Literacy Work in the Managed University
Edited by Marc Bousquet, Tony Scott and Leo Parascondola		 We are in contract negotiations for this book as of the release date of Workplace 4.1 (June 1, 2001). If you would like to pre-order or review a copy, send email to Leo Parascondola at leoparas@earthlink.net We'll let you know as soon as more detailed ordering information is available.
As composition has disciplinarized and professionalized over the past thirty years, the working conditions of most of the people who actually teach college writing has steadily worsened. Though composition has always generally professed a politically committed orientation, many of the people who do composition scholarship find that they are being asked to supervise, theorize and legitimate the increasing degradation of the scene of college writing. 
Table of Contents
Foreword  by Randy Martin

Introduction by Marc Bousquet 
Composition as Management Science

1. Bordered by the Bottom Line: Writing in the Corporate University
Richard Ohmann,Citizenship and Literacy Work: Thoughts Without a Conclusion
Ira Shor, Cheap Labor in a World of Precious Words: What do Writing  Teachers Produce? (interviewed by Leo Parascondola)
James Sledd, Composition’s ‘Revolutionaries’: Cherry-Picking Without Change

2. Putting Labor First
Bill Hendricks, Making a Place for Labor: Composition and Unions
Eileen Schell Toward a New Labor Movement in Higher Education: Contingent Labor and Organizing For Change
Walter Jacobsohn, Lip Service: Contingency and Composition Theory
Ruth Kiefson, The Politics and Economics of the Superexploitation of Adjuncts
Eric Marshall, Teaching Writing in a Managed Environment
Tony Baker, Abolish or Perish? Managed Labor in Composition: A Roundtable with Sharon Crowley

3. Managing Contradiction
Steve Parks, Laborers Across the Curriculum: The Role of Writing Programs in  Academic Labor Relations
Tony Scott, Benevolent Bosses, Contented Workers 
Leo Parascondola Write-to-Earn: The Rhetoric of Student Need and Composition’s  Management of Space and Time
Chris Carter, Paternalism and Writing Program Administration
William Vaughn, I Was an Adjunct Administrator
Robin Goodman, The Righting of Writing
Chris Carter, Composition, Cultural Studies, and Academic Labor A Roundtable with Cary Nelson

4. Business, Not as Usual
Chris Ferry, Professionals, Workers, and Doing Composition
JenniferTrainor and Amanda Godley,  Embracing the Rhetoric of the Marketplace: New Rhetorics for Labor in Composition
Richard Miller, The Virtues of Service: Composition in the New, Student-Centered University
Katherine Wills Psychic Income and Academic Capitalism
Ray Watkins Cultural Capital and the Professional  Writing Course
William Thelin and Leann Bertoncini  Textualizing and Transforming Critical Pedagogy: Blunders and Adjunct Review

5. After Contingency: Beyond the Managed University
Essays in dialogue with the collection by:
Paul Lauter, Gary Rhoades, Donald Lazere,  and Jon Curtiss

Status uncertain: Deb Kelsh, Composition’s Hostility to Historical Materialism
Nearly all composition classes are taught by sub-, para- and non-faculty, many of whom work primarily out of their homes or cars, enjoy few benefits, and earn wages at the poverty level. Few literacy workers have active research lives, participate in governance, or enjoy the system of rewards and protections that encourage innovation and guarantee academic freedom.

The disciplinarization of composition, marked by a great blossoming and new vitality in rhet-comp scholarship, has been accompanied by the near-total conversion of composition work to a system of flexible managed labor-so that, despite a great increase in rhet-comp Ph.Ds, a college writing student is more likely today than at any time since the 19th century to be taught by someone who does not hold a doctorate.

Writing is the single largest occupation of every category of higher-education teacher without traditional faculty control over their labor: adjunct lecturers, graduate student employees, nontenure-track instructors. Writing instructors are overwhelmingly white and female, on average older than other college teachers, and owe the smallest percentage of their total earned income to the university of any other postsecondary teaching group. The one thing that a composition instructor and her students are most likely to have in common is the experience of flexible work. What would happen if this shared experience of contingency were foregrounded in both pedagogy and politics? In what ways is the composition discourse a management discourse, producing metanarratives that legitimate the degradation of academic labor? What kind of literacy is produced in the scene of managed labor?

Nearly every participant in the composition conversation would like to see writing instructors become "more like" faculty-to have the chance to govern, enjoy an intellectual life and develop as an instructor, as well as enjoy better pay, benefits, protections, and security. But this hasn't translated into a consensus among compositionists that the writing instructors whose work they theorize and supervise should actually be faculty. Why not? Isn't writing work faculty work?

Contributor Notes (partial)

Randy Martin is Professor of Art and Public Policy and Associate Dean of Faculty and Interdisciplinary Programs at New York University. He is co-editor of Social Text and the editor of Chalk Lines: The Politics of Work in the Managed University (Duke, 2000) and  the author of the forthcoming On Your Marx: Rethinking Socialism and the Left (University of Minnesota Press) as well as three other books: Critical Moves: Dance Studies in Theory and Politics (Duke University Press, 1998); Socialist Ensembles: Theater and State in Cuba and Nicaragua (University of Minnesota Press, 1994); and Performance as Political Act: The Embodied Self (Greenwood Press, 1990).

Richard Ohmann is Professor Emeritus of English at Wesleyan University. He is the author of many books, most prominent among them English in America: A Marxist View of the Profession (republished in 1995 on its 20th anniversary), The Politics of Letters, and  Selling Culture: Magazines, Markets, and Class at the Turn of the Century. He is a former editor of College English and a contributor to and editor of Radical Teacher. He is also a founding member of the Radical Caucus of MLA and continues to serve on its steering committee.

 
 
 
contributor notes, continued
Ira  Shor is Professor in the City University of New York’s Graduate School, where he started up the doctorate in Composition/Rhetoric in 1993. He also serves on the English faculty at the College of Staten Island, CUNY. His 9 books include a recent 3-volume set in honor of the late Paulo Freire, the noted Brazilian educator who was his friend and mentor: Critical Literacy in Action (for college language arts) and  Education Is Politics (Vol. 1, k-12, and Vol. 2, Postsecondary Across the Curriculum). Shor also authored  Empowering Education (1992) and When Students Have Power  (1996), two foundational texts in critical teaching. He came out of the public schools of New York City, where he grew up in the Jewish working class of the South Bronx, went to the Bronx High School of Science, and then to the Universities of Michigan and Wisconsin. His mother was a bookkeeper and his father, a high-school dropout, was a sheet-metal worker. He taught Basic Writing for 15 years and still teaches first-year composition. In 2000-01, Shor was Distinguished Visiting Professor at William Paterson University in New Jersey.

Eileen Schell is Assistant Professor of Writing and Rhetoric and Director of the Composition and Cultural Rhetoric Doctoral Program at Syracuse University.  She is the author of  two books on the politics of contingent labor in composition studies:  Gypsy Academics and Mother-teachers: Gender, Contingent Labor, and Writing Instruction (Heinemann-Boynton/Cook, 1998) and a co-edited collection with Professor Patricia Lambert Stock, entitled  Moving a Mountain:  Transforming the Role of Contingent Faculty in Composition Studies and Higher Education (NCTE, 2000).  She is the co-chair with Karen Thompson of the Conference on College Composition and Communication Committee to Improve the Working Conditions of Part-time/Adjunct Faculty.  She is currently working with this Committee to shape an analysis and a report for CCCC on the Coalition on the Academic Workforce study on part-time and non-tenure-track labor.

Steve Parks is Associate Professor of English at Temple University. He is the author of Class Politics: The Movement for a Students Right to Their Own Language  (NCTE 2000) which studies the relationship between 1960's politics, academic political organizations, and composition studies. He is the director of Teachers for a Democratic Culture (www.temple.edu/tdc), a national organization of progressive and liberal academic activists. Along with Dr. Eli Goldblatt, he is also the creator and director of the Institute for the Study of Literature, Literacy, and Culture at Temple.

Bill Hendricks is Director of First-year Writing and Professor of English at the California University of Pennsylvania.

James Sledd is Professor Emeritus of English at UT-Austin, and the author of numerous essays on composition and academic labor, including “The Profession of Letters as Confidence Game” (1966); “Or Get Off the Pot: Notes Toward the Restoration of Moderate Honesty Even in English Departments” (1977);  “Why the Wyoming Resolution Had to Be Emasculated: A History and a Quixotism (1991). ” some of which have been collected by Richard Freed in the volume Eloquent Dissent: The Writings of James Sledd (Boynton/Cook, 1996).

Tony Scott, Chris Carter, Katherine Wills, and Laura Snyder are candidates for the Ph.D. in Rhetoric and Composition at the University of Louisville, and have published in a number of journals and collections.

Sharon Crowley is Professor of the history and theory of rhetoric  and composition at Arizona State University, where she co-directs the PhD in Rhetoric and Linguistics. She has written extensively on the history of rhetoric, deconstruction, and composition theory and pedagogy. Her recent books include Composition in the University (1998),which won MLA's Mina Shaugnessy prize for the year's best book on teaching, and the second edition of Ancient Rhetorics for Contemporary Students (1998), with Debra Hawhee. She also co-edited Rhetorical Bodies (1999), with Jack Selzer and has published widely in such journals as College English, College Composition and Communication,  and Rhetoric Review.

Walter Jacobsohn is Instructor of English at Seton Hall University.

Marc Bousquet is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Louisville where he teaches literature, critical theory, and new-media studies. He is a member of the board of Teachers For A Democratic Culture and founding editor of Workplace: A Journal for Academic Labor (http://www.workplace-gsc.com). He is the author of a number of journal articles and the editor (with Katherine Wills) of the forthcoming collection, The Informatics of Resistance.

Ruth Kiefson teaches at Roxbury Community College in the Boston area and is Secretary of the Roxbury Community College Professional Association.

Deb Kelsh has published on theory, pedagogy, rhetoric and contemporary Marxism in Cultural Logic and elsewhere. She is a founding member of The Red Theory Collective and a doctoral candidate at the University at Albany, State University of New York.

Cary Nelson is Professor of English at the University of Illinois-Urbana Champaign. He is the author and editor of many books on academic labor issues including Manifesto of a Tenured Radical, Higher Education Under Fire: Politics, Economics, and the Crisis of the Humanities, Will Teach for Food: Academic Labor in Crisis, and (with Steven Watt) Academic Keywords: a Devil's Dictionary for Higher Education.

William Vaughn is Assistant Professor of English at Central Missouri State University, a former writing program administrator, the author of a number of journal articles, and a founder of the University of Illinois—Urbana-Champaign graduate employees’ union.

William Thelin is an Associate Professor of English in the Language Arts Department of the University of Cincinnati.  He has spent most of his professional life studying the impact of political agendas on the teaching of writing, and with co-editor John Tassoni, has recently released the volume, Blundering for a Change: Errors & Expectations in Critical Pedagogy. Leann Bertoncini is an Adjunct Instructor at the College of Mount Saint Joseph, teaching composition and speech.  A former editor of the New Growth Arts Review, she is interested in fiction writing and using pop culture in her speech classes.  She presents her theories and research regularly at the Teaching Academic Survival Skills national conference.

Eric Marshall won election as theVice President for Part-Time Employees of the CUNY Professional Staff Congress as a member of the insurgent “New Caucus” slate led by Barbara Bowen and Stanley Aronowitz. He has been a CUNY Adjunct Lecturer since 1991, first at Kingsborough Community College and now at Queens College. A founding member of CUNY Adjuncts Unite, the CUNY Doctoral Students’ Adjunct Project and the international Coalition of Contingent Academic Labor, he is the author of many articles on academic labor issues.

Leo Parascondola is writing a dissertation in rhetoric and composition under the direction of Ira Shor. He is a member of the Steering Committees of the MLA Graduate Student Caucus and Radical Caucus, and a frequent contributor to Workplace: A Journal for Academic Labor.

Jennifer Trainor is Assistant professor of English, University of Pittsburgh. Her recent publications include "After Wyoming: Labor Practices in Two University Writing Programs," (CCC 50 1998, with Amanda Godley) and "Being Material Enough: New Directions for Reforming English" (College English, forthcoming).

Ray Watkins is Assistant Professor of English at Eastern Illinois University, a member of the Workplace Editorial Collective, and a member of the board of Teachers for a Democratic Culture.

Richard Miller is Associate Professor of English at Rutgers University. He is the author  of As If Learning Mattered: Reforming Higher Education (Cornell UP, 1998), as well as numerous articles in College English, including "Faultlines in the Contact Zone" (1994), "The Nervous System" (1996), and "The Arts of Complicity” (1998).