BY AARON BARLOW

In response to a recent post of mine, a professor wrote, “We are in a highly competitive and insecure field. How the heck do we rise together?” The competitive nature and insecurity of academia certainly have been exacerbated of the past decades (they were always with us); the only way that is going to change is by faculty taking the lead.

But how?

First (and this has been said ad nauseam—to no effect), we have to step out from behind the protections of our own assumptions about governance. Is, for example, our current system of hiring/reappointment/promotion/tenure universally viable in higher education? Michael Berube and Jennifer Ruth tried to start s conversation on this question in The Humanities, Higher Education, and Academic Freedom: Three Necessary Arguments but were largely ignored—in part because faculty don’t want to directly address the appalling situation of the precariat, the adjuncts and other contingent hires who now do the bulk of lower-level teaching in American universities. In part, though, because faculty are leery of difference, of varying paths to permanent appointment becoming hierarchical—an irony, given the set-in-stone hierarchies already surrounding the profession.

Second, we have to step away from quantification, be it in publication numbers, committee service or evaluation of teaching. It has long been said of IQ tests that the one thing they measure accurately is how well the taker did on that particular test on that particular day. Our reliance on numbers of publications in evaluation for hiring, reappointment, promotion and tenure also does nothing more than tell us that Professor X published Y books and Z articles. Not even numbers of citations have much real meaning—not only do they mean different things in different fields, but they punish those whose work lies outside of the mainstream of any field. Beyond that, Student Evaluation of Teaching scores are easily manipulated and give little indication of anything outside of teacher popularity. Somehow, in both evaluation of scholarship and of teaching, we need to pull back from numbers and return to engagement—with having actually seen the candidate in action and having actively followed the scholarship. This takes time, though, and we have eroded that time.

Service and class size take serious bites out of the time faculty need if they are going to work collaboratively. Service, which once meant real collaboration within a shared-governance context, now means serving in administration-mandated capacities, completing tasks whose need arose not through faculty participation in setting goals and decision-making but through the demands from distant overseers, sometimes political and sometimes even within accreditation entities.

Because the number of faculty involved in service tasks had dwindled, in relation to enrollment, the burden on tenure-track and tenured faculty has increased substantially. This, of course, is another consequence of the reliance on adjuncts, who are paid by the course and who are not expected to complete service tasks. And (it hardly needs saying) of rising class size. Add to this not only the new external mandates but the pressures brought on by the also dwindling number of tenure-track positions and faculty begin to feel squeezed in all areas. So, third, we have to resist increasing demands on us for completion of newly mandated bureaucratic tasks.

Squeezed by expanding requirements for scholarship. Squeezed by evaluation of teaching that has little to do, really, with student progress. And squeezed by service requirements often of a bureaucratic nature, tasks that were little expected as people prepared for the profession. Not to mention emotionally squeezed by an American culture that appreciates professors less and less each year. Is it any wonder so many faculty members are so unhappy?

Just yesterday, I learned of the self-inflicted death of a promising young academic, Katie McWain, newly on the tenure track at Texas Women’s University. Almost six years ago, Charles Hirsch, a close friend and colleague of mine at New York City College of Technology, also took his own life. There have been plenty more in between. In all instances, I am sure, factors far beyond work contributed to their decisions. But we have allowed campus environments to become increasingly toxic without examining our personal as well as faculty responsibility for what is happening to too many of our colleagues.

So, fourth, each of us on each of our campuses can start the process of change in small ways, first by examining how we interact with each other. I need to do this as much as any other and know it is going to be hard, in some cases, to even be civil to certain colleagues. But I am going to try.

Taken together, all of these can lead to making our professional environments ones of support.

We can do this, as I have said, by scaling back demands on each other but also by learning more about our lives beyond campus. We can help each other by collaborating more on teaching and scholarship and by refusing to let service drive our professional lives. We can all be effective agents of change—even if it is only on campus.

But only if we try.