way, there is no relation (to my knowledge) between Jonathan Cole and Juan Cole of the University of Michigan (who has also written on the Columbia academic freedom case).