Adjunct faculty: steps in the right direction

Warning: heavy linkage ahead.

Dean Dad calls attention to Josh Boldt's post and a crowd-sourced Google spreadsheet of per-course payment at a number of institutions. The numbers might surprise anyone who hasn't worked as an adjunct. They sure didn't surprise me, because I have.

They would certainly surprise that Columbia philosophy professor (can't recall his name) who a few years ago caused an uproar by helpfully saying that if adjuncts didn't like getting paid ONLY $6-7,000 per course, why, they ought to go out and get themselves a tenure-track job. He also suggested that maybe we should just let students major in whatever is this year's trend ("water" was one of the disciplines, as I recall). Well, it was better than this, but you get the idea.

Anyway. This is part of MLA President Michael Berube's call for real change in treatment and pay for the new faculty majority: "Adjunct, contingent faculty members now make up over 1 million of the 1.5 million people teaching in American colleges and universities." The MLA has talked about this for a long time, including in its 2009 report, but there seems to be a new seriousness and urgency about it, as there should be; you can read more at New Faculty Majority. (For the record, the places I've taught have really worked hard to ensure long-term contracts, health benefits, and other issues of fairness for contingent faculty.) Somehow this new energy on the part of the MLA makes me think, or hope, that these are steps in the right direction.

The debate seems to have spilled over into the "I've got tenure--how depressing" thread over at the Chronicle, too. As I've said before, "post-tenure depression" frankly baffles me, but then, everyone has different stress or depression points. The comments over at the Chronicle break down into two categories: (1) "I felt the same way, too" or (2) "You have a full-time job! How DARE you complain?" [Note: Dr. Virago has a good take on this in the comments.]

Notes from a former adjunct

There have been two blog threads I've watched going the rounds recently, threads I've watched from afar. One is the "burnout after tenure" thread (seen at Historiann's and elsewhere), and the other is the controversy over Tenured Radical's advice to adjuncts. I spent a lot of years as an adjunct, so I have a few thoughts:

• When TR tells you "Don't listen to senior colleagues who tell you that there will soon be a line in your field and that you are ideally positioned for it," believe it. Repeat it. Cross-stitch it on a sampler. Tattoo it on your forehead. Anyone who would tell you that is probably trying to be (1) kind or (2) hopeful about your prospects, but it's just cruel.
• Let me put it this way: If they're not willing to put a ring on it, so to speak, when they're telling you that they can't live without you because of all your fancy extra service work and great teaching, they're not going to be more likely to do so when a shiny new parade of faculty candidates comes to campus. If you decide to stay when your department is courting the shiny ones, that's your decision, but do so with your eyes open.
  
• Let me put it another way: do you remember the movie An Officer and a Gentleman? For those who didn't see it, Richard Gere is a Navy officer-in-training and Louis Gossett, Junior, is the grizzled old sergeant. Gossett knocks the snotty attitude out of Gere and teaches him life lessons. At the end, Gere is a shiny new officer, ready to have an exciting career, and Gossett is . . . the grizzled old sergeant, waiting to knock some sense into the next batch of snotty recruits and show them the ropes. I did not want to become that grizzled old sergeant (adjunct) showing the new officers (t-t faculty) the ropes of the place, even if it meant getting out of teaching altogether.
  
• On the other hand, New Kid says that "there is a whole cohort of people out there for whom contingent employment is their career." Absolutely true. A lot of people who were adjuncting in my old department are still adjuncting there many years later, either because they had family ties or because they didn't want to leave grad school city.
  
• I have known people who have retired from their positions as adjuncts, and they were happy about their careers.
  
• I've also known people who became administrators of programs, or advisers, or otherwise were employed in academia without tenure-track positions, and they were happy, too.
  

This isn't to say that there shouldn't be more tenure-track jobs, or that the job market is bad, or that those who want t-t jobs shouldn't be angry, or any of that. I don't have any advice.

Academe and the handmaiden

I'm just catching up with Perlmutter's "The Joyless Quest for Tenure" at the Chronicle. To put it mildly, I have a few problems with it.

1. What quest-romances has he been reading where the protagonist says, "Golly gee whiz, I'm glad to be going on this quest! What a swell adventure it'll be!" and lives happily ever after? Isn't a quest by definition, well, hard to achieve and not especially joyful?

2. Perlmutter tells us to "Just avoid being relentlessly negative," a state that doesn't seem to go away with time. Are people really depressed and not especially joyful when they get tenure? Do we really need to throw them a Tenure Shower with Post-Its and "Guess the Citation Format" games just to cheer them up?

3. Dr. Crazy has rightly called him out for the assumption that "wife" and administrative assistants (translation: academic wives, for people of a certain mindset) would take care of the petty details. As Dr. Crazy pointed out, some of us have this support and some of us don't. Even though this advice is well meant, it's the kind of advice that could only come from someone who has (and has always had) this kind of support--a person with academic privilege.

I'm reminded of Wendell Berry's essay "Why I Am Not Going to Buy a Computer." Shorter Berry: "Because it is Good for the Earth and I am an environmentally pure soul, I refuse to buy a computer. Oh, and also because I just put the pages on my wife's typewriter and she types them. See how easy it is to get along without one?"

There's a kind of idealism, or "professionalism," or whatever you want to call it, that doesn't want to get its hands dirty by doing something of lower status but isn't averse to having someone else do so. Sometimes this status differential is obvious (just ask me about my years as adjunct faculty), and sometimes less so: "Undine, would you like to take notes?" if I'm the only woman at the table. Mercifully, I think there's less of this than there used to be, but I guess what I'd like to see is this "academic handmaiden" work made more visible so that the privilege of those who use it is equally visible--visible enough, in fact, that Perlmutter wouldn't be caught off guard by comments about it as Wendell Berry was twenty years ago.


And the "have your wife type your papers" thing isn't a myth; I've actually heard this.

Likely Outcomes?

http://chronicle.com/weekly/v52/i28/28a01401.htm
From an article on the Adjunct Advocate:
"Ms. Lesko thinks that the best way to win beneficial restrictions on the use of adjuncts in academe is simply to focus on data that show, for instance, that an adjunct teaching seven classes cannot teach as well as an adjunct teaching two or three classes. Do that, she says, and the parents and students who pay tuition will pressure institutions to change because the current regime of part-time employment in higher education will be seen as delivering a lousy product. In other words, when playing to people in Peoria, aim for their wallets, not their class solidarity — and forget the rhetoric of abuse."

In a market in which the supply of potential adjuncts was roughly equivalent to the demand, Lesko might have a point, but what's the most likely outcome when looking at, as Mr. Cheney might say, the job market we have rather than the market we want?

1) Parents will surely place this issue at the top of their radar screen and demand that adjuncts be limited to two or three classes, thus ensuring better wages for all.

2) In the event that parents notice, and care, and make an issue of this, administrators will respond to this data, slap their foreheads, and immediately provide better wages with all of the unlimited funds at their disposal.

3) The data will be used to cut the number of sections given to individual adjuncts and spread among a greater number of the ever-increasing pool. This will have the effect of denying some adjuncts health benefits, since a certain number of courses taught is usually required to receive benefits, and will also ensure that those who have been squeezing out an existence teaching 7 courses will not be able to survive without getting a job at Wal-mart.