Scott, an adjunct instructor, artist, writer, and filmmaker, uses various forms of art as her mode of expression. She’s currently working on a documentary called ‘Junct: The Trashing of Higher Ed. in America. She urges those with artistic means and motivation to use them to spread the word about contingent faculty issues. She talked about some of her fellow adjuncts who live in vans or in their parents’ basements. She said these stories are heart-wrenching, but the images could be even more striking if they were captured on film, in fiction, or in some other artistic form. The idea was to let the general public know, somehow, what is happening. As Gary Rhoades, a professor of higher education at the University of Arizona and director of the Center for the Future of Higher Education, and others had pointed out, the general public is unaware of this issue. And they should be aware.

Recently, Vice President Joe Biden said, in public, that the cost of tuition keeps rising because of the large faculty salaries. Like Biden, the general public has this perception that professors all drive fancy cars and are members of country clubs. Of course, readers here know this is a false perception.

I think we need to use our gifts to get students and parents more involved. Wouldn’t students and parents be upset if they forked over tons of cash for an education, then found out that most of the undergraduate courses — especially for the first two years — are taught by part-time employees who are likely to have limited office hours and limited academic freedom? (Maybe the first task is getting the general public to care about academic freedom.)

Many readers here understand this already, so I’ll use this post as a call to action. Write something. Say something. Paint it. Sculpt it. Put it in a song or on film. Tell people you don’t work with. What can you do to get students and parents involved?

Of course, the more I learned, the clearer it became that some of the jobs I am most competitive for are no one’s “dream jobs.” In one interview the dean of arts and sciences made it clear that, while the university encourages research, in most cases the volume of teaching and service obligations effectively precludes it. Another interviewer at a different school described the university’s finances as “precarious” and admitted that they had recently lost good faculty to greener pastures elsewhere.

That said, these aren’t necessarily bad jobs either. When the schools I have interviewed with introduced such concerns, it was so that they could talk about where they believe their institutions are headed. In one case, a new president seems to have inspired faculty and administrators alike with his reaffirmation of the university’s mission and the early success of his capital campaign. In another, the English department has plans in the works to make my specialty an area of particular focus.

It doesn’t take much of that talk to inspire someone like me. I start picturing not only the prospective job as it stands now, but the job it could become. Perhaps more importantly, I have found myself imagining how I might partner with a school that is just beginning to define itself for the future, how in the long term I might have a role in shaping that definition.

My question now is: Am I still just being naive? How much of an impact can a single faculty member have on the culture of a university, even a small liberal-arts school? How far ahead can someone in my position reasonably afford to look? Can you buy low and see your dream job mature?

Since I attended the New Faculty Majority summit, however, I’ve been thinking about something equally important: education as a matter of civil rights and social justice.

Anne Wiegard, president of the NFM Foundation, shared remarks with a pre-summit group that were based on Martin Luther King Jr.’s words: “We can never be satisfied as long as our colleagues are stripped of their selfhood and robbed of their dignity by signs stating ‘For Tenure Track Only.’” She talked about inequality in the academic world — in terms of academic freedom, job security, and more.

There are two faculty worlds in academe, whether you are at a top research university or a community college: tenure track and nontenure track. There are also separate-but-unequal spheres when it comes to our students. This was brought into stark focus by Heather Wathington, an assistant professor of higher education at the University of Virginia who spoke at the summit. Contingent faculty primarily teach students who are first-generation, immigrants, poor, or all of the above.

These are the students I teach at my border community college and I sometimes forget that these high-need groups aren’t geographically isolated. Everywhere you go, there are students who need extra support if they want to achieve the American dream of getting an education and moving up in the world. Too often, though, they are receiving a second-tier education. Their professors are plenty qualified, but they have little time to work with students because of their contingent status. These professors may not know they are teaching a class until the last minute. These professors simply aren’t able to be the steady professional role models that disenfranchised students need.

The issues of contingent faculty aren’t just about improving the lot of teachers; they are issues at the very core of what we value and promise as a society.

“Obligated to do what?,” you ask.

“Obligated to tell you that Susan tends to sleep with her grad students,” your colleague replies. “It’s been a serious problem in her current department, so I’m sure that’s why she is looking to make a move.”

This, of course, prompts half of the group to call for Susan’s candidacy to be tossed out and the other half to question whether the grad students are in her lab, which would be very, very bad, or just grad students in the department, which seems possibly okay in a creepy kind of way.

After a few minutes of spirited conversation, you, being ever so practical, inquire, “What’s the source of your information?”

The response? Wait for it … wait for it … “I’m sorry,” your colleague replies. “I was sworn to secrecy.”

What’s a search committee to do? It is entirely possible that the allegation was made to sabotage Susan’s candidacy, so immediately eliminating her from the finalist list would be a bad decision. But what if the claim is actually true and Susan continues her bad behavior once she gets to your campus? What if you could have prevented this with a little due diligence and didn’t?

For the most part, facts tend to be verifiable, so I’d urge the committee to develop a strategy to uncover the truth that does not involve asking Susan about her relationship history — a line of inquiry almost guaranteed to cause even bigger problems. These kinds of situations surface all the time, so a conversation with your human-resources or legal department, or the office that handles sexual-harassment claims can be helpful.

Have you ever served on a search committee in which a member provided “off the record” information? Or, have you ever called a reference only to be given scandalous information that was accompanied by, “and you should know I will deny this conversation if you give anyone my name”? How did you handle it?

Years ago, when I first became department chair at another institution, I was told by the other chairs (most of whom had been there for 20 years or more) about several policies regarding faculty teaching schedules–for example, that every full-time faculty member had to teach at least one night class a year. Because the people in my department weren’t thrilled with some of those policies and were constantly asking for exceptions, I began searching through the college’s policy manual to find out exactly what I could and couldn’t do. To my surprise, and somewhat to my chagrin, I discovered that most of those supposed policies didn’t exist. The issue of assigning teaching schedules was not even addressed in the manual.

Rather than robotically adhering to imaginary policies, I pulled my faculty together and we discussed how we were going to handle scheduling. As it turned out, a couple of people in the department preferred teaching at night. When we factored them into the schedule, we discovered that those with young children at home or other good reasons for not teaching at night didn’t really need to. This solution worked very well, and I never heard a word of complaint from the administration. After that, I never paid any more attention to phantom policies.

Obviously, administrative edicts are not quite as easy to ignore. But because those who issue such edicts without proper faculty input tend to be bullies by nature, and because they usually don’t have good reasons for their pronouncements, faculty members and lower-level administrators can often stand up to them successfully.

About a decade ago, a faculty member in my department who had been one of the college’s virtual pioneers decided that she wanted to teach online exclusively. But the campus provost had decreed that faculty members could teach no more than three of their five classes online. I believed it was a bad policy, and in fact it wasn’t really a policy at all. It wasn’t written anywhere, and it hadn’t been approved by any policy council. It was just that administrator’s personal preference.

I also knew that I had full online sections that needed an instructor, that this particular faculty member wanted to teach them, and that she was good at it (which not many were, back in those days). From a management standpoint, it was much easier for me to find someone to cover two face-to-face sections than it would have been for me to twist somebody’s arm into picking up two online sections. So I gave her the schedule she requested.

A few days later, the provost showed up in my office, visibly angry and demanding to know why I had defied him. I calmly explained my reasoning, and to his credit he listened. At the end he stood up, said, “Well, it’s your department, you do what you think is best,” and stalked out of the room.

So much for that “policy.” Today the institution has an entire cohort of dedicated online faculty, most of whom don’t even keep offices on campus. (I should add that that particular administrator was not really a bully. He was actually a pretty decent guy, just a little set in his ways.)

What are some of your experiences with phantom policies and/or unreasonable administrative edicts?

One of the most important ideas was that of fear, which was implied by many, but brought up specifically by Rich Moser, a senior staff representative at the Rutgers Council of the AAUP Chapters, and by Joe Berry, author of Reclaiming the Ivory Tower. Whether it’s consciously or unconsciously, higher-education systems often work to keep contingent faculty members quiet. That way, they can claim that their contingent faculty members are happy because they don’t complain.

A scarier byproduct of this is the self-censorship of many contingent faculty. Many are unhappy but they fear speaking up. Like all working conditions, this seeps into the classroom as well — many contingent faculty members want to try something different, but they fear how it will look on evaluations or that their department head will catch wind of what they tried. This is an issue of job security. It’s also an issue of academic freedom.

As a tenure-track faculty member, I sat there listening, wondering what I could do. I’m sympathetic and even empathetic, but that’s only so helpful. Berry suggests I need to propose ways to “lower the fear.” That’s still not very concrete, so I thought I’d propose the question here: What can your departments, schools, etc., do to “lower the fear?” What can you do as an individual? Have you or your departments done anything in the past?

This kind of preparation is relatively straightforward. The questions are predictable and in most cases department Web sites with faculty biographies make it easy for job seekers to learn about past and ongoing projects. What I am finding more difficult to prepare for, though, are those last 5 to 10 minutes of the conversation when the tables are turned and the applicant is asked what questions he or she has for the interviewers.

In our questions, we interviewees are out to learn more about the department and university at large, but of course we are also still presenting ourselves to the committee and our questions will dramatize both our professional interest and our personal engagement. It’s a rather complicated part of the conversation and potentially a place to stand out. As I wrestle with this aspect of the procedure myself, allow me to pose a couple of questions to applicants and interviewers:

Is there an etiquette for when or where questions are asked? For instance, should queries about the tenure process be reserved for an on-campus interview and more general departmental support questions (e.g., How are faculty members encouraged in their research?) be posed at the MLA or in a long-distance interview?

What questions have you asked, or seen asked, that provoked an animated response from a committee, questions that got beyond the predictable and superficial? Alternatively, what questions stand out as presumptuous, inappropriate, or simply problematic?

Consider the very first response to my column, a long and (I thought) rather nasty comment in which the writer basically accused me of being single-handedly responsible for the decay of America’s youth because I don’t snatch up students’ cell phones whenever I see them texting in class. My reply, I admit, was hardly kinder (OK, it was pretty snide): “Do you also require your students to sit up straight, raise their hands before they speak, and form a perfect line when they go to lunch?” Obviously, the person who wrote that comment and I are diametrically opposed on this issue, and we’re both fairly snippy about it.

But here’s the interesting thing: the comment received 54 “likes,” while my reply got 30. If you’re a regular reader of The Chronicle online, you know that very few comments earn more than a handful of “likes.” Double digits are fairly uncommon. So 54 is a lot of “likes,” and for that matter so is 30.

In other words, it’s clear that readers felt very strongly about this topic, one way or another. Judging from the ratio of “likes,” I’d say that we classroom libertarians appear to be outnumbered by the authoritarians about two to one. You’ll see the same thing if you read all 79 comments: about two-thirds of them are against me, while the other third agree.

After 26 years in higher education, 16 of those as a chair, dean, or program director, that doesn’t exactly surprise me–although I was a bit taken aback by the vitriol apparent in some of the comments. It’s not that I don’t expect academics to become a bit heated, at times, in defense of their viewpoints on various issues. It’s just that I never anticipated that this might be one of those issues.

Please understand that I’m not taking sides. Well, maybe a little. Obviously, I think my more libertarian approach is better suited to the college classroom or I wouldn’t have written about it the way I did. But I’ve also known many good teachers who took a more authoritarian stance. Heck, I studied under several of them, in both undergraduate and graduate courses.

The thing that does disturb me, though–if I may open another can of worms–is that I’m afraid the majority of academic administrators come from the authoritarian two-thirds of the faculty. That might explain the absence of true shared governance at most institutions, the rise of “insubordination” rhetoric that I’ve brought up in previous posts, and perhaps some of the recent internal attacks on tenure that have made national headlines.

Just before the holidays, I received a message asking me to return a reference call for a “highly confidential search.” No name and no clue about who we might be talking about were provided. Because I take reference inquiries seriously and always take care to return these kinds of calls promptly, I did what I always do. I got on the phone and looked forward to being helpful. Unfortunately for the candidate, I was not helpful at all. Why? Because I barely know him. In fact, I recall exactly three face-to-face encounters with him over the last decade or so and none of them lasted more than 5 or 10 minutes. I can’t even say those encounters were positive because each time we interacted he struck me as pushy and annoyingly arrogant.

When the man on the other end of the line asked me to explain how I had worked with the candidate, no words came out and the silence grew a little awkward. “I’m hesitating,” I explained, “because I don’t really know him. I’m surprised he would list me as a reference.”

What I did not share was that the candidate had listed me as a reference without permission in the past, as in at least four times that I know about. The first time he did it, I called him to express surprise and let him know that I didn’t know him well enough to serve as a reference. He responded with something dismissive like, “I thought you were more collegial than that.” The second time I sent an e-mail expressing disappointment that he had once again given my name and asking him to focus on people who could be more helpful to him. I gave up after that, but find myself highly agitated whenever I receive an inquiry on his behalf. The takeaway lesson for me is to never assume that reference lists are legitimate.

Have you ever been asked to provide a reference for someone you hardly know?

A theme for the NFM is the title of this post and something that I think we need to emphasize in any discussion with the broader public about why they should care about our problems; after all, jobs are tough to find all over. Why does contingent faculty even matter? It matters not just to me and you and the other 800,000 non-tenure-track faculty across America. It matters to everyone who will take a college course, pay for someone else to take courses, hire someone with any level of post-secondary training from certificates to graduate degrees, and more.

Massachusetts Congressman John Tierney opened the NFM session by video message, saying that contingent faculty concerns are important to every family and every student. We need to get that message out to students and parents and even those in academe who simply don’t know. Do people know who is teaching the majority of undergraduate courses? Do students know that most of their professors can’t be reached outside of class hours? Do parents know how little of tuition money is spent on faculty salaries? Do people in our own departments known the day-to-day ways that adjuncting makes us feel less than enough?

Getting this message across is the first step. We need to talk more to members of our communities. Of all the ways to move forward, this is the most crucial. Filmmaker and adjunct professor Debra Leigh Scott spoke at the summit, speaking of the power of art to make the truth of contingent faculty life clear to others. Whether that is through film, fiction, essay, or whatever your medium, we can use our individual talents to more effectively share our message.

I’ll split this up and give you a second look at some of the other things that really jumped out at me from the NFM summit.