Tenured and tenure track faculty share a (broken) system with adjuncts. We are all connected in this system of higher education. It’s time we believe it and start acting that way.
Because today is National Adjunct Walkout Day, I said some things on Twitter last night. What follows is the recap, with a few links to longer connected thoughts. (Or, you can read the Storify version.)
Hey fellow tenured/TT faculty, can we talk about the situation with contingent labor in higher education? It’s important.
Many of us decry efforts to replace tenured/TT faculty with adjuncts because we see it as administrators undervaluing us, undercutting tenure.
But let’s recognize that a big part of this is administrators undervaluing the labors of our colleagues who are adjuncts!
Adjunctification means the teaching without which higher education wouldn’t be higher education is done for less pay, with little or no job security.
No reason to think adjuncts’ teaching is worth less pay; students can’t tell from teaching quality who’s TT vs. contingent.
(Students don’t pay more for classes taught by TT profs; indeed, TT profs lots of places are advised to prioritize research over teaching!)
My colleagues who are adjuncts are masterful teachers, devoted to their students and their subject matter.
Main impediments to their pedagogical professional development are crushing courseloads, economic pressures to do other things.
Tenured/TT faculty can (and should) value contributions of colleagues who are adjuncts EVEN AS WE RESIST ADJUNCTIFICATION.
We can (and should) press to make conditions of employment for adjunct faculty more humane, even fulfilling.
We can (and should) recognize the ways our choices, our behaviors, the prerogatives we assert can make things worse for adjuncts.
For example, if a tenured prof’s class is cancelled due to low enrollment, she might have to teach another course that’s not her first choice.
But that other course TT prof “has” to teach may be the course her adjunct colleague has waited 3 years for a chance to teach.
Doesn’t matter if adjunct is better at that course, better prepared, more knowledgeable. TT prof’s needs trump adjunct’s (and students’).
And, adjunct losing that course to tenured colleague at last minute might not get another course in its place.
Losing a section to your tenured colleague at last minute cuts your salary and maybe benefits (if you drop below “full-time” employment).
Not getting to teach your favorite class is a very different harm from not being able to make rent because everyone else moved down a chair.
Folks who think tenured/TT faculty deserve better treatment and more respect than their adjunct colleagues have weird notion of desert.
Differences in training, credentials, devotion, promise between people hired to TT and those adjuncting are negligible.
It is hard to acknowledge that some part of where you are is luck of the draw rather than earned by being awesome, but that’s reality.
It’s so hard, in fact, that we have become experts at drawing lines to separate who *really* counts as part of our professional community and who doesn’t.
We tenured/TT faculty got lucky. It doesn’t mean we are objectively better than our adjunct colleagues. Remember that.
What regard would we hope for if we had not been so lucky? If we were adjuncts, how would we want to be treated?
What do we do to perpetuate the market forces that make it possible for universities to exploit cheap contingent labor?
It’s more than “overproducing” PhDs in our fields. We also act as though the only thing those PhDs should want to do is be profs.
If “being in” a discipline is restricted to being part of a college or university department in that discipline, adjuncting is a way to be in.
It’s a suboptimal way, where you’ll take lots of punishment for small rewards, but you are “in” even if at the margins.
What if we didn’t treat people from our grad programs who pursued careers outside academe as if they were dead to us?
What if grad school included professional development geared toward careers that weren’t just like those of the folks training us?
If we’re not doing this now, we are harming our students! Pretending there’s One True Career Path is supporting adjunctification.
What if we recognized that being hired to tenure track is not itself an objective measure of intelligence, skill, potential?
What if we stopped playing the zero-sum game pitting TT against adjunct, resources for teaching vs. resources for research?
What if we structured arrangements so that *all* people contributing vital labor to higher education made a living wage?
What if we saw ourselves as connected and decided to find a way to fix the system together, for our students and our colleagues?
Fixing the existing systems in higher ed is a hard problem, but academics are smart folks who tackle hard problems ALL THE TIME.
Today seems like as good a day as any for us to think hard about how to make progress with this problem. So let’s do that.
Reblogged this on The Consulting Editor and commented:
It’s time for adjuncts, NTTs, tenureds, and other FT faculty to connect and ACT.
It’s hard to be a tenured professor who supports adjunct rights in a truly activist way — not just someone who will sign a petition or march in a parade but someone who calls up the dean and the union and protests when an adjunct is asked to teach an independent study for no extra pay so that a retrenched program’s students can complete their degrees.
Someone who lodges a formal complaint when a hearing-impaired adjunct teaching American Sign Language is denied the use of a computer and almost never afforded an interpreter for participation in the life of the department. Someone who accosts the Vice President in the hallway, demanding a visual fire alarm in such an adjunct’s office so that she won’t sit blithely sit through a fire drill — or a fire — which only hearing individuals would survive.
It’s hard — because the administration won’t like you, will alter your teaching schedule to punish you, will cut your merit raise or deny you such a raise, will shun you right down to the department level as others among your colleagues will be recruited by the administration to bully you.
But until more of the tenured are willing to “walk the walk” — and not just “talk the talk” — the plight of contingent/adjunct colleagues will worsen, until one day there are only casualized workers in academe.
With apologies to Martin Niemoeller: “When they came for the adjuncts, I didn’t care, because I was not an adjunct….then when they came for me, there was nobody left to care.”
The hard part is convincing most of us tenured folks to acknowledge our own privilege in our institutions, and be willing to give it up (or at least spend some of it) in favor of basic humaneness and justice. We critique privilege all the time and very deftly, but when it comes to ours, most of the time it’s crickets.
The villain in the story is not the tenured faculty. It is not the critique and surrendering of the privileges of tenure which would improve the lot of adjuncts — for all that does is expand contingency and make adjuncts of all faculty.
The hard part is convincing faculty with tenure to use that tenure for its original purposes rather than for self-service — for the pursuit of truth and the maintenance of the university as the premier institution for both the pursuit of truth and the evaluation of the pursuit of truth. There is no university when any of the faculty are enslaved to administration; there is no university when any of the faculty do not have the most basic of fair working conditions; and there is no truth but Mammon in the corporatized institutions of the late twentieth and now the twenty-first century.
I didn’t say tenured faculty are the villains. And I didn’t say anything about surrendering tenure. Your point about not being self-serving is exactly the same thing I was saying.
Professors, whether tenured or adjuncts are becoming challenged by the increasing technological environment we are in and face. Teaching is being increasingly generated by the use of electronic sources rather than by a live human professor expressing, relating, sharing, and guiding in a manner that students can relate to for application in vocational and further academic environments. One day in the near future, we professors may be replaced in classrooms by real-looking robots!
Good Adjuncts,
Yeah, I know it doesn’t sound as well the morning after, but now it’s time to drink that bitter cup of coffee, or in my case a 16 oz. can of Rockstar, and get on with it.
First, and I cannot stress this enough NAWD, NADA, or NAAD who whatever you want to call it cannot die.
This is what I’m going to do over the next few days. I’m going to every site on the blogroll that has a comments page, and I’m telling that henceforth, every fourth Wednesday in February should be declared National Adjunct Day of Action, or well…whatever.
We need to institutionalize this date while it is fresh in mind.
Don’t simply make it the date of 2/25. Why not? Because NADA needs to be a day of campus-related action, and needs to take place on campuses, and at times when campus traffic is at its highest–right square in the middle of the week.
We do these actions to empower ourselves and to inform those most directly affect by our presence, exploitation, or again whatever you want to call it–our students.
How many are you going to reach on a Saturday or Sunday rally? Yeah, you know…
And by the way, we need to do this now, before the various organizations at large get together and tussle with the date, and lose the whole point in their turbidity.
The next thing you need to do, well, I’m going to get into that tomorrow, but now I’ve got Humanities quizzes to grade, because after all, besides being a noise maker and general pain in the ass, I’m a teacher, and yes…
I’m still an Adjunct
Geoff
A Good Adjunct
“It’s more than “overproducing” PhDs in our fields. We also act as though the only thing those PhDs should want to do is be profs.”
There are lots of good points made here, but to go on a tangent, this one is just odd. Sure, there are plenty of great things people with PhDs can do instead of being professors. The majority of PhDs aren’t professors and never will be.
But this is entirely compatible with saying the primary problem is overproducing PhDs. I know plenty of people who left grad school not wanting to be professors. I don’t know anyone who _entered_ grad school saying that. I know PhD physicists who are data scientists, but they would have been a lot better served studying statistics and computer science than physics, if they’d thought all along that they weren’t going to be physicists. Getting a PhD is a stressful, time-consuming process that is a baseball bat to the knees of your financial future*, and no one should get one unless they _need_ it for their career.
*Unlike a medical doctor, a PhD will never make back this lost salary, and they won’t be able to invest during the most lucrative time in their life to do so, with the long time horizon of their 20s.
Adjunctification of higher ed has other effects on the system that are never talked about in the media. Adjuncts often teach at multiple institutions, to make ends meet, thus diluting institutional distinctiveness; and students frequently need academic references for several years following graduation. If the instructor who knew them best was an adjunct, how long will that adjunct remember his or her former students?