“The Adjunct Underclass”

“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).

The Chronicle Review

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Illinois Legislature Repeals 3% Cap on Pensionable Teacher Salaries

Struck from Amendment to Senate Bill 1814:

“…For academic years beginning on or after July 1, 2018 and for earnings paid to a participant under a contract or collective bargaining agreement entered into, amended, or renewed on or after the effective date of this amendatory Act of the 100th General Assembly, if the amount of a participant's earnings for any academic year used to determine the final rate of earnings, determined on a full-time equivalent basis, exceeds the amount of his or her earnings with the same employer for the previous academic year, determined on a full-time equivalent basis, by more than 3%, then the participant's employer shall pay to the System, in addition to all other payments required under this Section and in accordance with guidelines established by the System, the present value of the increase in benefits resulting from the portion of the increase in earnings that is in excess of 3%.

“This present value shall be computed by the System on the basis of the actuarial assumptions and tables used in the most recent actuarial valuation of the System that is available at the time of the computation. The System may require the employer to provide any pertinent information or documentation.

“Whenever it determines that a payment is or may be required under this subsection (g-1), the System shall calculate the amount of the payment and bill the employer for that amount. The bill shall specify the calculations used to determine the amount due. If the employer disputes the amount of the bill, it may, within 30 days after receipt of the bill, apply to the System in writing for a recalculation. The application must specify in detail the grounds of the dispute and, if the employer asserts that subsection (g) of this Section applies, must include an affidavit setting forth and attesting to all facts within the employer's knowledge that are pertinent to the applicability of subsection (g). Upon receiving a timely application for recalculation, the System shall review the application and, if appropriate, recalculate the amount due.

“The employer contributions required under this subsection (g-1) may be paid in the form of a lump sum within 90 days after receipt of the bill. If the employer contributions are not paid within 90 days after receipt of the bill, then interest shall be charged at a rate equal to the System's annual actuarially assumed rate of return on investment compounded annually from the 91st day after receipt of the bill. Payments must be concluded within 3 years after the employer's receipt of the bill. This subsection (g-1) does not apply to (1) Tier 2 hybrid plan members and (2) Tier 2 defined benefit members who first participate under this Article on or after the implementation date of the Optional Hybrid Plan…” (pg. 351-353).  

“It is now time for House Democrats to follow his lead, and do what must be done. An impeachment inquiry must now be launched”—Jeffrey C. Isaac

“Robert Mueller’s public statement [yesterday] was, apparently, ‘vintage Mueller’—I say apparently because I don’t know this guy at all, and am relying on the comments of those who do. He was careful, concise, by the book, and delivered with all the dispassion he could muster.

“Mueller essentially reiterated what has already been clear: (1) his investigation was a professional endeavor warranted by overwhelming evidence of Russian interference in the 2016 election, and was the farthest thing from a ‘witch hunt’ or a ‘coup’; (2) the report which resulted from the probe contains substantial evidence of Trump campaign cooperation with the Russian effort, even if not ‘criminal conspiracy’; (3) the report contains more substantial evidence of Trump’s obstruction of justice, but it did not recommend criminal indictment for one simple reason: such a recommendation was inconsistent with Justice Department rules, and thus with Mueller’s charge as a Justice employee; (4) it is for Congress to decide whether and how to act on the evidence contained in the report.

“Mueller stated that he did not wish to say anything else ‘in this manner,’ i.e., in unprompted public testimony, and that if called to testify before Congress, he would do little more than reiterate what he has said here, which is that ‘the report is my testimony.’ Fair enough. Mueller is a by-the-book ex-Marine, a professional federal prosecutor who is scrupulous about his job and its limits.

“His very terse judiciousness puts the lie to White House claims of ‘witch hunt.’ And in his own exceedingly legalistic way, Mueller is now the second Republican in [three] days—and Mueller is most definitely a registered Republican—to make plain that it is Congress that has a Constitutional responsibility to deal with the evidence contained in his Report. The first is Republican Congressman Justin Amash, who yesterday held a town meeting explaining to his constituents—in language much bolder and more emphatic than Mueller’s—that an impeachment inquiry is necessary.

“It is both ironic and embarrassing that it is now two Republicans who are schooling Nancy Pelosi and her so-called Democratic ‘leadership team’ about the responsibilities of Congress. It is now for Congressional Democrats to take the lead in moving the process forward. And an impeachment inquiry is the only way to move it forward in a powerful, publicly-focused way.

“And the first order of business of such an investigation will be to invite, and if necessary subpoena, Mueller to testify. He might not want to testify. He might truly believe that the report is his testimony. But that is not for him to decide. And if he has clearly demonstrated the backbone to stand by his sense of professional responsibility, it is not for House Democratic leaders to demonstrate their backbone in the performance of their responsibilities, by requiring Mueller to testify. Because, here's the problem, the report does not ‘speak for itself.’

“And there are a great many procedural questions that really need to be answered—questions that are not contained in the report but are about the report—related to how the investigation chose to limit itself, and how it decided who to interview and how not to interview (Don Jr.?), and what other information relevant to Congressional oversight was turned over to other Justice Department probes.

“Mueller must be required to speak about these things, in a careful and serious way, by answering careful and serious questions put before him by Congressional inquirers, in a public hearing. In order for this to happen, House Democratic leaders must get serious about their responsibilities and about politics: a careful, well-organized impeachment process, designed to expose the malfeasance of the Trump administration, is both constitutionally necessary and politically necessary to weaken this dangerous president, so that he can be legitimately defeated in November 2020.

“This requires a very honest, transparent, and public process, designed to inform the public at large. Without such a process, the information contained in the Mueller report—the truth uncovered by the Mueller investigation—will remain obscured, mute, irrelevant, and thus null. For in order for the truth to have the power of truth, it must be properly communicated.

“John Dewey explained this well in his 1927 classic, The Public and its Problems, where he criticized this naivete of ‘scholastics’ who imagine that ‘truth’ is ever self-evident: ‘The schools may suppose that a thing is known when it is found out… [but] a thing is fully known only when it is published, shared, socially accessible. Record and communication are indispensable to knowledge. Knowledge cooped upon in a private consciousness is a myth, and knowledge of social phenomena is peculiarly dependent upon dissemination… A fact of community life which is not spread abroad so as to be a common possession is a contradiction in terms. Dissemination is something other than scattering at large. Seeds are sown. Not by virtue of being thrown out at random, but by being so distributed as to take root and have a chance of growth…’

“The knowledge contained in the Mueller Report must truly become public knowledge. This can only happen through a public process of communication of the report and about the report. And this process must be more than simply a ‘scattering at large’ of information. It must be a deliberate (and deliberative) process centered on the sharing of a range of facts, inquiry and debate about the meaning of the facts, and then action on the facts.

“Only impeachment can accomplish this now. Mueller must speak in public, before Congress, as part of a broader inquiry into the many ways that President Trump and his administration represent a clear and present danger to constitutional democracy. Mueller all but invited this conclusion in his very terse comments [yesterday]. It is now time for House Democrats to follow his lead, and do what must be done. An impeachment inquiry must now be launched.

Mueller Just Invited To Do Its Job: Impeach Trump 

Jeffrey C. Isaac is James H. Rudy Professor of Political Science at Indiana University, Bloomington. His books include: Democracy in Dark Times (1998); The Poverty of Progressivism: The Future of American Democracy in a Time of Liberal Decline; and Arendt, Camus, and Modern Rebellion.