BY HANK REICHMAN

Last week I was scheduled to participate in a Round Table discussion of a recently published book, Contingent Faculty and the Remaking of Higher Education: A Labor History, edited by Eric Fure-Slocum and Claire Goldstene, in a session sponsored by the Labor and Working Class History Association at the Organization of American Historians meeting in New Orleans.  Unfortunately, I was unable to make the trip, but I promised the session organizers that I would share on this blog a version of what I had hoped to say, if only because I’m convinced this is an important book that merits a wide readership.

The editors call this “a labor history,” but it isn’t a work of history in the common sense, although some of the essays it includes are more historical than others.  It does, however, effectively and appropriately situate academic work in the sphere of labor.  The book combines multiple approaches, as Fure-Slocum writes, “bringing together historical inquiries of higher education, structural analyses of employment patterns, meditations on adjuncts’ everyday experiences, and essays documenting resistance and organizing.” (p. 9-10)

With such a broad sweep there is, of course, a variety not only of approaches but also of conclusions.  I’ll comment briefly below on some, but certainly not all, of the issues and potential debates and questions raised in these pages, but it is important first to emphasize the common themes running through virtually all the book’s twenty essays.  These center around what Sue Doe and Steven Shulman of Colorado State University call “the paradox of contingency in higher education: although contingent instructors are treated as though they have little value as individuals, their collective labor is the bedrock of the educational enterprise.” (p. 84)  Or, as long-time lecturer Claire Raymond puts it in her searing essay, “Social Dirt, Liminality, and the Adjunct Predicament,” “the adjunct plays the role of a professor but is not imbued with the social reality of a professor” and “in promoting the idea that the adjunct—whose sole role in the university is to teach—is socially dirty, the neoliberal university’s mythology creates a belief in the unimportance of teaching.” (p. 118)  This may be because, as Gary Rhoades notes, under academic capitalism “course production and provision are no longer the sole or primary domain of faculty.” (p. 21)  Fure-Slocum’s analogy sums up the situation well: “As students become consumers in this world of education retail, faculty become shop clerks, with adjuncts as the frontline discount store workers.” (p. 5)

One issue on which several contributors offer differing, if not necessarily opposing, perspectives concerns how to view the broader historical context for the contemporary contingent phenomenon.  The development of what has been labeled “adjunctification” since the 1970s has often been presented as a turn from prior commitments to both mass higher education and scholarly research as part of a broader turn to “neoliberal” austerity—what Joe Berry and Helena Worthen label “the neoliberal contraction” (p. 58-63)—or, as Rhoades and Sheila Slaughter have argued—as have I—to a demonstrably new “academic capitalism,” albeit one with historical roots.  While few, if any, informed commentators would describe this as a fall from a previous “golden age,” the emphasis has most often been on both its novelty and dramatically negative impact.

In arguably the most historical essay in the volume, however, Elizabeth Tandy Shermer, professor of history at Loyola University, offers an essential counter.  She writes,

Labeling campuses neoliberal does not capture the complexity of the growing turn-of-the-millenium reliance on contingent faculty.  Campus managerial norms have shifted since the 1970s.  Those changes reveal how the country’s business and workplace standards have always shaped the structure, culture, and labor practices of US colleges and universities.  Many now insist that “neoliberal universities” have replaced far more progressive, inclusive, and affordable institutions solely dedicated to and able to robustly support the life of the mind for students and faculty.  But most campuses finances have historically been precarious and have constrained these institutions’ ability to fully serve the public.  Campuses often needed to focus on serving business donors’ research and workforce training needs.  Moreover, working and studying conditions only improved as faculty, staff, and students began organizing for them in times when Americans laboring off campuses made similar demands for secure jobs and more democratic workplaces. . . . Uncertain finances, fiscal catastrophes, and unseemly labor practices have been a longstanding characteristic of US higher education, which never received consistent, robust “financial aid.” (p. 39-40)

Tandy Shermer’s brief history of higher education provides a much-needed corrective to the presentism of so many contemporary critiques.  While I wish that more authors in the collection had done a bit more to follow her lead, her essay provides important context within which their arguments and conclusions might be considered.

Take, for instance, the issue of tenure.  There can be little argument with the observation, central to Gwendolyn Alker’s essay, “Women’s Work: A Feminist Rethinking of the Contingent Academy,” that the tenure system emerged in the context of an academy that was overwhelmingly male and white.  Indeed, tenure’s broad acceptance in the years immediately following WWII actually coincided with a reduction in the percentage of women in the faculty, especially among the tenured.  I certainly agree with Alker that, “if we continue to divide the work of academics between a less valued system of teaching and an increasingly cutthroat publication system, the seams of our patriarchal beginnings will show themselves.”  And worse.  But I cannot endorse the two sentences that precede this conclusion, in which she declares, “the continued push to preserve tenure, and the very inability to question its efficacy, is not about academic freedom at all.  Especially at research universities like mine [Alker teaches theater studies at NYU], it is about maintaining a divided class and feminized structure within the marketplace of the university.” (p. 79)

I’m not entirely sure whether Alker is suggesting that we abandon the fight to preserve and extend tenure, although that’s certainly what I take from these lines.  That, however, would be like deciding that workers shouldn’t join unions because of much of the labor movement’s undeniable (and, alas, sometimes continuing) history of racial and sexual discrimination.  As I’ve argued elsewhere, “To restore tenure we must rethink tenure, ironically, by returning to its original conception.  We must fight for tenure as it could and should be, not as it too frequently has become.”  At the same time, it’s critical that we not fall victim to “divide and conquer” schemes, which pit tenured against adjuncts.  “All faculty members, including the tenured, need one another in this effort, but a precondition for unity is that the privileged among us, the tenured, must discard their too-frequent indifference to the plight of our peers,” I wrote.  “The fight to expand the reach of tenure . . . is the fight of all who teach and do research in higher education, regardless of employment status.”

That fight to expand tenure must inevitably be joined to the fight for union representation.  Where once faculty members could hope that tenure, and the academic freedom it is designed to protect, might be guaranteed as a constitutional First Amendment right, it is now clear that academic freedom, tenure, and other forms of job security and due process protection are best defended judicially not by the Constitution but by contract law, especially by well-constructed union contracts.  In that light the essays in the final section of the book on union organizing efforts are especially germane.

Unfortunately, as Naomi Williams and Jiyoon Park inform us, “despite some key gains, a review of these contracts demonstrates that collective bargaining has yet to produce stability and livable wages for contingent faculty, especially adjuncts. . . . [M]ost of the contracts revealed that part-time lecturers work under a tiered system of employment based on semesters of service, which effectively divides faculty.” (p. 254)  Berry and Worthen have elsewhere celebrated the contracts won for contingent instructors by the California Faculty Association (CFA), of which I am a retired member.  The gains for contingent faculty by CFA in the California State University (CSU) have been real and impressive, to be sure.  Indeed, the CFA contract may well be the best for contingent faculty in the country, won most importantly by a union representing all instructional faculty, tenured, tenure-track, and contingent (as well as librarians and coaches).  Nonetheless, as University of California lecturer Trevor Griffey argues, “CSU administrators have undermined faculty union victories by growing on the cheap, which has stymied CFA’s attempt to increase tenure density and create parity between tenure-track and non-tenure-track faculty.” (p. 225)  Surveying all three tiers of California’s massive public higher education system, Griffey balefully concludes that “faculty labor organizing has so far produced limited and often unsatisfying results for its non-tenure-track members.” (p. 216).  I find it no comfort to add that the results for the tenure-track may not be all that much better.

What is to be done?  In her thoughtful contribution Maria Maisto, cofounder of the New Faculty Majority, interrogates the popular slogan embraced by faculty members from the adjunct to the tenured: “Faculty working conditions are student learning conditions.”  She writes,

Saying that faculty working conditions are student learning conditions sounds like a claim that faculty and students, and their concerns, are equally important.  But rhetorical equivalence does not always translate into equality in value.  In this neoliberal, pandemic-informed context, the primacy of students over faculty is asserted, framed now as the primacy of consumers over essential workers.  The motto actually provides a dangerous justification for a utilitarian exploitation of the ethic of service by implying that if you care about student learning, then you simply need to make sure that those who serve students are willing to make sacrifices. (p. 163)

Still, Maisto points to a path forward by reembracing the slogan as an expression that is “not merely utilitarian” but instead “a demand to correct the erroneous and insulting assumptions that faculty and students are adversaries or that working and learning are opposites.” (p. 166)  It is in this common ground that Maisto situates a common good that can unite a movement in defense not only of contingent faculty but of higher education itself.

“Higher education should expose students to controversial material, push them to question what they previously took for granted, and allow teachers time to think about the material they present,” writes co-editor Clare Goldstene in her powerful concluding essay.  “This all requires that faculty take risks the classroom.  However, in the twenty-first-century iteration of higher education the working conditions of contingent faculty contrive to preclude such an education.” (p. 270-71)  Specifically joining the issue of contingency with the fight to defend and expand academic freedom, as did the AAUP’s founders, she continues:

Born out of a rejection of historic claims to special knowledge among, for example, religious and political leaders, academic freedom is yoked to efforts intended to expand access to learning and knowledge to greater numbers of people and, in so doing, extending to them greater power. . . .  Academic freedom ultimately protects collective inquiry that challenges conventional wisdsom and encourages the reconsideration of seemingly established and settled truths.  This informs both the sciences and the humanities. . . .

However, the financial precariousness, intense isolation, and marginalization of contingent faculty profoundly undermine a model of education centered on critical thinking and the free exchange of ideas so crucial to open inquiry.  The working conditions of those who do the most college teaching affect the substantive content of curricula–what is taught and how it is taught.  Given the circumstances under which contingents struggle, teachers can too easily become interchangeable parts whose influence is diluted as they deliver a set of data points lacking nuance, creativity, or independent thought. . . .  This fundamentally alters the role of the university in the public sphere.  The rise of contingency is, finally, about who controls teaching and the very purpose of an education. (p. 275-76)

Amen!

This important volume now joins Adrianna Kezar, Tom DePaola, and Daniel T. Scott’s The Gig Academy: Mapping Labor in the Neoliberal University, Herb Childress’s The Adjunct Underclass, and Berry and Worthen’s Power Despite Precarity: Strategies for the Contingent Faculty Movement in Higher Education as an essential work for those seeking to understand, defend, and ultimately transform higher education today in the interest of the common good.

Contributing editor Hank Reichman is professor emeritus of history at California State University, East Bay; former AAUP vice-president and chair 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; a second edition is in preparation.