Crossposted from howtheuniversityworks.com

With the whole first-time dad thing, I’ve been a bit behind on the video project! I have 20 interviews on the external hard drive and another 30 or so scheduled for this spring (I’m taking advantage of my book tour to collect more important testimony than my own). At the rate of one interview a week — a rate I haven’t really kept up, I’ll be at this another year.

I may have a third segment’s worth in the conversation with Cary Nelson, who is running for re-election as AAUP president. As it happens, I’m also running for re-election, to the national Council. It actually doesn’t matter whether I’m re-elected — my “opponent” is just as committed to the issues as I am, and I expect both of us will continue to serve the cause whether we’re on the Council or not. This is the case with many of the Council races: as it should be, they’re a win for the AAUP either way. Nonetheless, the presidential election in which Nelson figures is quite important with genuine philosphical differences between Nelson and his opponent: if you’re an AAUP member, you will have recently received a ballot. I urge you to read both candidates’ statements and VOTE.

If you’re not an AAUP member, you really should join, especially if you’re a graduate student or faculty member serving contingently. Why do I think that? In partial answer, I’ve copied my candidate statement below:

The wholesale permatemping of the academic workplace is the global warming of our professional lives. Forty years ago most faculty were in the tenure stream. Today, the overwhelming majority are contingent faculty and graduate students. Many graduate students are laboring in the only academic job they’ll ever have. The turnover among contingent faculty, including full-time contingent faculty, is extraordinarily high, because their pay, benefits, security, and rights to due process — including those protecting academic freedom — are appallingly low.

This explosion of ill-paid, ill-protected contingent work hurts everyone concerned with higher ed, not just contingent faculty themselves. Undergraduate students are particularly harmed, suffering lower retention and graduation rates in connection with the insecurity, uncertain intellectual freedoms, and substandard employment conditions of the new majority.

The tenure-stream faculty are harmed as well. In the short term, individual groups of tenurable faculty may have the sense of retaining their status and benefits by acquiescing to representations of the “necessity” for ever-more contingent faculty and graduate employees. However the long-term consequence of over-reliance on insecure faculty is quite the opposite. Just as in any other field of endeavor, academic wages and workplace rights trend in the direction of the poorest paid and least protected, as is already obvious by the steadily growing wage inequality between tenured faculty in fields where contingent labor is most employed and those where it is least employed.

The association has for years been moving in the right direction to serve our “new majority,” with significant policy statements, reduced fees, leadership roles, and the devotion of staff positions. But we can and must do more: devote additional staff time, interlock more vigorously with accreditation agencies, initiate public-policy debate in federal and state venues devoted particularly to the substitution of flex labor for tenurable faculty, engage in public relations examining the relationship between teaching conditions and learning conditions, and so on. Over the next 18 months the association can, and must, communicate to every member of the majority faculty that their needs are concretely and unwaveringly central to its mission.