(A humble rant.)
The decisions we make have unintended consequences that can define us for years to come.
Certainly this is true for individuals, but it is no less a fact for institutions, and for higher education as a whole. If you try to talk to department chairs, deans, or others about faculty labor practices—the growing ranks of disposable adjuncts and part timers—you are likely to get a polite demurral. A meeting beckons, there are papers to grade, a cat box with someone's name on it. It's true that academic labor equity is a losing issue and has been for a long time. That's why many will write about it in The Chronicle of Higher Education, Inside Higher Education, or other national publications. But no one inside the Ivory Tower who has primary responsibility for executing these policies is much interested in talking about it. No one likes it, but no one -- even those at the highest levels of academia -- believes they have the power to change the situation.
It is also true that most of non-academic America has little sympathy for the overeducated and underemployed — the "PhDs on Food Stamps.” And I have to say, I get it. When I read of the legion of hapless, debt-ridden, struggling adjunct faculty part of me wants to react unsympathetically: Well, who the hell asked you to get a PhD in (Art History/Linguistics/Ethno-Botany)? Certainly no one put a gun to my head. But, if no one asked us to pursue higher education as a calling and career, we were indeed called. We believed in the primacy and necessity of higher education for economic, scientific, and cultural advancement, and for the health of democracy and the body politic. We wanted these things not for ourselves primarily, but to help others and our communities at large achieve them. When the necessary labor of teaching, learning, and service becomes economically untenable for contingent faculty (many of whom have PhDs, publications, teaching awards, fellowships, and excellent professional evaluations and references), when the system devolves into a race to the bottom to pay the New Faculty Majority, we begin (and will continue) to lose faith. Faith can persist in spite of all evidence to the contrary; but eventually, faith must also feel justified. And it is not just the graduate assistants—the talented mathematicians or philologists who abandon dreams of graduate study and a life of teaching, research, and service—who lose faith. The students, the public at large, and some of our policy makers are losing faith in higher education and its much vaunted value proposition. The persistence of inequitable labor practices in teaching and learning in institutions whose other policies and rules have made them test-beds for some of the greatest advances in affirmative action, gender equity, and social responsibility can no longer be overlooked as a minor contradiction.
Questions of Policy
When you can wrangle a response to the question, "how did we get here?" you get two answers. It's been this way for going on thirty years or more. And it wasn't deliberate — it wasn't a "policy." It was an accidental juggernaut or a series of crisis responses. I think it's time to recognize that the de-professionalization of teaching resulted from deliberate policy choices. A policy is a repeated set of administrative actions that bring about a consistent result. We have to conclude that the present academic labor crisis is not a crisis at all, but the result of long term policy decisions. It may not be a system anyone wished for. It may be the result of decisions made long ago, before anyone knew how they would play out. Nevertheless, contingent faculty do most of the teaching, for inequitable pay, and under difficult working conditions, and very few are willing to stick their necks out to try and change that fact.
Should faculty labor policy change? I don't know of any person or organization who claims that things are as they should be, and nothing needs to change. What is lacking is institutional will.
Why should it change?
- Labor equity is a simple question of fairness — equal pay for equal work.
- The steady de-professionalization of teaching means that fewer and fewer faculty are tenure related. This leads to an erosion of faculty claims to governance and legitimacy when the majority have no role in faculty governing bodies, no meaningful roles for departmental service, and no say in hiring and retention. The de-professionalization of teaching means that fewer and fewer faculty take on administrative duties.
- A two tier, or multi-tier labor system creates tension and ill-will within departments.
- The current non-system of adjunct labor is inefficient. The need to find, hire, retain, and ultimately discharge so many faculty in short time leaves department chairs scrambling mere days before a term begins to find qualified people to teach crucial classes in the major or general education curriculum.
The Current Focus on Student Success
If faculty labor conditions do not create the need for action and forceful rhetoric among senior administrators and faculty, factors commonly gathered under the rubric of "Student Success” provide a stark contrast. Institutions have, motivated either by self-study or external scrutiny, looked to the conditions that affect student graduation rates. What helps them graduate with a bachelor's degree within six years? What teaching practices and support programs help them to get through the classes that have high attrition and failure rates? Institutional researchers look at many descriptors—transfer status, age, whether a student is a first-generation college student. And now more and more are examining the faculty status of those who teach the classes, and what interactions in class and outside of class students have with tenure related faculty and adjunct and part time faculty. There is a growing consensus that time spent in consultation with a professor outside the classroom (informally, in office hours, after or before class) is an important predictor of student success. Who has the time and resources—like a private office, like regular and predictable employment year to year at one institution—to initiate and respond to such interactions with students? Faculty on the tenure track, or those with tenure.
And most importantly, there is a growing body of research that shows that over-reliance on adjunct teaching negatively affects student persistence and success. Among the findings:
- Freeway fliers cannot spend time outside class with students, one of the main predictors of student success. According to the National Center for Educational Statistics, adjuncts spend less than half the amount of time outside class with students than do tenure related faculty.
- Adjuncts often lack access to basic resources, like an office, a phone, a place to meet with students.
- The current “system” of adjunct hiring, of fill-in professors, causes gross inefficiencies in administration.
- An over-reliance on adjunct labor also leads to discontinuities of service and class offerings. Adjunct faculty are less likely to be able to form the long term mentorship relationships that help students through a long uphill climb from first time freshman, or returning student, to college graduate.
Major studies are now being completed on this link between faculty labor and student completion rates, and finally some are asking—how can we organize faculty labor to better serve students, rather than ourselves?
What can be done? When we survey the de-professionalization of college teaching and its effects on student persistence and success, several alternatives present themselves.
- Doing nothing will lead to a further erosion of confidence in higher education, a further erosion of the tenure system, a further erosion of faculty claims to self governance, further erosion of our graduation rates, more students taking longer to get degrees, more debt, and more doubt about the legitimacy of higher education’s claims for its economic and social necessity.
- Commit to regularizing faculty in core liberal arts disciplines: math, science, humanities — those who teach for a living. Set goals and targets; make these part of the performance based budgeting criteria and accountability standards that are in vogue today. Institutions need to commit to making the regularization of contingent faculty in disciplines where the faculty in question are not professionals working in some field such as law or business, and who teach as a way of making extra money or giving something back to the field.
- Create state- and system-level policies that support adjunct faculty. The University of Maryland System created system policies on the hiring, retention, and resource support for adjuncts. The system board and leadership of the University of Maryland made this a priority not out of sympathy for part time faculty with no benefits, but out of their sense of obligation to the students.
- Graduate programs need to rethink their admissions policies, and grad students need to prepare themselves for careers other than teaching.
- Adjuncts need to organize and be prepared to work as partners with their tenure-related colleagues and administrators.
- Contingent faculty need meaningful roles in shared institutional and departmental governance.
- Accreditation bodies are starting to and need further to look at faculty labor conditions impacting on student outcomes. Labor practices should become one of the standard metrics of accreditation.
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