"The University Works Because We Do": University Decision-Making and Rhetorics of Graduate Labor

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Autor/in	Isaac, Jonathan S.
Titel	"The University Works Because We Do": University Decision-Making and Rhetorics of Graduate Labor
Quelle	(2022), (182 Seiten) PDF als Volltext Verfügbarkeit Ph.D. Dissertation, The University of Wisconsin - Madison
Sprache	englisch
Dokumenttyp	gedruckt; online; Monographie
ISBN	9798426850583
Schlagwörter	Hochschulschrift; Dissertation; Graduate Students; Student Employment; Institutional Administration; Decision Making; School Policy; Discourse Analysis; Work Environment; Research Assistants; Teaching Assistants; Rhetoric; College Administration; Wisconsin + Suchen Sie Ihr Suchwort? Thesis; Dissertations; Academic thesis; Graduate Study; Student; Students; Aufbaustudium; Graduiertenstudium; Hauptstudium; Studentin; Studentenarbeit; Decision-making; Entscheidungsfindung; Schulpolitik; Diskursanalyse; Arbeitsmilieu; Forschungspersonal; Rhetorik; College administrators; Hochschulverwaltung
Abstract	This dissertation analyzes how rhetorics of graduate labor clash with and condition rhetorical activity concerning university decision-making. I examine the rhetorical tactics by which graduate worker-organizers promote an explicit worker identity that invests graduate workers with agency in decision-making over their working conditions; I also identify how administrators and state legislators circulate discourses of university decision-making that flatten power differentials and exclude graduate workers from decision-making "as workers." This project interrogates how identification with one's location in the class structure, overtly or otherwise, shapes the rhetorical activity of those with a stake in workplace decision-making: in this case, not only graduate workers and administrators, but also governing boards, faculty, undergraduate students, and state legislators. In so doing, I demonstrate that the ongoing rhetorical contest over how, exactly, to categorize graduate workers--as students or apprentices, professors-in-training or workers--is fundamentally a contest over the right of graduate workers to wield power through participation in workplace decision-making. Chapter One, "Deliberating Decision-Making Power and the Rhetoric of Graduate Labor," argues that graduate worker rhetorics represent a key site of disruption to dominant rhetorics of decision-making that circulate in the university and the broader public. I argue that graduate student workers' experiences--of labor exploitation, power asymmetries, workplace discrimination, low wages, exclusion from decision-making, and more--name dynamics that undermine efforts by legislators, administrators, and governing boards to legitimize their own authority to near-singularly determine the best interests of graduate workers specifically, and the university more broadly. Chapter Two, "Defining Graduate Workers as Decision-Makers in the TAA's 1970 Unionization Campaign," draws from TAA newsletters and other communications during the union's formation and certification campaign of 1969 and 1970 to investigate the formation of a counterpublic explicitly attentive to the class dynamics of the university system writ large and the role of the graduate student worker within it. This chapter examines how the TAA rhetorically constructed its investment in and advocacy for more dispersed decision-making processes at UW--Madison. Chapters Three and Four examine a campaign fifty years later in which the union struggled to connect the experiences of graduate workers to larger political interests and pressures in ways that would inform their self-perception as workers and prepare them and their allies to confront administrators directly over decision-making powers. Chapter Three, "Constructing the Graduate Worker in the Neoliberal University," examines how TAA organizers structured the participation of graduate workers in protest against student fees, a revenue stream critical to the interpellation of students into neoliberal political rationality. I argue that the union's failure to engage in anti-neoliberal consciousness-raising constrained its ability to prepare graduate workers to take more disruptive collective labor action. Chapter Four, "Shared Governance as Rhetorical 'Topos' and Asymmetries of Meaning in Deliberative Arenas," analyzes how worker-organizers in the TAA attempted to write themselves into decision-making powers over student fees through participation in a Faculty Senate meeting, in the process misidentifying it as a discursive arena wherein workers could meaningfully challenge administrative decision-making even as amendments to state law had severely weakened faculty and student power over shared governance. The chapter accounts for how asymmetrical class power makes possible a sort of administrative double-speak that simultaneously champions shared governance practices and consolidates decision-making power among unaccountable administrators and state actors. Taken together, this project examines the rhetorical contestation over the definition of graduate labor as it relates to workplace decision-making. By illuminating decision-making as an essential feature of the ongoing contestation between academic workers and university administrators, this dissertation urges the academic labor movement and everyone with a stake in higher education to think clearly and seriously about how universities make decisions, and in whose interests. [The dissertation citations contained here are published with the permission of ProQuest LLC. Further reproduction is prohibited without permission. Copies of dissertations may be obtained by Telephone (800) 1-800-521-0600. Web page: http://www.proquest.com/en-US/products/dissertations/individuals.shtml.] (As Provided).
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Erfasst von	ERIC (Education Resources Information Center), Washington, DC
Update	2024/1/01