csurad

While the Brain Remains King, the Heart Knows Best

Knowledge workers employed at universities are paid to use their high-skilled brains. This is an expected part of their labor, but also unavoidable, too. This results in a familiar impulse to funnel all decisions through a finely-tuned filter of rationality. Thus, knowledge workers are apt to over-intellectualize everything. As Max Weber once warned, it’s easy to get lost in rationalization and utilitarian thinking. At great peril, knowledge workers may divorce their hearts—filled with passion, emotion, values, principles, humor, and whimsy—in pursuit of instrumental decision-making.

Fortunately, labor struggles are not only about objective facts—they’re also emotive and embodied challenges. Such struggles can force workers to “get out of their heads” and bring all workers together, collectively and physically, in ways impossible as individuals. Workers who go on strike end up chanting together, linking arms, shouting and marching. By engaging with the heart, we can remind the brain of other “reasons” why striking is important. It’s one thing to “know” that strikes can deliver improved working conditions and greater workplace power, but it’s another matter to witness the transformative power when fellow workers come to terms with those truths via each others’ energy and passion.

The emotions of a strike are an important resource for unions. Administrators want to appeal to our brains, convince us that what we’re doing is unreasonable, unusual, and unconstructive. They try to use logical arguments and “data” to demonstrate how they and their directives are, in fact, right. But, despite this intellectual appeal, workers shouldn’t fall for it. Not only are admin arguments specious and spurious, their data partial and cooked, and their honesty often in question. What may matter more is that our hearts know otherwise. And having the force of conviction combined with fiery passion (anchored in our guts), we can exercise our bodies, and thus feel totally human, even in situation that are anything but humane. Rationality may tell us that university bureaucracies and their admins are “doing the best they can”, but out intuition and hearts tell us this can’t possibly be true.

Universities as Autonomous Zones

Universities are contested, contradictory spaces in society: they facilitate the pursuit of justice and freedom, but also serve as an ideological support and resource supply for dominant, hierarchical systems. Although public universities receive taxpayer support, this does not necessarily make universities mere instrument of the state. They can and often do serve state interests, however. Political scientists help politicians determine how to win office or govern. Certain fields of science and engineering support weapons development. Computer scientists have assisted in the creation of tools and systems for state surveillance and cyber-warfare. And anthropologists, psychologists, and sociologists have been hired to advice the US military on counter-insurgency strategies in countries like Iraq and Afghanistan. But, this does not imply that universities must serve such functions.

Universities also contribute greatly to capitalism, first of all by training the next generation of business managers, accountants, and economists. And much research conducted at universities is eventually privatized in a process that David Noble describes in Force of Production, after public monies are invested for years or even decades in certain technologies, corporations swoop in with patents to take advantage. This has happened with everything from machine tools, aerospace, and computers. But, this does not mean that universities must serve corporate capitalism.

Most all of America’s dominant institutions have been captured by neoliberal cheerleaders—the state, all economic industries, and mass media and entertainment. Contrary to the claims of the paranoid far-right, American elites are vigilant defenders of American capitalism and American exceptionalism. Perhaps one reason why the far-right is so vitriolic in its attacks upon higher education is because it’s one of the few institutions not captured by those elites.

Arguably, universities should be viewed as spaces to serve and prioritize civil society. According to Jeffrey Alexander, the civil sphere is the social sphere where most of us—except for state policy planners or CEOs—dwell. The civil sphere is constantly under-attack and is threatened with invasion by the “non-civil sphere”, namely capitalism and the state. Thus, universities could be incubators for experimenting with nonprofit ways to provide for human needs, for protecting and defending the Earth, for waging struggles for peace and justice, and for learning how to build strong, progressive social movements to usher in such a world. This would be a radically different kind of university. It would be a place where the market doesn’t drive decision-making and the state doesn’t look to it for new resources to wield its power.

Not everyone currently employed at universities would be apt to prefer such an orientation, but for those who understand that capitalism is incompatible with an economically-just society or that the state is a violent, repressive coalition of ruling elites, such an autonomous space would be welcome and crucial to fight for a better society. Universities have the ability to strengthen civil society, but only if not also fueling capitalist exploitation and statist domination at the same time.

The Limits of the Union Organization

Unions are great for gathering, building, maintaining, and wielding solidarity. There’s a centripetal force to the organization’s energy that keeps it focused singularly on its mission. Its cause is impressive: representing workers’ interests, gaining resources for those workers, and propelling the cause of labor forward. Unions are a time-tested organizational form going back to the mid-19th century, although it’s enjoyed a number of important innovations since that time.

Nonetheless, like all organizations, there’s always the potential for goal-displacement—what was originally the mission of the union may fade to the background, to be replaced by a new goal. Unions were originally ways of protecting craft workers from the onslaught of capitalist expansion. They soon after became tools for empowering workers to actively fight against those capitalist forces, often with the aim of defeating capitalism on behalf of a new, more equal system (variously termed “socialism”, “democracy”, or “utopia”). Radical variants were spawned to represent all workers, regardless of occupation or demographic characteristics. Later transformations in the 20th century saw the rise of “business unionism”, where the anti-capitalist goals of fighting the bosses and the struggle for a free working class, were traded for basic workplace concessions for union members (and them alone). Working class solidarity was abandoned, as was the dream of a radically-different future.

The conciliatory nature of business unionism inadvertently led to a de-fanged union movement which hesitated to use its main weapon (the strike) and instead depended upon its legal cunning at the bargaining table to achieve compromises with their employers. This occurred for both private-sector and public-sector unions in the United States, although the former lost more since the deindustrialization that began in the 1960s and when Reaganinsm kicked-in during the 1980s. The latter—public-sector unions—gained considerable ground during that same time period, thanks to advantageous legal decisions. But both types of unions generally preferred labor defensiveness and passivity, while attempting to regain some of the former unionized density the movement previously enjoyed. Working within the legal system, campaigning for Democratic Party politicians, and lobbying for advantageous policy became a major objective for many national unions.

But, the labor movement grew the most during past moments of tumult. Unionization was rapid, riding the wave of daring strike campaigns. According to Dan Clawson’s The Next Upsurge, experimental forms and daring strategies are what hold the most promise for the labor movement, not more of the same business unionism. Labor must abandon the idea that only its members are important. Strikes should be bold and inspire passion, sweeping-up those who were recently unconvinced of its merits. Strike waves ought to be encouraged, spreading discontent from workplace to workplace, employer to employer, industry to industry. Class consciousness is like a contagious disease—it’s spread when those who are “infected” bring it into immediate contact with as many people as possible.

Union struggles cannot remain just labor conflicts, reduced to banal workplace demands. If unions are to remain relevant, they must continue to broad their scope beyond parochial concerns of a single workplace to the rest of civil society; unions thus must be antiracist and antifascist, they must center feminist values, they must take seriously the abolitionist opposition to carceral society, and they must be decolonialist. Intersectionality isn’t a buzzword, it’s the rocket-fuel that will make labor and class issues salient with people for whom those issues matter most.

When unions fail to deliver on their promises, which they sometimes do, or when leadership is more willing to shake-hands with the bosses than to fight them, workers must transcend the union. This might mean creating a new union alongside the old, or at least creating radical factions within the existing union to keep it on its original mission of winning a better world. Historically “union flying squads” were groups of committed militants who went beyond the reformist impulses the union organization pursued; they provided solidarity and mutual aid where it was lacking, kept their radical eyes “on the prize” of a transformed society, and weren’t afraid to act autonomously among their fellow union members if need be, to push the struggle forward.

It’s hard to believe that such an old organizational form would be able to continue to provide what was necessary in the 21st century. If the current union form can’t accomplish what is needed, because the world has changed or because it is hobbled by legalistic quicksand, then the labor movement must adapt. The union doesn’t need to be abandoned, but it must both rediscover its radical original purpose, as well as foresee what it needs to become to win the future.

Academia’s “Privileges” Should Be Enjoyed By All Workers

The American Rightwing likes to claim that academics are over-entitled, privileged, and lazy trouble-makers. It repeats the silly myths that university knowledge workers don’t work hard—except at the task of corrupting young people’s minds! If only it were so simple.

Others also express annoyance at university knowledge workers because they do have relatively nice jobs, especially compared to the average, heavily-exploited American worker. Most workers lack basic benefits like parental leave or vacation time, regular schedules, union representation, or even living wages (and thus have to work multiple jobs). In comparison, academics look like royalty, with luxuries and freedoms that most workers could only dream about.

Knowledge workers at universities enjoy working conditions that seem almost fantastical. Beyond basic, core assumptions, no one dictates what instructors do every day in their classes. They are simply trusted to do what they should, as they are the presumed experts. In a syndicalist context, this would be called “self-management”; as long as workers can get their jobs done and achieve certain outcomes, others don’t intrude in the process. They also enjoy “academic freedom”, which implies that people should be able to be honest and critical when warranted (but not vindictive or mean) about the things they study and the work they do. Academics select their own areas of interest and are permitted to investigate at will, so as long as they do so ethically.

Academics are typically organized in particular units called departments, where they have considerable influence over how that department is run. Usually any faculty member (including non-tenured workers) can speak at department meetings and contribute ideas; if those suggestions have good merits, they are usually honestly considered, regardless of the source. These meetings are democratically-run, often based on majority-rule. (It should be said that non-tenure-track knowledge workers don’t always have equal rights in this situation, as they may not be able to vote or may have less weight associated with their votes.) This democratic oversight means that faculty control their own curriculum, can create their own committees for new projects, and can collectively-manage their own affairs—within certain administrative limits, of course.

Lastly, knowledge workers enjoy tenure protections—at least if they are hired on the “tenure track”. This means that after a certain period of review, if the worker is good at their job, it’s assumed they will continue to do good work. As long as they don’t stop doing their work (e.g., stop teaching their classes) or do something flagrantly against the law or university rules (e.g., set fire to a university building or have sexual relations with a student), they’ll be guaranteed indefinite employment. This is a privilege enjoyed by only the smallest class of American workers.

With all these attractive working conditions, it’s easy to understand why other workers may be either jealous or—in the interests of equity—may think academics should be stripped off those privileges so they are more like all other workers. But, this is the wrong analysis of the situation. Instead of lowering knowledge workers to the level of exploited workers, we need to raise the floor for all workers to the level of the university—and then beyond.

Knowledge workers should spend less time justifying why they deserve these privileges and instead advocate for the expansion of all of these benefits to the entirety of the working class. There’s no reason why democratic mechanisms can’t be created (and thrive!) within all kinds of workplaces—from auto mechanic shops, factories, and restaurants, to offices, worksites, and farms. The protections of tenure and the peace-of-mind that comes from guaranteed employment after an evaluation period is also something easily applied to other places of employment. Of course employers of all stripes would absolutely hate this, since it would reduce their power. But there’s no practical reason why it couldn’t work. It would create a more committed, skilled, empowered, and satisfied workforce. It would be more just because the degree of exploitation and alienation would be greatly reduced (although still present under capitalism). Thus, the only real question to consider is: how to force employers to relinquish their power, to create better work and more just conditions?

The seemingly strange and impressive benefits that knowledge workers enjoy, stem from the university’s history as a Medieval-era institution, where craft labor reigned. Master workers trained their apprentices in their craft, and no one else was assumed to be able to do that work; thus the worker controlled not only their own labor, but also the entirety of their craft. Universities have changed greatly over the centuries, though. Much more administrative management exists now, which reflects the hierarchical influences from both state and corporate capitalism. To be clear, the university is no worker utopia, but it possess unique features that are worth defending; these working conditions also empower knowledge workers to resist the creeping colonizing forces of hierarchy that corporate-styled administers wish to spread.

Academics ought to defend their relatively nice working conditions by not only justifying how they are themselves deserving, but by arguing that all workers are deserving of them, too, because just, democratic, and empowering conditions and benefits are core human rights. Thus, the university can serve as a model for other workplaces.

While the Brain Remains King, the Heart Knows Best

Knowledge workers employed at universities are paid to use their high-skilled brains. This is an expected part of their labor, but also unavoidable, too. This results in a familiar impulse to funnel all decisions through a finely-tuned filter of rationality. Thus, knowledge workers are apt to over-intellectualize everything. As Max Weber once warned, it’s easy to get lost in rationalization and utilitarian thinking. At great peril, knowledge workers may divorce their hearts—filled with passion, emotion, values, principles, humor, and whimsy—in pursuit of instrumental decision-making.

Fortunately, labor struggles are not only about objective facts—they’re also emotive and embodied challenges. Such struggles can force workers to “get out of their heads” and bring all workers together, collectively and physically, in ways impossible as individuals. Workers who go on strike end up chanting together, linking arms, shouting and marching. By engaging with the heart, we can remind the brain of other “reasons” why striking is important. It’s one thing to “know” that strikes can deliver improved working conditions and greater workplace power, but it’s another matter to witness the transformative power when fellow workers come to terms with those truths via each others’ energy and passion.

The emotions of a strike are an important resource for unions. Administrators want to appeal to our brains, convince us that what we’re doing is unreasonable, unusual, and unconstructive. They try to use logical arguments and “data” to demonstrate how they and their directives are, in fact, right. But, despite this intellectual appeal, workers shouldn’t fall for it. Not only are admin arguments specious and spurious, their data partial and cooked, and their honesty often in question. What may matter more is that our hearts know otherwise. And having the force of conviction combined with fiery passion (anchored in our guts), we can exercise our bodies, and thus feel totally human, even in situation that are anything but humane. Rationality may tell us that university bureaucracies and their admins are “doing the best they can”, but out intuition and hearts tell us this can’t possibly be true.

Faculty Strikes are Good Pedagogy

Teachers regularly craft lessons, exercises, lectures, and other learning tools to help their students develop their critical thinking skills. Indeed, an instructor’s primary objective is often to help their students by making their role as instructor obsolete: if a student knows all that the teacher knows, then there’s no longer a need for the instructor to occupy a position of authority. Needless to say, most teachers would go the extra mile for their students, make considerable sacrifices so that the classroom environment can achieve its potential, and to facilitate the achievement of students’ learning objectives.

But there are some things that simply can’t be taught in the classroom. Not all lessons can be compressed into a tight, terse lecture. Teaching is not always about conveying facts to students. Sometimes the most important thing a teacher can do is model what it means to be a professional in their discipline. For example, faculty demonstrate through their own principled actions what being a professor is all about—being a responsible learner, being reflexive and critical about information, being creative and precise. Another thing that faculty should model is self-respect and how to assert their right to worker self-management.

When faculty go on strike, they are demonstrating via their actions what solidarity is. Strikes demonstrate collective responsibility and the importance of justice. Striking is an assertion of worker rights and empowerment. Faculty on strike are demonstrating these facts to their fellow workers, to administrators, and the general public, for sure. But, one of the key groups that witnesses this demonstration—indeed, the group that looks to faculty for guidance and inspiration—is students. Faculty strikes are diverse, complex lessons that instruct all involved, that shake-up the status quo, and that push an important agenda forward. The key lessons for students to learn include: that they should also advocate for their rights, they should collaborate with their peers, that they deserve power when in conflict with their future employers, and that direct action gets the goods. Even though many college graduates end up in “professions” that have been historically under-unionized, students can learn from striking faculty that worker collective action can benefit them, too, just as it benefits other groups within the working class.

As faculty plan to go on strike, they should acknowledge that such action does not just benefit them and the public. Students do benefit from certain tangible faculty strike goals—such as the demand for more campus counselors or tuition freezes. But faculty also strike to teach students a lesson that can only be taught outside the classroom: that worker solidarity is critical no matter who we are and that we can only win when we fight.

Solidarity is a Muscle: It Needs Exercise!

Labor unions do many things, but the most important thing is bring workers together into a collective project. The work of a union is to build solidarity among its members and to expand that solidarity into the rest of the workplace, then ultimately, globally throughout the entirety of the working class. Like all great athletic feats, the creation of an international labor movement requires lots of boring exercise. Daily practice at speaking to fellow workers, being attentive and supportive, reaching out and checking in on others regularly, and showing-up to socialize, commiserate, and plan. This is the un-sexy work required to build the muscles of solidarity.

Like all exercise, its gains can be lost is we just go back to sitting on the couch and eating potato chips afterward. If we ignore what we did to achieve our prime fitness, we risk it vanishing on us. Once a union helps to focus workers’ solidarity, it must be maintained. There’s the need to regularly work together on important issues and workout our solidarity muscles often. This means that workers need to regularly converge and rally, protest and march, and sometimes threaten to strike. And, it’s not just enough to say we’re willing to strike. (And it may be even worse to admit we don’t want to strike.) We must be willing, maybe even eager, to flex those muscles when necessary. Our solidarity is a living, breathing thing. It requires our energy, attention, and love. And a strike is the ultimate performance of solidarity.

Sometimes labor unions have been established and recognized for so long that its solidarity muscles atrophy. The original cohort of militants who brought the union to life have aged—maybe retired or moved-on, possibly just gotten distracted or disinterested in the exercise of solidarity. This is a natural part of life, as well as a natural part of organizations, including unions. But, those older generations possess crucial institutional memory and their knowledge of the earlier conditions that inspired unionization are valuable. Unions need to preserve the work that went into the creation of the labor movement, to keep the flame alive. This is a reason why regular organizing and labor actions are valuable. They form a bridge across time, they create a culture of militancy and class consciousness, and help to make the union relevant now, rather than just something that was relevant.

Recognized labor unions in the US have the luxury of certain protections from labor law. While these laws buffer workers from the worst excesses of earlier generations of capitalist exploitation, they are no panacea. The US labor market is no utopia and employers tend to fight every single attempt by workers to unionize, even in ways prohibited by law. Once recognized in a union, workers can collectively bargain together. This offers a group voice and strength that workers could never wield as individuals. But, bargaining occurs on the terrain of law, and employers have the advantage, since they have more information about the workplace and its finances. When we enter into bargaining negotiations, workers enter an alien world filled with lawyers and people telling them “no” or “you can’t do that”. This is why workers should never rely solely on collective bargaining. Our solidarity makes that bargaining possible, but it’s not where our strength lies. Our solidarity thrives when all of us can be together: inspiring and supporting each other, while marching and sitting-down. This muscle is exercised on the picket line, more than the boardroom. We flex the solidarity muscle more when we march on our manager’s office than while sitting at the bargaining table. We wield our solidarity when we link arms (physically or metaphorically), more so than when one or two empowered representatives speak on our behalf.

Collective bargaining is important and crucial, but it can be overly polite. Workers end-up having to bite their tongues or grit their teeth. We’re forced to compromise on things that shouldn’t be compromised. Our solidarity muscles weaken we’re not using them together. Solidarity means we can fight and that we are stronger in that fight together.

The Rebirth of the “Fighting Union” in a Post-Janus America

When a few Illinois state employees protested that they shouldn’t have to pay for the privilege of having union protection, few in the labor movement thought much would come of it. It had long been established US labor precedent that “closed shops” (a.k.a. a “union security agreement”) could permit unionized workplaces the privilege of taking the cost of union dues from the paychecks of all covered workers. But, as the lawsuit wormed its way through American courts, more public-sector labor activists became concerned. Finally, the Janus case arrived at the right-wing-dominated Supreme Court, who declared that unlike nearly everything else in American society, public workers didn’t need to pay for the protections that their unions offered them and that they could still receive all the benefits of union representation without having to contribute a single dime. This exemplified what economist Mancur Olson decades ago referred to as the “free rider problem”—wherein people refuse to contribute to a public good that they can get for free (e.g., the privilege of listening to public radio without having to pay for it). Needless to say, the Janus case and Olson’s theory optimizes a central characteristic of capitalist ideology: the presumed selfishness of individuals.

Despite this being a real blow to the economic coffers of public sector unions, there are still reasons to ultimately understand the Janus case as a blessing. The justification for closed shops is the assumption that workers would remain selfish individualistic, profit-maximizing machines who had to be forced to act in their own best interests by mandatory dues. It allowed unions to feel less pressure to meet the needs of their members, and thus to simply expect economic resources without necessarily having to convince skeptical workers of its merits. The Janus decision forces unions to recall what the pre-closed shop era was like—where the fight to win-over every single union member was a crucial struggle for worker victory. The expectation that unions can rely upon worker dues (and consequently loyalty) is as presumptuous as the assumption of post-WW2 “business unionism”, where labor simply trusted capital to offer improved wages (for their union members only, of course) in exchange for refusing to strike.

It’s helpful to drop all the pretenses of business-labor peace, or, as in the case of public sector unions, the idea that corporate-inspired managers actually know what’s best for the public (or public workers). It’s helpful for unions to realize that they need to make substantive efforts to address workers’ needs (all workers, not just the politicized ones who officially “join” unions). It requires a return to the active organizing campaigns of the past, where workers discussed critical matters with their fellow workers, in pursuit of the obvious realization that workers only have power insofar as they possess solidarity with each other. Being compelled to contribute dues in the past was a false form of “solidarity”; it served as a perverse proxy for the hard work of building a union. Instead of assuming that unions fundamentally and exclusively require economic resources to organize, let’s acknowledge that the more important resource is the people themselves. If the labor movement can win over workers directly, then unions will still have the economic resources they need to fight the bosses. And, crucially, they’ll also have a more activated and rebellious membership that is ready for that fight, too.

Administrators are Ex-Academics Who Have “Crossed-Over”

University-based knowledge workers often have lots of advanced degrees. Some of those workers—either due to a desire to move up the ranks, a yearning to earn excessively higher incomes, or delusions of grandeur—decide to cross-over to administration. This involves leaving the ranks of the general faculty in their departments, ceasing their classroom instruction, halting their research agendas, and usually allowing the connection to their disciplines atrophy. Instead, administrators move deeper into the bowels of university bureaucracy.

Highly-educated people are not necessarily society’s most intelligent people, but they are some of the more stubborn. It takes many years of patient rule-following and attention to detail to earn advanced degrees. This results in university knowledge workers having lots of insight into their areas of study, as well as a positive orientation toward learning. Administrators or future-administrators are the same, but they also tend to assume that they possess particularly important insight and intelligence, which make them uniquely suited to lead these complex bureaucracies. Like national-level politicians, administrators usually possess a narcissistic belief that they themselves are crucial for the organization's success. As opposed to the democratic governance of a faculty senate or the federated democracy of academic departments, admins believe they alone can solve other people’s problems.

Admins are attracted by greater pay and higher prestige associated with admin positions that don’t really exist anywhere else in society, except universities, such as “dean” and “provost”. Presidents may be the most ego-maniacal; they are self-promoters-extraordinaire. When seeking to climb up the steep ladder of university bureaucracy, admins must partly appease the general faculty they have abandoned. But, primarily, they must impress other admins, especially those higher up the food-chain. Many admins seek to make lateral or upward leaps from their current position to another. They must catch the favor and approval of top-administrators, who are less impressed by the popularity with the faculty than with their adherence to higher admins’ policies and goals. Admins move-up the ranks because they impress other admins, not because they serve faculty well.

There are a few helpful social science theories that explain the general ineptitude and selfishness of admins. These theories are not specific to universities, but are used to interpret managers and administrators in all types of organizations. The infamous Peter Principle dictates that “people rise to the level of their incompetence”. This means that people who do their jobs well (according to management standards), tend to get promoted to higher positions. But once they cease to be good at their jobs, they tend to languish. Thus, at any given moment, a complex organization’s bureaucracy has many highly-placed cogs that aren’t particularly skilled at their current positions, thus dragging down the entire machinery. This theory overlooks how some faculty self-limit their climb-to-the-top out of principle—they are not necessarily all incompetent. But, many admins have an inflated sense of self-importance and overconfidence in their abilities. Thus, they’re apt to fall prey to the Peter Principle.

The Iron Law of Oligarchy, described by Robert Michels, pertains to the tendency of top leaders in organizations to slowly detach themselves from the interests of the rank-and-file. Michels was highly interested in organizations like social democratic political parties and labor unions that are otherwise rather concerned about social justice and empowerment. Nonetheless, overtime, leaders start to see their interests as interchangeable with the interests of the organization itself. They don’t seek to empower active participation among the rank-and-file, since the mass just tends to get in the way of their plans. When all sorts of organizations increase in size, this distance between the leader(s) and the rank-and-file grows, until “democracy” becomes just a pretense of performative voting for a leader, who does whatever they want once in power.

University admins are impacted greatly by the hierarchical structures they adhere themselves to. In order to “get ahead”, they play “the game”, which comes at great cost to the rank-and-file faculty and the university itself.

“Professionalism” as Code for Submissiveness and Deference

Faculty are highly-educated people who have spent a lot of time studying within their scholarly fields, and acting as experienced representative of those disciplines. They are often called “professionals” and when they aspire and live up to disciplinary expectations, it’s called “professionalism”.

Given the high occupational status of faculty and the esteemed prestige associated with universities, it’s easy to assume that such faculty ought to be “well-heeled”, respectful, and polite. While it’s never a good policy to universally be an asshole, just because someone has lots of advanced degree and a high prestige job doesn’t mean that they shouldn't be able to fight and demand respect when they are poorly treated by administrators. Protesting or striking are often accused of being “unprofessional”, since faculty end up speaking (or chanting) emotionally, waving their fists, and refusing to offer those admins the deference they [incorrectly] believe they deserve.

This logic has succeeded in preventing all sorts of white-collar workers from organizing unions—labor struggles are assumed to be something that those overly-emotional, working-class blue-collar workers might resort to, but not professionals and not academics! In addition to the classist stereotypes of this anti-working class viewpoint, it also denies a whole class of white-collar workers the legitimacy of also petitioning for their rights, too.

It is better to occasionally chant slogans like “chop from the top” or to accept injustice? Should knowledge workers be able to boldly confront their admins or should they submissively constrain themselves to the expertise contained in just their own narrow subfields of study? It’s clear that admins would prefer to use faculty’s privileged positions against them, demanding that they “act appropriate to their station”. This is just a snooty way of demanding they accept their mistreatment silently. Such politeness and domesticity obscures that mistreatment. Respecting rigid standards of professional restraint is bullshit in an era of austerity and neoliberalism, where workers are simply expected to relinquish all their collective power in the face of the wild, uncontrollable market. Faculty ought to refuse submission to admin exploitation and their condescending demands to “act professional”.