"Cogs in the Classroom Factory offers a view of the university from the bottom-up-a place where academic workers' struggles provide an alternative to the top-down corporate model now creeping into many administrations. An engaging and important read!" -- Caroline Waldron Merithew, Visiting Assistant Professor, Industrial and Labor Relations, Cornell University "This work underscores the fact that faculty unionization is not a simple reaction against working conditions, but reflects deep commitment to working in the academic world as a shared, intellectual pursuit and not as an enterprising capital venture for administrators and senior faculty members. Academic labor is a reality, not a neologism created by frustrated trade unionists, and that reality begs for definition by all members of the professoriate." -- Philo Hutcheson, Author of Professional Professoriate: Unionization, Bureaucratization, and the AAUP, Associate Professor of Educational Policy Studies, Georgia State University "The hottest issue on campus is the effort by graduate students and faculty to return control of academia to the workers who actually care about teaching and research. Cogs in the Classroom Factory is the first book to give us a riveting series of on-the-ground reports from this ongoing struggle. If you want to know what it's like to fight for change in higher education, you should read this book." -- Cary Nelson, Coauthor of Academic Keywords: A Devil's Dictionary for Higher Education, Professor of English, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Brings together essays by tenure-track faculty, adjuncts, and graduate employees from a variety of disciplines and geographical regions in an analysis of the changing identity of academic labor. The essays included suggest alternatives for responding to the ongoing erosion of tenure and academic freedom and reshaping the academic workplace.

Contributors discuss the impact of today's casualized academic job market on faculty's self-perception, political action, and responses to the changing nature of higher education. The essays included in this collection address a number of topics, including: today's academic labor situation from an educational history perspective, the development of an academic worker identity via the build-up to a strike, the graduate-employee union movement, unionization as a social justice movement, faculty unionization and workplace solidarity, the potential culture clash between professional and blue-collar unions, the faculty's complicity in the creation of a two-tiered job system, and the othering of adjunct and non-tenure-track faculty.

By focusing on the state of the academic job system on their campuses, the contributors to this volume suggest some alternatives for responding to the ongoing erosion of tenure and academic freedom in higher education and reshaping the academic workplace.