POSTED BY MARTIN KICH

Rebecca Bodenheimer has contributed a freelance opinion piece to CNN that is very lucid, very galvanizing, and very much worth reading and sharing. In it, she connects to the frustrations being expressed by K-12 teachers in an ever-expanding number of states to the endemic frustrations of contingent faculty at the post-secondary level. In “University Teachers Are Exploited, Too,” Bodenheimer makes clear that, at all levels, there is a correlation between the underfunding of public education and the increasing economic exploitation of teachers, as well as between the promotion of self-interest and skewed ideas about what is in the public interest.

Bodenheimer’s article opens:

Can you envision anyone asking a doctor or a lawyer to work for free? It seems ludicrous, laughable even. But it’s not, because it actually happened–to alumni of Southern Illinois University who have Ph.D.s.

Academic Twitter was abuzz last month after noted career coach Karen Kelsky posted a leaked email from an assistant dean in SIU’s College of Liberal Arts. It was addressed to department chairs and requested they help the school’s alumni association in recruiting “qualified alumni to join the SIU Graduate Faculty in a zero-time (adjunct) status.” They would join a “pilot program” as “zero- time adjuncts”–in other words, SIU proposed recruiting “alumni adjuncts” with advanced degrees (Ph.D.s) to volunteer for duties including teaching both graduate and undergraduate courses, lecturing, serving on committees, and/or advising students, all for no pay.

SIU interim provost Meera Komarraju told local media that the pilot program would not place volunteers in roles as professors or on committees deciding policy; in her estimation, this would be beneficial for alumni, who “have left and they still have this strong love for SIU and they want to give back.” Whether this pilot program is meant to be a cost-saving measure (i.e., volunteers filling slots normally filled by paid faculty) or, as SIU argues, an alumni relations gambit, the idea of “provid(ing) ‘eager’ alumni an opportunity to give back” when they’ve already sacrificed their peak earning years to pursue a doctorate is insulting.

Although Bodenheimer broadly connects the exploitation of teachers with the exploitation of contingent faculty, she makes this crucial distinction:

Parents should be paying attention to this, too, because the numbers indicate that it’s overwhelmingly likely their kids will be in an adjunct’s classroom at least once and possibly many times during college. Exploitation of adjunct instructors–who constitute 70% of the instructional faculty at US colleges and universities–is already a well-documented crisis.

This makes SIU’s proposal particularly outrageous, not only because it asks people to volunteer to engage in the tough and often thankless work of educating, but also because (unlike with public K- 12 education), parents are paying tens of thousands of dollars for their sons and daughters to get college degrees. Presumably, a good portion of those tuition fees go to faculty salaries. I don’t think there’s a parent in this country who would expect a college professor to work for free, and I bet they wouldn’t put much faith in one who would to provide his or her child with a good education.

Proposals like this illustrate the quickening pace of academia’s race to the bottom. I never thought I’d say this, but asking people with Ph.D.s to work for free in exchange for “intellectual interactions” with faculty getting paid to do the same work makes the woefully inadequate course rates paid to adjunct faculty–generally between $3,000 and $6,000 per course–seem not that bad by comparison.

Bodenheimer criticizes tenured faculty for tacitly accepting, if not openly endorsing, “the uniquely regressive labor politics in academia–which is, ironically, populated with many tenured scholars who call themselves Marxists and teach and write about class consciousness, but ignore the economic exploitation of adjuncts and other non-tenure-track colleagues.”

Later, after detailing how adjunct faculty must self-fund their own professional development, research, and scholarship in order to have any hope of competing for a more secure, full-time position, Bodenheimer observes:

This sets up academia to be the opposite of the meritocracy that it so often claims to be: it self-selects middle-class and wealthy candidates and eliminates those coming from poor or working-class backgrounds, which is disproportionately the case for people of color, who are perpetually underrepresented in academia.

She closes:

Instead of sending a message to universities that these types of exploitative initiatives are acceptable, and just another consequence of the turn to the “gig economy,” precarious academics should look to the model of K-12 teachers, who are using strikes to successfully push for pay raises and other benefits. Indeed, the past five years have seen a major push toward unionization by adjunct instructors in higher education. As a recent successful strike by Loyola University Chicago instructors demonstrates, collective organizing and bargaining tactics are still the most effective way to counter academia’s regressive labor politics.

Rebecca Bodenheimer’s complete article is available at: www.cnn.com/2018/05/08/opinions/teachers-pay-adjuncts-southern-illinois-bodenheimer-opinion/index.html