The Generation of Public Intellectuals

Corporate Universities and Private Intellectuals

Recent years have witnessed the rise of what many scholars have termed the corporate university, in which the concerns of the marketplace have wielded increasing influence, often at the expense of classroom learning and teaching conditions (e.g., Washburn 2005). The rise of the corporate university is of particular consequence to the debate over public intellectuals, as it has involved the increasing “privatization of knowledge” (Ohmann 2003, 105). To be sure, research universities in the United States have always shared a close relationship with business. The proliferation of universities in the late nineteenth century was closely related to the nation’s industrialization, and the birth of the modern research university in the years following World War II signaled a further set of connections between capitalist expansion and higher education. However, the ties between U.S. universities and big business grew substantially stronger in the 1980s as corporations faced new competition from other parts of the world. As Sheila Slaughter and Larry L. Leslie (1997, 6) outline in their study Academic Capitalism, U.S. corporations turned increasingly to research universities in this period for “science-based products and processes to market in a global economy.” At the same time, public budget shortfalls eroded traditional sources of educational funding, forcing a number of professors, departments and universities toward more lucrative, market-driven research agendas. This shift marked a dramatic change in the place of educational institutions in the larger structure of society, as universities themselves became central sites of capitalist production.

The Bayh-Dole Act of 1980, which enables universities to patent and profit from the results of federally funded research, stands as a watershed in the corporatization of the U.S. academy. Universities welcomed Bayh-Dole as a cash cow and moved to devote more resources to the production of marketable research. On the same day that the Act went into effect, Columbia University enacted a new patent policy that “stated that [the University] could assert rights to faculty inventions created within University laboratories or research facilities, mandated the disclosure of such inventions to the University, and provided for royalty-sharing with the inventor and his or her department.” The number of universities with technology licensing and transfer offices to oversee this process grew from 25 to 200 during the 1980s. The number of patents issued annually to universities grew from 264 in 1979 to 1,228 in 1989 (Mowery et al. 2001, 104-5). The Association of University Technology Managers (AUTM), which conducts annual surveys of U.S. universities’ patenting and licensing activities, notes that for the 84 U.S. institutions responding to the 1991 and 2000 surveys, licensing royalties increased by more than 520% during that nine-year period (Thursby and Thursby 2003). This trend has continued in recent years, with universities earning record profits from the licensing of research. By 2010, according to the AUTM’s annual survey, U.S. universities received 4,109 U.S. patents and collectively earned nearly $1.8 billion in licensing revenue. In addition, universities reported that their research produced 613 spin-off companies (Blumenstyk 2011). These figures suggest the staggering extent to which profit has become central to the mission of U.S. research universities in the decades since Bayh-Dole.

These trends have unfolded within the larger context of neoliberal change in the academy, marked by the increasing privatization and appropriation of ideas, creativity and innovation for corporate purposes. The privatization of publicly funded university–based research constitutes one component of the global neoliberal imperative to expand intellectual property rights. The World Trade Organization’s 1994 Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights requires member states to establish strong intellectual property rights in order to participate in world markets. As David Harvey (2005, 160) notes, the agreement “defines genetic materials, seed plasmas, and all manner of other products as private property.” The valuing of private profit over public use in the age of neoliberalism has devastating consequences for public health, advancing the bottom line of the pharmaceutical industry at the expense of the global poor. As Harvey argues, the advance of private property rights marks a key terrain of neoliberalism’s “accumulation by dispossession.”

Corporate influence in the academy extends beyond licensing revenue to the curriculum, research agenda and makeup of the faculty. The proliferation of corporate-named chairs at research universities (the Chemistry Department at Northwestern University’s Dow Chemical Company Professorship, for example) is one especially visible marker of the close relationship between industry and academia. More significantly, corporate funding of university research often comes with explicit expectations for deepened integration of the academy and the marketplace. Reporting on plans for $2.36 million in Dow Chemical–sponsored research at Northwestern in 2012, a university press release from late 2011 noted that Northwestern was selected (along with ten other institutions) “for their excellence in science and engineering education, research and willingness to collaborate with industry” (Working on tomorrow’s solutions 2011).

As corporate funding has become more and more central to American research universities, especially in the current age of shrinking budgets and declining public funding, new questions have been raised about the ethical implications of this trend. A 2004 report by the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) documents several cases in which fundamental academic standards have been compromised in the service of corporate profit. An especially troubling case documented in the report involves the department of Microbial Biology at the University of California at Berkeley, which in 1998 entered into a close business relationship with the Swiss pharmaceutical company Novartis. The arrangement gave Novartis licensing rights to “a proportion of the number of discoveries by the department’s total research budget, whether or not the discoveries result directly from the company-sponsored research.” The report concludes that such arrangements create “the potential, no matter how elaborate the safeguards for respecting academic freedom and the independence of researchers, for weakening peer review both in research and in promotion and tenure decisions, for distorting the priorities of undergraduate and graduate education, and for compromising scientific openness.”

Champions of the new corporate university strive to remake the very standards of job security in the academy so as to be contingent on product innovation. For example, in an influential 2004 New York Times op-ed, Stevens Institute of Technology Professor (and soon thereafter Provost of New York University’s [NYU’s] Polytechnic Institute) Erich E. Kunhardt embraced the value of “academic entrepreneurship,” arguing that the academy must make drastic changes in order to “help America keep its place in the global economic order.” Disturbingly, Kunhardt suggested that “invention” should be considered alongside teaching and research in tenure decisions. Kunhardt and others who would expand the presence of market forces in the academy constitute an increasingly powerful chorus of voices that presents a grave threat to the future of the critical public intellectual and the very survival of the public sphere itself. Indeed, as the university has become increasingly corporatized over the last quarter-century, a new breed of private intellectual—valued to the extent their scholarly work can be commodified and sold on the free market—has emerged with such force as to call into serious question the long-term prognosis for intellectual work in service of the public good. Neoliberal models of academic employment form part of a larger constellation of market-based trends in higher education, with serious implications for learning and working conditions alike. Indeed, the growing call for a more entrepreneurial faculty comes at the same moment that the values of affordability and access that helped democratize university education in the twentieth century are at risk of being displaced by the imperative of profitability in an era of for-profit schools, declining state support and escalating tuition costs.

Of special concern is the fact that today’s universities, with their private intellectuals, have privileged profitable research at the expense of less lucrative endeavors, such as classroom teaching (Noble 2003, 28). At the heart of this profound shift in universities’ economic and curricular priorities has been the steady casualization of teaching positions. While growing corporate influence in the academy has had a particularly dramatic impact on research agendas in the “hard” sciences, university moves to implement cost-saving measures have also affected teaching conditions across the disciplines. Indeed, fields in which faculty research does not produce marketable products on the same scale as some sciences—foreign languages and literature, for example—have seen an especially dramatic erosion of full-time, secure positions. Since the early 1970s, tenured and tenure-track teaching positions at U.S. universities have steadily declined, while insecure and contingent jobs have proliferated. The AAUP reports that whereas approximately 75% of faculty in 1970 were in the “tenure stream,” by 2007 “almost 70% were employed off the tenure track” (AAUP 2010). The spread of casualization through the academy has been breathtaking, as most faculty members and graduate students are all too aware. As Joe Berry reports in his recent study of organizing among contingent faculty, university classrooms have become some of the most casualized workplaces in the United States, with the academy representing “one of the few recent instances in the United States economy (another is taxi driving) where an entire occupation has been converted from permanent career status to temporary, often part-time, status in the space of a single generation of workers” (Berry 2005, 4). Even more disturbingly, women and people of color are disproportionately impacted by the casualization of university teaching, representing a majority of part-time and adjunct faculty and a minority of tenured professors (Bousquet 2008, 43).

The landscape of intellectual work in the age of the corporate, casualized university is increasingly defined by a dangerous hierarchy in which tenure and job security are reserved for a select few, and non-tenured, casual workers conduct a disproportionate amount of the instruction at these institutions. NYU, which has distinguished itself over the last twenty years as one of the most prominent research institutions in the country, has become one of the most striking examples of this new trend. As Jonathan VanAntwerpren and David L. Kirp (2003) detail in their study of NYU’s development under President John Sexton, the university’s much-publicized acquisition of prominent “star” faculty in a number of fields has been accompanied by the growth of a much larger number of part-time teachers, enlisted to do the vast majority of the institution’s classroom teaching. NYU’s development in this regard is emblematic of the situation of research universities more broadly and stands as a high-profile model of new management practices for other institutions as they look to remake themselves in the age of neoliberalism. The state of affairs at major research universities like NYU is especially meaningful for their Ph.D. students, those emerging intellectuals who have devoted years of their lives to earning doctoral degrees as basic credentials for careers as college professors. In one of the great ironies of modern academic life, the very institutions charged with training new scholars to lead universities into the next century have developed employment practices that make the sustainable scholarly career an increasingly elusive dream.

The Academic Labor Movement and the New Public Intellectuals

Despite the trends outlined above, scholars continue to pursue careers as university professors, even in fields with seemingly little potential for growth in an era of corporate universities and private intellectuals. The stark realities of future job prospects in the academy have received widespread attention in recent years, in part through high-profile opinion pieces in publications like the Chronicle of Higher Education that have attempted to warn would-be doctoral candidates from launching academic careers in the humanities and social sciences. While such discussions have served to bring the crisis of academic employment to a broader audience, they have tended to lack any substantive engagement with the possibility of changing the dire circumstances in which members of the rising generation of university professors find themselves. For example, in one of the most prominent entries into the discussion of declining career prospects in the academy, Hope College’s William Pannapacker (2009), writing in the Chronicle of Higher Education under the pen name Thomas H. Benton, posited that the only people who should consider pursuing the Ph.D. were those with independent sources of income, those who “come from that small class of well-connected people in academe who will be able to find a place for you somewhere” or those who are being paid by their employer to earn credentials for positions they already hold. In cautioning most aspiring academics away from graduate school, Pannapacker effectively endorses a model of the private intellectual, ceding the terrain of credentialed scholarship to those with means and connections. Though pieces such as Pannapacker’s may well be intended as helpful advice for naïve young scholars, such cautionary accounts do little to highlight the possibility—however challenging—of systemic change, around which thousands of academics are actively organizing. Instead, to find hope for an alternative future for the academy, aspiring scholars can look to the academic labor movement.

Taken as a whole, universities are among the most unionized workplaces in the contemporary United States. As Marc Bousquet (2008, 96) notes, faculty at over 1,000 U.S. colleges and universities are covered by collective bargaining agreements, and “nearly two-thirds of all full-time faculty at public institutions are unionized.” This striking union density has its roots in the era of mass organizing among public-sector workers in the 1960s and 1970s, a period that also saw the emergence of the first wave of unionization among graduate employees, much of the energy of which grew out of the larger student movement of the period (Rhoads and Rhoades 2005). Unionization among faculty at private universities was dealt a devastating blow in 1980, when the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that faculty at Yeshiva University were managerial employees and thus excluded from collective bargaining protections under the National Labor Relations Act. Coming in the same year as the Bayh-Dole Act, discussed above, the Yeshiva decision marked a turning point in the history of U.S. universities, decreasing collective faculty power at precisely the moment that corporate influence was accelerating. The post-Yeshiva rollback of union rights on private campuses, combined with growth of part-time and other contingent faculty outside of collective bargaining agreements, has left increasing numbers of academic workers without a recognized voice on the job in a period in which they need one more than ever, and has allowed university administrations to further casualize classroom instruction.

Despite the distinct challenges to organizing in the contemporary academy, a vibrant movement continues to grow. Joe Berry’s (2005) Reclaiming the Ivory Tower: Organizing Adjuncts to Change Higher Education presents a valuable overview of (and handbook for) the growing organizing movement among part-time and contingent faculty. Highlighting national organizations like the Coalition of Contingent Academic Labor, as well as some of the ways in which established campus unions have begun reaching out to unorganized, contingent faculty, Berry makes a powerful case for the potential of a new wave of academic worker militancy. One of the many interesting observations that Berry makes has to do with the sometimes uneasy relationship between contingent faculty and graduate employees: “Some activists in the graduate employee movement have kept the rest of the contingent movement at arm’s length” (Berry 2005, 137). Still, Berry notes, despite real challenges and forms of resentment and misunderstanding on both sides, graduate employees have helped forge valuable alliances in solidarity with other academic workers.

One of the most important of such alliances emerged over the last decade at NYU, an institution whose approach to the organization of academic labor, with its small cadres of elite faculty “stars” and much larger numbers of contingent teachers, has created one of the key sites of academic unionism in recent memory. In 2002, the Graduate Student Organizing Committee (GSOC/United Auto Workers [UAW] Local 2110) at NYU became the first officially recognized union of graduate employees at a private university in the United States. GSOC’s successful collective bargaining grew out of years of organizing as well as a unanimous 2000 ruling by the National Labor Relations Board that graduate employees at private universities were statutory employees under the National Labor Relations Act. Two years after the graduate employees won their campaign, the university’s adjunct faculty members won their own union—Adjuncts Come Together (UAW Local 7902).

The organizing victories at NYU were hugely significant for the academic labor movement, demonstrating the power of academic workers to mobilize for a collective voice in their workplaces, even on campuses at the forefront of corporatization. However, in July 2004 the National Labor Relations Board reversed the 2000 decision, and when GSOC’s contract expired the following year the university’s administration refused to renegotiate with the union. A long strike ensued, which ended without an agreement. Though the NYU administration still refuses to bargain with GSOC, the union continues to organize, and other “card check” organizing drives proceed at private universities like Yale, despite the lack of National Labor Relations Act protections (Krause et al. 2008).

While some members of the shrinking first tier of “star” faculty at places like NYU are able to act as public intellectuals in the classic sense, intervening in critical debates in the public sphere, the exploding second tier of contingent faculty is busy crafting new models of public intellectual work. Ongoing struggles by graduate employees demonstrate the efficacy of collaboration between academic workers and other workers on their campuses and in their communities who are also threatened by the age of neoliberalism’s imperative of flexible labor. In what follows I want to highlight three modes of activism that have defined graduate employee unionism as a movement of intellectuals committed to building and defending broader publics: industrial unionism on campus, solidarity with public-sector workers in the midst of wide-ranging attacks, and leadership in the emerging “Occupy” movement.

One central model for organizing across the broad publics that make up university communities is that of industrial unionism, uniting workers from all sectors of the expanding corporate university. As research universities have become increasingly corporatized, their workforces have learned from those workers in other industries who, throughout the modern history of capitalism, have recognized the power in organizing across an employer’s imposed divisions. This model is exemplified at Yale University, where since the early 1990s the Graduate Employees and Students Organization (GESO) has been an active part of the Federation of Hospital and University Employees (FHUE). GESO has pursued recognition as a union of graduate employees while organizing alongside Yale’s established unions, UNITE-HERE Locals 34 and 35 (representing clerical/technical and service/maintenance, respectively), as well as workers at Yale–New Haven Hospital and members of affiliated community and religious organizations. While this struggle has yet to result in a contract for Yale’s casual academic workers, it has created remarkable manifestations of solidarity across Yale’s workforce. For example, a strike at the beginning of the 2003 fall semester saw graduate employees; clerical, technical and maintenance workers; community members and national labor leaders get arrested together in acts of civil disobedience before the university finally settled contracts with Locals 34 and 35 that included significant increases in wages and benefits (Carter 2003; Tuhus 2003).

GESO and the other members of FHUE share ideas, staff and resources and have built a powerful model of social justice unionism through joint projects ranging from a 2006 campaign to push Yale to divest from the for-profit prison industry to an electoral strategy to hold New Haven’s Democratic machine more accountable to the city’s working people (Bailey 2012). Graduate employees organizing in GESO have become leaders within the Federation, and many have gone on to careers as organizers in the labor movement (Glenn 2005). While the ability to recruit and train new generations of union activists may be seen by UNITE-HERE as one very tangible benefit of support for GESO’s organizing efforts, the collaboration also reflects a longer history of industrial unionism at Yale (Denning 2005). Of particular significance here is the example of Local 34’s hard-fought 1984 strike for recognition, which turned in large part on Local 35 members’ refusal to cross Local 34’s picket lines (Gilpin et al. 1995). By joining this tradition of industrial unionism at Yale, graduate employees not only are able to build workers’ collective power in New Haven (even without recognition for their own union); they are able to present a critique of the corporatization of higher education that accounts for and represents the breadth of the university community. For example, GESO’s (2010) recent report, Yale Inc.: The Corporate Model in Higher Education, highlights the ways in which new management practices impact workers throughout the university and draws on the history of collective bargaining by Locals 34 and 35 as a model for ways in which graduate employees can help shape the communities in which they work and live. Building on histories and alliances created by earlier organizing drives at Yale, GESO’s development within a broader context of university-wide unionism, in which graduate employees have come to see their own struggles as inextricably linked with the struggles of other university workers, has made the organization a model of militant public intellectualism. Moreover, for over a decade, GESO organizers have consistently gone on to key roles elsewhere in the labor movement, most notably in the challenging organizing in the hotel industry that UNITE-HERE locals have undertaken in cities like Chicago, Toronto and Las Vegas. In this way, organizations like GESO have become key sources of new energy and on-the-ground training in an era in which unions often struggle to recruit, develop and retain talented and dedicated organizers.

While the multi-union alliances and collaborative institutional critiques generated by campus industrial unionism represent one dimension of graduate employee organizing, other forms of mobilization have also placed the rising generation of academic workers at the forefront of struggle over the public sphere. Nowhere has the question of labor in the public sphere been more hotly contested than during the struggles over public-sector bargaining rights that have emerged in a number of states in recent years. Attacks on public-sector collective bargaining, which have created some of the most critical flash points for the contemporary labor movement, have served to mobilize graduate employee unions at public universities, whose roughly 40,000 members represent a significant constituency of the academic labor movement (Rhoads and Rhoades 2005, 246). Perhaps most notably, the Teaching Assistants’ Association (TAA) at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, the academy’s oldest graduate employee union (having won its first contract in 1970), played a central role in the protests against Governor Scott Walker’s legislative attempt to strip public employees of collective bargaining rights. TAA members led the occupation of the Capitol and were key organizers of the broad coalition of union members and supporters that transformed Madison into the center of one of the most extraordinary movements for workers’ rights in recent memory (Buhle 2011; Simmons 2011). TAA members were not the only graduate employees involved in the Madison campaign, as counterparts from other campuses came by the carload from around the Midwest. For example, a number of members of the University of Illinois’s Graduate Employees Organization traveled to Madison to support the movement for public-sector workers’ rights (Verderame 2011).

Just as graduate employees and their unions helped create and sustain the movement for public-sector workers’ rights in Madison and beyond, they have been vital participants in a range of the most prominent direct-action mobilizations of the Great Recession, both around university-specific concerns and as part of the network of “Occupy” protests that have swept the United States since the fall of 2011. Notable in this recent history has been the participation of graduate employees at the University of California, who have been among the most visible members of the coalition that has emerged in California to challenge budget cuts and tuition hikes. Rank-and-file members of UAW Local 2865, representing graduate employees across the UC system, led a grassroots democracy movement to make their union into an organization capable of leading on these issues (Eidlin 2011). Organized as Academic Workers for a Democratic Union, the rank-and-file movement helped place graduate students at the forefront of the University of California student movement. This leadership has continued into the recent Occupy mobilizations in cities like Oakland, where a broad coalition has come together under the banner of “the 99 percent” (Soriano-Castillo 2011). While University of California graduate employees and their union took especially notable early leadership roles in what became recognized as a national center of Occupy mobilizations, graduate unions in other parts of the country have joined in strategic alliances with local Occupy movements. GESO at Yale, GSOC at NYU, Graduate Students United at the University of Chicago, and the Graduate Employees’ Organization at the University of Illinois are among the many graduate unions to have had members and leaders participate in local Occupy events and mobilizations. Graduate students’ experience in organizing in their workplaces, and their involvement in campus-level struggles over resources and access in the age of neoliberal austerity, has made them and their organizations especially well positioned to join the Occupy movement’s larger call for economic and social justice in the name of “the 99 percent.”

Taken together, the mobilizations of the graduate employee movement at both private and public universities over the last decade point to the emergence of a new generation of academic workers committed to solidarity with broader publics. The short case studies explored above point to graduate employee unionism’s sustained engagement with some of the most pressing challenges for the contemporary labor movement: building forms of industrial unionism for the workplaces of neoliberal capitalism, creating a new generation of skilled organizers, responding to the growing attacks on public-sector workers, and building a transformative, systemic critique that extends beyond the workplace. Whether through industrial unionism on their campuses, militant defense of public sector bargaining rights or mobilizations under the banner of “the 99 percent,” graduate employees and their unions are putting into practice powerful, collective models of public intellectual work. Their organizing suggests that the most pressing crisis facing intellectual life in the United States in the age of neoliberalism is not a lack of great public thinkers but rather a quickly eroding public sphere, of which university teachers and researchers are key contributors and essential guardians. As graduate employees and other casual workers build their movement, they aim to build concrete checks on the ongoing casualization of academic work that has been a hallmark of the corporate university. In some hopeful places throughout the U.S. academy this claim takes the form of contractual guarantees regarding the conditions and terms of academic work, including limits on the percentage of casual faculty (American Federation of Teachers 2001). Rolling back casualization and increasing tenure-eligible positions and the attendant protections for academic freedom represent key goals in preserving universities’ roles in the public sphere—as sites for the development and dissemination of knowledge as a public good, regardless of market considerations. These core goals of the academic labor movement, as well as the modes of organization and mobilization that graduate employees and others have employed in pursuit of these goals, define the work of a new generation of public intellectuals.

Conclusion: Reconsidering the Special Status of Intellectual Work

The changes and struggles that have defined the experience of graduate teachers and researchers in the age of neoliberalism serve to raise new questions about what it means to be an academic. Not everyone, of course, embraces the alternative visions of intellectual work and university workers put forward by the academic labor movement. Strikingly, in an era in which slogans like “civic engagement” and “global citizenship” have become part of the everyday academic lexicon, and when the forms of corporate-campus collaboration discussed above become increasingly common, critics of the movement are quick to draw rhetorical boundaries around the academy. One of the most pervasive criticisms of organizing among graduate employees is the notion that the movement threatens to introduce the “foreign” logics of workplace collective bargaining into the special relationships among students, mentors and colleagues that form the bedrock of the academy. Writing in the Chronicle of Higher Education in response to the 1995 grading strike by Yale’s teaching assistants, the then Dean of the Graduate School, Thomas Appelquist (1997), offered a version of this oft-repeated critique:

The process that prepares graduate students to be scholars and educators is, by its nature, collegial. It depends upon intellectual rapport and scholarly interaction between students and faculty members. A relationship that begins as one between mentor and promising novice is transformed over the course of years into one of collaborative scholarship, often lasting a lifetime. Clearly, this description does not apply to the adversarial economic relationship of employer and employees upon which collective bargaining and the rules governing it are premised. Rather, it describes an evolving relationship that would be compromised and distorted by the dynamic of bargaining.

Here, Appelquist presents an academic version of a classic antiunion argument: some workers may need a union, but not these workers. As the history of the movement lays bare, however, academic unionism represents a collective response to the degradation of academic work, and it is casualization, not unionism, that erodes academic freedom, making job security—let alone tenure—a distant dream to a growing proportion of the academic workforce.

Still, identifying as workers and taking collective action as part of a union can be a difficult mental leap for individuals who enter the academy specifically because of their fields’ apparent position outside the logics of capitalism and the market. What Andrew Ross has termed the “cultural discount” is a key challenge in this process, as intellectuals and other cultural workers often accept the very nature of their work as a kind of non-monetary compensation (Ross 2004). The true consequences of the cultural discount become increasingly apparent, however, as the academy is home to increasing numbers of casualized jobs, standing as a model for the ongoing establishment of flexible labor practices in all sectors of the economy. Piecing together a living by teaching several classes and grading several hundred papers a semester, many contingent faculty members find themselves unable to conduct research, write, publish, attend academic conferences or otherwise participate in their fields and disciplines. It is this very separation between the ideals of academic freedom and the realities of the contemporary academy that is galvanizing a new generation of public intellectuals. At its most visionary and activist moments—the occupation of the Capitol in Madison, for example—the movement has become much more than an attempt to reclaim some lost ideal of a life of the mind removed from the influence of the state and the market. Through struggles alongside other workers and as part of broader publics, graduate employees and their unions hold out the promise of an academic community built in collaboration with democratic concerns and constituencies.

The fact that new groupings of public intellectuals and new spheres of collective action in which they operate are emerging from the ongoing degradation of public work forms a key point of resonance between workers in the academy and those in other industries, both past and present. Indeed, it recalls the critical observations that Antonio Gramsci made about what he termed “organic intellectuals”—figures that emerge as the key organizers and voices of new social movements. “The mode of being of the new intellectual can no longer consist in eloquence, which is an exterior and momentary mover of feelings and passions, but in active participation in practical life, as constructor, organizer, ‘permanent persuader’ and not just a simple orator […]” (Hoare and Smith 1971, 10). There is no question that university intellectuals have key roles to play in researching and writing about the present crisis and in constructing eloquent critiques of the new forms of inequality that define the age of neoliberalism. But their task is greater than one of words and ideas. Struggles, both past and present, have taught the new generation of academic workers that there is no such thing as a guaranteed public sphere, no abstract public divorced from the collective work of democracy. As graduate employees and other intellectuals organize collectively to transform the corporate university, they make their work part of the ongoing project to build a public sphere.