Our position on the current strikes of part-time faculty at American universities

The situation

We are currently witnessing what has been called “the largest strike movement by academic workers in US history” (https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2022/11/17/isum-n17.html).  Universities affected currently include the historically ‘progressive’ New School University in New York, and all 10 campuses of the University of California.  Earlier this year, graduate student instructors and researchers and part-time faculty won strikes at Columbia University and NYU, and there is talk of a strike at CUNY.  These are major events for us here in New York where we are located, although we have clients who are students and scholars across the country and the world.  In the US, it is a nationwide movement that has been happening for some time, in response to a problem that exists across the country and in all institutions of higher education, private and public. Students as well as graduate students, scientists, and scholars in this country have a stake in this. 

Accordingly, described below are some things that we are doing in response, and that you may wish to do.  These are followed by some general remarks on how we see the problem, as part of a larger set of problems facing the world of university scholarship and teaching, and higher education as part of it. The future of creative work in many fields and of learning and intellectual life in this country are in some ways at stake as well.

What can you do to help? And what is the position of Academic English Editing on the academic strikes?  What are we doing and not doing in this situation?

If you can, Verso Books, which has an excellent article on the recent events here  (https://www.versobooks.com/blogs/5507-from-the-front-lines-of-the-largest-academic-strike-in-us-history-graduate-students-across-the-uc-system-go-on-strike), asks for contributions to the hardship fund for the strikers of the UAW(United Auto Workers) (the union representing the strikers at several universities), here:
https://givebutter.com/uc-uaw?fbclid=IwAR1EzjU6xKljYCREtxPKwQ2tTKoPnJhfxuDe29EGNurKo7Nx90kglwURJ7I.

If you are an alum of a college or university, you can write the university’s president and let them know of your concern.  They rely on alumni to donate money (most of which is not going to pay the salaries of the instructors who do most of the work that matters).  They therefore care what you think.

If you are a student or other person not directly involved, you can join a picket line in solidarity.  

If you are a student, you also may or may not find that some of your classes are still being held and the instructors still teaching and reading papers.  (Perhaps your instructor is one of the few who is a permanent faculty member with tenure or on a tenure track, and not involved in the strike.)  Some people will choose to not participate in university business as usual, out of solidarity with the strikers.  We support this and encourage it where possible. 

Others will consider that they are unable to fully honor the strikers and their strike, for personal practical reasons — funding, visa concerns, whatever.  In that case, the right thing to do may be what enables you to get whatever you cannot realistically do without, while otherwise recognizing and supporting the strike in whatever way you can.  

One option may be to do your coursework as best you can, and research and write the papers that are normally required in the course — and turn them in when the strike is over and instructors are all accepting papers.  There may be ways of showing solidarity while also doing your work.  If your instructor is accepting (and probably requiring) papers, you may want to ask if you may submit it when the strike is over, letting the instructor know you are working on it.  (A strike is a hardship for the workers who are striking; as a student, you should not take the hiatus as a gratuitous vacation.). Accordingly, we are offering a 15% discount on all editing of papers during the strike if your university is affected by one of the strikes, and will contribute in your name an additional 5% to the strikers’ hardship fund. Just mention that you are supporting the strike and will turn in your paper after the strike is over and the workers have won a settlement that they have agreed to; we will edit it and return it to you, and you can turn it in when you like.

At the same time, because we recognize that people’s circumstances vary and one sometimes make compromises and do what they can, we will still edit and comment on papers that are sent to us.  We leave it to the student or scholar writing the paper to decide how they will proceed.  

We stand in solidarity with the scholars, researchers, and educators who are on strike.  We recognize the importance of the national and international movement against the super-exploitation of academic faculty.  It is part of a larger struggle, in which the future of higher education itself is at stake.  This is one of the most important social and political struggles of our time.  (More on this follows below.)

The immediate problem

American colleges and universities now mostly employ low-paid ‘adjunct professors’ and graduate students to handle their teaching.  Many of these are people who at one time would have very satisfying careers as scientists or scholars who also do much of the teaching, and would normally receive academic ‘tenure’ after several years if they were promoted in normal ways based on the quality of their research.  Most adjuncts are not given time to do research or writing of their own, even though the (now usually dim) prospects of advancement depend on it.  And they are paid very poorly.  Many work extra jobs, often menial ones, to make ends meet.  Their salaries do not enable them to meet the living expenses in the city or town where the school is located.  

What we have been witnessing for decades now is a ‘proletarianization’ (transformation into wage workers, often at low pay, long hours, and exploitative working conditions) of ‘intellectuals’ and workers in the sciences and arts, and the professions of teaching, as has happened in the past with people driven into factory work or other unskilled or semi-skilled jobs.  People who want to become scientists or scholars invest a lot of their time, energy, and money — and their employers profit from their labor but are content to treat them like unskilled workers who are only there to be profited from and otherwise can be thrown away.  If you are a college or university student in the US, the UK, or many other countries, you might hope or expect to have better opportunities, later, but you might well be disappointed.  Your instructors who are striking are fighting for their own livelihoods.  They are needed, but their employers, the universities, may not want to pay them as they should.  

That is the situation broadly faced by academic instructors today.  It is not about status or identity, so much as the kind of work people do and how they are paid.  If you have a deviant social identity that you want recognized, your school or employer may be happy to honor that.  When workers go on strike, it’s usually because they want to have a decent life.  Their work should entitle them to that, but they must fight for it, because employers want to save money, and they are part of a system organized as a market, so that it is ‘rational’ for them to behave that way, all other things being equal. Workers then only get what they need and deserve if they demand it and are willing to take action, and the risks this involves.  

Indeed, striking academic workers have won major gains recently at a number of schools as a result of negotiated agreements with their employers, the universities, made possible by the strikes.  This is only encouraging news for all of us.      

Strikes of workers at Amazon, at Starbucks, and other companies, and those at universities, are part of a common struggle.  College and university students and graduate students are part of the working class, and their fate is one in common.  We are not ‘temporarily embarrassed billionaires’; we are workers who are part of the class of workers, the class of people whose role in the economy is to be labor power, and thus a source of profit.  We should all support these struggles in any way we can, and not just for moral reasons, as ‘the right thing to do’, but also because we are bound to the class of workers by a common fate and destiny.    

The broader problem

The underlying problems include the way crises of capitalism in recent decades have involved an assault on higher education and people whose professional and career opportunities are dependent on it.  For students, this has mean skyrocketing tuition costs and the elimination of tuition-free education, even as ideal, at public universities, which are increasingly indistinguishable from private ones in the way they are run, on a corporate model.  This has led to the student loan crisis. 

That is because higher education in countries like the United States is privately rather than publicly financed.  It is a treated as private consumer good, and not a public good.  If it were understood as a public good, it would be because there is a societal commitment to the education of people as citizens (or those second-class citizens who are residents though they work, pay taxes, buy consumer goods, pay debts, and thus contribute to our economy) who should be knowledgeable participants in a society that is a republic in the sense of being organized around shared concerns with common matters (res publicae), as well as people who in private life should have legitimate access to the use of some things that are not for sale (like public libraries, public schools, public hospitals and health care services, etc.).  But education at least at the university level has become a private commodity, in effect a luxury that one can only have by paying for, while at the same time it is also a necessity, since you cannot get a good professional job without it, which is why so many people go to college or university by taking out student loans.  It is not a luxury like a private yacht or a multimillion dollar home, but it is funded like one, one that many people must want, which makes it possible for investors to profit by selling the thing — your education.   Higher education now paid mostly through student loans, which now exceed mortgages on homes as the largest debt obligation of most Americans lucky enough to have a higher education.   

Even greater problems are related to this, and faced by people who want to become professional scholars, scientists, researchers, or teachers in higher education. 

The way universities are run today is not a situation that benefits students or the people who do the research and teaching that is the universities’ reason for existing.  And the only way it will change is through collective struggle and protest, and recognition of, and solidarity with, the struggles of these instructors.  

We also need to combat not just the industry that profits off of student loan debts, but also the absence of a public commitment on the part of federal and state governments to higher education, which should be a right for anyone who wants it.

The purpose of a higher education is more than just preparing for a career, in order to get a job with a middle-class income (which you will need in part to pay back your student loans).  College and university education is valuable for several reasons, that have to do with an idea of the good life both of individual persons and of a society.  

The effective downgrading of higher education, which we are witnessing with both the student loan crisis and the proletarianization of scientific and educational labor, is a development of the last few decades, and characterizes the ‘neoliberal’ university. Neoliberalism is form of capitalism involving public disinvestment and privatization, the transfer of government funding and services away from services to citizens and towards mostly just policing/prisons and war, profits made partly by interest on debts and financial industries separated from actual industrial production, and the engagement of citizens and residents in effectively required purchases of commodities they are supposed to need, like health care, that often also involve them in forms of social control, like mental health services and pharmaceuticals prescribed for them.

What if we spent more money on schools and less on policing, prisons, and guns?  Would that require having a society that is organized to meet people’s needs and not for profit?  

You may want to vote for or support candidates for public office who are concerned about these problems and want to address them in useful ways, but in fact, real social change is even more likely to happen as a result of people doing what your instructors may be forced to do, which is to strike. Because that alone can force universities like other employers to change the pay and working conditions of the people who do the work; otherwise, they are subject to market competition and may find it difficult to do what reason would otherwise suggest is fair and right.

How this relates to what we do

Our approach at Academic English Editing to the research and writing of academic papers is consistent with the way we view college and university education, its purposes and benefits, and what is the best way to approach the work of a student or scholar in this system. Many of our competitors are big companies that basically advertise that they will give you what you supposedly want: a better grade, or passing your course, getting your degree and diploma, and eventually using it to get a good professional job. We will help you get these things to, but we see these as effects of doing the kind of work that is involved in getting these results, and doing that work in the best way. People today are marketed a college or university education as a way to get a good job in a professional career, and there is much — unavoidable — pressure to basically just try to meet the expectations given to you. And when it comes to writing papers in a class, people too often assume that is a simpler task than it really is — if you want to write, and really excel. We think that writing well is thinking well. Many American public school students do not get the best training in this, in part because schools now often emphasize easily measurable ‘results’ and standardized tests with multiple choice questions, rather than essay exams that require critical thinking. Many of our competitors will tell you that they know how to write a good paper, but they do not emphasize as they should how to think well and clearly, and write a paper that makes a strong and interesting argument. That is our focus. We specialize mostly in papers in the humanities and interpretive social sciences (more than the quantitative and controlled experiment kind) because it is in those fields that these skills are most emphasized. In all cases, we look not just at grammar and other elements of good writing (appropriate word choice, correctness of syntax, and even a clear and readable style, which is important), but also at the substantive claims and the way that they are presented in and as an argument. That is what a good academic paper is. It doesn’t have a ‘right’ answer, and there is not so much a ‘correct’ and ‘incorrect’ way to do it, as more and less effective ways that are dependent on things that are more a matter of good editorial judgment than anything that could be so simple as just doing it ‘right’. We will certainly help you do it right, but when we work with clients, we always comment in ways that are meant to help you strengthen the paper by thinking most clearly in your writing, because that is what good university level writing is.

This goes along with a commitment to learning and good scholarly and scientific research and study pursued for their own sake. The most successful scholars and scientists certainly all do approach their work in that way, even if the ‘neoliberal’ economy has driven universities and their faculty to make everything measurable in ways that result in a ‘de-skill-ing’ of the life of the mind. This is why we support the strikes of graduate student researchers and teachers and 'adjunct’ faculty. It follows logically and necessarily from our commitment to an ideal of what education and the life of mind should be, and what their role should be in a society. This is ultimately what is being contested.