[A review of a book that calls the adjunct faculty issue a civil rights movement]
“When it comes to the faculty, separate
tracks can’t be equal. That’s the argument prominent adjunct activists make in
a new anthology edited by Keith Hoeller, a longtime adjunct professor of philosophy
at Green River Community College in Washington and vocal critic of the
‘two-tier’ system of adjunct and tenure-line employment. Through historical
references and rhetoric, Equality
for Contingent Faculty: Overcoming the Two-Tier System
(Vanderbilt University Press) presents adjuncts’ struggle for better working
conditions in what they see as an inherently unfair system as civil rights
issue. It also discusses examples of and other opportunities for reform.
“‘[The] two-track system in academe
does set up two entirely separate, but unequal, tiers in which the upper tier,
the tenure track, is treated in a vastly superior manner to the lower tier, the
non-tenure track, which is treated as inferior,’ Hoeller says in his essay, ‘The
Academic Labor System of Faculty Apartheid.’ He adds: ‘Higher education is not
simply another commodity produced by American factories; it is the building
block of our culture and democracy.’
“Hoeller uses the term ‘tenurism’
(drawing on Robert Fuller’s discussion of ‘rankism’ in his book, Somebodies
and Nobodies) to describe what he sees as the systematic subjugation of
adjuncts – under which they’re denied the same per-course pay, benefits, job
security and working conditions as their tenure-track counterparts.
“Lantz Simpson, a tenured professor of
English at Santa Monica College who taught for nearly 20 years off the tenure
track, makes a similar argument in his essay, ‘The New Abolition Movement.’ [According
to Simpson], ‘My proposal is simply this: the current, two-tiered system, mired
in contingency, should be replaced with the systematic regularization of
faculty — that is, contingent faculty routinely moving onto the tenure track
and thereby achieving full-time tenured status throughout the country,’ he says…
“Hoeller… proposes the creation of an
American Anti-Contingency Association, dedicated to the abolition of the
two-tier system and ‘equality for all professors, whose teaching should be judged
on merit, not on the tenure status held by the individual.’ He advocates for a
single salary scale for all professors and a single set of procedures for job
security and grievances. Whether the professor teaches part time or full time
should be at his or her discretion, he says.
“One of the book’s most provocative
arguments comes from Frank Donoghue in, ‘Do College Teachers Have to Be
Scholars?’ Donoghue, a tenured professor of English at Ohio State University
and author of The Last Professors: The Corporate University and the Fate of
the Humanities, asks what ‘holds adjuncts in their places for minimum
wage,’ despite having nearly the same jobs as their better-compensated
tenure-line counterparts. He says the pervasive ‘myth of meritocracy’ plays a
role, as does the prestige associated with the profession – scholarship, in
particular (for which most adjuncts don’t have time and aren’t compensated).
“Donoghue says that college teachers
should be scholars but calls for a broadening of the notion of scholarship beyond
articles and monographs, ‘the preponderance of which go... unread.’ (Donoghue
cites Ernest Boyer, who makes the same argument but extending well beyond
adjuncts in his Scholarship Reconsidered.)
“In an ideal world, he says, pedagogy –
including class preparation and reading groups -- also would be recognized by
administrators as scholarship, leveling the playing field for adjuncts, who
today do most of the teaching. ‘The tradition of published scholarship would
not die out; it simply would be brought into balance because it no longer would
be measured as a credential, but rather as some other more idealistic aspect of
our intellectual life,’ Donoghue says. ‘And the people making use of that
scholarship would be recognized as scholars themselves, as they should be.’
“Don Eron, a non-tenure-track,
full-time professor of writing at the University of Colorado at Boulder and
member of the American Association of University Professors’ Committee A on
Academic Freedom and Tenure, argues that the playing field would best be
leveled by granting adjunct instructors in good standing tenure after a similar
number of years as an assistant professorship.
“In ‘The Case for Instructor Tenure,’ Eron
argues that most adjuncts’ ‘at-will’ employment status is fundamentally
incompatible with the notion of academic freedom. That lack of academic freedom
ultimately threatens the profession as a whole – not just adjuncts, he says.
(Eron advocated unsuccessfully for this to be adopted at his institution, which
he recounts.)
“‘Instructor tenure is a natural
correction to the trend that began [40] years ago of replacing retired tenured
faculty with less expensive contingent faculty in order to achieve a more
flexible workforce in times of budgetary constraints and curricular change,
[Eron] says. ‘The unintended consequence of employing faculty who specialize in
teaching, but do so without academic freedom protected by due process,
plausible avenues for participating in shared governance, or an appreciable
commitment to their professionalism, has been the corrosion of undergraduate
education.’
“The two-tier system hasn’t been wholly
eliminated within the California State University system, but its faculty has
what Hoeller called ‘the best union contract in the U.S.’ for adjuncts. (Many
others have said the same, as adjuncts in good standing there have access to
health insurance and long-term contracts, among other benefits largely denied
to their counterparts elsewhere).
“Elizabeth Hoffman, and adjunct
professor of English at the California State University at Long Beach, and John
Hess, a retired organizer within the California Faculty Association, wrote the
book’s first essay, on just how the original, adjunct-friendly contract was won
for the association, in 2002. The association, affiliated with the AAUP,
National Education Association and Service Employees International Union,
represents both adjuncts and tenure-line professors.
“Despite initial acrimony between the
two groups, the authors say, harmony seemed to follow the parity in benefits
and working conditions that was achieved through an ‘inside-outside’ organizing
strategy. ‘This means that we organized within the [association] with all the
resources available to us and, at the same time, we went outside the traditional
[association] statewide and campus-based lines of command to confront our
campus administrators, to develop parallel forms of lobbying, and to reach out
to other contingent faculty.’
“…Hoeller said the book’s biggest
takeaway is that the adjunct faculty movement is really a civil rights
movement. If equality for all faculty really matters, he said, ‘we should be
against tenurism just as much as we are against racism and
sexism. Contingent faculty are not inferior. They are equal and should be
treated as such.’”
For the entire
article from Inside Higher Ed, Click Here.
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