Rhetoric and Resistance in the Corporate Academy

In this volume, the author analyzes the heated debates and ongoing legal struggles between school administrators and academic labor movements over the rise of part-time and temporary jobs in higher education. Focusing particular attention on the labor of writing instruction, the author finds among literacy workers both a deeply exploited segment of the campus population and a vector of organized resistance to the flexible hiring and unilateral decision making that now characterizes the corporate university. Contrary to visions of ivory tower seclusion, this volume traces continuities between writing teachers' and students' experiences as corporate employees, all the while contending that their frequently insecure positions, inadequate working conditions, minimal benefits, and marginalized voices constitute a grounds for political alliance. The author outlines a labor theory of agency that entails long-range collaboration among tenure-line faculty, part-time and non-tenure-track teachers, and student social movements, listening always for harmonies as well as dissonances among their modes of argument.