BY HANK REICHMAN

I usually admire American Prospect editor Robert Kuttner’s writings, but a short piece published online today, “The Republican Attack on Tenure,” got my hackles up a bit.  Most of the piece is fine, calling appropriate attention to the assault on both tenure and academic freedom being waged by the GOP in red state after red state.  But then we come to this concluding paragraph:

Academia, like so much of American society, has divided into a nicely compensated dwindling elite, and an army of serfs who are so harried that they lack the time to be first-class instructors, much less researchers. The AAUP, representing the elite, has issued reports and statements of outrage about the state efforts to abolish or weaken tenure. They would have more credibility if they put as much effort into resisting the plague of contingent teachers.

First of all, it’s not at all clear that the “dwindling elite” of full-time tenure-track faculty is all that “nicely compensated.”  According to the AAUP’s Annual Report on the Economic Status of the Profession, despite increases in average salaries of 4.1 percent for full-time faculty members from fall 2021 to fall 2022—the greatest one-year increase since 1990–91—real average salaries decreased 2.4 percent after adjusting for inflation.  According to that report, real average salaries have declined sharply for three consecutive years, with a cumulative decrease of 7.5 percent from fall 2019 to fall 2022.  Looking at the longer term preceding those years, a comprehensive study by Learning Tree issued in 2021 found that “the average salary for full-time faculty—when accounting for inflation—has increased just 9.5% over nearly 50 years.  In the 1970-71 school year, full-time faculty were paid the equivalent of $81,030 on average in 2018-19 dollars.  By 2018-19, that figure had only risen to $88,703.”  Interestingly, that study found that while in 1970-71 full-time faculty at public institutions earned more than their colleagues in private institutions, by 2018-19 the roles were reversed, reflecting the systematic neoliberal defunding of the public sector.  In 1970-71, faculty in private institutions were paid the equivalent of $74,074 on average after adjusting for inflation.  By 2018-19, they earned an average of $96,962.  At public institutions, however, faculty have seen a piddling 3.1% increase since 1970-71, from an average of $82,585 (when adjusted for inflation) to $85,148 in 2018-19.

To be sure, these figures do mask some distinctions between full-time tenured faculty and the still rather small group of full-time faculty on contingent contracts, although they also do not take into account often dramatic variations by discipline.  Still, the fact is that pretty much all segments of the faculty have seen their compensation–and job security–decline or at best stagnate for some time.  Of course, most faculty members on contingent contracts, without access to tenure, are employed part-time, amounting to more than 40% of all those teaching in higher education, and no one can doubt the special desperation of their condition.

Which brings me to my main complaint: Kuttner’s unwarranted claim that the AAUP represents only “the elite” and has, in his reading, done nothing to resist “the plague of contingent teachers.”  This charge is so easily refutable by the factual record as to suggest willful ignorance, at best, on Kuttner’s part.  First of all, the AAUP has long welcomed the membership and activism of contingent faculty colleagues, large numbers of whom have served on the association’s many committees (and not only its longstanding Committee on Contingency in the Profession), on its national Council, and as national officers.  I am not aware of the current proportion of members on contingent contracts, but I know that it is significant.  I might also note that the AAUP’s affiliates, the CSU California Faculty Association and the CUNY Professional Staff Congress, the two largest faculty unions in the country, represent all faculty at their institutions, tenure-track and contingent, full- and part-time, as do other AAUP collective bargaining chapters.

More important, the AAUP has for decades been on the front lines in combating the contingency “plague,” to employ Kuttner’s term, as can be seen at a glance on this page from the organization’s website highlighting association resources on contingent faculty issues.  As early as 1979, AAUP’s Committee A on Academic Freedom and Tenure created a summary entitled “Academic Freedom and Due Process for Faculty Members Who Serve Less Than Full Time,” which reaffirmed the organization’s commitment to academic freedom and due process “for all faculty members, including those who serve less than full time.”

More substantively, in 1993, the AAUP issued a lengthy report on “The Status of Non-Tenure-track Faculty.”  That report  concluded:

The treatment of non-tenure-track faculty appointments is the barometer whereby the general status of the profession may be measured.  While the colleague whose performance is undervalued or whose potential is blighted by underemployment bears the personal brunt of the situation, the status of all faculty is undermined by the degree of exploitation the profession allows of its members.  Institutions that rely heavily on part-time faculty marginalize the faculty as a whole.  Failure to extend to all faculty reasonable professional commitments compromises quality and risks the stability of the profession and the integrity of our standing with the public.

Ten years later, in 2003, the association issued a second even more comprehensive report, “Contingent Appointments and the Academic Profession,” which remains the foundation of the AAUP’s approach to the growth of contingency.  That report offered “guidelines by which institutions and faculties can plan and implement gradual transitions to a higher proportion of tenurable positions and, at the same time, affirms the development of intermediate, ameliorative measures by which the academic freedom and professional integration of faculty currently appointed to contingent positions can be enhanced by academic due process and assurances of continued employment.”  The report “identified some of the real costs of overreliance on part-time and non-tenure-track faculty: costs to the quality of student learning, to equity among academic colleagues, to the integrity of faculty work, and to academic freedom.  These costs are now borne primarily by students and by contingent faculty.  In the long term, however, the cost of cutting corners on education will be borne by society as a whole as it gradually loses its independent academic sector.”

Then there is the AAUP’s “One Hundred Years. One Faculty” declaration issued to mark the association’s centennial in 2015.  That document began:

At the time of the AAUP’s founding one hundred years ago, many faculty served in contingent positions.

Establishing economic and job security to protect academic freedom was a central reason for the foundation of the national AAUP, the formation of strong campus‐based chapters, and the development of recommended policies.

The AAUP is dedicated to fighting contingency in higher education.

“One Hundred Years. One Faculty” further enunciated a series of principles, including these:

We define as “faculty” all those whose appointments consist primarily of teaching or research activities conducted at a professional level, including tenure‐track and non‐tenure track faculty, full‐time and part‐time faculty, and most librarians, research and teaching assistants, and postdocs. If you do the work, then you are faculty, regardless of the title assigned by the administration.

The best way to halt the erosion of tenure and to extend economic security and other rights to contingent faculty is by organizing and using our collective strength—working together in solidarity across faculty ranks.

Of course, the AAUP’s magazine, Academe, and this blog have over the last several decades carried literally hundreds of articles and posts on the problem of contingency, many of which have called on tenured faculty members to more vigorously fight for the rights and interests of their nontenured colleagues.  I was the author of more than a few of these, including this piece, “Do Adjuncts Have Academic Freedom? or Why Tenure Matters,” from 2021.  (I searched the American Prospect website for the term “contingent faculty” and found 21 pieces, but only one–today’s–by Kuttner.)

And, finally, the AAUP has conducted multiple investigations of institutions that have violated the academic freedom rights of faculty members on contingent contracts.  To name only some of the more recent, we can cite reports on events at Hamline University and Collin College just this year, Pacific Lutheran University in 2020, and, in one of the most significant recent incidents, the Community College of Aurora in Colorado in 2017.

I could go on, and on, and on.  Could the AAUP have done more?  Sure.  But it certainly hasn’t been remiss.  Indeed, the AAUP has probably put more effort into addressing the challenge of contingency than it has to any other issue facing the profession.  I’m happy to welcome Kuttner to this battle, but I believe he owes the AAUP an apology.

Contributing editor Hank Reichman is professor emeritus of history at California State University, East Bay; former AAUP vice-president and president of the AAUP Foundation; and from 2012-2021 Chair of AAUP’s Committee A on Academic Freedom and Tenure. His book, The Future of Academic Freedom, based in part on posts to this blog, was published in 2019.  His Understanding Academic Freedom was published in October, 2021.