With the whole first-time dad thing, I’ve been a bit behind on the video project! I have twenty interviews on the external hard drive and another thirty or so scheduled for this spring (I’m taking advantage of my book tour to collect more important testimony than my own). At the rate of one interview a week–a rate I haven’t really kept up, I’ll be at this another year.
I may have a third segment’s worth in the conversation with Cary Nelson, who is running for re-election as AAUP president. As it happens, I’m also running for re-election, to the national Council. It actually doesn’t matter whether I’m re-elected–my “opponent” is just as committed to the issues as I am, and I expect both of us will continue to serve the cause whether we’re on the Council or not. This is the case with many of the Council races: as it should be, they’re a win for the AAUP either way. Nonetheless, the presidential election in which Nelson figures is quite important with genuine philosphical differences between Nelson and his opponent: if you’re an AAUP member, you will have recently received a ballot. I urge you to read both candidates’ statements and VOTE.
If you’re not an AAUP member, you really should join, especially if you’re a graduate student or faculty member serving contingently. Why do I think that? In partial answer, I’ve copied my candidate statement below
The wholesale permatemping of the academic workplace is the global warming of our professional lives. Forty years ago most faculty were in the tenure stream. Today, the overwhelming majority are contingent faculty and graduate students. Many graduate students are laboring in the only academic job they’ll ever have. The turnover among contingent faculty, including full-time contingent faculty, is extraordinarily high, because their pay, benefits, security, and rights to due process—including those protecting academic freedom–are appallingly low.
This explosion of ill-paid, ill-protected contingent work hurts everyone concerned with higher ed, not just contingent faculty themselves. Undergraduate students are particularly harmed, suffering lower retention and graduation rates in connection with the insecurity, uncertain intellectual freedoms, and substandard employment conditions of the new majority.
The tenure-stream faculty are harmed as well. In the short term, individual groups of tenurable faculty may have the sense of retaining their status and benefits by acquiescing to representations of the “necessity” for ever-more contingent faculty and graduate employees. However the long term consequence of over-reliance on insecure faculty is quite the opposite. Just as in any other field of endeavor, academic wages and workplace rights trend in the direction of the poorest paid and least protected, as is already obvious by the steadily growing wage inequality between tenured faculty in fields where contingent labor is most employed and those where it is least employed.
The association has for years been moving in the right direction to serve our “new majority,” with significant policy statements, reduced fees, leadership roles, and the devotion of staff positions. But we can and must do more: devote additional staff time, interlock more vigorously with accreditation agencies, initiate public policy debate in federal and state venues devoted particularly to the substitution of flex labor for tenurable faculty, engage in public relations examining the relationship between teaching conditions and learning conditions, and so on. Over the next eighteen months the association can, and must, communicate to every member of the majority faculty that their needs are concretely and unwaveringly central to its mission.
Recently:
- Happy Fourth?
- Poverty In Higher Ed
- What I’m Reading Now
- Meet the Trustees, Part 1: Trustees Behind Bars
- They’ll Be Watching You
- Maybe He Can’t
- Academic Labor Bookshelf
- Job Listing #666
- Psst! Forward this Link to Grad Students
- Don’t Miss COCAL VIII
Comments
This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 11th, 2008 at 6:16 pm and is filed under Precarity, academic freedom, academic labor system, coming attractions, faculty on food stamps, solidarity and a tiered workforce. 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.
Marc,
A couple of quick points:
1. AAUP policy statements make it quite clear that the organization is on this Earth to defend tenure and academic freedom, even the policy statements relating to part-time faculty.
2. I have no issue with the AAUP about that. I find it refreshingly direct. However, it means that AAUP is committed to defending the jobs of its members who hold tenure-line and tenured appointments, not necessarily the jobs of those members who hold part-time appointments. This is a conflict of interest any way you slice it, I think.
3. There is no research that concludes the use of part-time faculty impacts the retention and/or graduation rates of undergraduate students at 4-year institutions. The Jacoby study refers to community college students, not those in 4-year institutions.
4. The NEA conducted a survey which concluded that the average part-time faculty member held her/his job 7 years. We conducted a survey of Adjunct Advocate readers, and found that the majority of them had held their jobs between 7-20 years. The “high turnover” rate among part-time faculty is a myth. One-fifth of tenure-line faculty, according to AFT research, are denied tenure and leave their jobs after 5 years. Two percent of tenured faculty are dismissed each year, according to the same research.
It’s just really difficult to pinpoint documented differences between full-time and part-time faculty. This is, of course, why the students benefit, learn and graduate– even with the use of 70 percent of temporary faculty in our higher education system.
Hey, PD. We can talk about this in detail next week. We probably don’t disagree on the need to protect the job security of faculty serving contingently. They should have tenure in the positions they have, and the opportunity to convert to different kinds of positions if that’s what they prefer, and shouldn’t be displaced by younger faculty in any kind of conversion plan.
I think you may unintentionally be mischaracterizing the AAUP position on these issues: over the past several years, AAUP and all of the major unions have moved toward better positions. Defending “tenure” and “academic freedom” needs to mean defending the rights of all faculty. I don’t think everyone in the organization believes that yet–any more than any academic organization has come to 100% realization on the issue yet. But AAUP isn’t the enemy of faculty serving contingently, though it probably won’t become the perfect friend to faculty serving contingently that we both want it to be until we make a lot of progress in a lot of other institutions. (All this is the subject of my Monday IHE column.)
Quick note: by contingent, as you know, we are no longer talking about full-time versus part time: we are talking about full-time contingency.
Anyway, plenty to talk about, and I don’t think we have serious disagreements here. Solidarity, M
Marc,
Good post. Keep up the good work with regard to making the AAUP ~more~ and more sensitive to the contingent faculty plight. I’ve been an AAUP member on and off for about five years (depending on my finances). I think the organization and many of its members truly do want what’s right for the part-timers. Many, unfortunately, understand the economics better than the academic freedom issues. Please keep reinforcing the plight of part-timers who don’t have tenure protection.
Most sincerely,
Tim Lacy, Ph.D. (history)
Chicago, IL
After thirty odd years in business around the world, I decided to enter academia by teaching as an adjunct and getting a doctorate in org. leadership, principally because I was interested in what made some organizations work and what made others disasters.
I can’t resist comparing the academic world with some parts of the business world. For example, one concept that has been found to be very useful is that of the value stream, originally popularized by Michael Porter. Simply put, it is the some of the activities that an organization engages in in order to deliver a product or service to customers, or more broadly, stakeholders. If the cost of the activities in the value stream exceeds what the stakeholders will pay for (in the case of academia - students, parents, donors, foundations and others who give grants) for the value they receive, then the model is broken. It is hard not to wonder why the academic model is broken, and I have to conclude it is broken if tuition keeps going up and the average wage per student hour goes down as more adjuncts are used. What goes on in the value stream that contributes the non value added costs - for example the committee on the color palette mentioned by one of the interviewees on the videos. I also listen in wonderment at the rueful comments about why things take so long - “This is academia” is the classic answer and nobody thinks it is unacceptable. In the business world, slow decisions, inability to change, a disconnect between the income and costs are all indicative of broken business models, a changing value proposition, and inefficient processes. The term corporate university is a misnomer. No corporation would put up with the bloated inefficiencies that exist in the administrative processes and the bloated administrative ranks. Finally, some universities are outsourcing noncore processes like email to people like Google who can do it better and more efficiently.
Maybe it is time to look at models from the business world. IBM and Accenture have drastically cut their overhead by eliminating offices. Why is it necessary to maintain the office space and other infrastructure on campuses? Let the faculty work from home and go to the classroom when it is time to teach. All of the costs in the value stream not directly related to research or content delivery must be examined and eliminated, cost reduced or outsourced.