THELIN:
For anybody who wants
to know what late capitalism in the twenty-first century
looks like, go to the university and you'll
see it, it's there. (♪♪♪) STEVE STREET:
We all like to deal with
simple blocks of meaning. You know, simple phrases,
simple truths. You know, we like to know
who's going to listen, who outside academia
is going to listen to listen to us explain
the difference between the two tiers. The difference between
contingent faculty. Are you a teacher
or are you not? Are you a professor
or are you not? JULIE DEMERS: A lot of people
don't know what an adjunct is. A lot of my students don't know
what the difference is. They come up here
to do conferences with me and they say, "Oh, is this your
office? It's really cool." And I say, "No.
I share this with a bunch of other adjuncts
for the English department" and some people say,
"What's an adjunct?" CHRISTOPHER DEAN:
I know a lot of folks who've
worked as contingent faculty. They don't come from
one perspective. They don't have one experience. They don't have one particular
type of income even. It's a huge diverse group and to lump them all together
into this sort of junk term. Adjunct faculty, like we're
some sort of appendix. It's an Adjunct means that
you really aren't a part of the entire endeavor
of the academy. Contingent at least
gets a whole lot closer
to the sort of honest truth. Is that our jobs are contingent. They're contingent
on all sorts of things. JENNIFER LEE: Last semester
I taught four sections of comp one and then I taught comp one at
Saint Rose and creative writing. My husband didn't see me,
you know, hardly at all. I decided to take two graduate
classes as I'm pursuing my MFA and I'm only teaching four, but it's still a lot. It's still quite a challenge. QUESTION: And how many students
do you have Jen? LEE: A hundred, hundred. QUESTION: A hundred students? LEE: Well, no.
Now it's probably, what, ninety. Ninety. Last semester it was a hundred and thirty.
Insanity. (♪♪♪) (♪♪♪) CARY NELSON: In a piece
some years ago I described the English and
foreign language departments as the fast food disciplines because they really have
originated the problem. I mean, they pioneered exploitation hiring
amongst the faculty. It's one of their
real achievements that they can go down
in history for. The casualization
and deprofessionalization of the work force. SETH KAHN: Well I certainly
think that English studies as has been a gigantic
contributor to the creation of our current
conditions. To the extent and you know, it gets into lots of
interdisciplinary politics. I think, to lay out the reason,
I think that's true. With departments becoming more
and more financially dependent on general
education writing courses and tenured faculty in other
parts of our discipline besides writing
who don't want to teach them and don't want to ever
think about them. BRONWYN WILLIAMS: As long as you
have a universal requirement for writing courses, then there are going to be
a lot of writing courses and the university
is going to say we can't possibly hire
full time people when you're running 150, 250,
300 sections a semester. That's just too many people. You're going to have
to hire part timers. BOB SAMUELS: So what we're
seeing in higher education is the same institutions
that are producing new PHDs are also then
eliminating the future jobs of those people by relying
on graduate students and part time faculty. B. WILLIAMS: Obviously, from
just an economic point of view the number of PHDs, MFAs, MAs who are out there
and the number of positions available for them
on the tenure line, as departments
are currently constructed, mean that there's a surplus. DEAN: I don't know
if it's a dark secret, but you know people in comp,
we don't tend to talk about labor conditions quite so much. We kind of need
an action plan I think. WILLIAM H. THELIN:
This is capitalism
as absolute perfection because you have
all these people making very little money doing
the hardest work. Supporting these programs
so that people a little bit farther up
on the pyramid can teach their
medieval literature or their seminar on Emerson
or whatever it might be. CARTOON:
So you said you wanted
to meet with me today. Yes. I'm going to grad school
in English. No. I don't think
that's a good idea. You will probably end up
as an adjunct, getting paid less than
many of the secretaries and janitors in the school. I will work hard. ELIZABETH CONWAY:
I had a lot of expectations
about being an adjunct because it was never my goal. You never hear
a first grader say, "Now when I grow up I want
to be an adjunct teacher." It's not something I planned on. SAMUELS: Of course the big
problems are with compensation, with job security,
with intellectual property. A lot of faculty are hired
at the last minute. A lot of them never get
support or training. A lot of them don't have
offices or computers. They're often judged solely
on student evaluations. Often they're not
even evaluated. And so it's just
a general kind of lowering of the quality of how
faculty are treated and it's a way of justifying
paying faculty less money. PETER BROWN:
I think casualization
came about as a result of monetary factors. It's a form of out sourcing. Such as the way we lost
a lot of our manufacturing base that went overseas
because labor was cheaper. It's a lot cheaper to hire
people off the tenure track and pay them a fraction of what
tenure track people make. MARC BOUSQUET: Cost and control.
That's what it amounts to. Administrators over
the past forty years have asserted tremendous control over the mission of
the university and their terms. Right, which is to say,
over the curriculum and governance
of the institution. Control over the spending,
the funds they've generated. Larger and larger pots of money
through unheard of tuition hikes and they have spent
those funds on initiatives that they
are deeply committed to which are not necessarily
the same initiatives that the faculty
are committed to. SAMUELS: I think the issue is becoming more
and more visible, but the question is, it's unclear how people
should feel about it. Or, just letting people know that your kids are going to be
taught by nontenured faculty. Well, their general public
person says well, you know, I don't have tenure.
No one else I know has tenure. Like, why should anyone
have tenure? Everyone I know is part time. Or, you know, and so,
I think we have to talk about the quality of education issues and also look at
the spending issues. Where is the money going? If it's not going to the
faculty, where is it going? What are the priorities
of these institutions? DON ERON:
When state appropriations
to higher education began to go down administrators started replacing
retiring tenured faculty with contingent faculty, quote
on quote, temporary faculty. I say quote on quote not because
I'm self conscious, a self-conscious ironist, but because they would be hired
semester after semester, year after year after year. These were not temporary jobs,
only technically. And they would teach twice
the courses for half the pay. MIKE PALMQUIST:
The problem is a simple one.
We've got this oddly tiered faculty system in which some people get paid
quite a bit more than others. It creates inherent inequities. And anybody whose seeing
what's going on says, well, we have to still, we've
a growing college population. And how do you meet the need of putting a teacher in front
of a classroom? So, economically it makes sense
to hire faculty who cost less to the university. I've hard arguments with,
or discussions. I think argument
might be too strong a word, with some of my colleagues, who are in higher administrative
positions than I am who tell me that really we owe
it the people of the state to provide the highest
quality education at the lowest possible cost. KAHN: One reason that
contingency has become as much as much of a standard
practice as it has... my inclination is to want to put
it in terms of neo-liberal economics in the
way that that's kind of become the dominant paradigm
for higher education. Minimizing costs, selling access
to higher education as a kind of economic boon. Saying hey, students you can
afford to go to college more easily if we can cheapen the cost of providing
the work force for you. (♪♪♪) LEE: There's been a lot
of talk at Hudson Valley lately, ever since the adjuncts' hours and the number of classes
they can teach has been lowered due
to the affordable care act and not wanting to...see, it all
sounds bad doesn't it? MATT WILLIAMS: There is not
necessarily a qualitative difference between someone who
is a contingent faculty member and someone who
is a full time faculty member. But there is a difference
in the realities that those, that those
two groups live within, okay. And it's those circumstances that impinge on every
aspect of what we do. ROSS BORDEN: I don't even think
that the distinction between part time
and full time faculty is in fact, it's not a
qualitative distinction. All it is, is the terms
of your contract. You're employed in this way
on these terms, under these conditions. Or, under different terms
with different wages. It's just these are just
employment categories... Theres no whether you're going
to be, you might as well say, these are the people
that are not going to be paid and these are the people that
are going to paid, but the work is the same
and the place wouldn't work unless these people were
at the work. M. WILLIAMS: The median wage
is $800 per credit hour on a range of about $600
to $1000 per credit hour. Depending on whether you have
PHD, or a master's degree, how long you've been there,
how many courses you've taught. At $800 a credit hour, it's, it's impossible to earn
a living wage. The university limits
an adjunct faculty member to only teaching 21 credit hours
per academic year. So at $800 a credit hour,
that's you know what $16,800. LEE: One semester I was
on three campuses and it's a lot of travel
and less investment. Even if you want to invest
more in your students, it's just not feasible. (♪♪♪) I guess I just
imagined having more interaction with other adjuncts,
other professors, on a regular basis. I guess I didn't think about
just even the travel, right? And the logistical aspects
of how split my time is. If I were on one campus
it would change everything. JENNIFER MARLOW:
I just was not educated to the realities of higher ed. It's labor practices,
it's politics. So, I when I first got my first
adjunct position, I really thought this was like
the key to the magic kingdom. JESSICA BROUKER:
When I got the job
at Hudson Valley everybody said, you just wait it out because
they are really good about hiring full time after
you've been there for a while. And they were
really good about it. Until about the past four years. Because the year that I came in was the last year that they
hired anybody full time. STREET: I worked real hard,
worked many different campuses, but you know once you get
on the adjunct tract, you stay on that tract. JILL HANIFAN: The problem,
somewhat with contingencies, is not that it's part time, which is its own problem, but that it's perceived
as it's temporary. When in fact, people are
doing this, like, like myself, for
twenty-three years. CARY NELSON: If you look at
all the areas, where the use
of contingent teachers is heaviest in higher education, you know, the need for it
is going to be there for our great grandchildren. Let alone for the lives
of the contingent teachers. So there's also no need
for flexibility. PALMQUIST: I remember
back in 1995, the first time I was a WPA,
maybe it was '96. I had brought a proposal from
the composition faculty to allow adjunct faculty
to have a voice in our department
executive committee. And I heard a range
of really heartfelt arguments against doing that. Three years later, we were able
to get that done, but it was interesting to see
just sort of the attitudes, the notion that these
are short time people, they are not committed
to the department, they are not part of us. So I think part of it is this
notion that the faculty really is composed entirely
of tenure line, and other folks are there
just to assist. (♪♪♪) DEAN: Well, you know,
I'm a big believer in truth in advertising. I think the parents would be
kind of surprised to know that a huge number of their
children's classes are going to be taught by people who, in some instances, are
right on the edge of poverty. DEMERS: There was a day,
not too long ago, when I was looking
at my bank statement and I needed to buy groceries. And I thought,
well, I'll have to wait till the end of the week
till I get my check. A student, at the same time,
came into class and she was holding one of those like mocha latte grande
Starbucks something's. You know, they cost $5,
something like that. And I just remember looking
at this student and thinking that here she was
buying this drink and that's more than
the half gallon of milk that I was going to be buying and couldn't afford
at that point. It was just sort
of a moment for me because it shouldn't
be like that. CARRIE HOLLIGAN:
The thing that can improve
the condition of my job, what I would have to say,
would be higher pay. My reason for believing
that is because it's difficult to live
on an adjunct's salary. Many of us pair it with
different jobs and different professions,
and night jobs and side jobs. And as a result it's difficult
to focus solely on teaching. DEMERS: I do have
health insurance, but the funny thing about
the health insurance is the health insurance
is so expensive that you can't pay for
a doctor's visit. LEE: Well, they did
actually offer health insurance, but they paid zero of it
and it was $800 a month. BROUKER: I don't have
health insurance and I haven't had it since 2009. So, I go to Planned Parenthood because that's where I get my
checkups and whatever I need. So, I was at Planned Parenthood
in the waiting room one day and one of my students
walked in. And that was the most mortifying
experience of my entire life. I don't want the students to see
me at Planned Parenthood. And that's just one
sort of example of how strange
it is for me sometimes to be standing in front
of them thinking, okay, you know, I want to give
you the tools to be productive in society
so that you can do better than what I'm doing for myself. You know what I mean, so that
you can go out and make and have a financial future
that I'm not getting. ZARTASHA SAMSON:
A couple of students
said that they were going to were looking for
jobs for the summer. And I said, you know what,
I'm in the same boat. I'm looking for work, too. And I was very straight
with them. I said, look,
if you see me at the mall selling frozen yogurt,
don't be surprised because I can't find
work right now. DANIEL BEAUDRY: I understand
why schools have set limits about how many courses you can
teach as an adjunct, but the unintended
consequence of that is the fact that we have
to go and sort of, use the word
prostitute yourself, but you end up sort of going
door to door, saying hey will you hire me
for two courses? PAUL LAMAR: I think I would
say to an adjunct, ally yourself with one or two
people on campus who have had some experience
with the institution and really ask for what you need
and be part of the conversation. Again, there's a little luxury
of having some time to do that if you're trying
to satisfy two masters, being at two different
institutions... may not have that opportunity
to be as collegial. MARY FITZSIMMONS: Especially
if you're on multiple campuses and you don't have necessarily
a presence on your own campus. You can feel, I think, a part
from, rather than a part of. LEE: I feel marginalized
a lot of the time. I feel powerless sometimes
and it's a strange juxtaposition with the role of a professor. LAMAR: I love
my adjunct life, but it's partly
because of where I am in terms of age
and experience. If I were younger
and starting out and didn't have some
experience behind me, I think I'd be hoping I would
always land somewhere full time. DEMERS: There's nothing
I'd change about the students or the other teachers. It would just be to be able
to have a full time position. That's the only thing
that I would change. DEAN: You occasionally hear
things, little snippets, that make it kind of clear that maybe the work
that you're doing, the position that you hold
isn't that important. Or, you should be doing
something more and better. You should get
into a PHD program. You should get into a tenure
line position. That kind of eats away
at you a little bit. SAMSON: In this job
market I don't even know that with a PHD if I will be
able to get a full time job. BROUKER: Quite frankly I
don't know if I can afford
to get my PHD to have more debt and the same amount
of opportunity. I just don't know that
it's worth it. FITZSIMMONS: So if retention
is a concern of colleges and it is,
that long-term necessity of having people who are
committed to the college, committed to the students
is really an important factor in considering what is best for the larger community
of the college. M. WILLIAMS: Let's face it,
we're addicted. Okay, the system is addicted
to contingency. It's the fundamental business
model in higher education. SUZANNE HUDSON: Administrators
are addicted to cheap labor and that's all it is. It's cheap labor, but I don't think there
are any arguments that contingency
is a good thing for anybody. It's not good for the faculty. It's not good for the college. It's not good for the students. Especially not good
for the students. BROWN: Conditions
of teaching are the same as the conditions of learning. Adjuncts typically
teach the introductory, elementary courses,
the general education courses. So, that for the first
two years maybe, most students will encounter
primarily adjuncts and if they're running off
to another job, if they don't have an office, that's certainly going to affect
the students. ANNE WIEGARD: I think that
teaching conditions equals learning conditions
is an equation that can go really
in the wrong direction when people say, oh that means
that part time people aren't teaching as well because
they're not paid enough and so on to do a good job. And that's not what it means. It means the same thing
that it would mean if you were looking
at a hospital and there was a nurse
who was responsible for 75 patients by herself. You would say, hmm,
the working conditions there are going to affect
the patient care. Even if she doesn't sit
down all night, if she doesn't get dinner, if she's doing her very,
very best, and ninety percent
of the patients would say, gosh, this is a wonderful nurse
and she's treating me great. It's inevitably going to affect
the quality of care. SAMUELS: I think a lot
of contingent faculty are excellent teachers. Some are better
than tenured faculty, but often they're
working without proper preparation
or time to prepare. Often they're hired
at the last minute. Sometimes they're forced
to teach a book that they don't even know. THELIN: And what's really
bad is the things that start to appear
tried and true are current
traditional practices and they're looked upon
as rigorous or, I can't...there's
no administrator in the whole university
and I would bet any university, who would complain about a TA or an adjunct giving
grammar lessons. Yet, we know those
were ineffective. When it comes down
to the effects on pedagogy we're getting a lot
of undereducated people to begin with teaching
introductory composition. BETHANY AERY CLERICO:
As I understand that
there's a lot of discussion now about what to do with this
massive adjunct pool and the labor force and the lack of full time
positions that are available. I would hope that there
eventually comes some change because I think that would help streamline writing instruction and give students
much better access to better funded,
happier, smarter, more informed instructors. THELIN: Composition
after this fifteen years or almost twenty years
we've become a field and we have understandings
that we're going to move on and move forward with and it never really happened because all
this composition theory never ever took into
consideration who is teaching this, the conditions under
which they suffer, under which they toil. FITZSIMMONS: Teaching
the writing courses definitely has a different commitment, a different rhythm in the time
that you devote to... The reading of the writing takes
time and care, and so there could be
a lot of that conversation that goes on certainly outside
of your classroom space, but I think it's necessary when you're teaching writing
to continue that conversation as generously as you can. (♪♪♪) LEE: So we're writing
more than ever as a society, so if you can find the way
to get each student connected to the importance
of writing through something
they enjoy already. That's kind of a huge task. There's only so much time
in the semester to teach you know
certain things developing a thesis, research, knowing how to integrate sources
into one's writing, both ethically and effectively understanding what
it means to analyze something versus summarizing or responding and then also
I think, how to read. CONWAY: The problem
is that teaching writing remains a compulsory course
at many universities, and yet it's not
its own department and it's often not taught by
full time faculty members who have invested interested
in the campus. But rather, these full time
teaching appointments are broken up into
bits and pieces and they're scattered
to adjunct professors who may or may not
be able to return to that campus the next year
and who are overworked because they're also
waitressing in the evening and working at another campus. LAMAR: For me it's
the having the flexibility a little bit of my schedule. So Tuesday and Thursday
I can be here, but then some of my students
can't meet, so this morning I signed up
for Friday morning to come in from 9 to 12 to meet
with the students that way. But if I were an adjunct,
let's say, at two or three or two institutions
that could be tough. DEAN: You want people
who really give a damn about their students
and care about them and you can teach the rest, but if you don't have that,
you're hosed. And I think I've met so many
contingent faculty that have that and are willing
to do things above and beyond often times what they're
actually paid to do. BROUKER: The policy
of the community college where I teach
used to be you could have up to four courses
without being full time. With this new policy, they're
saying they can't give us any more than two courses. So now they're hiring
more adjuncts so they can get more
two courses, instead of fewer four courses. A lot of adjuncts are leaving. I know about four who have
other job options right now and they probably
won't be there next semester. LEE: And there's
adjuncts that have been teaching four classes for fifteen years and now half of their income is being cut
and it's not just here. FITZSIMMONS: There's
that sense that that person is a consistent member of
the community, of the faculty. That's wonderful for students especially if they've
built a rapport and they really appreciate
looking in the book and finding your name. They want to find you. They'll be like, why isn't
she teaching that course. She's taught that before. I was hoping to take that course
with her. And you just won't have it. Your name will be missing. BROUKER: But if I have
to leave teaching, which it's looking like
I might have to do because I can't survive
with four courses. It will kill me
a little bit each day, mentally and emotionally.
It really will. NATHANIEL WARD: What's
central to the issue of working as an adjunct in humanities
is this issue of why? If you're going to pay us
what you pay us and if you're going to eliminate
full time positions all over the place,
why even bother? Why are these things required? If institutionally you're not
that interested in the outcome, then what are we showing up for? What are we making the students
jump through these hoops for? So, I think that all of those
questions would be answered, the health insurance
would be taken care of. I mean I don't know. It's funny. Every time I go into teach I
feel like I'm part of a problem. MOVIE CLIP: I'm not doing it. LEE: Truthfully I love teaching,
but I get really exhausted. At this point I'm
looking into other areas. I have one other job
one day a week. Until a full time position
presented itself to me, I'm looking at
what my options are. (♪♪♪) BROUKER: I mean I feel
like I've been reading so many things about it
that it is out there, but who is reading it? Who's investing in it? WARD: If I'm teaching in an
institution that's willing
to hire me more or less sight on scene
and doesn't really care what I do in the classroom and isn't necessarily
too concerned with what comes out
the other end... How do you assert that it's as meaningful as what goes
on in the bio lab or in the economics class or in the political science
class or whatever, right? If the institutional policies
and practices are tacitly suggesting that what goes on
doesn't really matter and hey, everybody gets
an A or a B anyway. I think it's difficult
not to fall into that place of being
the archetypal, frustrated composition
instructor. If only the world understood and the world is not going
to understand, so we need to bring
understanding to the world. And that's a hard thing to do. PALMQUIST:
You ought to be thinking
about rhetorical arguments, the things that we can use
to make real changes. NELSON: The appeal to, I
think, tenure tracked faculty is not only based on
professionalism and ethics. It's also based on the
self-interest of the faculty in maintaining its traditional
areas of authority so that they can guarantee
the quality of education. And I think that's it's also
potentially an appeal to students and parents
that they can understand. They may not care that much
that contingent faculty are poorly treated because so
are many other employee groups, but they might care
that if faculty are contingent, if the majority of faculty
are contingent, the control of the faculty
to make good decisions in its area of expertise
is jeopardized. That's the big price
for higher education to pay. BROWN: Most students
are not aware of this whole issue
of contingency, so we can start
with the students, the student newspaper. M. WILLIAMS: And they buy fair
trade coffee, how about fair trade education? KAHN: 4C's has its statement,
MLA has its statement, NCTE has its statement and everybody's
got their statement about why the treatment
of adjunct faculty is unjust. We need to figure out
more ethical ways to handle the situation and you
know it's everybody knows. I don't think there are very
many people in our field who don't understand how bad
the situation is. B. WILLIAMS: If the larger
culture in the culture within the university
still thinks you know when you
give them assignments and you correct the grammar
and you give it back to them, Why should they pay for it? Right? If they don't really
understand what we're doing and why we need to do things
like have writing conferences and work through multiple drafts and the amount of time that
takes and so forth. If we haven't made
the first case we can't make the second case. What we need to do is show them how it's in the interest of the way that they want
to think about education to have students
who are thoughtful, critical, rhetorical savvy
readers and writers and that's what we're doing. It's not just an instrumental
kind of transcription that we do when we teach writing
but this is a fundamental, core function of a university
in every way. THELIN: So we as compositionists
really need to ban together and make a national assault
on the media about what good composition
instructors should look like. DEAN: What I've tried to do
and move more towards
is sort of action. It's nice to theorize about
these things, but at the end of the day I don't think
that does a damn thing. We've got like
rhetoric over here and we've got this
action over here. We bring them together
and we've got reaction, baby. I mean, like, whoa. BROWN: It came about slowly. A lot of us were not
paying attention and now there's
this huge problem and it's going to take a while
to rectify it, but I think eventually
it will be changed. It's going to take
a huge effort, though. MARIA MAISTO: It is our duty
to stand up and to speak out about when
there is injustice in the work place in our society and when we refuse to do that
out of our own fear then we're actually contributing
to the problem. DEAN: Until you have
a lot of contingent faculty as sort of part of the process, they're going to have
their identities made for them
by people who don't share the same sort
of material conditions. THELIN: The first
thing that I think adjuncts must do is they have
to stop thinking of themselves as these professionals
who are privileged, who should be happy they're
working in the university because of the luxury
or flexibility of the situation. They've got to start thinking
of themselves as labor, as the working class
of the university. DEAN: If we're working people we
need a lot of working people and I think that's what we are. Academic workers,
but working people nonetheless. THELIN: In the history
of labor struggles, the workers have had to take
action to make things better. That's I can't think of one
labor struggle that was averted because
the management said, you know, you guys are just
working a lot harder than we're
giving you credit for. We need to give you guys raises and better benefits
and better work conditions. We're going to get
right on that. NELSON: One of the obvious
things a union can do is to say, no more than
x percentage of courses on this campus will be taught
by contingent faculty. You can have that written
into a contract, otherwise, what've you got? A hope and prayer
of doing that kind of work. I think, actually,
unionization has become practically the only way
of sustaining instruction as the primary function
of the university. LEE: I pay union dues, but I
don't know what I pay them for. My sense is
that the full time faculty are much more
participatory in the union. DEAN: I think the one way
that you make your labor matter sometimes to management
is you withhold it. BORDEN: I wish you could,
as a generation, hold the line. You could say
I'm not going to accept a position on these terms.
It's insulting. LEE: If all of the adjuncts
across the country went on strike, then the colleges
would have a very big problem. Everything would shut down. KAHN: I want to be able to say, stand up and scream and yell
and stomp your feet until people get it but
you'd be fired for doing that. I want to be able
to say you know organize, unionize,
collectivize. People get fired for that. LEE: If the laborers go out
and are the ones to picket, then will they still have
a job the next semester? SUE DOE: Thanks to really
some leadership on the part of tenured people, who were willing
to stick their necks out... I got involved at sort
of a different level. I don't think I would have,
frankly, done that independently because I had certainly gotten
the message over the years that these were
not issues that you challenged because, of course,
you were contingent and at any moment
could be asked to go. MAISTO: I know many, many,
many tenured faculty who are absolutely appalled at the working conditions
of contingent faculty and are not afraid to say so, but more need to speak out. DEAN: We need to be maybe
a little more locally focused and actually look around
and say, huh, that group of people down
the hall, who are they? What are they doing? Maybe I should talk to them
for heaven's sake. KAHN: There are active ways
to support people who need the support and if we
are in a position that is yes, privileged with a capital P, enough to be able to do it,
then why aren't we? But I don't think a great deal
is going to happen until people, like me, who are tenured
and promoted, and what have you...
are willing to say, no I will not ask for
reassigned time for research. I will not ask
for reassigned time for parts of my job that don't
directly support my department and the faculty in my department because I'm a whole
lot more concerned about the people
who are working here than I am about
whether I get to publish this article in one year or two. B.WILLIAMS: We need to certainly
be unified as tenured faculty, but what we need to do
is take the game to the people with the money and the people who set
the larger policies. That's where things
have to change. THELIN: If people were to engage
in collective action, which is actually
just individually asking out of contracts, they can get more salary. I know if I were the WPA
and I had that happen to me, I'd be screaming at my dean, I'd be resigning from
my position. I'd be saying, no,
I can't do this. You need to find some money
and you need to find it now that we can hire back these
people who are dependable, who do their job as well as they
possibly can and perhaps, if we pay them better, they can do their job
even better. B. WILLIAMS: But when I think
about my work as director of a composition program, my number one goal was to raise
pay for the adjuncts. a goal at which
I failed miserably. It's like being
the manager of a restaurant. You don't own the restaurant,
you can't set the menu, you can't set the pay rate
for the waiters, all you can do is run
the day-to-day operations. It's middle management
and middle management is almost always and very often
justifiably unpopular for those very reasons... because you're carrying
out the orders of people
you often disagree with and exploiting people with whom you may have
a lot more sympathy and feel you have
more in common, but you can't really do
anything for them. DEAN: The people at the higher
levels of university systems... you want to make them
a little bit ashamed even that they are trying to sort
of exploit a class of people. And sort of not talking about
it, not making public, just allows it to keep
on going as it is. B. WILLIAMS: The contingent
problem is a problem of gender. It's a class problem, but it's also incredibly
a problem of gender. If we don't attack it as such... and I think that's another
political statement we could be
making to departments. I think it's another
political statement we could be making
to presidents, to boards of trustees...to say, you have a huge
gender inequity here. PALMQUIST: But here's
the issue: we've got very bright people
in contingent positions, who have not seen
a pay raise in a while, who are likely
to start organizing, unless the university
does something to show that they care, and are concerned
about their positions. What are we going to do? Are we going to wait
till this blows up? Are we going to start
putting people into
longer-term positions? Are we going to start
increasing salaries? And the answer actually
has been at my institution to put people
in longer-term positions and start raising salaries. They're not at a level that's
adequate yet, but it's better. B. WILLIAMS: I may
continue to agitate for a lot of things
at different levels, but there's also the case of what you can try to achieve
and what you can get. I'm sure there are other people
you're talking to who will say this is
the wrong tactic, but at some level
I'm pragmatic about it. What can we get now? THELIN: If you can put some more
bucks into each adjunct's pocket that could be done tomorrow. There's money on those campuses. You can't tell me
the football stadium, or reconstructing it,
or putting more seats in it is more important than paying
the people teaching. DOE: Renewable contracts
have been a strategy that many colleges and
universities have undertaken. Certainly we can
go back to Wyoming and the idea
of the humane lectureship, the idea that
with some degree of continuity, that people could at least enjoy
the sense of job security, if not the reality of it. While that hasn't been
entirely successful, it certainly offers
something more than the semester by
semester contract or the year by year contract, which still remains
a very common practice. MAISTO: Providing some sense,
some job security, continuing contracts. KAHN:
Offering longer term contracts. PALMQUIST: I think
the most likely solution is going to be
specialized positions. We haven't been successful
in higher ed for arguing
for more tenure lines and with the economic situation
the way it is, it's likely that we'll continue
to be put off on that for a number of years. So, I think we need
to look at alternatives that sort of debunk this
notion of the two-tier system and say we have about
a twenty-five-tier system. B. WILLIAMS:
There are a lot of places now
that have been able to turn most of their positions
into term positions. Term positions meaning,
the terminology varies, but by that I mean
non tenure track, but full time with benefits,
and so forth. I think that places like,
you know, Doug Hesse, what he said
at the University of Denver, has really been amazing and I think those are
really good jobs. DOE: Places like
Penn State and Duke have something called
the professor of practice, which is a very
interesting idea. These are non-tenure track
positions, but they carry rank and they have a degree
of sort of credibility and distinction
associated with them. They're legitimate positions. They're term positions. BOUSQUET: If you look
at what's happened with the ameliorative strategies over the past
thirty or forty years, what you've seen is a massive
growth in full time, non-tenure track,
teaching only appointments. That represents
nearly twenty percent of the academic workforce,
which is to say, roughly the same number
of people who are tenured. If you wanted to double,
double overnight the percentage of faculty
who are in the tenure steam, one strategy would be
to move all of those people into teaching intensive tenure
track appointments for a relatively modest cost over what they're being paid
right now. SAMUELS: I think
the federal government, which provides so much
financial aid, and pell grants,
and different types of funding. should have a certain
kind of requirement that seventy five percent
of the faculty are full time. There should be some effort
by the federal government to involve themselves in this. PALMQUIST: We need to get our
professional organizations even more involved in this. They need to be doing
some research on what are the effects
of long term, of the long-term growth
of non-tenure line positions. What are we giving up
by not putting people into positions that are secure? That allow them
to grow as teachers? To allow them to contribute
to the life of the department. I think that's one of
the issues that we really
ought to be looking at. DEAN: Universities can change and sort of tack in the same way that oil tankers can. It's a very slow process, but if we start turning
the wheel now, eventually the ship will turn.
