College Literature

From Strangers in Paradise to Liberating Memory

In the post-1945 boom, more working-class students had the opportunity to go to college, and in this same period, the number of academics from working-class backgrounds also increased. Given the enormous gulf between working-class life and the customs and lifestyles of professionals, it is not surprising that even those working-class academics recruited during the comparatively golden years of university growth tended to view the academic workplace critically. Alienation from the institutions in which they work is apparent in most of the twenty-four anonymous autobiographical essays included in Jake Ryan’s and Charles Sackrey’s groundbreaking work on working-class academics, Strangers in Paradise. In the introduction, Ryan and Sackrey note that their “book actually began with conversations over several years about the mixed blessing of being half-committed to our work, half resentful over the fact that our workplace in many ways was so disappointing” (1984, 4). Published more than twenty years ago, Strangers in Paradise was the first major work on working-class academics. When I discovered it in the mid-eighties, it was an emotional experience—here were people talking about my working life in ways that, retrospectively, seemed obvious, but which I had never understood so clearly before. [End Page 151]

As the first published collection on the lives of working-class academics, Strangers in Paradise assisted in the foundation of working-class studies as a legitimate field of study.³ For many working-class academics, autobiography was a way to reassert the importance of class in a society that denies class realities. Like feminists before them, working-class academics created a field in which the personal is political, and it is no accident that the similar books that immediately followed Strangers in Paradise—Tokarczyk & Fay’s Working-Class Women in the Academy in 1993, Zandy’s Liberating Memory, and Dews and Law’s This Fine Place So Far From Home in 1995—were either books about women exclusively or books where women writers outnumbered men. But ironically, the arrival of large numbers of women in the academic profession coincided, especially in the Humanities and Social Science fields in which women were concentrated, with the job crisis in the academic profession and the increasing deprofessionalization of academic jobs. Similarly, in an American economy that is increasingly postindustrial and which is creating a new white collar working-class, women predominate in many of the downwardly mobile service jobs of that class. Indeed, adjunct faculty, whose jobs may be considered representative of white collar working-class employment, have traditionally been women more often than men. (Thus, in the changing American economy “working-class academic” seems less like an oxymoron and more like an accurate description of part of the academic workforce, even when the words don’t quite seem to fit.)

But regardless of whether or not contingent faculty are considered part of a new working class, it is clear that Ryan and Sackrey’s book was only the first of a number of collections of autobiographical essays by academics who defined themselves as having working-class origins. Taken as a whole, working-class academic autobiographies are significant in the following ways: (1) They reassert the fundamental importance of class in an America where the significance of class is often denied; (2) They generate a critique of academic institutions, particularly of the hierarchies of status within academia and the contradictions between stated values and practices, especially in regard to the low status of teaching; (3) As part of the above critique, many of these autobiographies (especially those written after Strangers in Paradise) critique the increasing use and exploitation of part-time faculty, the most glaring class inequity in the academic workplace; (4) Both implicitly and explicitly, working class academic autobiographies help to build class solidarity. Thus, working-class academic autobiographies are significant not only as a critique of the peculiar hierarchies of academic work but as an examination of the class dynamics of contemporary America. Reclaiming a working-class identity is often a way of critiquing the dynamics of power within the academic world and beyond. As Zweig argues, naming the working-class as such is not a matter [End Page 152] of semantics: it is part of understanding the dynamics of power in contemporary society (2000, 74). In an academic world increasingly defined by para-professional, part-time labor, the experience of many, if not most, academic workers is more and more like that of the workforce outside academic institutions. Working-class academic autobiographies are written because contemporary America has not come to terms with its repressed class relations, and those autobiographies in turn reflect the changing dynamics of class in a society where even white-collar work is often highly exploitative.

In Strangers in Paradise, Ryan and Sackrey reclaimed the idea of “the relevance of class as an important arbiter of life chances”(1984, 4) despite the denial of that relevance by the dominant myth of social mobility in Cold War America. But they also focused on the way upwardly mobile people, including themselves, experience internal conflict. For academics from the working-class, that conflict is also often a conflict with the unstated values of coworkers within the academic system: “For us, in our salad days, the ideal campus was a pretty little world set apart from the crass pursuits of the marketplace. Indeed, we assumed as late as our graduate years the university or college to be a place where the concern for truth, justice and beauty came first; a world dedicated to teaching and to the intellectual growth of young people. Once there, however, we found much of college life a part of the very real capitalist world, a life where institutional aggrandizement, careerism, and denigration or misapprehension of the teaching function were as often the rule as the exception” (3).

Again and again, when working-class academics tell their stories, complaints about the denigration of teaching appear. Although there is no reason to assume that working-class people are inherently drawn more to teaching than to other aspects of an academic job such as writing and research or service, these complaints are not surprising. Working-class people come from backgrounds that tend to make them sensitive to hierarchy, and those that enter academic careers tend to be clustered in colleges and universities that are lower on the academic totem pole and thus more teaching-intensive. Ryan and Sackrey point out that, although one quarter of those in the academic profession were judged to be from the working-class in a 1977 survey, these working–class academics tended to be concentrated in lower-tier, less prestigious institutions (1984, 77). Although the survey that Ryan and Sackrey cite is now 30 years old, it is corroborated by a more recent study done in 2001 (see Muzzatti and Samarco 2006, 2). Indeed, academia is more hierarchical today than ever. Working-class academics, “late arrivers on the professional scene, for the most part, end up somewhere toward the bottom of the prestige scale of the profession, if for no other reason, they are affiliated with second rank institutions” (Ryan and Sackrey 1984, 76–77) [End Page 153] And in academic institutions, “prestige replaces wealth as the mediating value” (74). Indeed, concern for prestige is pervasive in academic institutions; in many if not most colleges and universities, tenure is still based primarily on publications, which are judged by where they are published. And today, faculty with jobs that give primacy to teaching are increasingly off the tenure track entirely.

Academics from the working-class tend to look at academic work less as some sort of intellectual high priesthood and more realistically. Being a professor is, after all, a job—a much better job than the working-class teacher’s dad or mom had, most likely, but a job nevertheless. However much academia is cloaked in professional ideals of research, the greatest need at most colleges and universities for the foreseeable future is the need for teachers, and teaching is a labor-intensive job. Working-class people tend to value coworkers who get what most needs doing done, having learned an ethic of workplace responsibility that might be summed up as follows: “Don’t be a hero, but don’t slack off and expect others to do your work.” (When I worked in a warehouse after school and summers in the late 1960s, I remember an older worker who used the words “don’t be a hero” repeatedly when younger men overexerted themselves. But I also remember the contempt shown toward those who didn’t do enough and who consequently made others work harder.) These attitudes are almost exactly the opposite of the underlying values in academe, where one is encouraged to become (or at least to admire) the academic star, and where to be praised as someone who “loves to teach” is usually a backhanded sort of praise. Thus, Mike Rose recounts how one tenure track assistant professor at USC begged not to be considered for a teaching award until being given tenure—such a story may seem incredible to the average student or parent but is hardly surprising to an academic insider (1989,198).Teaching and institutions that stress teaching are unmistakably at the bottom in terms of prestige, and that is where working-class academics tend to be clustered.

Writing in 1984, Ryan and Sackrey point out that the conditions that had led increasing numbers of working-class academics into academia were already being reversed. Whereas most of the working-class academics whose anonymous autobiographical essays they studied were from the generation that had entered college teaching in response to the increased need for faculty resulting from the growth in university enrollment (and funding) after 1945, they note that the era of expanded funding for higher education was over, leaving much less opportunity for working-class aspirants to careers in academia than had existed for their own generation. This happened less because enrollments declined (they in fact continued to expand into the 1980s and beyond), but because the organization of universities changed. [End Page 154] Like Marc Bousquet, Randy Martin, and other critics of higher education, Ryan and Sackrey argue that colleges and universities had become bureaucratic corporate institutions in the period from the boom years after the Second World War to the early 1980s. Universities were dominated by “managerialism,” the running of a university like a business. According to Ryan and Sackrey, the university’s “increased dependency on hierarchy, epitomized by the rise of ‘managerialism,’ with its narrow efficiency measures—faculty careerism, narrow specialization of function, worship of prestige and academic status ranking—all derive their particular form in our view from the culture of capitalism in which the university is embedded” (1984, 18). Universities became less like “communities of scholars” where faculty treated one another with respect and had influence in the university and instead became increasingly competitive hierarchical organizations. The ratio of administrators to faculty skyrocketed, and divided labor began to become more commonplace, separating the prestigious faculty who did less and less teaching and the less prestigious (and increasingly part-time) teaching faculty.

Rereading Strangers in Paradise in the twenty-first century, its criticism of the rise of managerialism, the overvaluing of research, and the denigration of teaching still seems remarkably accurate. Yet in other respects, Ryan and Sackrey seem to be describing a university system that is disappearing. Writing in 1984, they could not have predicted how far corporate management styles would go in changing many colleges and universities from places that could at least aspire to being communities of scholars to institutions fueled by part-time labor. The contributors to Strangers, like those interviewed in Studs Terkel’s Working, published a decade earlier, often appear to be telling a story of a world that no longer exists. The industrial era was closing at the time of their writing—to point to only one example, Chicago’s steel industry collapsed during Ronald Reagan’s first term and 90% of it was gone by 1984, Strangers date of publication. However, as the good jobs in academia decline, class conflict within its professional and paraprofessional ranks becomes more pointed; similarly, as good, unionized industrial jobs disappear, the need for a way to talk about class becomes more urgent. Like Terkel’s famous book, Strangers in Paradise has a special urgency today, even as it tells stories about conditions that more rarely exist.⁴

Despite the fact that most of the twenty-four working-class academics that Ryan and Sackrey studied were tenured, most of their autobiographical narratives reveal a deep alienation from the academic workplaces where they had seemingly thrived. Ryan and Sackrey account for this alienation by pointing to the way in which those who cross class boundaries internalize class conflict (1984, 5). And the increasingly hierarchical nature of work in the university during the post-1945 period, where status is almost worshipped [End Page 155] and careerism can take precedence over intellectual values, increases this internal conflict.

The autobiographical narratives of working-class academics provide a critical perspective on university culture, especially its emphasis on prestige and status and the way the pursuit of individual career goals takes precedence over solidarity and loyalty among workers. As Ryan and Sackrey observe, “A theme that runs through many—but surely not all—of our autobiographies is dismay at the prevalence of careerist calculation among colleagues. Career consciousness and its careful nurturance, we assume, is a skill much more easily learned in a middle or upper class family . . . having a job and keeping it, is more a working-class perspective on the world of work” (1984, 90).The narratives in Strangers in Paradise are full of instances of resentment of colleagues for their careerism, and of opting out of committee work and other participation in the running of the university, whose operations are viewed by many of these academics as a sham. In some cases, as in Charles Finder’s (anonymous) narrative,⁵ this attitude emerges only after repeated discouragement with the lack of solidarity among faculty. Finder contrasts this attitude with what he found in the factory, noting that “the main learning experience that I had out of that whole period in the factory, was the tremendous degree of solidarity that I got from the workmates. . . .That experience was very important because in many ways it wasn’t replicated in the academic world. When the heat came on, at least as a faculty member, the main response of the faculties was to shiver and cower, and pull back from any attempts at expressing overt and militant solidarity” (173). Finder experienced solidarity in the factory from unexpected sources; a former graduate student who remained a Berkeley activist during the late fifties and early sixties, he finds that Southern workers who do not agree with his politics support his First Amendment rights and make it difficult for him to be fired. Years later, disillusioned with academic politics, Finder discovers meaning in engagement with larger political struggles outside the campus, which connect to his expertise in social science. His attitude toward institutional politics within the university is increasingly one of withdrawal.

Finder’s narrative is typical of the autobiographies in Strangers in Paradise, where the critique of university culture is often meliorated by a desire not to be bothered in pursuit of one’s own academic work and, in many cases, one’s own radical politics. While it is both understandable and admirable that many of these academics find an alternative source of political meaning in the world outside the university, within the university they are mostly individualists, consumed by their own teaching and research. However politically committed that research might be, there is a lost opportunity here; too many of Ryan’s and Sackrey’s working-class academics mirror the individualistic [End Page 156] values of the system that they so clearly resent (and in some cases, despise). In some instances, the contributors to Strangers seem oblivious to how traditional they have become in their resentment of administrators and colleagues and their defense of their own agendas. George Puck is clearly privileged: “I have had the opportunity to make my work in my own way. I limit my four courses per year to 15 students. I do all my teaching in my office . . . I serve, by choice, on no committees, or perhaps, on one every four or five years . . . I believe in my work. I have obligation to knowledge and to students. The college and university as an entity is a sham” (Ryan and Sackrey 1984, 181–82).

In contrast to Puck, other contributors provide a critique of academic work as work that is derived from the crossing of class boundaries. Thus, Douglas Brent, who grew up seeing his father condescended to as a small shopkeeper in an academic town, comments: “A constant refrain among my colleagues is that they are overworked and underpaid. In my experience the reverse is true” (1984, 290). Karl Anderson notes that “academics often use the word ‘work’ to refer to what they do, but, as a class, they do less productive work than any group I know. Teaching is tiring, and many people put much energy and effort into it” (270); however, at Anderson’s college, he finds only about half his colleagues put much effort into teaching. Many of Strangers’ contributors struggle, as outsiders, to find meaning in both teaching and research and to integrate the two activities. For Jane Ellen Wilson, one of only two women included in the book, this also means coming to terms with, and literally returning, home. From a rural Pennsylvania family, Wilson is a rebellious teenager who becomes an English major at a liberal arts college but returns to her rural community where, working at a small hotel and restaurant, she is surprised when she meets a truck driver who is proud that his wife writes poetry and becomes “shocked at my own arrogance that this class of people wouldn’t know or care about art” (211).Wilson becomes a folklorist at an Ivy League graduate school and returns to her parents’ home to write a dissertation about Pennsylvania German folk medicine, a dissertation which her parents read with interest, however little they understand her career. As a graduate student in the city, Wilson discovers that “what I was searching for didn’t exist ‘out there.’ Only by coming to terms with my own past, my own background, and seeing it in the context of the world at large, have I begun to find my own voice” (216). She enjoys teaching at a local community college, where the students are unpretentious and have a background like her own, but finds “it significant that some of my former professors consider this a low class job” (218).

Although many of the narrators in Strangers are active scholars, most of them decry the careerism with which many of their colleagues approach [End Page 157] research, and most find that teaching is central to their conception of academic work. In this respect, they are at odds with the way work is structured in academia. Making a more systematic critique than their respondents can in short narratives, Ryan and Sackrey argue against the way academic work is defined: “a dominant result of the so-called academic revolution after WW II is the enshrining of the research oriented university and the research oriented professor as the model for the profession as a whole. . . .The establishment of the research university and the scholar research model of an academic career as the ‘ideal’ establishes hierarchy where none need exist” (1984, 79). Academia has come to devalue the work of teaching undergraduates and the committee work by which faculty (sometimes) make real decisions about an institution’s policies. As universities are managed like businesses in a competitive game pursuing status (as well as dollars), the research model goes unquestioned. However, one result of the prevalence of the research model is that it “explains why it is possible for the exceptionally fine teacher at the community college, spending fifteen hours per week in the classroom, to feel inferior, or subordinate, to his/her counterparts at an elite university, who are most intensely pursuing publications—often of no social use whatsoever—that will make them academic stars”(85).

Ryan and Sackrey imply the need for a new model of the academic career. However, rather than taking this direction, they suggest that “it would take a thorough reconstruction of society” (1984, 85) to change this state of affairs. Like other leftist critiques produced in the 1970s and 1980s, including Richard Ohmann’s English in America, and Bowles and Gintis’ Schooling in Capitalist America, Ryan and Sackrey’s work suggests that a thorough revolution is necessary before meaningful change can occur. Their book is short on more immediate solutions for reforming academia, building solidarity among academics, and bringing about change in the professional workplace. Ryan and Sackrey’s narrators are able to move out of the working class through circumstance, coming along at a time when there was a greatly increased need for academic professionals. They also came of age as academics in a professional world that was being altered; the younger of these professionals, like Jane Ellen Wilson, entered a post-industrial world where professions were beginning to collapse.

Rereading them in the twenty-first century, the anonymity of the narratives in Strangers in Paradise stands out and perhaps contributes to the sense of the bitterness and alienation of many of these narratives. Most of the subsequently published life stories or autobiographical essays by working-class academics are not anonymous (at least, that is the case until we get to the narratives of adjunct faculty, who often have good reason to desire the protection of anonymity).The anonymity of the stories in Strangers may high-light [End Page 158] the bitter sarcasm of the narrators, but it also makes most of those narrators seem isolated, confirmed in an outsider status in which they cannot even be named. In her “Íntroduction” to This Fine Place so Far From Home: Voices of Academics From the Working Class (1995), Carolyn Leste Law, co-editor with C.L. Barney Dews, claims that “what working-class academics’ autobiographies do best is to develop community and aver that the emperor has no clothes” (Law, 1995, 10). The anonymity of Strangers works against the opportunity of its narrators to build community, although it allows them greater freedom in attacking the emperor. The bitterness and anger of many of Strangers’ tales is enhanced by their anonymity, and concerns about reprisal should not be taken too lightly. In their “Introduction” to Working-Class Women in the Academy: Laborers in the Knowledge Factory (1993), Michelle Tokarcyk and Elizabeth Fay report that many of the women who sent impassioned letters of inquiry or engaged in long phone conversations with them about possible essays did not submit contributions. Tokarcyk and Fay suggest that these women hesitated for a number of reasons, including the extent to which “many women were apprehensive about criticizing the academy, fearful of reprisal” (1993, 18). As a contributor to This Fine Place, I can testify to the extent that writing a working-class narrative, at least in the academic world of the early 1990s, was not easy (although it gets easier the more often one does it). It is not surprising that the first volume of such essays to appear after Strangers in Paradise was Tokarcyk and Fay’s book, Working-Class Women. As Law notes, the autobiographical turn in working-class academics’ essays is related to other areas of difference: “The soil for this work in the academy has obviously been prepared by the efforts of feminists, persons of color, and gays and lesbians” (1995, 5). Law’s own strategy in dealing with her working-class past was silence: “I betrayed my self in order to gain acceptance in the academic community: my strategy was silence and lies” (3). In her “Introduction,” Law points out that the burden of silence was not only hers, but also her family’s. “Until recently, I never spoke about my family at school, and I never spoke about school with my family. . . . When I told my mother that Barney and I were preparing this book, she was torn between pride and anger. She bristled with fear that I might embarrass her, make fun of her, sound ungrateful or disrespectful. I want to tell her now that this book is our attempt to stop being embarrassed after a very long time of hiding our pasts” (4).The third person plural is significant here—if working-class autobiography is intended as a public attempt to reclaim a collective past, anonymity is no longer appropriate.

Like the writers in Strangers in Paradise, the working-class academics of subsequent books critique higher education. In the Epilogue to Working Class Women in the Academy, Michele Tokarczyk points out the extent to [End Page 159] which working-class women have values “often in conflict with the academy’s values” (1993, 313). Coming of age at a time when an academic career no long offered security to most graduate students in the Humanities and social sciences, working-class women like Tokarczyk nevertheless tended to think of their careers in terms of service. Tokarczyk points out that it seemed natural to her to value teaching over her own research, and this attitude was shared by many other working-class women, including one of her former professors who “tirelessly serves on committees, directs numerous dissertations, and heads the job placement of new Ph.D.s in the English Department. Reportedly she was frustrated when yet another faculty member declined to be on a dissertation committee. ‘What do these people think they’re getting paid for?’ she angrily asked. Her question might be answered differently by different groups. Many academics would say that they are paid primarily to do research and add to the stature of their departments. Both the working-class and women, however, more typically define work as that which benefits the community as well as the individual” (316).

The criticisms of the careerist values dominant in academe that many of Tokarczyk and Fay’s contributors make are not unlike those that appear in Strangers in Paradise. However, there is a difference. Tokarczyk (and others like her) has a more intense experience of her “vulnerability as a nontenured faculty member, a person who spent her first years after she received a Ph.D. in non-tenure track positions with little status or security” (1993, 312). Significant numbers of women entered the academic profession only after it had already begun to decline in the postindustrial collapse of secure employment in America. Women like Tokarczyk are still encouraged to take on nurturing and service roles within the profession by their values and upbringing as working-class women, but those are values that the academic world does not esteem. Supervising adjunct faculty as part of her job, she feels the dilemma of being complicit in work relations she finds unjust: “I would have liked to have treated my workers better—fairly. But I did not have the means. I thought it would do me or my workers little good to appeal to higher authorities. So I did not” (319) How many tenure track faculty are there who have worked in rhetoric and composition in the past twenty years or so who have not faced a similar dilemma? But to those of us who have faced poverty—and Tokarczyk faced it twice, as a child and as an adjunct—it is perhaps a deeper source of anger.

Not surprisingly, some of the contributors to Working-Class Women in the Academy criticize Ryan and Sackrey’s book, claiming that these (typically more established) male narrators do not speak for their own experience. Patricia Clark Smith notes that when she reads the narratives in Strangers In Paradise “what surprises me is how little they speak of what that experience [End Page 160] has meant for them as teachers of their own working-class students” (1993, 137). Similarly, Pamela Fox criticizes Ryan and Sackrey for their “negative presentation of working-class culture” (1993, 229) and their inclusion of only two women in Strangers in Paradise. Moreover, Fox finds a difference between these two narratives and most of the other, male, narratives in Strangers, claiming that the female contributors are better able to reconcile their academic world to the working-class worlds they still continue to inhabit. While it is unfortunate that few women were included in Strangers in Paradise, I think that the major shift between the narratives in Strangers and in later working-class academic autobiographies has to do with academic generation, not gender per se—although it is true that women are included in large numbers within academia only after the postwar boom was over, and women, even moreso than male academics from the working-class, disproportionately occupy the lower tiers in the academic hierarchy. However, Fox is probably correct in suggesting that women from the working-class are more attuned, because of their gender, to accepting an insider/outsider status and more adept, at least in an academic culture influenced by feminism, at building a community of resistance out of their oppression.

In an important sense, Strangers in Paradise has built community, for it helped to initiate the discussion of working-class academics and their peculiar place in the academy and served as a model (even if it was sometimes perceived as a negative one) for the books that followed. In addition to Working-Class Women in the Academy, This Fine Place, and Liberating Memory, three other collections of essays by academics from the working-class (along with many other essays and autobiographical gestures within more mainstream academic writing) have appeared: Shepard, McMillan, and Tate’s Coming to Class (1998), Linkon’s Teaching Working Class (1999), and Muzzatti and Samarco’s Reflections from the Wrong Side of the Tracks (2006). For all of these, Ryan and Sackrey’s work is at least a point of reference. Muzzatti and Samarco do not refer to Strangers in Paradise directly in their introduction, but in some respects the social science perspective of their book bears the greatest similarity to Ryan and Sackrey’s. Muzzati and Samarco refer to the working-class narratives in their collection as “autoethnographies,” and they argue that such narratives are an important source of knowledge. However, their book contains few references to previous collections of working-class academic narratives—there are three references to This Fine Place, two to Strangers in Paradise, and one to Working-Class Women in the Academy (Muzzatti and Samarco 2006, 3–4; xv, 20, 47, 168, 206).

Although influence is difficult to trace, I am surely not alone among those who wrote about their experience as a working-class academic in feeling that Ryan and Sackrey allowed me to write in a new way that was connected [End Page 161] to my identity. For example, in Coming to Class, Gary Tate claims that “Strangers in Paradise served as a catalyst for [his] thinking about social class” (1998, 255).Tate writes: “As I read account after account of the pain and discomfort and anger of these authors as they tried to negotiate the rituals and traditions of the academy, it was as if my entire life changed in front of me” (255). Nevertheless, Tate reports a discomfort not unlike that of Fox, discomfort “because of the negative feelings, the real anger that comes through in many of the essays. I can understand this anger, but I have spent most of my academic career arguing that anger, cynicism, bitterness are destructive unless somehow converted into action, into work” (256). In Strangers, Tate finds “a bitterness unrelieved by any sense that there are working-class attributes that can be used in the academy, that are needed in the academy. And so it was with relief that I turned to other books” (256).

Among those other books of essays by working-class academics, Liberating Memory: Our Work and Our Working-Class Consciousness is the most consciously constructed around the idea that working-class experience is a source of cultural critique. In Liberating Memory, Zandy argues that working-class identity, rather than being “intended for disposal” (1995, 1) in the traditional dream of upward mobility, is a useful source of political memory. She writes: “I want the reader who is of the next generation of working-class intellectuals to know that it is possible to engage in a process of self-creation that resists denial of working-class identity and consciousness, indeed, uses working-class knowledge to produce culture and to claim a place as a public intellectual. Although it is not easy, it does not have to be isolating work” (7). The process of naming the working class and engaging in the public struggle for power is central to Zandy’s work. Unlike most of the other books on the working-class academics, Zandy includes working-class intellectuals (mainly poets and other artists) who are not college teachers; Liberating Memory draws upon Zandy’s earlier collection of working-class women poets, Calling Home, including some of the same writers from that collection. However, these non-academics are mostly politically engaged, public intellectuals, such as the writer of the first essay in Zandy’s book, the poet and university administrative assistant Carol Tarlen. Taking pride in a job that she knows is not esteemed, Tarlen says: “When people use truck drivers as examples of ignorance and prejudice, or when they say I am too intelligent to be a clerical worker, I tell them that they are bigots, and that my job is hard and I’m not ashamed of it. . . . I use my education in both my political and artistic work, but I especially use the anger that comes from my living in the working class. A healthy response to oppression is anger, and I use my mental health to enrich my creative life” (1995, 20).When I have used Zandy’s book in courses, it is Tarlen’s anger that many students (especially [End Page 162] middle-class students) have the hardest time understanding and accepting. Many believe that Tarlen, who has a master’s degree, should simply “get over it” and find a better job than that of an academic secretary. (It is interesting that many students use the same phrase when discussing African Americans; the idea that class and race are real sources of ongoing oppression is hard for many students to accept.) However, instead of something to “get over,” anger can be politically useful. In Tarlen’s case, it nurtures her positive sense of her working-class identity, her poetry, and her political activism, as well as her skepticism toward the academics among whom she is employed: “If intellectualism means critical thinking, skepticism, and risk-taking, then I qualify as an intellectual. However, I doubt that many so-called academics qualify as intellectuals” (23).Tarlen’s comment, with its sarcastic tone, could easily have been placed in many of the autobiographies in Strangers in Paradise. Similarly, Jim Daniels, poet, professor, and former auto worker, echoes Strangers’ “Charles Finder” when he says, “One of the things I did miss about the factory was that workers relationships and feelings about each other were much more clearly defined than in an academic job. If someone thought you were an asshole in the plant, they didn’t have any qualms about telling you. On the other hand, I have seen quite a bit of subterfuge in academia over the years” (Daniels 1995, 94).

With each essay, Liberating Memory includes photographs of the contributors. However, these are photographs from the past, mostly from childhood and adolescence, thus reinforcing the connection between working-class memory and present consciousness. Many of the essays are about the recovery of an identity that has been partially lost which the photographs help evoke. Often, this loss of identity occurred in the writer’s childhood or in their parents’ generation. Thus, Maxine Scates writes: “when I think of where I locate my working-class identity, I think not of an experience solidly grounded in a sense of class consciousness or community, but rather, based as it was on negation, an absence of it suggesting that identity was, aside from our exultant Irishness and the vacuum of our own fears, available in everything we were not” (1995, 189). Similarly, Linda McCarriston, writing of the loss of working-class history in her native town of Lynn, Massachusetts, a site of many important strikes, claims that “with the disappearance of class consciousness, each of us was isolated, to measure ourselves against the myth of classlessness and to fail” (1995, 105).

Like Strangers in Paradise, Liberating Memory tries to break this isolation by reclaiming class identity, but in Liberating Memory this is a public reclamation of history that is both personal and collective. In contrast to Strangers in Paradise, the majority of the contributors are women, for whom feminist assertion in the first person is a valuable model of truth-telling. Liberating [End Page 163] Memory reflects a later stage of capitalist America: while Strangers in Paradise told of the hidden angst of working-class academics (mostly men) who had “made it” in a postwar boom where inequality was declining and professions were still growing in strength, Liberating Memory is on the other side of the divide, where women and people of color are admitted to professions already in decline. Many of Zandy’s narrators tell of class identification rooted not only in their past but also in their ongoing marginalized status as adjuncts or others who do work that is not highly valued.

Linda McCarriston, who has spent most of her career as a poet, mother, and adjunct faculty member, writes about her struggle to find a voice, a voice that could be found only with the acknowledgement of past and present working-class status. “Off limits were not only the narratives of my life as a mother—married, divorced, remarried, without means, ‘adjuncting,’ raising children between two men of means, a ‘migrant worker in the Groves’ of both Academe and Matrimony—but also the emotional response I had to it: indignation, outrage, grief, bitterness” (1995, 100–01).McCarriston struggles, as one of her mentors, Grace Paley, suggests, “to reveal what has been hidden” (103).That which is hidden involves the causes of individual malaise, which in her case includes the working-class history of her family in Lynn, Massachusetts, but also emotional attitudes toward her experience. McCarriston learns to resist the tendency of the individualist tradition learned in her M.F.A. program that kept her away from that experience and the indignation it aroused: “When the emotional content—grief, despair, rancor, alienation, hatred—is present in art that depicts underclass life we are taught to consider that work propaganda. When the soundtrack is dubbed out, we are taught to consider it art. E.P. Thompson, the English historian, refers to such art as ‘the propaganda of the victors’” (McCarriston 1995, 102).

It is difficult for working-class people to find a voice of authority, McCarriston notes, for they are taught to adopt the myth of American classlessness, accept their “failure” as their own fault, and keep silent—a silence interrupted only by the occasional outbursts, like those of her father, who would “just ‘tell them off’ in such a way that would not be taken seriously.” Thus, the working-class voice is submerged in these two alternatives, “the parrot and the pit bull” (1995, 106). McCarriston struggles to find the voice to articulate a working-class consciousness in a world in which the working-class has become anonymous and invisible in a service economy, often caught in “token ‘white-collar’ positions, seduced in part by the dignity of genteel poverty into denying the real worth of their work” (106). One paradigm of this genteel poverty is provided, of course, by adjuncting. Refusing to keep the secret of her subordinate status and its implications for her writing, which [End Page 164] received less support than that of full-time colleagues, McCarriston reports that one college fired her for being “uncollegial.”

A strongly class-conscious group, a group well versed in labor history and tactics, would know exactly where they stood and what they must do. Instead, my fellows—my colleagues, the adjuncts—dress like their betters, teach like their betters, allow the students to believe they are in fact “colleagues.” And go without all that makes the professional lives of their betters possible.

(McCarriston 1995, 108)

Zandy’s own narrative discusses her efforts to help organize fellow part-time faculty and notes that “opportunities for praxis in class struggle are available behind the academic gate; one does not have to travel to Wigan Pier. . . .The increasing use of adjunct faculty is a piece of a larger labor story; white and blue collars blur in a common history of being overworked and underpaid” (1995, 73). As the working-class has itself become increasingly white-collar and professions like college teaching decline, the working class has not declined; it has both expanded and become more invisible. The final full essay in Liberating Memory, by Julie Olsen Edwards, offers a similarly inclusive view of the idea of the working-class. Recounting a visit to the MLA convention to hear her mother, the famous writer Tillie Olsen, speak at a panel on Working-Class Literature in 1991, Edwards says:

One of the speakers, a brilliant writer, a Chicana, says of herself with great sorrow, “I am a member of a University faculty. I have such privilege now. I am no longer working class.” And my mother, almost in tears, replies: “Oh no. You embody the working class in all you do. You are the working class that your working-class parents fought into being, believed could be. To call education a privilege, to call development of self, of capacity—to call those the province of the middle class is a distortion of history. You are the first generation of your family to claim this birthright. You have not left your family behind, you carry them with you. You are committed to the true potentiality of your students. You are doing your work serving and honoring the working class”

(Edwards 1995, 357; italics in original).

Tillie Olsen’s words imply a broader definition of working class than Zweig’s: the socialist hope that the working class might someday include all who do productive labor. More modestly, she also suggests that working-class people, who carry their traditions into middle-class occupations such as college teaching, might help transform those occupations. College teaching should be “commit[ment] to the true potentiality of students,” a way of “serving and honoring the working class.”

Indeed, two of the most recent collections of working class academic autobiography focus on pedagogy and students: Shepard’s, McMillan’s, and Tate’s Coming to Class: Pedagogy and The Social Class of Teachers and Linkon’s Teaching Working Class. The editors of Coming to Class asked their contributors, [End Page 165] all of whom teach in English departments, “to trace the effects of their own class histories on their teaching” (Shepard, McMillan, &Tate 1998, vii). Similarly, Sherry Linkon’s Teaching Working Class (1999) focuses on efforts to teach working class students, as well as the development of working class studies as a field. While Linkon found much that was valuable in working class academics’ autobiography, she also reports finding “all this autobiography frustrating. Yes, the experiences of working-class academics are important and instructive. But what about the students? What about my students?” (1). Most of the essays in Teaching Working Class move from the authors’ personal experience to discussions of pedagogy, hoping in the process to counter “the erasure of class from most North American pedagogies” (Green 1999, 16) and to counter the isolation of working-class students, in part by asking them to participate in narratives that allow them to explore their experience of class (Greenwald and Grant 1999, 33–36). In the second half of Teaching Working Class, on teaching working-class studies, the connection between working-class academic autobiography and the development of working-class studies as an academic field of study becomes explicit.

Ironically as college teaching is itself becoming deprofessionalized, the lines between teachers and the working-class majority of students begins to blur. As Victor Villaneuva has argued, the need for more and more “mental laborers” has meant that more of the traditionally excluded, including women and people of color, are drawn in as part of the middle-class, white-collar labor force. But Villaneuva denies the importance of the collars. Drawing from the Gramscian notion of hegemony, he argues that hegemony (the way in which various practices and ideas reinforce the status quo of power relations in postindustrial America) “fosters the commonsensensical notion that mental work is not labor. Rhetorically, hegemony plays up the blue collar/white collar distinction and downplays its hold on both collars chains” (Villaneuva 1993, 137). Like Tillie Olsen, Villaneuva suggests that the traditionally excluded (by class, color, or gender) take with them memories of a different common sense, which might question the way white collar, “middle class” work is thought of. But this process is a kind of new proletarianization for Villaneuva, and “the new proletarianization, where labor includes the word processor as well as the assembly line, should remind us that we, educators, are no less the new working class” (138).⁶

Teaching in the Box-Store University

In Reclaiming the Ivory Tower: Organizing Adjuncts to Change Higher Education, Joe Berry argues that the there is now a working-class majority of adjunct skilled labor in American colleges and universities. Unprotected by tenure, the contingent majority has the same needs for union protection as [End Page 166] other American workers (he prefers the term “contingent faculty” because “adjunct” suggests that the non-tenure track majority have a secondary role). Berry points out that within a generation, the majority of college teaching jobs have been converted to “professional skilled wage labor” (2005, 12) and that these jobs are working-class jobs, despite the fact that contingent faculty often have a contradictory class position :“in common with most other contingent workers, our class position, and certainly our class perception, is heavily influenced by the class position of our spouses and other family members. . . . Another source of contradiction in the class position is that many of us do not have working class origins” (13). However, Berry points out these contradictions primarily as problems that organizers must face in working with contingent faculty; although they often do not identify with the working-class, the contingent majority of college teachers have working-class jobs.

The transformation of the higher education workforce has occurred at a time when the informal pact between labor and management “that regular jobs would be full-time, include benefits, living wages, and carry the expectation of continued employment” (Berry 2005, 23) has eroded. The Postwar labor-management accord has been replaced by the era of flexible capitalism, where privatization and the race to the bottom are the norm, and (at least in the U.S.), union protections are the exception. Despite the image of the university as a haven from the real world trauma of contemporary capitalism, a more realistic view occasionally emerges, even in the pronouncements of administrators. Thus, Berry reports that after a meeting on part-time issues, the vice president of a large community college quietly told an adjunct faculty leader: “‘You know, I really support what you are trying to do for part-timers, but you should realize that you are not considered faculty, or even people. You are units of flexibility’”(x).

As Nelson Lichtenstein has argued, Wal-Mart has become the template for a new American economy of neo-liberal, flexible capitalism. Whereas General Motors, with its high-paying union jobs that provided benefits and a middle-class lifestyle to many of its working-class employees, was once the largest American corporation, that place is now held by Wal-Mart:

Wal-Mart is now the template business for world capitalism because it takes the most potent technological and logistic innovations of the twenty-first century and puts them at the service of an organization whose competitive success depends upon the destruction of all that remains of New Deal-style social regulation and replaces it, in the U.S. and abroad, with a global system that relentlessly squeezes labor costs from South Carolina to south China, from Indianapolis to Indonesia.

(Lichtenstein 2006, 4) [End Page 167]

Wal-Mart, as Lichtenstein argues, has a paradoxical relationship to the American working-class. “Wal-Mart’s prices are low, cheap enough to enable hard-pressed working-class families to stretch their dollars and survive to the next paycheck” (2006, 7). However, the real “effect” of Wal-Mart is to lower wage levels for American service workers, wipe out local small businesses which have a greater tendency than box stores to re-circulate dollars in the local economy, strain municipal budgets, entail larger government health care subsidies, and break the power of service worker unions. Globally, Wal-Mart depends on a vast industrial work force that can be exploited at will in totalitarian countries, especially China. In the U.S. Wal-Mart depends upon the continuance of an alienated, “red State” working-class consciousness, skeptical of unions and government intervention while often identifying with a right-wing, conservative Christian agenda (see Lichtenstein 2006, 3–30; Krajanen 2006, 143–62).⁷

As Lichtenstein points out, Wal-Mart is dependent on cheap labor to survive, and Wal-Mart justifies its practices by pointing out that most of its workers are marginal to the support of their families. In other words, it depends on the labor of an army of lowly paid women (and young workers) and it justifies its practices on the basis that these women choose to work at Wal-Mart and are quite happy with the choice that they make, thank you. Of course, Wal-Mart must also contend with extremely high turnover.

The above will be familiar to anyone who has staffed a first-year writing program at the majority of colleges and universities across the U.S.: without this army of part-time women (and some men) who choose such work, where would writing instruction be? Who would do the work? The parallel between Wal-Mart and the employment practices of the contemporary university can be extended further: Lichtenstein points out that Wal-Mart justifies its low wages, and

its discrimination against women workers . . . on the grounds that they are not the main family breadwinner. Not since the rise of the textile industry early in the nineteenth century, when women and children composed a majority of the labor force, has the leadership of an industry central to American economic development sought a workforce that it defined as marginal to the family economy.

(Lichtenstein 2006, 24)

But in some respects, colleges and universities, taken as a whole, may be more central to the American economy than the Box Stores of the service industry, and the policies of low pay for their increasingly contingent workforce are justified in similar ways.

The image of the university as “Box Store” is meant to suggest that, contrary to the image of part-time faculty as peripheral, the work of part-time faculty is now central to what universities do. After all, most moms and dads [End Page 168] are still under the mistaken impression that universities consider educating Johnny and Jane as freshmen as a central part of their mission, and they would be quite shocked to know the cavalier treatment that undergraduate education, especially in the crucial first two years, actually receives. At institutions that serve working-class students, the percentage of contingent faculty is especially high, but prestigious private universities are also very dependent on adjuncts. At CUNY, with its large working-class enrollment, 50–60% of all classes are taught by adjuncts, although the numbers have been as high as 70% (Dawson and Lewis 2008, 22). At private NYU, the site of a much publicized strike to maintain graduate student union recognition in 2005–06, the numbers are even higher. Although NYU strives to be a top international university, less than 23% of its courses are taught by tenure-line faculty, and in the 10 departments that do the most teaching, that number is a meager 13% (Schell 2008, 37).The Box Store isn’t just for the working-class anymore. Even elite colleges increasingly staff their undergraduate classes with part-time workers.

The representation of adjunct faculty is a charged subject. I have met administrators who have assured me that, having met with part-time faculty, they have found that, contrary to my arguments, the adjuncts are quite content. I have occasionally been accused of describing adjuncts as victims. I have had countless conversations with adjunct faculty, and can understand the complicated motivations that cause someone to work part-time at a university—after all, I myself did so many years ago, not willing to give up my connection to the academy, yet inwardly seething with working-class anger even as I made the choice. (In fact, working-class people choose work that makes them angry every day—the idea that the boss or the company you work for is beneath contempt is not a new idea to many American workers).

In Gypsy Academics and Mother Teachers, Eileen Schell points out that although some women teaching part-time “argue that they are exploited workers, others vehemently reject such a label” (1998, 56).While agreeing that many adjunct faculty are exploited, Schell insists that it is important not to label them as victims, thus denying their agency. The labels that people choose to represent their own experience are complex. “Working class” is probably not the first label that many adjunct faculty would choose to describe themselves; indeed, Marc Bousquet points out that one of the ironies of the part-time academic labor system is that “it has increasingly closed the profession to people who rely on waged work to live—and replaced them with individuals for whom teaching figures as a secondary income” (2008b, 43). However, there are also many faculty who do rely on adjunct wages—and many of them share working-class anger at the low pay and lack of benefits. Joe Berry recounts: “At a conference of contingent faculty [End Page 169] from all over North America, after a few drinks, the talk turns to retirement. No one in the discussion is under thirty and most are well over forty. One New Yorker, after listening for a time, drops his one-liner: ‘My only retirement plan is a bullet in my dresser drawer’” (2005, ix).

Anger comes through clearly in Michael Dubson’s collection of essays on adjunct labor, Ghosts in the Classroom. Some of the essays in Dubson’s collection, like the essays in Strangers in Paradise, are written under pseudonyms. Dubson notes that many of the writers included in his collection were “afraid, and their manuscripts were delivered with enormous amounts of trepidation, fear of the retribution and terrorism found only in academic departments” (2001, v). Although many of the contributors to Ghosts in the Classroom have mixed things to say about their experiences teaching as adjuncts, finding positives as well as negatives, the picture they present of the academic workplace is even harsher than that presented in the other narratives of academics from the working-class—and I consider Dubson’s book a collection of working-class narratives, although in a different sense than those I have discussed above. Although some of these part-time faculty come from working-class backgrounds, they cannot be said to have escaped that class; some have remained in the working-class, while others have fallen into it. Some retain the middle-class identity of their families of origin or families of marriage; all have working-class jobs. As Dubson points out in the introduction, the labor practices of higher education are comparable to those of other parts of the service economy, such as the fast food industry: “No one else but the fast food industry allows so much of its principal work to be done by underpaid, expendable help. . . . The excessive use and abuse of adjuncts puts the grandstanding, the pontificating and the intellectualism of higher education officials into a very different light indeed” (vi–vii).

The essays in Ghosts in the Classroom should be required reading for college administrators and tenured faculty. Those who think that part-time faculty tend to be freelancers content with their lot should meet Martin Naparsteck, who points out the difficulty of discerning the attitudes of part-time faculty in a situation where the lack of job security creates fear. According to Naparsteck, although “everyone knows part-timers are the most openly exploited class on America’s college campuses . . . if you’re a part-timer and you say what everyone knows, you’re likely to lose your job. That’s what happened to me at one of the colleges I worked at in New York” (2001, 58). The essays in Ghosts in the Classroom are not reticent in speaking about working conditions. Ed Meek compares the part-time situation to past examples of working-class exploitation in his essay, arguing that “Charles Dickens could not have envisioned this situation—a professional class of part-time and adjunct college faculty who teach approximately half of the [End Page 170] courses offered in the colleges and universities of America, who are paid less than half what their full-time counterparts earn, who often have no retirement benefits, no health insurance and no job security” (2001, 35). Will MacKenzie notes the connection between adjuncts like himself and others with lower-status service jobs:

Teaching, direct contact with students, is not valued. It is something people do for pleasure. Rewards remove teachers from teaching and draw teachers from the classroom to administration or research. In the world we have built, we do not value direct contact. The lower tiers of all professions, waiters in the restaurant, nurses in the hospital, tellers in the bank, and house keeping staff at the hotel, are all your human contact in institutions.

(MacKenzie 2001, 46)

Admittedly, jobs with human contact can have intrinsic benefits; MacKenzie notes that “there are rewards that transcend the compensation, the abuse, and the exploitation built into systems and structures that govern institutions” (2001, 46). But if we value teaching, as every college and university claims, why then do we institutionalize the exploitation of teachers at the lower tiers? Kate Gale, in an essay called “Adjuncts are not People,” recounts that “each college has its own way of humiliating you. Of letting you know that you are a second class citizen” (2001, 14). Jim Neal points out that

the term part-timer is a misnomer. I have met many people in my years of teaching who are euphemistically called “adjunct.” Of those, I can count on one hand, with fingers to spare, the lucky few for whom teaching is actually a part-time proposition—a hobby which stimulates the mind, occupies otherwise idle hours and supplements the breadwinner’s already sufficient income.

(Neal 2001, 18)

Neal ends his essay with the plaintive sentence, “But my years as an adjunct have obliterated any trace of egotism and pride, not to mention confidence, I might once have had” (2001, 21).

Although some of the contributors to Ghosts in the Classroom report good, supportive relations with full-time colleagues, and some express sympathy with administrators who are, like themselves, stuck in an immoral system, such attitudes are not the norm. More typical is Meek’s claim that “fulltime faculty are unwitting co-conspirators in the exploitation of part-time faculty . . . they are not willing to stand in solidarity with us because they do not see us as one of them” (2001, 56). R. Piehler notes that even unions can be the vehicle for this failure of solidarity: “there’s no guarantee that the class won’t be cancelled at the last second because of low enrollment, or that someone higher in the predatory cycle won’t snatch one of your classes away should one of theirs be cancelled. (This practice is actually allowed in the union-sanctioned contract at the college where I teach.)” (2001, 26). As to [End Page 171] support from faculty senates, so vital in non-unionized campuses, Barbara Wilson Hahn reports the resentment that a $25 per credit raise created at her college:

The President of the Faculty Senate, in a snit over not getting the COLA he thought tenured instructors deserved, stood up in the Learning Council and reiterated for the thousandth time the old saw that adjuncts ‘just wanted to teach their one class and go home’ . . . After attending meetings for three years, on my own time and at my own expense, the Senate president’s statement was the last straw.

(Hahn 2001, 67)

Many parents and students would be shocked by the extent to which the concerns of the adjunct faculty are not even on the agenda of the top administrators at many universities. In the last essay in Ghosts in the Classroom, “Farewell to Teaching,” Jody Brannen Brady reports:

I was a bad guest at a reception for the new president of the university. I took advantage of receiving line and, after introducing myself, I went into a spiel about how I hoped he would make teaching his top priority and would look at the deplorable teaching conditions of lecturers at the university. I expected a sage nod and a little more—but I didn’t get that. “That’s a problem everywhere I’ve been,” he told me. “It’s not our problem.” I moved on to let the next person say hello, and I shook hands with the president’s wife and moved on out of the way, all the while hearing his response in my head. How, I wanted to ask him—does the fact that the problem is widespread make it not a problem? How can you dismiss the problem so glibly when you’ve just told me you’re aware of it? . . . I don’t believe that administrators have any intention of addressing the concerns of their part-time employees; as long as there are over-qualified teachers willing to fill low-cost positions, there’s little incentive to change.

(Brady 2001, 148–49).

Although the starkness of the president’s dismissal may be unusual, Brady’s story points to a more general truth: universities have become corporate-like entities where the concerns of the faculty who do the majority of the teaching are a low priority.

There have been instances where faculty and administrators have made changes to address the concerns of adjunct faculty, converting part-time positions to full-time positions (usually without tenure) when possible, hiring former part-time faculty for full-time (even tenure line) positions, and working through faculty senates to try to raise the salaries of part-time faculty. I have seen all of the above changes occur at my own institution, although with limited success. As Bousquet, Berry, and others have pointed out, the problems of academic workers are similar to the problems of other workers, and they can best be addressed by a labor movement. But unfortunately, the academic workplace is usually characterized by the profound lack of solidarity [End Page 172] noted by Charles Finder, Jim Daniels, and other working-class academics above. As Bousquet argues, most tenure-stream faculty have presented very little opposition to the increased corporatization of the university. However, “there is nonetheless an emergent and vigorous culture of faculty opposition—just not in the tenurable majority” (2008b, 13).

Bousquet is referring, of course, to the increasing union activity and public protest by those seeking equity for part-time and non-tenure track faculty. As Joe Berry has argued, the new working-class “situation for most college teachers could be the basis for the rise of a new, more expansive working-class consciousness and a new unionism among faculty” (2005, 19). In the first Campus Equity Week in the fall of 2001, protests and forums were held at colleges and universities throughout the U.S. and Canada, signaling what may be a new wave of activism on college campuses. Rather than being led by students, however, this activism is led by part-time faculty and graduate teaching assistants who seek to form alliances with students, tenured faculty, and other constituents to achieve a just wage and decent working conditions for performing some of the most important teaching in higher education. Although the 2004 Brown decision by the National Labor Relations Board has provided a set-back for union organizing at private universities, this has not stopped union organizing on campuses, and there is hope that a change in the political climate will make organizing for all workers, in Box Stores and in Box Store Universities, easier. In some instances, union activity has brought a restored sense of community. As Schell argues in her discussion of the NYU strike, “unions may actually be the most effective vehicle for restoring collegiality to academe” (2008, 40). Even where formal unions do not exist, informal organizing by contingent faculty will continue. Today, organized formally through unions or informally over the internet, adjunct faculty activism has parallels with other contemporary social movements, such as the movement against the globalization of corporate power.

Working-class academic autobiography has migrated to the internet. The latest versions of working-class academic autobiography include You Tube postings such as MarcBousquet’s interviews with Monica Jacobe, Michelle Masse, and Elizabeth Hoffman, which make many of the same points as the faculty in Dubson’s book. This time, however, there is no anonymity. Instead, one sees very articulate and professional women discussing working in a professional writing program where 30 out of 33 of the instructors are part-time (Bousquet 2008d), the way in which the influx of women into academe has not broken the sexist division of labor in higher education (2008a), and the way the struggle for recognition among adjunct faculty has parallels to struggles such as those by the California Nurses’ Association, in that both are trying to defend themselves as workers while improving conditions for the [End Page 173] patients and students that they serve (2008c). In these and other interviews that Bousquet has posted in the online companion to How the University Works, I hear a matter-of-fact tone in discussing the ironies of academic exploitation. Most of those Bousquet interviews are, like Joe Berry, adjunct faculty who are activists in the movement to organize academic labor. Publishing online as well as in print, Bousquet and others in the academic labor movement have become the public intellectuals advocating for the working class that Zandy called for in 1995, although many of them undoubtedly do not have working-class origins. As public political statements, these interviews have come a long way from the quietly anonymous anger of Ryan and Sackrey’s narratives, although, like earlier working-class academic narratives, their focus is on opposing injustice. Opposition to injustice is traditionally part of the role of the university, but in the twenty-first century, some of the starkest injustices the university must confront lie within its own walls, and among its own working class.