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About the Author
Marc Bousquet is an associate professor of cultural studies and writing with new media at Santa Clara University. His book How the University Works: Higher Education and the Low-Wage Nation has just been released by New York University Press with a foreword by Cary Nelson. He serves on the national council of the American Association of University Professors and was the founding editor of Workplace: A Journal for Academic Labor.
About Brainstorm
Mark Bauerlein
Marc Bousquet
Kevin Carey
Laurie Fendrich
Teresa Ghilarducci, guest blogger
Sara Goldrick-Rab, guest blogger
John L. Jackson Jr.
Stan Katz
Brainstorm Alumni
Eric BanksDan Greenberg
Michael Nelson, guest blogger
Marty Nemko, guest blogger
Graham Spanier
Stephen Joel Trachtenberg
Bob Zemsky
Recent Posts
The Figure of Writing and the Future of English Studies (Part 1) | Comment [28]
The Figure of Writing and the Future of English Studies (Part 2) | Comment [14]
Single Payer: the New American Exception | Comment [23]
No Problem With Student Debt? | Comment [48]
We Work 1 | Comment [7]
Are You Part of the Solution?
cross-posted from howtheuniversityworks.com
In the current issue of The Chronicle, faculty activist Steve Street writes from the perspective of the overwhelming majority who serve contingently to the shrinking minority of us who serve in the tenure stream.
Titled Don’t Be Kind to Adjuncts, the piece has an appropriately angry and dismissive tone. (The original title, softened by the editorial staff, was “Kick an Adjunct Today.”)
Keep your sympathy, he says. Don’t bother being kind, he says, unless you’re willing to step up and fight on behalf of the exploited majority:
unless you can also put equity for us — proportional pay, benefits, security, and opportunities for professional development and advancement — front and center in department meetings, faculty senates, budget allocations, and even mission statements.
There may well come a time when the tenured minority do these things. It’s worth noting that they haven’t thus far. There are exceptions, of course, but fairly consistently over the past four decades the tenurable — in their senates, disciplinary associations, and even their unions — have played along with administrations in permatemping.
This was preserving their own perquisites the easy way — not by arguing for the profession’s contribution to society, defending tenure and faculty governance, but accepting expedience and selling out the future in exchange for the easiest path to a 4-percent salary increase and easy course releases.
And that’s what the tenured did when they were still in the majority!
So, as I’ve said to Steve before: I agree wholeheartedly that this is what the tenurable ought to do. I agree that change will come faster and better when the tenurable end their complicity and silent, relatively comfortable acquiescence.
But I doubt they’ll do that unless and until the time comes when the majority — faculty serving contingently — step into leadership.
My long experience in the movement — and my long study of movement cultures in the United States — suggests that there won’t be effective leadership by the tenured on these issues until there is leadership by the nontenurable. The nontenurable majority will have to show the tenured what to do.
While my little boy was having trouble getting back to sleep, I watched a suffragist docudrama I’d speculatively recorded, but didn’t necessarily plan on ever watching, HBO’s Iron-Jawed Angels.
I’m not a big fan of docudramas, but this one was exceptional, featuring Hilary Swank as Alice Paul, who was an insurgent within the suffragist movement. She had to fight against the established leadership of women in the movement — to defy them and suffer retaliation, mount a campaign to embarass those women and the politicians they supported, picketing the White House in wartime under a banner referring to the president as “Kaiser Wilson,” endure vilification, go to jail, and be force-fed.
So is my response to Steve that he should be prepared to become a political prisoner? No.
But faculty serving contingently are fired every day. Many would have more dignity, better pay, and more due process working at Wal-Mart. They generally don’t have anything resembling guarantees of academic freedom, as AAUP president Cary Nelson freely acknowledges. They usually don’t have anything remotely resembling equal pay and equal rights in the profession, forming second, third, and fourth tiers that amount to a state of academic apartheid of second, third, and fourth-class citizenship, or, really, noncitizenship. In many of the most ill-paid fields, adjunct labor is overwhelming female — often spouses of male faculty earning much more.
There are, in other words, both analogies and actual, traceable, historical ties to the women’s movement and Alice Paul’s demand for equal rights, in the embodied women serving in these degraded jobs.
Historically the women’s movement didn’t succeed by asking male politicians to enact reforms, but by self-organization, direct action, and forcing those changes. It swept male civic, social, and political leadership into its orbit.
The same will be true of faculty serving contingently.
The next issue of AAUP’s Academe is devoted to the “new majority faculty.” In my piece, I talk about some of the ways that faculty serving contingently are emerging into leadership — often using some of the same forms of creative disruption employed by Alice Paul.
In my view, every issue should be devoted to faculty serving contingently, and 100 percent of organizing, membership, and lobbying efforts should be devoted to the issue of contingency for the next couple of decades.
But that’s not going to happen until faculty serving contingently JOIN — not just AAUP, but their disciplinary associations and, where possible, senates and unions — form insurgent caucuses and candidacies — and take over the organizations, becoming the leadership and hijacking the resources to the struggle.
In the next issue of Academe:
The Core of Academe
By Gary Rhoades
If you’re concerned about academe, you need to be concerned about contingent faculty.
Gender, Contingent Labor, and Writing Studies
By Deirdre McMahon and Ann Green
Teaching composition off the tenure track.
Nameless, New Haven, and Nicholls
By Jordan E. Kurland
Three recent AAUP cases.
Organizing in the Lab
By Benjamin Weaver
Postdocs seek union protection.
The Seamy Side of Science
By Daniel S. Greenberg
Something seriously amiss with postdoc programs.
How to Succeed in an Academic Science Career
Juan Carlos G. Marvizón
No tenure, no salary, no role in governance.
Battling for Hearts and Minds
By Marc Bousquet
Administrative culture vs. contingent faculty.
Including Contingent Faculty in Governance
By Joe Berry and Elizabeth Hoffman
Job security is a prerequisite.
Legal Remedies for Contingent Faculty
By Nicolas Manicone
Contracts, handbooks, and the law.
Gaining Access to Unemployment Insurance
By Beverly Stewart
Strategies for success.
Lobbying for Contingent Faculty Interests
By Nicole Byrd
Lobbying in and outside of unions:
Working Without a Union in New Mexico
By Niame Adele and Christine Rack
Organizing a Legislative Forum
By Jack Longmate
Multi-Union Efforts in New York
By Marcia Newfield
Lobbying in a “Right-to-Work” State
By Andrew William Smith
Contingent Faculty and Student Outcomes
By Audrey J. Jaeger
Exploiting faculty hurts students.
Comments
Commenting is closed for this article.
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“But faculty serving contingently are fired every day. Many would have more dignity, better pay, and more due process working at Wal-Mart.”
While not to distract too much from the point, sometimes people are complicit in the own mistreatment. If adjuncts refused to work for low wages, few benefits, and little dignity, then the university would have to re-evaluate its priorities and treatment. But for every crappy job, there are people willing to do the work. If Wal-Mart is better, why not go work there?
— Tessier-Ashpool · Oct 23, 03:09 PM · #
If women have the vote in Wyoming, why not move there?
Seriously, though, your point is well taken. In the larger, collective sense: people are always complicit in their own exploitation. The employer has the power that we give it.
The question is whether the strategy of shopping yourself around the labor market (as you suggest), or organizing to take power (as I suggest) is more effective.
Those who have to live the answer must choose.
— Marc Bousquet · Oct 23, 03:54 PM · #
Marc points our attention to the collective and the systematic, yet always, we are quick to turn and point our finger at individual choices. Choices are made in context.
I do not intend to denigrate anybody’s acheivements. However, I strongly believe that tenured faculty need to realize that the difference between them and contingent faculty is often pure luck. Look at me carefully, there but for the grace of god go you. In a way, it is like disablity. What really is the difference between the able bodies and the disabled? Happenstance, somewhere in the course of one’s life. That alone is a good argument for “interclass” solidarity.
Sigh. Perhaps I ruined my life by becoming a sharp, insightful, passionate, and compassionate social theorist.
It’s hard to get a job at WalMart with a PhD. You have to lie.
— Maria · Oct 23, 04:01 PM · #
It’s hard to get a job at WalMart with a PhD. You have to lie.
And therein lies the problem! And I don’t just mean the unethical and illegal fact of fibbing on a resume.
When I finally got fed up with the adjuncting abuse, I decided to leave the academy.
Do you know how much people respect college instruction experience in the general workforce?
Not. At. All.
The last 7 years on my resume have essentially been wasted for all purposes except further college instructing.
— anon · Oct 23, 04:23 PM · #
“However, I strongly believe that tenured faculty need to realize that the difference between them and contingent faculty is often pure luck.”
This is probably more true in the humanities fields than in other fields. Marc doesn’t like it when I bring up the field of finance, but let’s be honest about it, there are no exploited adjuncts in finance. If you have a Ph.d and are competent, you can find a tenure track job. Those who are contingent faculty in finance are qualitatively different from the tenure track. For example, at Marc’s university, the contingent faculty in finance tend to be former CFO’s, hardly the type of people who are easy to exploit.
So the question is, why does exploitation happen so easily in the humanities?
— James · Oct 23, 04:51 PM · #
I got fed up with the abuse and left with my top-tier R1 Ph.D. I was replaced by a second year graduate student and a high school teacher with an MA. I understand she finds the job really challenging but she’s having fun. I understand from the students that she’s completely incompetent and that they frequently correct her glaring mistakes. But hey, she works cheap!
If the university isn’t concerned about quality, they can always find someone to fill the slot — but don’t you think that the students deserve more than that? Don’t we all?
— Fed UP · Oct 23, 08:49 PM · #
Check out Steve Street’s ranking on RateMyProfessor.com — his students loathe him. Why am I not surprised he wrote such an obnoxious opinion piece in the Chronicle?
As for students deserving quality, I’m not sure they notice the different between an entertaining but mediocre scholar and a boring but brilliant scholar, except that they’d rather not take a class from the latter (unless they’re spoon fed a really good study guide).
— fg · Oct 23, 09:25 PM · #
Steven Street Buffalo State
— fg · Oct 23, 09:28 PM · #
fg already posted a similar comment in the Chronicle forum.
The supposed correlation between the oh-so-reliable measure of pedagogical skill called RateMyProfessor.com & actual talent would be amusing if only for the fact that so many educrats think it’s not spurious.
— anon · Oct 23, 09:47 PM · #
I second Steve Street’s argument. Sure, the non-tenured contingent faculty need to organize, but it is equally important for the tenured to organize for and with them.
On more than one occasion on this blog I have expressed exactly the same sentiments (with approximately the same tone) as those of Street’s article. And each time, we are met with the refrain of “the contingent need to do it themselves”.
I suggest that the tenured start doing all those little things that actually do add up, and set the context for effective organizing. It’s both/and and not the “do it yourself” maxim that is the formula for success. These “blame the victim” speeches from the mouths of tenured faculty are in the end both self-serving and self-interested. After all, tenured faculty, like Liberace, “cry all the way to the bank”.
— Anti-hypocrisy advocate · Oct 23, 09:54 PM · #
Yikes: Rate My Profs was a wake-up, all right. I was particularly troubled by that incisive“He rides a bicycle!” criticism. True though that I’ve had some rough semesters, commuting 240 miles a week between three campuses, and haven’t been as patient as I should — when, for example, some of my freshmen had the same trouble “fg” seems to have understanding the validity of ad hominem. At least with his/her comment we get initials, though.
— Steve Street · Oct 24, 07:09 AM · #
I suspect Steve Street might have a track record of giving honest grades (as opposed to the normal, inflated variety). That’ll get you a “Rate My Profs” bad rep every time. And, of course, administrators generally care more about “student satisfaction” rather than honest grades so only the tenured have any semblance of academic freedom. That’s another one of those oft-neglected obligations of the tenured: protecting the academic freedom of the contingent faculty.
— Anti-hypocrisy advocate · Oct 24, 07:16 AM · #
Every professor gets an occasional bad comment on RMP.com (I do) but when there’s a consistent pattern over a period of time, with no variance of vitriol, a reasonable person has to wonder what kind of head-case is teaching those classes. I sympathize with those stuck teaching a grueling gateway course (again, I do), but ENGL 101? You have to go out of your way to anger students with that marshmallow class.
Please, adjuncts, stop whining. And stop taking your can’t-afford-to-own-a-modern-vehicle frustration out on defenseless 18-year-olds.
— fg · Oct 24, 08:29 AM · #
James, in #5, asks, “So the question is, why does exploitation happen so easily in the humanities?”
The reason, obviously, is that people who teach finance are tough, competitive, free-market intellects who build their own houses and roads and provide for their own retirement by investing in high-return startup companies instead of relying on the nanny state to do these things for them, while people who teach the humanities are soft, coddled leftists who want the government to furnish them with health insurance, child care, and easy tenure. Let’s just put it this way: a finance professor would never teach at a nanny-state university and have the government duplicate services for a few finance students that the private sector brilliantly supplies, and a finance professor would never refuse to try to extricate himself from a nanny-state university because his wife wants to stay put and hang around with her relatives.
Next question?
— LuckyJim · Oct 24, 08:41 AM · #
The comments regarding Prof. Street on RateMyProfessor.com are so similar (especially repetition of the word “horrible,” as if no other epithet were available) as to arouse suspicion that a particular student has it in for him and has posted multiple times.
— Mr. Wiki · Oct 24, 08:52 AM · #
Tenured faculty who have the courage and compassion to seek solidarity with their contingent counterparts might do well to take up the cause of pedagogy. Surely one reason why contingent faculty are treated as poorly as they are is that the administration doesn’t care enough about what they do—i.e., teaching—in comparison with the supposedly more august activities of research and publication. If teaching were treated as the central mission of an academic department, there would be far less ground to distinguish between contingent and tenured forms of labor in order to protect the one and exploit the other. Tenured faculty would be required to teach more (and might even, dare I say it, be evaluated on the basis of such teaching), and they would be expected to work together with non-tenured faculty in pursuit of the same end.
Then again, such an approach might feed all to well into the desire of administrators to reduce learning to the most quantifiable and alienated forms: student satisfaction, standardized benchmarks, skills, etc. Will tenured faculty ever wake up and realize that their species is dwindling and headed for extinction? That tenure cannot long survive the engines of corporatization? Maybe not—after all, being tenured, they don’t have much incentive to. Meanwhile, it’s more and more like Hollywood, or the lottery: the tenured serve as the glimmer and promise of redemption to the alienated majority, whose position is ineluctable because demanded by the structure itself.
— Benjamin · Oct 24, 08:53 AM · #
Oh, Mr. Wiki, give it up. We’re to believe this student went back again and again over a period of years? If you look at other teachers on RMP.com who get bad reviews, very often you will see the word “horrible” — it’s not a word with a fingerprint.
— fg · Oct 24, 09:53 AM · #
Years? 2006 and 2007, with one or two 2005. Well within the normal four-year matriculation of an individual student.
“Horrible” does have a bit of a fingerprint. “Worst,” “terrible,” “awful,” etc., etc., are—in addition to whatever neologisms and undergraduate patois are currently being used—available, so “horrible” is just a little bit conspicuous.
Also, there are a few complaints about grades—fair enough in itself—that cite a sudden, and presumably unfair, drop from A’s in high school to C’s in Prof. Street’s class. The basketball coach at Buffalo State probably gets similar complaints, e.g., “In high school, I was a starter.”
Finally, I never said that one vengeful student entirely explained away Prof. Street’s overall negative rating. I only pointed out that such a student could have skewed the results.
— Mr. Wiki · Oct 24, 10:33 AM · #
I know nothing about Steve Street, but I was intrigued enough to join the game of “Are the RMP posts from one student or many.”
Page 2 particulary stands out with the repeated use of an all caps final sentence and the admonition to “pick” another teacher. The style and phrasing both seem idiosyncratic. As does the “mouth full of”: marbles or cotton balls.
Most of page one does, however, seem to be individual posters rather than one. The uniformity of negative response speaks less to this person’s teaching skills and more to his personality, specifically, that it is particularly offensive to at least some students.
That was fun! Whose RMP do we do next?
— Tessier-Ashpool · Oct 24, 10:41 AM · #
“However, I strongly believe that tenured faculty need to realize that the difference between them and contingent faculty is often pure luck.”
No. Not in my field. I can’t speak for the humanities, but few, if any, hiring committees in the country would conclude that the difference between my potential and that of an adjunct is a matter of personal preference. I’m tenured and I’m much stronger as a job candidate than any adjunct I’ve ever seen.
“I suggest that the tenured start doing all those little things that actually do add up, and set the context for effective organizing.”
Why? I’ve got a full-time job and a family. What in the world has any adjunct ever done for me? There are far more important problems in the world than adjuncts not getting the job they want at the pay they want.
What’s the monetary value of the humanities? Oh, you say it’s not about the money? The whining you folks do about money sure does imply that it is about the money. You want to be paid a real salary? Do something with monetary value.
The only response I ever get is “you’re a troll” or “you don’t understand the situation”. Acting like a bunch of pigs (like Steve Street) is not the answer. Articles like this have confirmed my suspicions: there’s a reason why humanities adjuncts are paid so little. And the more I read, the more I think they’re probably overpaid. Can’t get a job at Wal-Mart? I wouldn’t hire someone with that kind of attitude either.
— me · Oct 24, 10:57 AM · #
My RMP is pretty good, and I got a chili pepper! Somebody thought I was cute.
But I don’t teach anymore. In fact, these days I don’t do anything for pay. I’m a leach, a parasite on society. Shoot me, and put me out of your misery. I and my ilk (the “lower classes”) are the root cause of all our troubles, from the mortgage crisis to the Iraq War. We took out mortgages we couldn’t afford. Could this nation have gone into Iraq if the Armed Forces couldn’t recruit enlisted people from the working class? Rumsfield woulldn’t have been able to go to war without the working class. We fill up your emergency rooms, we swamp your food shelves, we crowd your public transportation, we put limits on tax breaks because money for food support, Section 8 housing, and Medicaid has to come from somewhere. It is our fault your health insurance premiums are so high. The cost of medical care we can’t pay for has to be picked up by someone.
Why should the affliuent care about the poor. We don’t smell good, we are lazy, we believe the world owes us a living. Many of us abuse drugs, alcohol, and suffer from mental illness. We are not like you. We are the problem. Scrooge suggested starvation. Jonathon Swift proposed …, well, that applied to the Irish Problem.
Okay, tangental rant over.
— Maria · Oct 24, 11:01 AM · #
Fascinating to see how the merits of Steve Street’s arguments are drowned in the sea of comments about RMP. Indeed, now I’m beginning to think that even disgruntled administrators are likely suspects for those negative postings. After all, anything to “shoot the messenger” and discredit the message.
As for the tenured faculty (who “cry all the way to the bank”) being a dying breed, yes, indeed. Their motto is that of the Sun King: apres moi, le deluge!
— Anti-hypocrisy advocate · Oct 24, 11:17 AM · #
I would be more impressed by advocacy on behalf of contingent faculty if I saw that group, and organizations like the AAUP make their case to students and their parents. Why isn’t AAUP doing an annual press release ranking colleges and universities on the proportion of faculty hired contingently? Being on top of that list might influence higher administration and governing boards, particularly if application numbers were impacted.
— perplexed · Oct 24, 03:20 PM · #
“I’m tenured and I’m much stronger as a job candidate than any adjunct I’ve ever seen.”
Now, or when “me” was first hired? Full-time and tenure do provide ways of ramping up the ol’ resume (more time to do research, not much need for a second job, less harried schedule, travel support for conferences, connections and networking, etc., etc.) fairly unavailable to most adjuncts. Second, if “me” is pretty senior, then he/she was hired back in the days before colleges started operating with only skeleton crews of full-time, tenure-track faculty and with a greatly increased percentage of adjunct faculty to do the scut work. Right now, there are almost certainly a lot of adjuncts shut out by this policy from being hired full-time, tenure-track, who are as good, if not better, job candidates than “me” was when he/she was put on the tenure track. Third, “me’s” opinion of his/herself as a theoretical job candidate—as opposed to “any” adjunct— is colored not only by the usual vanity, but by his/her animus against adjuncts in general.
“I’ve got a full-time job and a family. What in the world has any adjunct ever done for me? There are far more important problems in the world than adjuncts not getting the job they want at the pay they want.”
Where to begin? Well, first “me’s” having a family is “me’s” problem, not a selfless service to academe. Second, “what in the world has any adjunct ever done for me?” is a complete non-sequiteur. Third, there are far more important problems in the world than “me’s” having to contend with a family while having a full-time job.
Since “me” “can’t speak for the humanities” and seems to be rather proud of his/her lack of even a drop of the milk of human kindness, I’d guess the field of this academic Mme Defarge lies somewhere in the inhumanities.
— LuckyJim · Oct 24, 03:20 PM · #
“I’m tenured and I’m much stronger as a job candidate than any adjunct I’ve ever seen.”
What people like LJ seem to ignore is that in some fields, adjuncts are qualitatively different from full time faculty. If we turned all adjunct positions into full time positions, all of the adjuncts would lose their jobs because we would never remotely consider them for a full time position. They have no doctorate, no research, etc. Why would anyone want to hire them, except for the fact that they are cheap?
— James · Oct 24, 05:20 PM · #
…adjuncts are qualitatively different from full time faculty. If we turned all adjunct positions into full time positions, all of the adjuncts would lose their jobs because we would never remotely consider them for a full time position. They have no doctorate, no research, etc.
James, you’ve missed the point.
Back in the Dark Ages [like the 1970s], people got tt jobs with little more than good recommendations and some TA experience. It was on the job that they started their research agendas, gathered grant money, started trolling conferences, etc.
Today, one needs to do ALL OF THESE THINGS, often while still in grad school, just to BE CONSIDERED for a VAP or tt job.
Or so it goes in the humanities and several prominent social sciences.
An adjunct in English who gains a tt job with a research component often quickly takes advantage of those now-available resources to publish prolifically in their subfield.
Apparently, it’s hard to do research without financial support when you’re teaching 5-8 courses on 3 different campuses every single semester.
Go figure.
Now, if you’re referring to all the adjuncts who only have Master’s degrees [and are not currently enrolled in a doctoral program], that’s a different story.
— anon · Oct 24, 06:41 PM · #
Am I the only commentator here who knows of adjuncts, hired with a masters, who nevertheless managed to complete a PhD and even publish the dissertation as a book? Indeed, in the case of one such adjunct, she has out-published the majority of the full professors in her department. Has this even gotten her an interview for any full-time tenure-track positions in her department? Of course not.
The adjunctification of the corporate university is not about quality or qualifications – it is about the maximization of budget resources in favor of the administration and the physical plant, at the expense of as many contingent faculty (and other underpaid workers, e.g. secretaries, janitors, etc.) as possible. In other words, it is about power and greed, pure and simple.
— Anti-hypocrisy advocate · Oct 24, 07:14 PM · #
OK James, name the fields in which adjuncts are, as a class, qualitatively “different” (i.e., inferior) from full-time faculty. And why. And how you know it (personal experience with people in your department? national survey? recent books on the subject?).
Of course, full-time faculty, especially tenured ones, have usually been in place longer, under better conditions, so they have longer resumes, more publications, etc. But if James’s contention is that, generally, full-time faculty have Ph.D.‘s and adjuncts are are adjuncts because they have only masters’ degrees, I think he’s wrong.
Also, in finance, couldn’t it be argued that full-time faculty are inferior…at least to the financial experts who disdain teaching at salaries considerably below what they can make outside of academe? (Hope this doesn’t cut too close, James.)
— LuckyJim · Oct 24, 07:24 PM · #
Following up on #28:
A prominent prof in my former field once noted that many of the profs at our school were fired from industry.
To these people, being a professor was a back-up plan!
Think about the ramifications of that potential reality to the contingency problem…
Although, it seems clear that the most prominent fields relying on contingents are swamped with people whose sole purpose in earning a PhD was to become an academic.
Those other fields: not so much.
Which command higher salaries, fewer adjuncts, and profs who supplement their incomes with often tons of “consulting” $$$$$?
— anon · Oct 26, 12:27 AM · #
“What in the world has any adjunct ever done for me?”
Have you ever taken a sabbatical to continue your research? Have you ever asked for a course reduction to serve as chair? or to dedicate yourself to starting a new subprogram that will raise your profile on campus/with the administration?
Who, pray tell, covered those courses that you didn’t teach in order to dedicate yourself to your own career advancement? Chances are, it was adjuncts. And how much were they paid to teach? Surely not as much on a pro-rata basis as you are…..hmmm, so I guess we could consider the going adjunct rate on a campus as something of an objective measure of what teaching is really worth (or at least, what the given administration thinks it’s worth).
Full-timers have to realize that old union maxim: “An injury to one is an injury to all”!
— beth w · Oct 26, 07:02 AM · #
“Full-timers have to realize that old union maxim: “An injury to one is an injury to all”!”
That of course, assumes that adjuncts are injured by the current pay rates. The problem is, not everyone is necessarily injured, even by a generous definition of that term.
For example, I have occasionally taught as an adjunct. Since I was already a tenured professor elsewhere, I was in a very good position not to be exploited. So therefore, whatever they paid me was fair, because I freely agreed to it.
So, if the activists want to convince some of us that they have a point worth considering, they first have to face the fact that not every adjunct is being exploited.
— James · Oct 26, 08:12 AM · #
Me’s post was so dumb I suspect satire. To ask, “What have adjuncts done for me?” coupled with the current data about this particular crisis in higher education is just too contrarian to be credible!
Adjuncts teach students. Your students, at your school. Adjuncts teach your children. Adjuncts taught your grad students and finance students.
Adjuncts are prevalent in humanities because the humanities and the liberal arts require a different, much more individualized and labor-intensive teaching methodology, one that relies heavily on basic writing competency. And if we were to look at the proportions of contingent to tenured specifically in writing instruction, I think we’d see that adjuncts are responsible for an overwhelming share of that pie chart.
So think about that next time you grade a paper. If the writing is fluent, it’s probably because some poorly paid, largely invisible adjunct did her often impossible job. If it’s not, then you might look to the way your institution treats its writing instructors.
— jil h · Oct 26, 08:54 AM · #
Jimmy, Jimmy, Jimmy:
1. Answer the question. Name the f**king fields.
2. Adjuncts are “injured” by the current pay rates. Hardly any adjunct who works a full-time total makes a decent full-time wage. Being exploited is being injured.
3. You occasionally teach as an adjunct as a second job, for pin money. So of course you don’t feel exploited; any salary is gravy. Then there’s that “occasionally”: you’re a dilletante adjunct, you don’t have to do it.
4. Sure, not “every” adjunct is being exploited. Look at you. But 99 percent of them are.
5. Is your obliviousness to the issue of economic exploitation of adjuncts a natural talent, a product of rather blind adherence to free-market doctrine (which makes every man free, as Orwell put it, to sleep under bridges), or a real intellectual struggle you fight every day?
— LuckyJim · Oct 26, 09:00 AM · #
Another reason why universities keep adjunct wages low relates precisely to those courses replacing a professor on a grant. Cost share can be calculated as the difference between the cost of the adjunct and the cost of the percentage of the faculty member’s salary s/he is replacing.
Neat trick, eh? And it is often (if not usually) the primary source of required cost share for grants in the humanities where institutions cannot claim the cost of laboratories, equipment, etc. in the grant calculation.
— Anti-hypocrisy advocate · Oct 26, 09:16 AM · #
Although I could do without the sneers, James’ point is important – that activists need to clearly articulate the nature of the crisis.
College administrations abuse the part-time appointment. When part-time means the kind of appointment James describes, where someone is brought in to teach from another institution or profession, then it is a benefit to the institutional mission. But when part-time means untenured lecturers who REPLACE tenured faculty, then that’s different. And that’s the crisis. So James is correct, not every adjunct is exploited. But lots of them are, systemically and persistently, to the detriment of higher education. Face the fact, James.
— jil h · Oct 26, 09:32 AM · #
“1. Answer the question. Name the f**king fields.”
Sorry, LJ. Ok, the fields where adjuncts are qualitatively different from full time faculty that I am aware of are: finance, marketing, management, accounting. This is from my experience at my own institution, but from other institutions which I have investigated.
“2. Adjuncts are “injured” by the current pay rates. Hardly any adjunct who works a full-time total makes a decent full-time wage. Being exploited is being injured.”
How was I injured when I was an adjunct?
“3. You occasionally teach as an adjunct as a second job, for pin money. So of course you don’t feel exploited; any salary is gravy. Then there’s that “occasionally”: you’re a dilletante adjunct, you don’t have to do it.”
And of course, if they don’t offer enough $, I tell them to find someone else.
“4. Sure, not “every” adjunct is being exploited. Look at you. But 99 percent of them are.”
Can you cite some data?
“5. Is your obliviousness to the issue of economic exploitation of adjuncts a natural talent, a product of rather blind adherence to free-market doctrine (which makes every man free, as Orwell put it, to sleep under bridges), or a real intellectual struggle you fight every day?”
It comes from critical thinking and looking at the issue without a pre-conceived agenda.
— James · Oct 26, 11:05 AM · #
“College administrations abuse the part-time appointment.”
This could very well be true. When I was an adjunct, I taught and did nothing else. My commitment to the institution was minimal.
“ When part-time means the kind of appointment James describes, where someone is brought in to teach from another institution or profession, then it is a benefit to the institutional mission. “
No argument here.
“But when part-time means untenured lecturers who REPLACE tenured faculty, then that’s different. And that’s the crisis. “
This is true, although part of the problem is that if we got rid of the adjuncts and hired full time faculty, it might just cause unemployment among the adjuncts. For example, some of our courses are routinely taught by practitioners, who would never be considered for a tenure track position. So, should we replace the adjunct position with a full time position? Perhaps, but it might not work to the benefit of the adjuncts.
— James · Oct 26, 11:11 AM · #
Are there any social theorists around here?
— Maria · Oct 26, 11:15 AM · #
I thought perhaps I’d posted on the question of contingent faculty in business schools before— in the comments perhaps?
In any event: at Santa Clara, I suggested to various faculty groups and the Senate that we form a committee to look into the <a href=“http://www.scu.edu/governance/committees/Committee-on-Lecturers.cfm”>status of lecturers</a>—who are a majority on campus here. Everyone tenured and in administration went on about how satisfied most lecturers were, especially in places like the business school.
Turns out not to have been the case. The b-school faculty serving contingently were a bit happier, on the whole, than arts & sciences lecturers. But a lot of them want better pay, more stable appointments, etc—the same things most of us want.
See the survey on this page. The “report” itself is far from perfect—despite my care to propose that the committee be at least half lecturers, it turned out to be 50% department chairs, and only 2 lecturers. But the survey tells the story fairly clearly. (This is the dissatisfaction of lecturers whose salaries are relatively high, btw: the issues are partly pay and benefits, but also status, control over one’s work, employment security, etc).
http://www.scu.edu/governance/committees/Committee-on-Lecturers.cfm
— Marc Bousquet · Oct 26, 11:39 AM · #
James seems to be unaware of the extent of the abuse of contingency in academe. As I understand it, and Marc can perhaps correct me if I am wrong, about 70% of the faculty in the US are contingent. This is a shocking statistic that explodes all notions of an ad hoc situation in which the outside, industry practitioner teaches a class here or there: contingency is systemic, pervasive and rotting education from its core.
— Unemployed Academic · Oct 26, 01:14 PM · #
Jil h: “Adjuncts taught your grad students”
If adjuncts are teaching in your grad program, you are in a bad department and that will directly influence your career prospects.
— Tessier-Ashpool · Oct 26, 02:46 PM · #
Sorry, Tessier-Ashpool. What I meant was that all grad students were once undergrads, and a large proportion of their undergraduate education, according to the data on part-time teaching, was probably assigned to adjunct instructors.
— jil h · Oct 26, 03:05 PM · #
I’ve known plenty of grad programs who farmed in adjuncts.
They were those cushy “pin money” adjuncts who usually taught “professional” courses.
Or who wanted to dip their wick in the “teaching” profession, but everyone knew [with a wink & a nod] they couldn’t be trusted with the undergrads.
— anon · Oct 26, 11:23 PM · #
James finally does name those mysterious fields in which, as a general rule, adjuncts are inferior to full-time faculty. But he does not say it’s because—as implied earlier and repeatedly—the adjuncts in all those business-related fields have only masters degrees, as opposed to Ph.D.’s for the full-time faculty. Although he’s “investigated” other institutions, he does not say exactly why these adjuncts are, as a class, inferior to full-time faculty.
(Within James’s answer, however, lurk some interesting questions. James works an occasional second job as an adjunct. Is he inferior to the full-time faculty where he works as an adjunct? Does this mean that the college where he works as an adjunct is superior to the one where he’s full-time, and that James simply can’t make the grade as a full-timer there? Or are the two institutions the same, or equal, making James at once both inferior and superior?)
To the matter of adjuncts being “injured” or exploited by their customarily low pay, James replies (with, I may add, with the typical obliviousness of the dogmatic free-marketer to the predicaments of others), “How was I injured when I was an adjunct?” [Emphases mine] James, with a full-time job as a floor under his well-being, probably wasn’t “injured” because it didn’t matter much to him how much he was paid as an adjunct. For him, an adjunct’s job was icing on the full-time cake. But for countless other adjuncts, shut out of full-time jobs because of the increasing—yea, prevalent—practice of staffing colleges with a only skeleton crew of full-time, tenure-track faculty, and with a veritable army of lost-cost adjunct faculty, trying to cobble together a full-time living out of two, three or four simultaneous adjunct jobs, the system does indeed “injure” them. How? I’ll leave the details—and the data James requests—to the testimony of those condemned to doing it. It does seem, however, that Prof. Bousquet and others have amply done so and are doing so in their posts and comments.
About his own adjunct salary, James says proudly, “And of course, if they don’t offer enough $, I tell them to find someone else.” Of course, indeed. James has a full-time job and can afford either a) to turn down adjunct position if he doesn’t pay to his satisfaction—he’s not going to starve or fail to make the rent without it, or b) operate with a very low threshhold of what constitutes “enough $.” Adjunct pay is win-win for guys like James who are doing it for gravy, and lose-lose for almost everybody else.
James says his attitude—he doesn’t contest that it’s “obliviousness to the issue of economic exploitation,” but I’ll let that pass—“arises from from critical thinking and looking at the issue without a pre-conceived agenda.” I daresay that most readers here will have the opinion that James—as earnest, thoughtful, polite, and reasonable a debator as he is—has one of the more rigid “pre-conceived agendas” on this and other threads. He’s a Ricardo/Smith/Friedman* free-marketer. I’d use the term “libertarian,” save that I don’t know James’s position on an individual’s right to ingest whatever recreational drugs, enjoy whatever kind of sex, or terminate pregnancies however. I and others have opined in these threads before that such an agenda is not only cold-hearted but more or less out of touch with the extremely interconnected and mutally dependent society in which we all live. This agenda may look good on paper—filled with ringing tones of “freedom,” “choice,” “liberty” and “rights”—but in actual practice it’s a rigged game with the croupier’s thumb on the wheel, in which the many are screwed while the few profit. This is as true in academe as it is on Wall Street.
Finally, there’s the continuing matter of James’s not walking the free-market walk himself. He espouses the free market, dislikes taxes (which he calls “forcing others to pay” for benefits enjoyed by somebody else), and says that the state shouldn’t tax its citizens to provide benefits already and/or easily provided by the private sector. Yet he teaches at state university, gets his salary on the taxpayers’ tab, and teaches classes which, along with the degrees they lead to, are duplicated by both for-profit and not-for-profit private colleges and universities. He is, in short, a classic case of “Do as I say and not as I do.”
* Thank goodness Paul Krugman has won the Nobel Prize in economics. Now there’s a counterweight to Milton Friedman on the argument-by-authority menu.
— LuckyJim · Oct 27, 07:23 AM · #
There are real problems in this area, but I find myself bothered by most of the posts. (Full disclosure: I am one of those greedy SOBs who work in adminsitration and make, well, less than an average associate professor at my school, even with my PhD. I have adjuncted as have friends and a family member, in and out of work, and all were typically grateful for the opportunity.)
I think we need a great deal more data. Post #40 suggests that 70% of faculty are contingent. That’s interesting, and possibly alarming, but we need to know a lot more. That doesn’t mean, for example, that most courses are taught by contingent faculty. Many adjuncts teach a single course. We need to know what percent of faculty FTE is composed of contingent faculty.
We need to know at what kinds of schools these folks teach — at my public university, the percentage of FTE is pretty small.
We need data on numbers in particular fields. In some professional fields, willing adjuncts who are current practioners arguably add to the quality of education. The adjunct in business, art, healthcare, etc. may be an entirely different issue than that underemployed history PhD.
We need to know how many are adjuncting as their sole or primary source of income (as opposed to retired profs, practitioners teaching an evening class, PhD moms not interested in a full-time job while kids are small, etc.). How many “full-timers” are full-time in a contingent position at a single university and how many have scaped together a “full” salary teaching classes at different schools all over town?
Until we have better numbers (or until we see them in discussions like this), we won’t be clear on the real scope of the problem. Posts here make it clear that arguments that treat all adjuncts alike fail to get traction with people in fields where adjuncts are willing and beneficial. Arguments that appear to overreach lose hearers.
I’m also puzzled by the sense of entitlement I read in many of these posts. The NBA is not entitled to give me a job, just because I spent years honing my basketball skills. Society doesn’t owe a job in keeping with their training to those experienced investment bankers losing jobs on Wall Street. I personally think it’s sad when arts education is reduced in public schools and good music and arts teachers have to find other jobs. But at some point people have to accept there may be more people who want to teach than there are teaching jobs, that despite a PhD I may lack certain skills that make me an appealing candidate, and that the world may change in ways that are not to my advantage. I’ve had some knocks in my life, some forced changes in course, and I’ve had to learn to make the best of things.
— drj50 · Oct 27, 08:33 AM · #
I’m jumping into this thread a little late but wanted to concur with Marc’s observation that the contingent faculty have to lead the way on behalf of their own movement. Hopefully the tenured faculty will be with them, athough, as some of us have said in other similar threads here, it’s doubtful that Tenured America will rise up in support. In any event, as I’ve learned time and again, those who wait to let others fight their battles for them should be prepared to wait a long time.
Re Marc’s post #39 and business school contingent faculty: I think we need to keep focused on the mainl problem: Exploited PhDs in the arts & sciences. Adjuncts in professional schools — esp. business and law — typically earn very good incomes from full-time jobs and regard teaching as an enjoyable side vocation. That’s certainly the case at the law school I teach at, where many adjuncts earn high salaries in full-time legal practice. It’s true that they could be treated much more inclusively by the institution, but they’re not using their modest adjunct salaries to pay the bills.
And practically speaking, I have doubts that adjuncts in professional schools are oriented towards the kind of political action and worldview that would lead them to be part of a movement like this one. In fact, it could undercut the movement: Add part-time b-school & law school faculty into a proposed bargaining unit representing contingent faculty, and you may be much more likely to lose a union election.
David Yamada
— David Yamada · Oct 27, 08:41 AM · #
Let me get this straight: The contingent must “lead the way on behalf of their own movement” while the tenured will be happy to 1) offer some advice, 2) write academic articles and blog posts about the plight of the contingent, and 3) not consider their own role to be to lead a simultaneous movement of the tenured faculty in support of the traditional values and extension of the tenure-track.
Well, now that that’s been cleared up, yes, even and especially the tenured who write about the plight of the contingent – while failing to organize the tenured along with the contingent – also fail to be “part of the solution”. Quod erat demonstrandum by the Steve Street article….
— Anti-hypocrisy advocate · Oct 27, 09:34 AM · #
“The NBA is not entitled to give me a job…”
I think drj means, “The NBA is not required to give me a job…”
No wonder his school keeps him out of the classroom.
— LuckyJim · Oct 27, 10:19 AM · #
Uh, anti-hypocrisy advocate, I think you’re putting words in my mouth (re posts 46 &47)…it’s classic straw man stuff.
To clarify: I’m suggesting there’s an unfortunate reality here. Whether it’s women’s rights, civil rights, anti-poverty, what have you, there’s a long history of the privileged not sticking out their necks for the less so.
I think it’s naive to expect tenured professors to be any different. In fact, I’ve come to expect LESS from tenured profs in terms of ethical, minimally risky action than any other group of people I’ve interacted with. This understanding has come through hard experience.
So… please take out your anger on those more deserving of it. While writing op-eds and blog posts may not exactly equate with storming the barricades, you’d be surprised how many academicians still don’t understand this phenomenon. Furthermore, your post erroneously assumes that all of those who are writing about this have not done anything else in terms of outreach or advocacy.
David Yamada
— David Yamada · Oct 27, 11:38 AM · #
Whether we like it or not, this is all about supply and demand. In such fields as electrical engineering, business administration, and biochemistry, there are far fewer adjuncts than there are in English, history, and sociology. In the last 45 years, college enrollment has increased from around 2.5 million to 17 million; the number of faculty has also increased tremendously. What we have now is a “tiered” system of faculty employment which is very different from the years before 1960. The strongest indictment should be made of our most prestigious and most wealthy institutions, which are using adjuncts to teach many of their lower division undergraduate classes. At least at many state institutions, who have far less money, there may be justifications to use some adjuncts on financial grounds; this is clearly not the case at the richest institutions.
— Carl · Oct 27, 01:34 PM · #
Some quotations from Prof. Bousquet’s book:
“Thirty-five years ago, nearly 75 percent of all college teachers were tenurable; only a quarter worked on an adjunct, part-time, or non-tenurable basis. Today, those proportions are reversed. If you’re enrolled in four college classes right now, you have a pretty good chance that one of the four will be taught by someone who has earned a doctorate and whose teaching, scholarship, and service to the profession has undergone the intensive peer scrutiny associated with the tenure system. In your other three classes, however, you are likely to be taught by someone who has started a degree but not finished it; was hired by a manager, not professional peers; may never publish in the field she is teaching; got into the pool of persons being considered for the job because she was willing to work for wages around the official poverty line (often under the delusion that she could ‘work her way into’ a tenurable position); and does not plan to be working at your institution three years from now.” (p. 2)
“The tenured are spread so thin with respect to undergraduate teaching, however, that even the most privileged undergraduates spend most of their education with parafaculty working in increasingly unprofessional circumstances.” (p. 4)
“In English departments, it is now typical for students to take nearly all first-year, many lower-division, and some advanced topics courses from nondegreed persons who are imperfectly attuned to disciplinary knowledge and who may or may not have an active research agenda or a future in the profession.” (p. 42)
It may seem simplistic to equate the ratio of contingent to tenurable faculty with the ratio of classes taught by each, but remember that contingent faculty (outside the rhet-comp labor mill) usually teach much larger classes. This is one reason why the ratio of classes taught is an inaccurate gauge of the problem. It would be better to measure by the number of students taught. FTE is also problematic because in many cases, institutions plop a tenurable faculty member in front of 100-400 students, then let graudate teaching assistants do the real work of educating. The tenurable faculty member is a facade to game the stats.
drj50, sorry, but I don’t have more time to look for the numbers. As most people recognize, however, the biggest problem with contingency exists in the humanities — educating good, active citizens and moral employees has lost its constituency lo these last 30 years.
— Unemployed Academic · Oct 27, 01:41 PM · #
drj’s request for data is understandable, but I wonder where it will lead? Let’s say that we “prove” that the majority of contingency teaching is in particular fields, and that it predominates in classes during the first years of college, one’s crucial to students’ future success, and that the failure to reward a commitment to such classes and teaching in general is a scandal and it all flies in the face of most college’s mission statements about providing optimal conditions for fostering student learning. In the end, it seems, that none of these “facts” really seem to matter for those who invoke a “market” which dictates and continually rationalizes adjunctification. In short, the “market” is, like the weather, something inevitable to be adapted to and fruitless to imagine our modifyiing. Just read dr j’s last pargraph and his (or her) self congratulation at “making the best of things.”
drj writes: “ I personally think it’s sad when arts education is reduced in public schools and good music and arts teachers have to find other jobs. But at some point people have to accept there may be more people who want to teach than there are teaching jobs, that despite a PhD I may lack certain skills that make me an appealing candidate, and that the world may change in ways that are not to my advantage.”
Think about the “connection” between the first two sentences and the sigh of resignation (“people have to accept”) so sagely uttered. The stunning nonsequitur speaks volumes.
I remain grateful for Marc’s work and the comments by so many. Despite my familiarity with many of these lines of argument and the persistence of the amazingly hard-hearted thinking of folks like “me,” it’s great to have responses from those like Lucky Jim, David Yamada, Maria, and AHA (27) and Beth (30) which put the case so well.
For those intereted, may I remind again of the Society for Values In Higher Education’s 2009 Summer meeting will take as its theme THE UNIVERSITY AND THE MARKETPLACE at Elmhurst College (IL) in July. papers invited: see www.svhe.org. See also the work of THE EDUCATION CONSERVANCY at www.educationconservancy.org to learn about efforts to combat “commercialism’s intrusion into college admissions” and marketing.
— George T. Karnezis · Oct 27, 02:08 PM · #
One more item.
Perhaps this article “University Official Offers Harsh Critique of Policies Toward Adjuncts” ( CHE 10/14) has been noted before. It reports on Angelo-Gene Monaco, Associate VP for Human resources at U Akron. Monaco is amazed that higher ed treats its workers less well than Walmart and spoke his mind at a gathering of his peers.
— George T. Karnezis · Oct 27, 02:57 PM · #
On Comment 49:
It remains noteworthy that, despite the fact that it is in the long-term interest of the tenured faculty to work to eliminate the ills of adjunctification, most of those who post on “Brainstorm” as published “experts” on universities repeat over and over again that the downtrodden are responsible for their own oppression. Yes, when telling adjuncts that it is they alone who hold the key to their liberation the commentator emphasizes that they bear responsibility for their own oppression. Hegelian, to be sure – but that wasn’t the point of Street’s article.
I can only refer the reader to Steve Street’s article once again – an article which has not evoked here a majority of comments concerning emulatable actions by the tenured for adjuncts, nor comments containing further suggestions of what the tenured might do to end the evils of adjunctification. No, the posting itself and many commentators have instead seen the article as yet one more occasion to say “Adjuncts shouldn’t rely upon us tenured folk – they need to organize themselves. You won’t see the tenured on the barricades with you. Just look at the civil rights movement.” Yeah, and no whites marched in Alabama, eh?
Steve Street: Your first title (“Kick an Adjunct Today”) was a far more accurate description of all of this, now, wasn’t it?
— Anti-hypocrisy advocate · Oct 27, 09:47 PM · #
A faculty with a strong union is in a much better position to limit the percentage of teaching hours open to adjuncts. If this percentage is limited contractually, more tenure-track people will be hired (unless class size is allowed to soar, or required courses are taught so irregularly that students find it difficult to graduate on time). This strategy works—although administrations will push back to erode the union’s clout. Once upon a time I had the privilege of teaching in a system with a strong union.
Now, having moved back “home,” I have taught a couple courses for poverty-level wages. I am at present refusing to do so. Even substitute teaching in the public schools is preferable, giving one time to read, do research, write, enjoy one’s grandchildren! But when the savings run out, well, the garage is there as an alternative.
— Renee · Oct 28, 09:19 AM · #
Not to be unkind, but whomever edits Marc Bousquet’s blog posting missed the astonishing irony of this piece. Marc writes, “My long experience in the movement — and my long study of movement cultures in the United States — suggests that there won’t be effective leadership by the tenured on these issues until there is leadership by the nontenurable.”
His claim of “long” experience aside, Marc Bousquet recently accepted an appointment as co-Chair of the AAUP’s Committee on Part-Time Faculty offered to him by Dr. Cary Nelson, AAUP’s recently re-elected president. So, as Bousquet plops himself down into the very type of leadership post he chides part-time faculty for not “stepping” into, he and Cary Nelson send the message to the higher education community and AAUP’s 3,500 part-time faculty members, that not a SINGLE part-time faculty member in AAUP could co-Chair the committee as well as Marc Bousquet. Hogwash. It was purely a political appointment, and such tactics inhibit and quash movements.
I would challenge Marc Bousquet to practice what he’s preaching in this blog entry. Resign from the AAUP Committee on Part-Time Faculty as co-Chair, and urge AAUP President Cary Nelson to appoint a part-time faculty member to lead the AAUP committee. That Bousquet didn’t do this when initially approached by Nelson leaves one wondering whether Nelson and Bousquet understand that in this particular drama, they’re not the stars, but rather extras.
— P.D. Lesko · Oct 29, 01:57 PM · #
On Comment 56:
Thank you for that important bit of information about the AAUP, its committee, and the blog host’s role, as well as for the eloquence of your comment.
To extend the theater metaphor: the tenured faculty should not aspire to the spotlight even as “extras” but rather be the enabling force in the “wings”, throwing the light where it belongs and keeping the sound level up.
Perhaps the blog host is padding his vita for promotion to full professor – that is a possibility. In any event, it is clear that he should step down from the post as chair and insist that “faux adjunct” Nelson appoint someone from the ranks of the contingent. At 70% of the nation’s faculty, there certainly is no lack of candidates.
But I’m not holding my breath. This is the AAUP which couldn’t even tolerate the operation of a listserv with direct feedback from the membership. It is indeed telling that dissent must migrate to other blogs to find expression. So much for the AAUP’s commitment to free speech, academic freedom, and the professoriate in all its ranks.
— Anti-hypocrisy advocate · Oct 29, 06:34 PM · #
“This is the AAUP which couldn’t even tolerate the operation of a listserv with direct feedback from the membership. “
My union dues at work.
— James · Oct 30, 06:53 AM · #