BY CATHERINE E. SAUNDERS, VIRGINIA HOY, AND DEBORAH M. SÁNCHEZ
This is the third in a series of three George Mason-AAUP Academe Blog posts on lessons learned from the presidential search campaign. Read the first posts on GMU’s campaign and the costs of secret presidential searches here and here.
“Communitas,” a statue by artist Azriel Awret on GMU’s Fairfax Campus.
The trend toward increasing secrecy in presidential searches is especially pernicious when combined with another trend in higher education: increasing employment of contingent faculty. Ideally, presidential searches provide an opportunity for all members of a university community to clarify the institution’s mission and goals through public discussion with each other and the candidates. The George Mason University (GMU) faculty handbook provides for such open exchanges by mandating “opportunities for the General Faculty to meet with candidates who are finalists for the presidency.”
However, as our tenured colleagues relate in the first two posts in this series, GMU’s governing board chose to conduct the final stages of their recent presidential search in secret. As our colleagues note, that decision not only violated the faculty handbook proviso regarding public searches, but also failed to recognize public interest in the hiring of one of the highest-paid public executives in the state, left the university vulnerable to post-hire discovery of adverse information about inadequately vetted candidates, and undermined long-held principles of shared governance.
From our point of view as contingent faculty members, the board’s decision to invite faculty senators to closed meetings with the finalists also exposed a weakness in existing governing bodies: while contingent faculty are eligible to serve on the faculty senate, we do not do so in numbers proportional to our presence. As a result, the voices of those who do the majority of the teaching at GMU, and the interests of the students we serve, were not fully represented. Instead, the search process both reflected and perpetuated a university structure in which research and research-focused faculty are privileged over teaching and teaching-focused faculty.
Like many colleges and universities, GMU increasingly depends on contingent faculty, including adjunct faculty (GMU’s nomenclature for faculty who are officially part-time, regardless of actual work hours) and term faculty (GMU’s name for full-time, non-tenure-track faculty, with ranks from instructor to full professor, contract lengths from one to five years, and duties that may include teaching, research, and/or department-level advising and administrative work). As of fall 2019, GMU instructional faculty included 919 tenure-track faculty, 484 term faculty, 1308 adjunct faculty, and 897 graduate teaching assistants. GMU does employ some adjunct faculty of the type administrators like to highlight to allay concerns that employing underpaid faculty may erode instructional quality: professionals teaching practice-focused classes while pursuing full-time careers. However, for many adjunct faculty, teaching at GMU and surrounding universities is their primary professional activity, and their primary income source.
GMU contingent faculty teach mostly introductory and core courses, so we are in close contact with students during the crucial early semesters of their GMU experience. Our heavier teaching loads—4/4 for most term instructional faculty, up to 3/3 for adjunct faculty—also mean that we teach more students than our tenure-track colleagues, most of whom have 2/2 teaching loads to allow time for research and service. GMU contingent faculty disproportionately shape the experiences of student populations that GMU is justifiably proud to serve well, including first-generation students and members of other historically underserved groups. GMU’s success in serving these students relies on the work of faculty who are neither equitably compensated nor fully integrated into the university community.
As a relatively young university with a devotion to access and a reputation for out-of-the-box thinking (longtime motto: “where innovation is tradition”), GMU has the opportunity to create a more inclusive, equitable, (and, we believe, sustainable) R1 model: one that truly values and rewards both research and teaching. We need a president who embraces this opportunity with as much fervor as the goal of building the university’s research mission.
Thanks to the efforts of GMU-AAUP chapter members who are also faculty senators, presidential finalists were asked during closed search meetings to share their visions for the role of teaching-focused faculty in a research-focused university. However, of the twenty-four faculty senators present to hear and assess the candidates’ answers, only three were term faculty. Adjunct faculty and graduate students were entirely absent.
GMU needs to increase contingent faculty participation in governance—an issue AAUP members at varying institutions identify as both crucial and complex. As Nicole Monnier argues, lack of tenure or equivalent due-process protections can impede effective participation in governance. However, as Carolyn Betensky notes, focusing on contingent faculty members’ vulnerability can also have the inadvertent effect of silencing us.
In conversation, our own contingent colleagues emphasize another obstacle Monnier identifies: time. At GMU as elsewhere, departments count faculty senate service as a substantial part of a tenure-track faculty member’s service commitment. In contrast, term faculty workloads allow only minimal time for service, and adjunct faculty workloads omit compensated service entirely.
Recent GMU task forces focused on adjunct and term faculty studied issues related to the professional lives of non-tenure-track faculty, including participation in governance. Implementation of recommendations from both task forces is in the preliminary stages, and contingent faculty who served (without additional compensation) on both bodies worry that, with a change of administration, their work may be lost. If contingent faculty had been invited to engage with the four finalists during what should have been public presentations, we would have probed finalists’ knowledge of the task forces’ recommendations as part of gauging their commitment to continuing the work of more fully integrating contingent faculty into the life and work of the university.
Since public presentations offer a low barrier to entering into conversation with candidates, they would have particularly benefited contingent faculty. As things stand, we look forward to working with Dr. Gregory Washington, whose personal academic journey mirrors that of many of our students, and whose initial remarks to the university community made his commitment to access clear. We eagerly await more information about his vision for fully and equitably incorporating undergraduate teaching and teaching-focused faculty into a research-focused institution. We also look forward to working with our tenure-track colleagues to ensure that contingent faculty are proportionately represented in faculty governance, and that we, like our tenure-track colleagues, are compensated for time spent in the work of governance.
The guest bloggers are term faculty at George Mason University. Catherine E. Saunders is a term professor in the English department, Virginia Hoy is a term instructor in the English and Bachelor of Individualized Studies departments, and Deborah M. Sánchez is a term assistant professor of English at INTO Mason, a public-private partnership with GMU and INTO Global Partners.
