A Personal Note
Welcome to my website! I'm Gary Zabel. I've taught in the Philosophy Department of the University of Massachusetts at Boston since 1989. Before that, I lived in New York City and taught in the Philosophy Department at the Brooklyn Campus of Long Island University. Though LIU is a private university and UMass Boston a public one, they have very similar student bodies. They are both urban commuter schools that are racially diverse and attended by a large number of immigrants as well as students from working-class families. It's a privilege to teach such students because of their down-to-earth demeanor, their involvement in the realities of work and family and urban life, and their desire for self-development. I was once in my office with the door slightly ajar when a student whom I hadn't met burst in and asked, without any formalities and in a booming voice, "Are you Zabel?" You don't get that at Harvard.
I grew up in an industrial working-class family myself. My father was a factory worker at an artificial textiles plant owned by Johnson and Johnson, and my mother was a grammar school secretary. They are warm, generous, intelligent people, self-reliant, family-oriented, and socially involved at the same time, with that mix of humor and dignity that characterizes American democratic culture at its best. I learned from them whatever virtues I can claim, but especially an enduring pride for the class into which I was born.
When I was eighteen, I got a scholarship to attend Yale University. That was real culture shock for me: luxurious buildings, expensive furniture, children of the elite. When I graduated in 1976, I was in the procession line behind Dink Morgan, the descendent of J.P. Morgan, the fabulously wealthy Robber Baron who sold 5000 defective Carbine rifles to the Union Army during the Civil War, and is famous for his stirring motto, " I owe the public nothing." I met some very fine people at Yale, some of whom are still among my closest friends, but I also learned to loath the competitiveness, self-satisfaction, and sense of entitlement that marks many of those who are either born into privilege or confidently aspire to it. Come to think of it, the friends that I've kept from my Yale days share that attitude, including my wife of 22 years, Danielle. I entered the doctoral program in Philosophy at Boston University in 1977. I was fortunate to be able to study with some of the most powerful thinkers then living, especially Hans Gadamer, Alasdair MacIntyre, and the brilliant and charmingly eccentric neo-Platonist, J.N. Findlay. At the age of 81, Findlay was one of the readers of my dissertation, though he died shortly after I defended it in 1986. I still miss him.
I won several fellowships and other awards in graduate school, but I never could bring myself to apply for a tenure-track university job. Despite my respect for the great philosophers I've studied with, tenured academics seem to me to occupy the other side of the class divide. Most of them are not very wealthy and do not have much political power, though there are important exceptions, such as Henry Kissinger, Robert Reich, and Paul Wolfowitz. Still, in general, their possession of advanced degrees, and, more importantly, their survival of the tenure process, often fills them with a sense of importance and justified privilege. They usually, though not always, identify with the administrators who run their institutions, sometimes assuming positions in the administrative apparatus themselves. Since their place in the academic hierarchy depends upon nothing more solid than the judgment of their peers, they are often prey to anxiety about status. That's the psychological reality that lies behind John Kenneth Galbraith's quip that the reason that the disputes in academia are so rancorous is that the stakes are so incredibly small.
In any event, I've made my living as an "adjunct professor." Adjuncts, which include part-time faculty members as well as full-time non-tenure track teachers, now comprise roughly 65 per cent of the entire higher education faculty nationally. They are generally low-paid, working without benefits or job security. part of that growing sector of the American workforce (around 1/3rd of the total right now) that is "precarious" or "contingent." For almost twenty years, I've been active in a growing new movement, now international in scope, to organize contingent faculty. By means of successful labor activism at UMass Boston, I and my comrades have been able to win health and pension benefits, decent pay, and some measure of job security for the half of the faculty there that works on a contingent basis. So I've been able to make a living teaching in the university while keeping a foot in the working class. For me, that's the best of all possible worlds.