In today’s mailbag, Miriam at The Little Professor has a nice reading of HTUW, and raises a couple of good questions in relation to the book. She wants to learn more about the way affect or “teaching for love” helps drive exploitation and wants to know what could happen to contingent faculty if contingent work is converted to tenurable positions. Also correspondent AMV wants to know whether spousal hiring policies are an authentic demand of the nontenurable, or simply a perk of the privileged.
Regarding teaching for love, folks that want to learn more about the way that affect benefits employers should read things like Andrew Ross’s “The Mental Labor Problem” and Dana Fisher’s Activism Inc, which shows the horrendous permatemping of undergraduates working for causes.
Regarding the theoretical bogey of displacing some of the majority contingent faculty by increasing tenure-track employment, Miriam asks this reasonable question, “what will happen to MA and ABD faculty if colleges are successfully persuaded to restore tenure-track percentages to earlier levels. Who is going to have a better job?”
This point about contingent faculty is a thorny one. Like most contingent faculty issues, there’s no consensus on it even among contingent faculty leadership. This is not surprising, since contingent faculty _are_ the faculty–including grad students, they could be 80% of the total. Increasingly “tenure stream” means “administrator candidate pool.”
The thing is: contingent faculty turnover is 30% a year. No real-world plan to restore tenure-stream lines would really be displacing these folks.
Additionally, no responsible plan to restore tenure-stream lines would permit it. Folks working at the institution can be tenured as part of the process.
There are lots of ways of thinking about this. First, individuals that have been on the faculty contingently with primarily teaching responsibility can be tenured on the basis of teaching if that works for the individual and the institution: tenurability has not historically, is not now, and does not in the future need to be equated with research scholars only.
Second, for the many who are en route to PhDs and are/would be research scholars, there’s plenty of precedent and opportunity to provide paths for conversion.
Lots more to talk about–including the fact that “tenure,” as we think of it, is a lousy form of job security. It’s too arduous, too arbitrary, relatively insecure, and vulnerable to demagoguery and institutional policy manipulation (ask scholars of German and Italian literature how tenure helped them when their departments were abolished!)
The tenure enjoyed by police officers and kindergarten teachers is generally superior. More on this point (contrary to propaganda, tenure is a lousy form of job security) in a couple of weeks.
Finally in the mailbag, in response to Adjunct Whore’s successful bid for conversion to the tenure stream after a policy change by her employer, AMV returns to the point of partner hiring, which we’ve discussed before. AMV asks whether spousal hiring policies are fair in “a grossly competitive job market,” and then asks whether it is a white and heterosexual privilege. I’ve already answered the latter question: spousal hiring policies should be extended to partner hiring, and AMV is right to suggest that the language should be modified (which I do in my own practice–in the book introduction, for instance, I thank my spouse as “my partner”).
And I’ve already given the big picture answer: the point is not to fall into the trap of “there’s one pie, folks; fight amongst yourselves for a piece.” The point is to bake more pies.
There are two further answers worth quickly noting here. First, most folks who’ve studied the question, such as the Council of Women Historians at the AHA, have concluded that partner hiring policies are a feminist demand. Increasing numbers of men concur.
Second, it’s important to distinguish the demand for a partner hiring policy from current partner hiring practices, most of which are ad hoc. In the absence of a policy to generate fairness, partner hiring benefits star faculty, coaches, and administrators. The absence of a policy generates potential for bias of all kinds, including gender and sexuality bias.
Recently:
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Comments
This entry was posted on Wednesday, January 30th, 2008 at 10:07 am and is filed under Precarity, administrators, faculty couples, gender, graduate education, this blogging life. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
But it is a zero-sum game, until we DEMAND that the pie be made bigger. And if you’re a tenured professor, whose inability to find an academic job will make you realize that something’s seriously out of whack? Your colleague’s spouse, who goes to all the same cocktail parties you do? Or some random name on a CV who’s now working at Starbucks?
I’m not suggesting rejecting partners as some kind of consciousness-raising measure. I realize that partner hiring has some benefits, such as promoting marriage between equals. But if we’re talking about the social consequences of non-solely-merit-based hiring policies, we should consider all of those consequences.
Thanks, Marc, for the link to the AHA’s very helpful and interesting document.
I’m just not sure what “bake more pies” means herein–somehow transcend the current cutthroat competition by somehow creating a greater demand?…’scuse my ignorance/dystopian demeanor, but how on earth might…that…ever…happen? (Whose got an oven big enough?)ann arbor’s right again. Exigence is the thing. Without issuing a practical, real, performative demand, no change. Marx’s Theses on Feuerbach (ahem…if’n I’m recollecting correctly): “philosophers want to understand the world, but the point is to change it!” We have lots of good literature, now to the point.
maybe i’m missing the point through the hostility, but are either of you (AMV/Ann Arbor is overrated) suggesting that there is some kind of meritocracy to academic hiring? there is no doubt a racial, sexual, and class bias to hiring practices across the board. but your dismissal (i went to cocktail parties and thus got a tenure track job?) falls squarely in the anti-affirmative action, naive camp. maybe next i’ll have to defend what i wear ala a rape case.
a critique of hiring practices is without any doubt warranted, but to fall into the same reductive summation, one steeped in gender and class bias of your own, is not only unproductive, but serves to reinforce the same practices you claim to despise.
seriously, folks, lets “broaden” as you suggest to understand that pointing fingers at other marginalized figures is lame.
I have not displayed any hostility, gender bias, or class bias. As a feminist and a female engineering lecturer, I am well aware of the realities of bias in hiring. And clearly, I did not suggest that going to cocktail parties results in anyone getting a job. I used that example to point out that when the brutal academic job market affects one’s friends, it is harder to ignore. I believe that partner hiring policies have positive and negative effect, and one of the negative effects is that they can insulate faculty from the worst effects of the current system. If you would like to argue that this is not true, I think that would be more effective than accusing me of racism, sexism or blaming rape victims for what they wear.
By the way, I currently work in the department I just graduated from. I would not, however, be terribly offended if someone suggested that there are upsides and downsides to a department hiring its own recent PhD graduates rather than bringing in outsiders.
Perhaps one way of moving forward is to think about ways that we make “demands” (ann arbor) and “change” (amv). Typically we do those things most effectively not as individuals, but in organized groups. The disciplinary associations are part of the picture, as are faculty senates, but there’s no substitute for a workplace association, such as a union. And if your union is dominated by a tenured minority (as some are), then it might be worth forming a ntt caucus.
I have to go back to my 2 core answers here: grow the pie (or, if you like, snatch it from the hands of the administration), and the importance of establishing _policy_, as opposed to the ad hoc practices that predominate, in which partner hiring means a bonanza for the tenured administrators and unfairness for most others.