Book ms sent in

On March 1 Joe and I sent the manuscript of our book in to Pluto, our publisher in the UK. It will come out as part of the Wildcat series, which we’re excited about. We expect it to be out by August so we can take it to the COCAL conference in Mexico City (assuming COVID has settled down — we both have had two shots by now).

Here is Joe reading through the whole thing again, tabbing pages where he thinks something should be changed or corrected.

All this is to say that there will be a separate blog for this book. I hope it will become an interactive space for contingents who will write in or write about what it’s like to teach, organize and represent workers under precarious employment conditions. It will also try to track some of the whopping changes being made in higher ed — like universities that are “re-writing” the tenure rules. At SF City College , by the way, about 165 tenured profs got March 15th pink slips. This is COVID disaster capitalism. Waiting for it to blow over is not a strategy.

The name of this other blog will be the same as the title of the book: Power Despite Precarity: Strategies for the Contingent Faculty movement in Higher Education. Right now there’s a good description of it on Patrick Sullivan’s blog, Teacher-Scholar-Activist.