Part-Time Faculty Members in the Humanities

Mr. Nelson is a professor of English at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and has been a leader in efforts to bring attention to employment prospects and situations of graduate students and academics without tenure-track positions. He is the author of Manifesto of a Tenured Radical, the co-author (with Stephen Watt) of Academic Keywords: A Devil's Dictionary for Higher Education, the editor of Will Teach for Food: Academic Labor in Crisis, and the coeditor(with Michael Berube) of Higher Education Under Fire: Politics, Economics, and the Crisis of the Humanities. He is also the author or editor of books about the Spanish Civil War, American poetry, and Marxism and culture.

Mr. Nelson will make some preliminary remarks, and then we'll begin.

Part-time appointments are the single worst problem higher education faces, and they are linked to every other crisis in the industry. If you start talking about the detenuring of the faculty, you end up talking about part-time employment. If you address threats to academic freedom, you must deal with the part-time scene, where they are the worst. Take up the risks in distance learning and you arrive at the certainty of more part-time hires. Discuss the future of affirmative action hiring and you confront the way part-time employment will shape and undermine it . . .

The massive shift to part-time employment is at the center of everything we do.

My questions: What disciplines are most affected? English departments? Foreign languages and literatures? History? I'd like to see specific data, broken down by discipline and type of institution.

This is the moderator, Ana. I want to point out that the MLA and company's report did break out the data on part-time instruction by discipline and the MLA report to come should break out by institution. (You can see the CAW for yourself here: http://www.theaha.org/caw/index.htm) Still, are we being alarmist? If -- as in anthropology -- the profile of part-time and grad student work is not quite so bad, should we really be sounding the sirens about part-time work in academia as a whole?

Cary Nelson:
    The only reason not to be alarmed about the massive shift to part-time instruction in higher education would be that higher education doesn't matter. We now have evidence that part-timers overall can spend only half as much time in course preparation and student advising. Those who teach at minimum wage salaries at multiple schools lack enough free time to stay current in their disciplines. Those who do not earn a living wage endure levels of stress that are catastrophic over time. Should we be alarmed that we are steadily reducing the quality of the best higher education system in the world? I think so.

The departments surveyed by the MLA--English, Composition, and Foreign languages--together have by far the largest block of part-time employees. They had over 10% of the total part-time employees ten years ago, and that percentage has clearly grown significantly during the 1990s. Philosophy on the other hand has only about 1% of the part-timers nationwide. The impact departments in the MLA survey have on hiring practices nationwide is substantial. It is the largest disciplinary block of hires nationwide by a considerable margin. The story gets worse if you add up the higher education workforce percentages of all the disciplines that exploit their part-timers.

1. For students in such courses to read primary texts within the history and tradition of the liberal arts, and

2. For such courses to be offered in a discussion, or seminar, format in order to best generate student engagement with the tradition.

Cary Nelson:
    I assume the underlying question here is whether we can save money by relying on more large lecture courses.

First of all I believe there is real value in a mix of large lecture and small discussion courses. Large lecture courses can be genuinely inspiring when they give students the opportunity to see a serious, knowledgeable intellectual comment on and shape a field over the course of a semester. At the same time students need the self-discovery and collaborative socialization available in small discussion courses.

Many humanities departments (including my own) have increased the number of large lecture courses over the last two decades in response to budget cuts. The mix in many departments may be about right, so I don't see major cost savings here.

The other issue is student writing, the quantity of which has seriously declined over the nearly 4 decades I've been in higher education as student or teacher. Long research papers--central not only to acquiring disciplinary expertise but also to the special role college graduates can play as informed citizens--are difficult to assign in large lecture courses. Undergrads should regularly write papers of at least 25 pages. That's not exactly realistic in a course with 500 students.

A good education is labor intensive and expensive.

Cary Nelson:
    I think there isn't really any way to know. First of all our highest level of response did come from institutions that grant Ph.D.'s and master's degrees. The lowest level of response to the survey came from jr. colleges and community colleges. Now it's perfectly true that they have some of the lowest rates of compensation but there are incredibly low rates of compensation at major institutions as well. The emergence of distance education over the last few years has opened up a whole new rate structure for part-timers so that well-known colleges and universities that might typically pay say $3,000 per course to a part-timer -- and that's of course where the part-timer is meeting students face to face -- may pay people doing distance education courses $800 per course, so I guess the bottom-line answer to your question is that execrable employment practices are generously distributed throughout higher education. We had thought in advance that we might get a higher rate of response from jr. colleges and community colleges than we did because many of them are unembarrassed by their employment practices. If they feel that extremely low pay and absence of benefits is typical of the industry then they're likely to feel less embarrassed following those practices. On the other hand, we had a pretty good response rate from those institutions -- especially Ph.D.-granting institutions -- that like to think well of themselves and you would think that they would therefore be less willing to fill out the survey. In the end it was probably loyalty to their disciplinary organization that led them to cooperate but I agree with Bill that there probably are a cluster of absolutely brutal employers in higher education who put the survey in the paper shredder the same day they got it.

I would then take the massive endowments of business colleges and other comparably endowed units and distribute 20% of them to other units on campus. In the future all donations to specific units would be tithed--10% of future endowments distributed to other units. It's time to accept the notion that campuses are communities with mutual responsibilities.

Dear Professor Nelson, I hold a J.D. , an M.A. and a recent Ph.D. from St. Louis University. I havesuccessfullyy taught as an adjunct instructor at SLU, UST and the College of St. Catherine. In addition I have practiced law and taught at the secondary level. After three years on the job market, things appear as dismal as ever. I am now looking for opportunities in Australia, New Zealand, Canada and Europe. I have basically given up on justice in American Higher Education. I have a family and three children. Now, in God's name, is there any convincing argument for persons of good will with significant personalresponsibilitiess to remain in the "Auschwitz" of higher education careerdom - which now contains so many of the best and brightest, denied the opportunity to contribute and to prove their worth? I ask this in the name of the many.

Cary Nelson:
    I would not myself use the Holocaust metaphor. We do not so much murder our part-timers as break them slowly over time. And many of us subscribe to the motto "Arbeit macht frei." People stay in higher education despite being mistreated because they love the work and because they believe it constitutes a higher calling, a spiritual mission that compensates them for poverty anddisrespectt. I believe it's an enterprise worth fighting for, but an enterprise increasingly crying out for honesty and reform.

On your first point -- Are there models of good practices? -- where part-timers are concerned there are certainly models of better practices, which means schools paying about $5,000 per course, providing health care and other benefits. Obviously, $5,000 a course is better than $1,000 a course. There are some schools paying their graduate students as much as $6,000 to $7,000 per course. So for graduate students there are some models of genuinely fair compensation.

I should point out that you do not have to phrase your comments in the form of a question -- if anyone simply wants to add to the discussion, please submit your thoughts.

It seems that the most prominent tenured faculty of the last three decades have made a name for themselves bewailing the plight of people with whom they have no contact. The exploited labor on their campuses underwrites their inflated salaries, sabbatical time, reduced teaching loads, and their departmental egos, while it gives the lie to their claims of being truly interested in social justice.

Doesn't the extraordinary use of adjuncts, especially in the humanities, raise serious issues of academic freedom?

Cary Nelson:
    The highest number of courses I've identified per semester has been seven or eight. A lifestyle whose stresses I cannot even imagine, especially considering that anyone who teaches that many courses is inevitably doing it at several different schools. It wouldn't surprise me to learn that there are some folks out there doing even more teaching than that.

The threat to academic freedom from over-reliance on part-timers is very real. A tenured faculty member who introduces controversial material in a classroom is usually protected. A part-timer really has no protection at all, except the possibility that tenured faculty will come to his or her defense. Part-timers are regularly fired for doing their job well. That is, for challenging their students intellectually.

Like greyhounds at the racetrack, adjuncts are seduced into continuing by the carrot of full-time employment. It can come, after years of part-time work, but this is the exception, not the rule. Full-timers don't relate to the part-time problem because they have problems of their own. Besides, everyone needs an underdog.

The tenured faculty will understand the exploitation of adjuncts more when they have to take the evening, weekend, and summer classes we will no longer cover. I was a tenured prof for 17 years and now (following relocation for my husband's career) adjunct at 3 colleges. Part of the problem, as noted before, is that our paths don't cross with the schedules of the full-time faculty. We're the phantoms who enable them to have evenings at home and summer vacations.

What I've discovered reporting on this story for several years now is that there is one crucial group who doesn't know about academia's dirty little secret. I suspect if parents who are paying for college educations knew that they're paying thousands of dollars for teaching by academic outsiders that they might raise a ruckus. But they don't know. I've been hanging out with high school students lately who have been going on their college tours to choose where they want to go. Ask them about who will be teaching you, I urged. When they come back, they say the admissions people don't answer that question. Let's assume kids go to college for an education. If so, then who is doing the teaching is THE crucial question.

I would disagree with one of Cary's earlier comments: I think that research is the enemy of good teaching. When faculty members are given tenure based largely on research and publishing, it takes the emphasis away from their teaching. How many tenured faculty received their tenure based on how well they taught their students? Then, those content, tenured faculty pressure (and preprofessionalize) their graduate students to concentrate on publishing when they need to be teaching them how to teach their students. They aren't concerned about the part-time instructors and graduate students because they are worried about being departmental "dead weight" if they aren't publishing. Teaching is getting lost in the research culture.

Specific institutions such as the Harvard Project on Faculty Appointments (their claims to a helpful "fairness" and "objectivity" notwithstanding) urge colleges and universities away from the use of traditional tenure systems and full-time-permanent appointment systems. (See gseweb.harvard.edu/~hpfa/)

Should academe respond to the role such institutions--even those within academe--play?

Cary Nelson:
    I agree with Joe that it's a both/and question. The developments in higher education including the shift to contingent labor and the corporate commitment to extracting labor at its lowest possible cost are certainly features of global capitalism. But every industry also has its own particular constituencies and influential forces. Actions within individual industries can produce meaningful reform, though admittedly not revolutionary change. We do need a lively debate in academe about what forces are part of the solution and what forces are contributing to the problem. Academics recommending the abandonment of tenure are not helping matters.

This is a practical suggestion, not a question. Without spending an extra penny, one thing departments could do is to INCLUDE the part-timers (we have more than our share, teaching more than 50% of undergrad courses and even some grad courses) at faculty meetings, hiring decisions, etc. In the Stanford English dept, the part-timers are invisible men and women; no one on the permanent faculty even knows who they are. They are never included in any dept. activities and hence are doubly disenfranchised. If they could attend curriculum planning and hiring meetings, then perhaps their situation would emerge as not permissible by the rest of us.

Labor practices in higher ed are changing amidst the rise of a corporate model in higher ed. For instance, "experts" with short-term contracts are growing (e.g. "retention specialist") and they have similar arrangements as those found in the private sector. I think that faculty have relinquished their responsibilities, and one outcome is the current increasing destruction of tenure.

Much of the rhetoric that is bandied about puts fixed term and adjunct faculty at a disadvantage from the start. It is assumed that many of us do not have the "committment" to teaching that tenured faculty do, often because we sometimes do not have terminal degrees. But if we do get terminal degrees, then we are overqualified to teach the lower level courses that we revel in.