“How did we discard the idea of college faculty? That is, how
did we decide to systematically eliminate an entire class of professionals whom
we once trusted to conduct the final distillation of our children into capable,
confident adults? How did we come to decide that college teachers didn’t
deserve job security, didn’t deserve health insurance, didn’t deserve to make
more than convenience-store clerks?
“It wasn’t hard, really.
“We discarded college faculty in the same way that we discarded
medical general practitioners: through providing insane rewards to specialists
and leaving most care in the hands of paraprofessionals.
“We discarded college faculty in the same way that we discarded
cab drivers: by leveling the profession and allowing anyone to participate, as
long as they had a minimum credential and didn’t need much money.
“We discarded college faculty in the same way that we discarded
magazine and newspaper writers: by relabeling the work “content” and its
workers “content providers.”
“We discarded college faculty in the same way that we discarded
local auto mechanics: by making all of the systems and regulations so
sophisticated that they now require an army of technicians and specialized
equipment.
“We discarded college faculty in the same way that we discarded
bookkeepers: by finally letting women do it after decades of declaring that
impossible, and then immediately reducing the status of the work once it became
evident that women could, in fact, do it well.
“Our contemporary religion of innovation has as one of its
tenets the following belief: Rather than defeat your competition, make your
competitors irrelevant. This is exactly what we see in higher education.
College faculty were not defeated after great struggle, after a battle with a
winner and a loser. College has simply been redefined, over and over, in ways
that make faculty irrelevant. College teaching, as a profession, is being
eliminated one small, undetected, definitional drop at a time…
“The problems with the adjunct structure of higher education are
not merely quantitative. It’s not just about how badly adjuncts are paid, not
just about the inadequate opportunities for our students to build enduring
relationships with the faculty who guide them. It’s also about fear, despair,
surrender, shame — the messy, hidden human elements that finance and policy
always miss.
“The story of the adjunct faculty, of the postdoctoral scholars,
of those in ‘alt-careers’ — that story will be incomplete unless we recognize
that we are refugees from a nation that would not have us. We have found our
way to innumerable continents, but still hold that lost home in our hearts. We
still, many of us, in quiet moments, mourn the loss of our community as we make
our scattered way across diverse lands.
“The decision to join a community is never solely rational. We
discover a way of life we find appealing, learn more about it, start to make
friends with others who hold similar values. We shift our vocabulary, our terms
of engagement, our enthusiasms. Our calendars are marked by different
constraints — rather than birthdays and Thanksgiving, we attune ourselves to
semesters, grant-proposal deadlines, the week of our discipline’s national
conference.
“We become new people in order to join this new culture. We know
that our proposed membership in that community will be subject to great
competition. We offer ourselves as contestants in a pageant for people who
can’t even describe their own desires. We imagine that with the right costume
or the right theme music, we might be chosen. We sniff the air, hoping for a
phrase to borrow, to learn this year’s color, to please the taste makers as we
pass by in the parade of the damned, hoping for the rare and unpredictable nod
that will allow us to move from the slush pile to the long list to the short
list to the campus visit to — dare we think it? — an offer of membership.
“Some few will get in.
Some larger number will not. But the peculiar cruelty of higher education is
its third option — the vast purgatory of contingent life, in which we are
neither welcomed nor rejected, but merely held adjacent to the mansion, to do
the work that our betters would prefer not to do…”
Herb Childress is a partner at Teleidoscope Group, LLC, an
ethnography-based consulting firm. This essay is excerpted from his new
book, The Adjunct Underclass: How America’s Colleges Betrayed Their
Faculty, Their Students, and Their Mission (University of Chicago
Press).
It is well known that adjunct faculty work without job security, without the benefit of healthcare, and without an ethical living wage. Most universities’ priorities are their development of building projects and technology, renovation of infrastructure, management of revenues and investments and reducing operating costs, administrative/bureaucratic positions and salaries, and athletic programs and their resources.
ReplyDeleteThere is no equity for adjunct instructors. Courses staffed with contingent adjunct faculty cost the same student tuition and provide the same credits staffed by tenured full-time faculty. Adjunct faculty grade compositions and tests, write recommendations and advise students, devise and develop classes, create lesson plans and course materials and improve curricula, among other unpaid responsibilities.
There are no due process protections for adjunct faculty. There is no equal pay for equal work. There is no professional advancement. There is no equity in the lack of health insurance and retirement benefits available for adjunct faculty. There is little to no inclusion in the way higher education’s formal decision-making procedures and structures are made. Indeed, adjunct faculty are simply part-time contractors, “lecturers,” or non-essential “marginalized” hires who are disenfranchised from high-level governance and required to carry out most of the responsibilities of the full-time faculty (and sometimes at multiple institutions), but for less than one-fifth of the salary of the full-time faculty and without meaningful job security from one semester to another.
From Tony Harper:
ReplyDeleteFrom the perspective of an active adjunct and one who functions well in the classroom, the interesting aspect of this issue is that the college teaching faculty have in a ssense abandonded themselves. Currently, the so called college teaching faculty are several generations removed from serious teaching responsibility, primarily due to the enormous influence and power of the military-industrial complex a la Eisenhower resulting in the bought (and sold) minds of the Ivory Tower. Teaching has never been a valued profession in this country, and the fact that this devaluation has expanded into the echelons of higher education is unsurprising. Given this cultural bias and the money available from the (now) military-university-nano-biotech complex, I see little change in the near future.
Best,
Tony