What Is The Good Life? - Scenes from a Dystopian Job Market

The lucky winner of this job will be in an excellent position to opine on the Good Life.

The College of Liberal Arts and Sciences at the University of Florida invites applications for the position of lecturer to teach the Humanities Common Course, IUF 1000: What is the Good Life?, to begin August 16, 2016. As part of the UF Core Curriculum, IUF 1000 is a multi-disciplinary humanities course, taught in collaboration by the faculties of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, the College of the Arts, and the College of Design, Construction, and Planning.

This is a full-time, renewable, nine-month, non-tenure accruing position. Duties include teaching two sections and up to six hundred students per semester while supervising up to ten graduate teaching assistants, and contributing to development of course content and assessment of course delivery. Minimum qualifications: experience teaching multi-disciplinary humanities core courses, and a Ph.D. in a humanities discipline in hand by the time of appointment. Preferred qualifications: experience teaching large lecture courses with comparable course content, and supervising graduate teaching assistants in such a course. Salary will be commensurate with qualifications and experience and include a full benefits package.

The Good Life does not have tenure.
The Good Life has a student-professor ratio of 600:1
The Good Life does come with benefits
All grading in The Good Life is done by graduate students who, upon completion of their PhD, will also be in an excellent position to opine on The Good Life (without tenure, with benefits).

Who comes up with this stuff?

Crowdsource: Adjunct Hiring - Best Practices?

Dear Adjunct, Part-Time, and/or Contingent Faculty,

I'd like to know how you were hired. Was there a public call for positions or were you just contacted by someone in your network - a friend, a patron, a colleague, a mentor? You can let me know through comments here, on social media, or via email.

I'm writing a piece on this issue for the Chronicle and so please email me and offer me a pseudonym or ask for anonymity if you don't want to disclose your identity.

I'm writing in the context of a new book that links the mistreatment of adjuncts to informal hiring practices, and argues that we need to re-professionalize systems of hiring. It's a good book and more on that later, but for now I'd like to hear from adjuncts about their thoughts.

My questions are:

1. How were you hired for your last adjunct job? Was there any formal process? Was the job announced and open?
2. How would you like adjunct hiring to work?
3. Do you think there is a relationship between the informal hiring of adjuncts and their mistreatment?

Thank you!

National Adjunct Walkout Day

Today is National Adjunct Walkout Day. Around the country, adjuncts have organized walkouts and rallies and donation funds and many other efforts to bring people together and insist on fair wages.

And they are right to do so. As a tenured faculty member, I stand fully in support with this movement, I see their movement as my movement, and will continue do the following - write publicly on the issue, act privately within my university and department, be ready to stand in picket lines and participate in labor actions as they emerge.

I have written some adjunct-related pieces.

• A two-part essay on language. I argue that adjuncts are forced to employ hyperbolic rhetoric (adjuncts are slaves, adjuncts are migrant workers) because too many tenured faculty refuse to see themselves as labor. But when all faculty and staff stand together, we've already accomplished a lot.
• An essay on #FreeCommunityCollege - Community Colleges are packed with contingent labor. The Free Community College debate must include adjunct action for the sake of the students.

Here are a few additional thoughts, though nothing formal, and I welcome debate, dissent, and added thoughts.

The entire university system is now balanced on a tower of debt on the one hand and an exploited workforce on the other. It is unsustainable. I think part of the key moving forward is to link these two problems in the eyes of students and parents (and politicians), rather than the current method of short-changing teachers to keep tuition costs down (not that it's working).

What does the future of higher education look like?

1. The whole university system collapses except for the super elite. We're all adjuncts. It's just about workforce training.

2. Students rebel against the adjunct system, realizing they are going into debt and the money isn't going into instruction. Paradise returns!

3. We continue to stratify in sustainable if unjust ways, dividing the profession between research and teaching profs more explicitly. Both earning stable middle class wages, but tracked and hard for teaching profs to switch from one to the other. Adjuncts return to their original purpose as short-term offerings, ways to bring professionals into the school, and related functions.

I guess I'm working for #3, as I believe it's realistic and possible that we could to turn most adjunct jobs into stable teaching positions with benefits, professional development, and a decent wage. I think we serve the students best when we are teacher-scholars (and I am very critical of profs who, at the elite level, try to avoid the classroom), both contributing to our field and engaging learners in the classroom. So I dislike the split model, but it's better than what we have now.

How do we get there?

One way is for the accrediting bodies to demand that we meet certain thresholds.

A second is for students and parents to demand it. Adjuncts are usually terrific teachers (my basic premise is that everyone is brilliant), but part of what makes a great college prof is the ability to really engage with your students. Adjuncts don't have the time. They often take time though, and then their wages per hour plummet even lower.

A third is for adjuncts, themselves, through labor actions and the support of other faculty, to force change.

Can we combine these three? I'm not sure, but I'm going to continue to write in ways that talk to fellow tenured faculty and to prospective students and parents of students, while supporting labor actions as they come up.

My pledge: I will not cross a picket line of adjuncts.

Contingent Faculty and #FreeCommunityCollege

For the next few days, Community Colleges will be in the news, thanks to the president's proposal. #FreeCommunityCollege was the top trending hashtag in the U.S. yesterday. There are lots of news reports and surely hundreds of think pieces to come.

My basic assessment is that it's a good plan that if enacted, because it's not a "last dollar" plan (i.e. the money only comes after other means have been exhausted) will make 2 years of college more affordable for many Americans. It will undermine the for-profit market as well as the Frankenstein ASU-style for-profit wing of non-profits. The devil is in the details, but I'm pleased.

And now, dear fellow academics, here's the thing for which we must lobby.

These new students need to be taught by full-time, salaried, faculty.

If we're going to claim that Community College is a pathway towards a better life, better wages, better education. If we're going to claim that public education is a public good. If we're going to invest federal money in making higher education accessible. Shouldn't we then demand that the people doing the actual teaching are fully supported? They must make a living wage. They need health care. They need access to faculty development. They need offices.

We do this for the students. And we're going to hear a lot about the students in the next few days and weeks.

We do this for basic economic justice.

We do this for the profession.

We have to demand that this new investment in community colleges arrives with an appropriate investment in instruction.

My baseline, at the moment - Any school receiving funding for the America's College Promise must have 80% full-time faculty.

This is one of those moments in which a unified voice can have an impact, so let's start speaking up.

Update: Thanks to New Faculty Majority, I got a link to this report on the state of community colleges as of 2012. A shocking 70% of all faculty are part-timers. Yes, some of those will be people who only want to teach a course or two while working at some other profession, but most are adjunct profs trying to scrape together a living.

The Hypereducated Poor - Adjuncts in Elle

In Elle, Alissa Quart has a piece she calls The Hypereducated Poor. It explores the adjunct crisis by looking at the life of a Chicago-area professor, Brianne Bolin. She teaches composition. She has a son with cerebral palsy named Finn. I've met them both as we live in the suburb of Brookfield, though until this article, I didn't know her situation.

She's an adjunct. She teaches a lot of composition at Columbia College in downtown Chicago. My understanding is that around 80% of all classes at Columbia are taught by adjuncts, but I cannot verify that number and will be glad to correct it. It's an arts school, so many of the classes are taught by artists in a sub-discipline, rather than full-time faculty. English composition, however, does not have that excuse.

I think the phrase - hypereducated poor - is useful. It points out the ways in which we've created an educational system in which both students and their educators are learning a lot and earning less and less than previous generations.

And it's hard. The article goes through the calculations that Bolin has to make to get by, and I know that some of my friends will sneer at her and question her decisions, her shopping venues, her aspirations towards a comfortable middle class life. Here's what the article says:

The point of the social-psychology research is that when so much mental activity is devoted to basic survival, little is left to engage in long-term thinking or to muster willpower—which Bolin well knows. "I need to smoke to relieve the pressure," she tells me as she feverishly rolls her own cigarettes one evening when I take her out to a bar, where she also finds relief in the form of plentiful margaritas. She's self-medicating, she says; other times, she uses Xanax for anxiety. She also takes a daily antidepressant. As Linda Tirado, whose rawly honest blog post on her own minimum-wage existence catapulted her into the national spotlight last year, bluntly writes in her new book, Hand to Mouth: "Being poor while working hard is fucking crushing."

Finn is just a few months older than my son Nico. I saw him last at a birthday party for a local boy with Down syndrome, and liked both him and his mother a lot, though I didn't know her situation.

There's a place in the higher education firmament for adjuncts, paid by the course to bring their expertise (or come out of retirement) to teach a class or two for per-course pay. But anyone who is good enough to work full time for an institution should be paid for full time work at a living wage, with benefits.

The Academic Job Market - Fundamental Premises

Yesterday I had a piece at Vitae on ending the conference interview and last week I had a blog post on the same topic, as a sort of prequel.

Today, I offer a few fundamental premises.

1. The job market today is about adjuncts, not graduate students.

A lot of my friends and colleagues and random internet commentators suggested graduate-training programs offer to fund sending their students to conferences if they get interviews; in fact, many programs do just that, if they are wealthy enough. But not only does it encourage another level of have/have-not, unless the programs are offering to fund grad student trips to conferences for 4-5 years, often long after they've finished their PhD, such a proposal doesn't solve the problem.

In modern academia, fewer and fewer people go straight from graduate school into a tenure-track job. Most adjunct for awhile or, if they are lucky, get post-docs or fixed-term positions. Any system has to protect them from financial exploitation.

Departments should send their graduate students to the annual disciplinary conference, though, in order to take advantage of all the professionalization and networking opportunities (and learning how to pitch books) that one can find there.

2. The conference interview is already dead.

We have a reliable technological fix that is only getting more reliable. My cellphone is better at video conferencing that the highest-tech suites of 10 years ago. Academic interviews will all turn into a round of video (or phone) followed by on-campus. This is not neoliberal. This is not corporatization. It's just efficient and smart. We don't need to be in the same meatspace to do a set of screener conversations.

It also has the benefit of being cheaper for the adjuncts and grad students. See point 1 (and pretty much every essay on this topic).

So the choice is this - take command of the funds used to send interviewers to conferences or see them lost to the general budget.  

3.  The video interview protects from certain forms of bias.

I didn't say this in my essay, but I've heard from a number of people - women who were pregnant in particular - that they are more comfortable concealing potentially bias-worthy features about themselves over video interviews (or phones). Pregnancy, in particular, is notorious red flag for departments, raising the specter of the "mommy track." It's true that on-campus such things may be visible (or there may be a baby or pumping breaks), but by that point the seachers are more invested in the candidate as a whole person. 

More to come on this topic. I am going to work very hard to get information from people doing conference interviews. I want to hear why. I want to hear what they think I'm missing.

 

 

 

End the Conference Interview, Take 47

On Chronicle Vitae, today, I will have a new essay about ending the conference interview. In it, I offer ways to make the shift into a positive rather than a surrender to austerity.

Listen. The conference interview is, in fact, already dead. Video interview technology is getting better and better, funds are limited, and like all traditions this one is going to fade away. It might take 20 years. But it's not going to last forever. The question is whether we, as faculty, manage this transition or whether it is eventually simply done to us by cost-cutting administrations.

Some background.

• I wrote these two blogs on the topic last November. They were by far not the first pieces pointing out the flaws in the system.

 For example.

• The Young Philospher - 2011 - End conference interviews.
• Sarah Kendzior - 2012 - uses the conference interview to talk about the closing of academia as a pathway towards class change.

Not long after I wrote my blogs, though entirely unconnected to them, the issue thoroughly exploded as a result UC-Riverside's job offer which promised to offer all-of three days of warning to candidates they wanted to interview. Rebecca Schuman's wrote an anti-interview piece, there was a backlash to her tone, then a backlash to the backlash, and so forth.

• Inside Higher Ed on the three-day notice.
• Schuman - Kill the conference interview
• Schuman - Shaming UC Riverside
• Potter - On "job-market rage" and Schuman
• Various pieces on privilege and civility and appropriate tone in the aftermath.

 Ok, caught up?

After all this was over, last February, I thought to myself. Next fall, early in the semester, I will write another piece on the conference interview. I will really think about how I might persuade skeptics and holdouts, people who believe the interview does more good than harm, people who are not bad or callous, who understand the financial issues, but who just are resistant to change.

Today's piece in Vitae, exploring how we might take control of funds once used to send people to the conferences for interviews, and re-purpose them, is my attempt at that.

I've spent a lot of time thinking about and listening to reasons that the conference interview is good. To my mind, they boil down to the following:

1. Skype sucks.

I deal with this in my piece. Low-rent skype using lousy hotel-room wi-fi does, indeed, suck. Professional video conferencing is pretty reliable. And as I describe at the end of this piece, face-to-face interviews, whether in the cattle call room, the hotel-suite sitting area or (NO NO NO!) on the hotel-room beds, have their problems too.

I try to think of it like math. Video interviews - free vs Conference interviews - thousands of dollars. There's no way that equation doesn't work out for video conferencing.

2. Going to the conference shows that we, the hiring department, are serious.

In this age of precarity, no department needs to prove they are serious. There is no school that will not have plenty of qualified candidates for any position. There are other ways to indicate your seriousness.

3. Conference interviews provide networking etc. to young PhDs.

I believe this can be true. Graduate training programs should budget in sending a senior grad student to their disciplinary conference, and then conferences should build programming designed to serve this population. In fact, they already do, but imagine of they were just there for the conference, not amid the interview madness. The experience will be so much better.

4. We've always done it that way

Well, not really, it was in the 60s and was a good thing too, as it helped break the "old boy's network." Before that, people just called up friends and asked them to send over a graduate student.

That time has passed. Moreover, video conferencing will do just as good a job and keeping the process "honest."

My next step is this - I am going to start calling search chairs that state they are going to hold interviews at conferences. I will ask them why. I will offer them anonymity in exchange for honesty.

I will publish the results, both here and, if interesting enough, at Vitae.

As I said almost a year ago - we can't fix most of the problems in higher ed very easily. They run deep, they tie into big issues in our society, and they involve millions of dollars.

But this one just takes an act of will. We can solve it tomorrow. Let's solve it tomorrow.

Sunday Roundup - All the News from Adjunct to Australia

It was a very good writing week for me. I pitched four columns, landed three, one of which came out immediately. I also wrote a first-draft treatment of a book (more on this later once it's ready). Most fun, I did an interview and part of  a call-in show with an Australian radio program! You can listen to it here.

My column was "The Most Interesting Adjunct in the World." The story of the Santa Clara Adjunct got lots of press when it happened. I saw it first here on Rebecca Schuman's blog as it emerged out of adjunct-related chat on Twitter. Within a few hours, the story moved quickly. Here's a piece from Vitae, but there are of other links, many citing my good friend Rick Gooden's tweets on the subject. Yesterday, driving out to a gig at a pub, the great Peter Sagal on Wait-Wait Don't Tell Me used it as a news item for a final question.

For those who missed the story, the short version is:

The posting, for an adjunct-lecturer slot at Santa Clara University, required applicants to have published at least 25 books, through top presses, on highly specific but varied topics; worked as a journalist; hosted radio and TV productions; founded startups; cultivated connections at Oxford University and throughout the Bay Area; and, perhaps most importantly, have some experience as a teacher.

TWENTY FIVE BOOKS. Ok, well, it turns out they were trying to hire a specific person. This is a fairly normal practice, but not usually in Adjunct Land. I was pleased, therefore, to write what I call a "next day" analysis piece (I was, I think, the person who alerted the Santa Clara PR director to the issue, as she was startled when I talked to her on the phone).

Here are some points from the column.

I am not opposed to inside hires in principle. Bifurcated job ads can be, however, a warning sign for a divided department. I wrote:

Tailoring job listings to internal candidates is a well-known practice, and inside hires are not necessarily a bad thing. I hear people complain that this type of hiring leads to departments settling for known quantities instead of pursuing excellence, but that’s not really my sense of things. The pursuit of prestige-laden superstars marks much of what is wrong at the top echelon of academic hiring, in which a few people get marked as geniuses and soak up enormous resources that might be more equitably distributed among many merely brilliant scholars and teachers. My experience is that the academic world is filled with smart scholars and good teachers, and if you have one who is doing a good job with your students, it’s reasonable to hire her. 

What's unusual is to see the language come to adjunct land. It reflects, perhaps, the normalization of adjunct labor as a central component to the higher education landscape, demanding an organized response from all of us, as I have written before. Adjuncts are not "adjunct" to our universities.

Along with my interview, I talked about fatherhood in other contexts. I need to get better about marketing myself as a fatherhood writer, because today is apparently Father's Day and I am not doing anything professional. I did pitch a column that didn't get picked up, which is fine and normal, then did other things. The use of the word "marketing" and "myself" makes me deeply uncomfortable. I am a terrible capitalist.

I wrote about the "Dads are incompetent" theme in our culture and what it says, as well as a longer piece about parenting against the grain, "Just say no to pink." I got plenty of pushback on that one, probably deserved, for coming off as femme-phobic. I'll have to keep working on how to articulate my agenda and using "pink" as metonymy clearly won't work. It distracts rather than helps. Maybe "Princess-culture?"

Other pieces were:

• Crowdsourcing Tenure and Promotion rules about Public Engagement. Watch for  my Chronicle piece on the 23rd.
• I reacted to a great post from Alison Kinney on the way police attack female protesters by going for their breasts, both now and in history.
• And finally, a piece on professionalism and code-switching. I'd like to think teaching code-switching as a skill, a choice, is empowering, rather than pushing conformity. I respect the counter-argument though. 

Thanks for reading. Please always point out mistakes I make and other things I might want to read.

A Higher Education May Day Hymn

There is power in a factory, power in the land

Power in the hands of a worker

But it all amounts to nothing if together we don't stand

There is power in a Union.

Just in the last few weeks, the rhetoric of the adjunct crisis in American Higher Education has shifted, intensifying around the language of  work, labor, and unionization.

Now the lessons of the past were all learned with workers' blood

The mistakes of the bosses we must pay for

From the cities and the farmlands to trenches full of mud

War has always been the bosses' way, sir.

Academics, even adjuncts, resist thinking of themselves as labor, as workers, as their occupations as work. We call ourselves artists or artisans even as the industrialized neoliberal forces bear down on us to turn us into dehumanized cogs.

The Union forever, defending our rights

Down with the blackleg, all workers unite

With our brothers and out sisters from many far off lands

There is power in a Union.

And sure, academic work is not coal mining. But look where the unions remain strong today - in highly skilled labor for the most part, rather than the blue collar factory work. This is a tragedy for the American people, but it's not a tragedy we can easily fix. One thing we can do is to embrace the power of unions in our own profession and to demonstrate that unionization need not be a disaster for the bottom line of cash-strapped educational institutions. No, what unionization does is give the scattered contingent workers a voice at the table, a look at the books, and the chance for procedure to replace arbitrary hirings and firings.

Now I long for the morning that they realise

Brutality and unjust laws can not defeat us

But who'll defend the workers who cannot organise

When the bosses send their lackies out to cheat us?

Teaching is work. Programming is work. Scholarship is work. Science is work. Grading is work. Committee service is work. This is not to embrace the business-speak model of the academy; no, that model seeks to de-value your labor. Labor - valuing your work as work - is the antidote to business-speak.

Money speaks for money, the Devil for his own

Who comes to speak for the skin and the bone

What a comfort to the widow, a light to the child

There is power in a Union.

This is easy for me to say. I have tenure. I was lucky. It's hard for me to just say it's luck because I worked so hard to get here, struggling with low wages and the brutal job market. But here I am and I can say that there is no meritocracy even though I do have merit. So do we all. I can't blame the frightened tenured professor for clinging to the myths of merit. I can't blame the adjunct for just thinking that if they keep their heads down, work hard, publish more, maybe break into something new and exciting like digital humanities, then the dream tenure-stream job will be waiting.  Maybe it is, but if not, organize. Change the conditions for the great majority.

The Union forever defending our rights

Down with the blackleg, all workers unite

With our brothers and out sisters from many far off lands

There is power in a Union.

All I can be, for now, is a cheerleader to your movements. But I am cheering. I am also talking to my peers so that when you have a picket line, we will be on it. We need to see our work as work too. All labor movements happened this way - with the disadvantaged in charge but the lucky advantaged in support, eroding the false perceptions of class difference. Belief in the meritocracy is a tool of the bosses. 

In the end, to change these conditions, you are going to have to exercise the power that comes from any movement. Organization. Pickets. Work stoppages. Propaganda to convince your peers and people like me that this is a fundamental labor issue. Academia is special, but we're not that special. Work is work. And ...

There is power in a Union.

How to Talk to Adjuncts (if you're tenured)

This is my first attempt to generalize some guidelines for talking about people with less power than yourself, especially when trying to highlight an injustice that you, to some extent, are responsible for perpetuating.

Almost a year ago, I wrote a piece on how to talk about feminism if you're a guy (especially a straight white married guy).  It was a somewhat light response to a serious discourse problem - it's complicated if you want to talk about problems experienced by others, especially if you are of the group that has all the power and privilege. It's complicated, but it's also necessary. The four core rules are:

1. It's not about you (don't make stories about the discrimination faced by women about how you, the man, feel about it).
2. It's sometimes about you (men need to talk to men about rape, for example).
3. It's always about them (don't erase women's voices from the conversation. Cite, link back, use privilege to amplify the voices of others and hopefully erode one's own privilege).
4. Don't expect gratitude (A lot of male feminists want women to like them more, or to exempt them from critiques - the "not all men" defense - or otherwise, once again, making it about the wrong topic).

This week I wrote about adjuncts - the contingent labor force of academia. I think all these rules apply. 

I'm a tenured professor living in a nice house in a suburb of Chicago. My wife and I have two professional incomes. I've also been given a big platforms on CNN, the Chronicle, and beyond. I'm a straight white married man. My university is a great place to work. If adjuncts resent these facts, that is reasonable. I can't expect gratitude for noticing their difficulties. And most of all, I cannot make the stories about me.

Rule #2 applies too, though, as it's going to take tenure-stream faculty being part of the movement to achieve any kind of change. I  have some ideas of how that can happen; I have a criticism of the attempt to use hyperbolic metaphors to evoke sympathy. I think we need SHARED identification, not to use analogies to marginalized groups. I might be wrong though.

For the rest of the blog, I want to offer an example of how NOT to talk about adjuncts from a position of privilege, then give a critic my space to critique me. 

Matt Reed, aka @DeanDad on Twitter, wrote a blogpost on Inside Higher Ed in which he asked for ideas to get adjuncts to come to workshops. He wrote, among other things:

In a perfect world, of course, we’d have enough money that this wouldn’t be a problem. But this isn’t a perfect world. So within the fiscal parameters that actually exist, we’re trying to find a more effective way to reach significant numbers of adjunct faculty.

In my piece for the Chronicle, I talked about specifically this kind of language, saying, "We tut-tut and say it’s too bad, but then throw up our hands, blame the budgets, and let the system continue." Reed's heart is in the right place I guess. Most people's hearts are in the right place. But then when attacked on Twitter, he got defensive. He makes a huge amount of money overseeing a system in which adjuncts are exploited, but he wants to be the good guy.

Adjuncts online started criticizing him, asking him how dare he ask adjuncts to do anything given that Deans make 150K and they make 3K a class. Dean Dad responded defensively. Here are the tweets.

@deandad about your post, the problem is that an #adjunct would have to teach 50 classes to have a salary = to a dean http://t.co/rWBSmb9iOW
— Fabián Banga (@fabianbanga) April 23, 2014

@deandad The math: #Adjunct $3k per class. Dean = $150k/year. So $150k/$3k=50. That is the answer to your problem
— Fabián Banga (@fabianbanga) April 23, 2014

@fabianbanga Where is this mystical land in which community college deans make 150k? Not even close.
— Matt Reed (@deandad) April 23, 2014

@deandad @fabianbanga Public records show Matt Reed's salary is $125,000 per year, plus benefits. pic.twitter.com/b4bLQMcfrg
— everlearners (@everlearners) April 23, 2014

In fact, most Deans at Reed's school make 80-90K. If you are an adjunct making $3000 a class, the difference between 90K and 150K (both with benefits and job stability) is negligible. It's like when people making a million dollars a year complain that they shouldn't be seen as rich because they aren't making 10 million a year and real estate in NYC is so expensive. Getting defensive when you have the privilege and are being criticized for it doesn't help. It's also not right. Sometimes, you just have to take it.

When I was criticized, I tried to keep Dean Dad in mind. Below is a Storify of a critique from an adjunct. What I tried to do was to accept the criticism and not to get too defensive. I tried to remember - it's not about me. Don't expect gratitude.

The critic, Gordon Haber, wants me to use my platform to rage about the injustice, making the criticism that sure, while adjuncts are raging, people like me aren't. We, to use my own language, just "tut-tut." I can defend my piece, but his criticism isn't wrong. I'm doing something think-y rather than rage-y, even though I agree the injustices are worthy of rage. Maybe a stronger piece as my first step onto Vitae would have been better.

At any rate, it's not about me and I'll keep working on living up to my rules.

I'm letting Gordon Haber have the last word from his blog post, in which he writes.

Now, Perry is right. And he was gracious when I criticized him on Twitter. And he ends his piece by suggesting that tenured faculty make common cause with adjuncts, to which I say, “A fine idea but I won’t hold my breath.” But in the end I find it galling that here we have another academic launching a critique of labor issues in higher ed byparsing adjunct rhetoric.

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Adjuncts are Labor. Professors are Labor. Graduate Students are Labor.

Adjuncts are Labor. Professors are Labor. Graduate Students are Labor.  Staff are Labor. Administrators, well, that's more complicated. What's a "Chair" anyway? More on that later (and in the meantime follow that link for a good piece on definitions).

I am going to be writing regular columns for the Chronicle and Chronicle Vitae over the next few months (and hopefully indefinitely, but I've got about 15 columns planned at this point on various topics, though organized around language and how it shapes the decisions we make).

I wanted to start with a few pieces nominally about adjuncts, but in many ways really about the rest of us and our response to adjuncts. Here's the first column - Sharecroppers. Migrant Workers. Adjuncts? - and some thoughts on it.

Resources: Adjuncts as slaves. Contingency in the modern workforce.

My opening anecdote is true. A friend, just about to finish his PhD and finishing a great 1-year, offered me a lift to JFK from Fordham's Lincoln-Center campus. I paid for parking and tolls, glad to skip the taxi or the train. In the car, he asked me what I thought about adjunct rights as civil rights. I gave him a response then and this essay is the longer form version once I actually read the work to which he was alluding.

Over the past few years, an increasing number of voices have argued that adjunctification is best understood as something especially terrible rather than an all-too-typical example of the rise of contingency across the North American workforce. Why do advocates need to go to such rhetorical lengths to gain our sympathy? 

In the piece, which I hope you will read and share (thus increasing my chances of having more columns published there),  I do two things. One, I argue that adjuncts are not slaves, migrant workers, or sharecroppers. Two, I argue that people use this language because we're not listening, or if we are listening, we don't act.

The issue here is not that writers are loosely deploying hyperbolic metaphors. The real problem is that adjuncts and their advocates believe the rest of us aren’t on their side.\

We tut-tut and say it’s too bad, but then throw up our hands, blame the budgets, and let the system continue. Civil rights, slavery, sharecropping, migrant laborers—these are terms that evoke sympathy and demand action within the neoliberal world of higher education in ways that just calling adjuncts “temps” does not.

The solution is not to see adjuncts as labor - the solution is to see yourself as labor.

 More to come.

Priorities in Higher Ed - Admin Bloat By the Numbers

Yesterday I followed a tweet from New Faculty Majority to Academe Blog (from but not speaking for the AAUP) - and read a startling set of statistics.

I posted this tweet:

Since 1976 - 23% growth FT fac. 269% growth in PT fac. 369% growth in admin. MT @NewFacMajority: http://t.co/duHV4Eg7da #highered #adjuncts
— David M. Perry (@Lollardfish) April 22, 2014

It was re-tweeted a lot (for me). As I altered and sent out the numbers again over twitter, those tweets were picked up by more people and circulated.  Clearly the story these numbers tell seemed compelling to the twitter-academics.

Here's the context from the blog:

In this past week’s issue of the Chronicle of Higher Education, there is a very revealing graph representing the changes in employment in colleges and universities from 1976 to 2011. The graph is based on an analysis of IPEDs data by AAUP’s John Curtis.

I've talked about this before when discussing the rise of the administration (aka the "Fall of the Faculty"). I wrote:

"I was called out for using the phrase, "administrative bloat." It's pejorative and I think I will drop it. [spoiler alert: I haven't dropped it] There certainly has been a rise in the number of administrators. This has both cultural and financial costs. A recent piece from the Chronicle notes that the faculty:admin ratio declined from 2000-12 by 40%, now at 2.5:1. Thus the savings from shifting to the adjunct model have largely been spent on hiring new admin. But at least some of this has happened because of new regulatory models (assessment assessment assessment), and "bloat" suggests that the university did this on purpose, rather than having no choice. It's an issue to consider."

That was me being nice. I know so many brilliant, dedicated, administrators who do amazing work to make their institutions of higher ed better. I feel exceptionally fortunate in the administrators with whom I work at Dominican. But the numbers are kind of bleak. Moreover, as I'll discuss below, there are choice here being made by administrators that lead to bloat, even if it's not deliberate, even if many of the choices are defensible.

When I survey the big higher ed landscape, I see the following linked processes [update: see comments for clarification] - 

1) Cuts in funding for public universities
2) Cuts in numbers of tenure track lines
3) Rise in numbers of students at the same time
4) Explosive growth of adjuncts
5) Explosive growth of staff and admin

What this ends up meaning is that the money saved by cutting full-time lines ends up going to admin and other non-instructional costs rather than to education OR to improve bottom lines. Adjunctification, admin expansion, and the cutting back on FT teachers has been a somewhat zero-sum game shifting costs around rather than saving money (to some extent).

Academe Blog has this useful take after running the numbers [my emphasis]:

It is as if higher education has borrowed very selectively and poorly from the corporate model. Although we now have much the same ever-widening gap in compensation between upper management and the bulk of the employees, we also have the sort of burgeoning middle management that was more typical of American corporations in the third quarter of the 20th century and increasing eliminated from our corporations in the last quarter of the 20th century. If our colleges and universities were truly operating as efficiently as the best corporations, the increase in administrative staff would be among the lowest numbers on this chart and not the highest number.

That rings true to me. It's not just that the universities have corporatized, but that we've DONE IT BADLY.

A really smart criticism of my customer service article for the Chronicle emphasized that my discussion of customers relied on a model for customer service not reflecting best practices in the business world. I believe it! But I also know that my outmoded model reflects the model that most universities use when they say "students are customers." It's not just corportization, it's bad corporitzation.

I don't think admin bloat happens intentionally - no one says (I really hope): Let's get rid of a bunch of tenure-track lines, hire a ton of Deanlets for high salaries, and then fill the classrooms with adjuncts. Rather, administrators get hired defensively - a need is located and the solution is to hire a single person and to give them a title to solve it. Those people are often understaffed, under-budgeted, and individually pretty well compensated as they try to wrestle with difficult tasks. They are hired, though, so their salaries now eat up a chunk of the budget once occupied by tenure-track lines, and the numbers have to balance. Enter the adjunct to save the day (or fill the lecture hall anyway).

Right now, at my unversitiy, we are hiring our first Chief Diversity Officer. We have real diversity issues on my campus. We are becoming a majority Latina/o university taught by a mostly white faculty.  A swastika was carved on an elevator door. There have been racial slurs against some African-American students, and plenty of other problems. I'm particularly focused on disability as diversity, and we've issues there too. If your campus doesn't have diversity issues, it probably means that you aren't looking hard enough and that your students - whether divided by race, class, gender, orientation, religion, ability, etc - don't feel safe enough to raise the issues. Denial is not a diversity strategy.

I'm pleased Dominican is taking this step. I hope a CDO helps all our students and faculty feel safer, empowered to speak out, included, and I will do everything in my power to support whoever we hire, though I'm not convinced an administrative hire is the optimal solution to our issues.

There's a cost here though. I assume the salary, at the president's cabinet level, will be significantly higher than my own, perhaps as high as one and a half starting tenure-track lines. That means one fewer faculty member, bigger undergraduate classes, and more part-timers. We're a tuition-driven institution and the budget has to balance.

What is a university to do? We have a need - whether it's diversity, or assessment, or more IT needs, or better facilities, or any number of other kinds of problems requiring staff/admin to solve. Yes, in some colleges we've got explosive middle-management issues based on #badmin (as the hashtag goes) trying to carve out self-replicating bureaucratic fiefdoms. That's not the problem at my small university and I expect not the problem at many other places either.

And yet, the growth of admin continues and the faculty fall.

Resources: Contingency in the Workplace is Great!

The business-world is full of essays lauding the advent of the contingent worker, or at least prepping companies to take advantage of it (selling their services to companies trying to deal with contingency).

I'm reading these in the context of adjunct labor and an essay I'm writing for Chronicle Vitae. I see strong parallels. Here are some examples.

• Harvard Business Review Blog Network: "Rise of the New Contract Worker."

Intriguingly, more and more people are choosing a contingent work style.

Some contingent workers say they are seeking better work/life balance; others want to create or design their own careers by choosing the kind of work or projects that create a unique set of skills, making them more desirable prospective employees. Contingent employment can expose individuals to a broad variety of challenges, demanding constant learning and new skills, which make work more interesting for them.

Often, contingent workers say that it was their full-time employment experience that convinced them to strike out on their own.

• Here's a law firm that wants your business, because the risks of this situation are for the job creators. 

A sea change in the U.S. workforce is swelling. Over the past 10 years, companies looking for alternatives to the traditional employee work model have increasingly turned to contingent arrangements. Recent data suggests that 30-40% of American workers hold part-time, temporary, or contract positions. According to a Randstad Workforce360 Study, two out of three U.S. companies are already using contingent workers. Moreover, while U.S. companies lead the world in using temporary workers as a core part of their business strategy, surveys show the rest of the world is not far behind in the quest for new work paradigms as the economic issues contributing to this shift become globalised. Business executives, in-house counsel, and HR professionals must strategically analyse legal issues surrounding the contingent workforce to stay ahead. This article addresses the key issues you need to understand.

• Fox Business News is excited about Freelancing in America:

We live in an on-demand world where speed is everything and companies better be prepared to keep up, or get left behind.

Modern companies are faced with moment-to-moment fluctuations in reaction to market demands that require quick decision making and agility to adapt to new trends. But these characteristics are rarely seen in large organizations.

To meet these new demands, companies are realizing they must change the way they view their workforce, and many are shifting toward a contingent workforce.  

• FBN cites a report by Accenture. It's pretty long. They want to advise the HR departments of the future to gain agility and talent by using an "Extended workforce."

To compete in the future, organizations will need to push talent management beyond the confines of the enterprise wall to include the new extended workforce: a global network of outside contractors, outsourcing partners, vendors, strategic partners and other nontraditional workers. By maximizing the potential of both an extended workforce and permanent employees, companies can gain critical advantages—including agility and access to valuable talent.

• A New York Times piece offers a balanced set of observations by an "independent" worker. 

I started my business as a workplace consultant in 2004, and since then I have seen more people take a similar employment path. A government report in 2006 said that 31 percent of the American work force was independent or contingent, a category that encompasses contractors, temporary workers and the self-employed, among others.

A strong part of me is thrilled with this. I generally like being a contingent worker. I’m a self-disciplined go-getter with two children, ages 1 and 4, so I enjoy having the independence to do what I need to do when I need to do it.

But, to be honest, I’m also tired. Tired of having to sell myself to a new client every week. Tired of worrying if I will earn enough in a year to cover child care and household expenses. And tired of dealing with the administrative and tax problems that inevitably crop up with self-employment. Another part of me yearns for the predictability, social outlets and built-in networking opportunities of previous jobs at big companies.

The piece also mentions a Freelancers Union, which is interesting.

Dissent from CBS Money Watch: "With job growth still weak in the U.S., another trend poses both an opportunity and a challenge for American workers: The explosion in temporary and part-time employment."

Resources: Adjunct Labor and Slave Labor

Over the past few years, a number of books and essays linking adjuncts to other historically oppressed peoples have been published. I'm writing an essay on the topic (that's largely critical). Here's some of the material with which I'm working, starting with the most recent.

• Equality for Contingent Faculty: Overcoming the Two-Tier System, edited by Keith Hoeller. Reviewed at Inside Higher Ed here. Includes essays on “The Academic Labor System of Faculty Apartheid," and “The New Abolition Movement.”- "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.”

• Hoeller also wrote a piece for ADJUNCTS: SLAVES OF COLLEGES: "It calls into question the myth that the two-track system in academe is an equal opportunity merit system. It is not; it is in fact a caste system with the tenured faculty occupying the upper caste and the off-track faculty serving as the “untouchables.”

• Featured in the cover art above, there's a book called "ACADEMIC SHARECROPPERS: Exploitation of Adjunct Faculty and the Higher Education System." The author, a long-time adjunct in business schools, writes, "Who are the academic sharecroppers? They are those who share, in a very limited way, in the largesse of education institutions-adjunct faculty. Historically, in literal terms, "A sharecropper was a farmer who was provided with credit for seeds, tools, living quarters, and food from the landowner's store. In return, the sharecropper worked the land and received a certain part of the value of the crop." In other words, the landowner made out, and the sharecropper barely got by. In today's world, the academic sharecroppers' world, they are used and abused. The exploitation of adjunct faculty is not illegal, but is certainly immoral and unethical."

• Catherine Wagner, a poet and tenured professor at Miami University writes that while she is not a sharecropper:

 "I work in one of the heavily used mansion-like buildings that dot the estate. Every weekday I walk down the hall past many doors. Behind some doors work my peers (tenure-line teacher-scholar-writers). Behind other doors work the sharecroppers (adjunct teachers, graduate teaching assistants).

The sharecroppers are inferior to me under the terms of the hierarchy on which the institution insists, and which it requires in order to continue to support itself (and me) as it did formerly. The support to which the university and I have become accustomed is collapsing. There is a terrible drought and a weevil. The drought we call a recession (although recession implies recovery and the recession as it affects sharecroppers is not going to end). The weevil is an infestation called student loans. It affects the robustness of the plants grown on the sharecropper estate. When everyone has cottoned on to the weevil infestation, they may begin growing their plants elsewhere without the help of the sharecropper estate. Then the estate will transform into I don’t know what.

In the meantime, when they are not out in the fields, the sharecroppers work in ten-by-ten-foot rooms that each contain three desks.

I really like Wagner's essay. It's beautifully written and makes an important link of the adjuncts to other forms of contingent labor in America. But I think the metaphor doesn't match the important parts of her argument.

• Here is an essay in the Times Herald, a Pennsylvania paper, with the title, "DeSIMONE: Adjunct professors: America's modern slaves." I never get to write my own titles so DeSimone might not have either, in which case this can be put on the editor. The essay itself doesn't use such language (though does reveal exploitation and frustration). He wrote a follow-up essay with the title "Beasts of Burden."

• ""Part-time instructors are the slave labor of higher education," said Philip Altbach, professor of higher education at Boston College. "You can't build a modern university on the basis of part-time faculty because they are not expected to have a full commitment to the institution." From H-Net, quoting an op-ed in the Tennessean.

• "Adjuncts are the new 21st-century slaves. We work like dogs and get little recognition and financial compensation." - From a Chronicle survey of Adjuncts

• Bangor Daily News: "How are the pyramids of Egypt and the community colleges of Maine alike?
They are both wonderful concepts built from, essentially, slave labor. No, this isn’t a joke."

Langston Snodgrass on quitting teaching: "Adjuncts: The Slave Labor of Higher Education."

• "Many [adjuncts] are on food stamps. One of the reasons is that more and more schools are hiring adjuncts, the slave labor of academia." From Patheos.
• Here's another "sharecropper" blog, this time from nursing faculty.
• This one says - Wage slaves. This one also has "slave labor" in the title (and pushback in the comments).
• This one says universities are the new "company stores." Which is at least a labor metaphor.

Finally, two dissents.

1. Adjunct by choice.

2. Adjuncts Aren’t Slaves. Let’s Stop Saying They Are. - David Leonard, Chronicle Vitae

And an alternate construction from Minnesota.

•  Adjuncts are the new temp workers.

Further resource - Union movement.