"Marc Bousquet's "How the University Works" should be required reading for anyone with an interest in the future of higher education, including administrators, faculty members, graduate students, and--even more significantly--undergraduates and their parents."
--Thomas Hart Benton, "The Chronicle of Higher Education"

""How the University Works" is a serious wake-up call for the entire profession, and, based on what I overheard at the [2007 MLA] book fair, Bousquet is about to emerge as the Al Gore of higher education."
aThomas Hart Benton, The Chronicle of Higher Education

"Marc Bousquet is the most trenchant theorist of the current academic labor situation, and How the University Works is the best study of academic labor conditions in the U.S. since the 1970s. It is thoroughly and creatively researched, theoretically bold, often mercifully frank, and frequently poignant in its arguments and findings."
aVincent B. Leitch, General Editor of the Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism

As much as we think we know about the modern university, very little has been said about what it's like to work there. Instead of the high-wage, high-profit world of knowledge work, most campus employees a including the vast majority of faculty a really work in the low-wage, low-profit sphere of the service economy. Tenure-track positions are at an all-time low, with adjuncts and graduate students teaching the majority of courses. This super-exploited corps of disposable workers commonly earn fewer than $16,000 annually, without benefits, teaching as many as eight classes per year. Even undergraduates are being exploited as a low-cost, disposable workforce.

Marc Bousquet, a majorfigure in the academic labor movement, exposes the seamy underbelly of higher education a a world where faculty, graduate students, and undergraduates work long hours for fast-food wages. Assessing the costs of higher educations corporatization on faculty and students at every level, How the University Works is urgent reading for anyone interested in the fate of the university. ALSO OF INTEREST Author interview with Cary Nelson Author Blog on "The Chronicle of Higher Education" Call to Arms for Academic Labor--Review by "Inside Higher Ed" Author's Blog View the Table of Contents
Read the Introduction

In an age when innovative scholarly work is at an all-time high, the academy itself is being rocked by structural change. Funding is plummeting. Tenure increasingly seems a prospect for only the elite few. Ph.D.'s are going begging for even adjunct work. Into this tumult steps Cary Nelson, with a no- holds-barred account of recent developments in higher education.

Eloquent and witty, Manifesto of a Tenured Radical urges academics to apply the theoretical advances of the last twenty years to an analysis of their own practices and standards of behavior. In the process, Nelson offers a devastating critique of current inequities and a detailed proposal for change in the form of A Twelve-Step Program for Academia.

Featuring new essays by such prominent cultural theorists as Tony Bennett, Homi Bhabha, Donna Haraway, bell hooks, Constance Penley, Janice Radway, Andrew Ross, and Cornel West, Cultural Studies offers numerous specific cultural analyses while simultaneously defining and debating the common body of assumptions, questions, and concerns that have helped create the field.

This title presents an authentic voice for the experiences of the Americans who volunteered for the Republic in the Spanish Civil War.

All research content shall be under university surveillance. Academic freedom must take second place to security from terrorism. Only disciplines that pay their way will earn the right to survive in the university of the future. Universities are increasingly profit-driven, and the faculty seems increasingly passive in the face of political and economic pressures. Office Hours argues that it's not enough to blame market forces or the indifference of politicians: academics can often be their own worst enemies. In a series of stinging analyses, Nelson and Watt examine the current sorry state of higher education. The second half of the volume offers 'alternative futures' for the academy, visions that involve academic organizations, public outreach through the internet, faculty unionization, and campus organizing.

Making a forceful case for political poetry as poetry, Nelson brings to bear his extraordinary knowledge of American poets, radical movements, and social struggles in order to bring out an undervalued strength in a literature often left at the canon's edge. Richly detailed and beautifully illustrated with period engravings and woodcuts, Revolutionary Memory brings that chorus dramatically to life and set a cultural agenda for future work.

Making a forceful case for political poetry as poetry, Nelson brings to bear his extraordinary knowledge of American poets, radical movements, and social struggles in order to bring out an undervalued strength in a literature often left at the canon's edge. Richly detailed and beautifully illustrated with period engravings and woodcuts, Revolutionary Memory brings that chorus dramatically to life and set a cultural agenda for future work.

Know what "academic freedom" is? Or what it's come to mean? What's affirmative about "affirmative action" these days? Think you're up on the problem of "sexual harassment" on campus? Or know how much the university depends on "part-time faculty"?
"Academic Keywords" is a witty, informed, and sometimes merciless assessment of today's campus, an increasingly corporatized institution that may have bitten off more than its administration is ready to chew. Cary Nelson and Steve Watt use the format of a dictionary to present stories and reflections on some of the most pressing issues affecting higher education in America. From the haphazard treatment of graduate students to the use and abuse of faculty (as well as abuses commited by faculty), Nelson and Watt present a compelling and, at times, enraging report on the state of the campus.
If you're working for a university, studying at one, or simply interested in what's wrong with American education, you won't want to miss "Academic Keywords."

In less than a generation, higher education has undergone tremendous economic and cultural changes Academic Keywords takes an honest look at the state of academia today. Arranged alphabetically, this insightful reference features many of the hottest buzzwords on campuses. From academic freedom to tenure, affirmative action to sexual harassment, Cary Nelson and Stephen Watt offer a passionate assessment of the changing landscape of higher education.

These letters will lift your spirit and break your heart. They will take you back to a time when 2,800 Americans took up arms and confronted Hitler's Condor Legion, Mussolini's Black Shirts, and Franco's fascist cavalry on the battlefields of Spain. Here are the actual letters that Abraham Lincoln Brigade members wrote home from 1936 to 1939. Here are accounts of their combat experiences, the love letters they wrote under fire, tales of the friendships they formed among themselves and with their Spanish comrades, and their reports of history's first saturation bombing of civilian targets in Madrid and Barcelona. It was the eve of World War II, and these men and women saw clearly the danger the world was facing. Now, both those who died and those who lived tell us their stories for the first time.

More and more Americans look to higher education to guarantee their income in increasingly precarious economic times, yet they seem equally willing to attack universities regularly. While both colleges and their professors are widely distructed and criticized, Americans also point ot higher education as their most valuable and durable product in the global economy. Why - and how - is higher education in America under fire?

Higher education is arguably America's most valuable and durable product in the global economy, yet it is constantly subject to criticism. The contributors to this book examine why - and how - this is happening, from a wide variety of perspectives. The book offers a combination of economic and political analysis and a comprehensive sense of the challenges currently facing teachers and students in the humanities.

The modern university is sustained by academic freedom; it guarantees higher education's independence, its quality, and its success in educating students. The need to uphold those values would seem obvious. Yet the university is presently under siege from all corners; workers are being exploited with paltry salaries for full-time work, politics and profit rather than intellectual freedom govern decision-making, and professors are being monitored for the topics they teach. No University Is an Island offers a comprehensive account of the social, political, and cultural forces undermining academic freedom. At once witty and devastating, it confronts these threats with exceptional frankness, then offers a prescription for higher education's renewal. In an insider's account of how the primary organization for faculty members nationwide has fought the culture wars, Cary Nelson, the current President of the American Association of University Professors, unveils struggles over governance and unionization and the increasing corporatization of higher education. Peppered throughout with previously unreported, and sometimes incendiary, higher education anecdotes, Nelson is at his flame-throwing best. will be the benchmark against which we measure the current definitive struggle for academic freedom. The book calls on higher education's advocates of both the Left and the Right to temper conviction with tolerance and focus on higher education's real injustices. Nelson demands we stop denying teachers, student workers, and other employees a living wage and basic rights. He urges unions to take up the larger cause of justice. And he challenges his own and other academic organizations to embrace greater democracy. With broad and crucial implications for the future, No University Is an Island will be the benchmark against which we measure the current definitive struggle for academic freedom.

"Marc Bousquet's "How the University Works" should be required reading for anyone with an interest in the future of higher education, including administrators, faculty members, graduate students, and--even more significantly--undergraduates and their parents."
--Thomas Hart Benton, "The Chronicle of Higher Education"

""How the University Works" is a serious wake-up call for the entire profession, and, based on what I overheard at the [2007 MLA] book fair, Bousquet is about to emerge as the Al Gore of higher education."
aThomas Hart Benton, The Chronicle of Higher Education

"Marc Bousquet is the most trenchant theorist of the current academic labor situation, and How the University Works is the best study of academic labor conditions in the U.S. since the 1970s. It is thoroughly and creatively researched, theoretically bold, often mercifully frank, and frequently poignant in its arguments and findings."
aVincent B. Leitch, General Editor of the Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism

As much as we think we know about the modern university, very little has been said about what it's like to work there. Instead of the high-wage, high-profit world of knowledge work, most campus employees a including the vast majority of faculty a really work in the low-wage, low-profit sphere of the service economy. Tenure-track positions are at an all-time low, with adjuncts and graduate students teaching the majority of courses. This super-exploited corps of disposable workers commonly earn fewer than $16,000 annually, without benefits, teaching as many as eight classes per year. Even undergraduates are being exploited as a low-cost, disposable workforce.

Marc Bousquet, a majorfigure in the academic labor movement, exposes the seamy underbelly of higher education a a world where faculty, graduate students, and undergraduates work long hours for fast-food wages. Assessing the costs of higher educations corporatization on faculty and students at every level, How the University Works is urgent reading for anyone interested in the fate of the university. ALSO OF INTEREST Author interview with Cary Nelson Author Blog on "The Chronicle of Higher Education" Call to Arms for Academic Labor--Review by "Inside Higher Ed" Author's Blog View the Table of Contents
Read the Introduction

In an age when innovative scholarly work is at an all-time high, the academy itself is being rocked by structural change. Funding is plummeting. Tenure increasingly seems a prospect for only the elite few. Ph.D.'s are going begging for even adjunct work. Into this tumult steps Cary Nelson, with a no- holds-barred account of recent developments in higher education.

Eloquent and witty, Manifesto of a Tenured Radical urges academics to apply the theoretical advances of the last twenty years to an analysis of their own practices and standards of behavior. In the process, Nelson offers a devastating critique of current inequities and a detailed proposal for change in the form of A Twelve-Step Program for Academia.

The contributors to Disciplinarity and Dissent in Cultural Studies include established scholars and new voices. In a series of polemic and exploratory essays written especially for this book, they track the struggle with cultural studies in disciplines like anthropology, literature and history; and between cultural studies and very different domains like Native American culture and the culture of science.

Based in part on an extraordinary five-day conference at the University of Illinois, Cultural Studies supplements and comments on the essays themselves by transcribing extended discussions between participants.

The Oxford Handbook of Modern and Contemporary American Poetry gives readers a cutting-edge introduction to the kaleidoscopic world of American poetry over the last century. Offering a comprehensive approach to the debates that have defined the study of American verse, the twenty-five original essays contained herein take up a wide array of topics: the influence of jazz on the Beats and beyond; European and surrealist influences on style; poetics of the disenfranchised; religion and the national epic; antiwar and dissent poetry; the AIDS epidemic; digital innovations; transnationalism; hip hop; and more. Alongside these topics, major interpretive perspectives such as Marxist, psychoanalytic, disability, queer, and ecocritcal are incorporated. Throughout, the names that have shaped American poetry in the period--Ezra Pound, Wallace Stevens, Marianne Moore, Mina Loy, Sterling Brown, Hart Crane, William Carlos Williams, Posey, Langston Hughes, Allen Ginsberg, John Ashbery, Rae Armantrout, Larry Eigner, and others--serve as touchstones along the tour of the poetic landscape.

The Oxford Handbook of Modern and Contemporary American Poetry gives readers a cutting-edge introduction to the kaleidoscopic world of American poetry over the last century. Offering a comprehensive approach to the debates that have defined the study of American verse, the twenty-five original essays contained herein take up a wide array of topics: the influence of jazz on the Beats and beyond; European and surrealist influences on style; poetics of the disenfranchised; religion and the national epic; antiwar and dissent poetry; the AIDS epidemic; digital innovations; transnationalism; hip hop; and more. Alongside these topics, major interpretive perspectives such as Marxist, psychoanalytic, disability, queer, and ecocritcal are incorporated. Throughout, the names that have shaped American poetry in the period--Ezra Pound, Wallace Stevens, Marianne Moore, Mina Loy, Sterling Brown, Hart Crane, William Carlos Williams, Posey, Langston Hughes, Allen Ginsberg, John Ashbery, Rae Armantrout, Larry Eigner, and others--serve as touchstones along the tour of the poetic landscape.

The modern university is sustained by academic freedom; it guarantees higher education's independence, its quality, and its success in educating students. The need to uphold those values would seem obvious. Yet the university is presently under siege from all corners; workers are being exploited with paltry salaries for full-time work, politics and profit rather than intellectual freedom govern decision-making, and professors are being monitored for the topics they teach. No University Is an Island offers a comprehensive account of the social, political, and cultural forces undermining academic freedom. At once witty and devastating, it confronts these threats with exceptional frankness, then offers a prescription for higher education's renewal. In an insider's account of how the primary organization for faculty members nationwide has fought the culture wars, Cary Nelson, the current President of the American Association of University Professors, unveils struggles over governance and unionization and the increasing corporatization of higher education. Peppered throughout with previously unreported, and sometimes incendiary, higher education anecdotes, Nelson is at his flame-throwing best. will be the benchmark against which we measure the current definitive struggle for academic freedom. The book calls on higher education's advocates of both the Left and the Right to temper conviction with tolerance and focus on higher education's real injustices. Nelson demands we stop denying teachers, student workers, and other employees a living wage and basic rights. He urges unions to take up the larger cause of justice. And he challenges his own and other academic organizations to embrace greater democracy. With broad and crucial implications for the future, No University Is an Island will be the benchmark against which we measure the current definitive struggle for academic freedom.

Israel Denial is the first book to offer detailed analyses of the work faculty members have published-individually and collectively-in support of the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement; it contrasts their claims with options for promoting peace. The faculty discussed here have devoted a significant part of their professional lives to delegitimizing the Jewish state. While there are beliefs they hold in common-including the conviction that there is nothing good to say about Israel-they also develop distinctive arguments designed to recruit converts to their cause in novel ways. They do so both as writers and as teachers; Israel Denial is the first to give substantial attention to anti-Zionist pedagogy. No effort to understand the BDS movement's impact on the academy and public policy can be complete without the kind of understanding this book offers. A co-publication of the Academic Engagement Network

Universities are in trouble. They face some tough choices about how to survive in our uncompromising times. In a series of stinging analyses this book tackles these issues head on. It argues that it's not enough to blame market forces or the indifference of politicians: academics can often be their own worst enemies. Universities are increasingly profit-driven, and the faculty seems increasingly passive in the face of political and economic pressures. This book examines the current sorry state of higher education and offers 'alternative futures' for the academy, visions that involve academic organizations, public outreach through the internet, faculty unionization, and campus organizing. Office Hours is a roll-up-your-sleeves look at the avoidable disaster facing the modern university. 'Straightforward, unpretentious, immensely readable, and on matters of extreme urgency to a very wide potential readership.' --Bruce Robbins, Professor of English and Comparative Literature, Columbia University 'Office Hours is always pointed, often poetic and amusing, and never dull. American higher education, and then suggest the cure. Do read this book-it's a tonic.' --Jane Buck, President, American Association of University Professors 'Straightforward, unpretentious, immensely readable, and on matters of extreme urgency to a very wide potential readership' - Bruce Robbins, Professor of English and Comparative Literature, Columbia University 'Office Hours is always pointed, often poetic and amusing, and never dull. Nelson and Watt accurately diagnose the serious malady that threatens American higher education, and then suggest the cure. Do read this book-it's a tonic - Jane Buck, President, American Association of University Professors

Dreams Deferred arrives as debates about the future of the Middle East and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict intensify under the extraordinary pressure of a region in chaos. The book empowers readers to be informed participants in conversations and debates about developments that increasingly touch all of our lives. Its sixty concise but detailed essays give facts and arguments to assist all who seek justice for both Israelis and Palestinians and who believe the two-state solution can yet be realized. Inspired both by the vision of a democratic Jewish state and by the need for Palestinian political self-determination, the book addresses the long history of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and its current status. It demonstrates that the division and suspicion promoted by the Boycott, Sanctions, and Divestment (BDS) movement will only undermine the cause of peace.

Dreams Deferred arrives as debates about the future of the Middle East and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict intensify under the extraordinary pressure of a region in chaos. The book empowers readers to be informed participants in conversations and debates about developments that increasingly touch all of our lives. Its sixty concise but detailed essays give facts and arguments to assist all who seek justice for both Israelis and Palestinians and who believe the two-state solution can yet be realized. Inspired both by the vision of a democratic Jewish state and by the need for Palestinian political self-determination, the book addresses the long history of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and its current status. It demonstrates that the division and suspicion promoted by the Boycott, Sanctions, and Divestment (BDS) movement will only undermine the cause of peace.