Dear Academia: We're All Labor

Today over at Inside Higher Education, John Warner has a great piece on "After Wisconsin." He writes: 

The erosion, or worse, destruction of tenure is very bad news for contingent faculty[1].
The forces that seek to erode tenure are the exact same ones that are the root causes of the adjunctification of the professorate, shrinking public support of higher education and the increasing influence of corporate and political interests in governing the public sphere.
Regardless of what happens[2] in Wisconsin, these issues aren’t going away. Indeed, as evidenced by the adjunctification of faculty, they’ve already been with us for many years.
Apparently, it takes crises like Wisconsin’s to make us pay attention.
Since many of us are presently paying attention, I’m hoping we can take this opportunity to broaden the discussion a bit.
I think the professorate is perhaps reluctant to see itself as labor, but these events make it clear that we are indeed workers like any other (contingent know this well as we are consistently reminded that we are fungible), and as such, we need to examine our work as part of the larger systems in which we operate.
All of labor is in an age of percarity [sic].

Warner is, in part (he said on Twitter), inspired by Kelly Baker's outstanding essay on tenure, which everyone should read. Baker talks about the purpose of tenure and the ways it was supposed to be linked to what professors do (teach, research, publish, communicate) rather than what kind of job they have. She says:

I don’t think this current exploitative tenure system is our only option. There are ways to improve the working conditions of contingent faculty if we are willing to do so. Tenure, and all of its securities, can be expanded to contingent laborers. Those who teach most of the classes need security and support. They need both academic freedom and economic security. This does not require a reimagining of what tenure is and who it should protect, but rather a return to the AAUP’s original conception of tenure for all of those who teach in Higher Ed. Can we please make tenure a right of many, not a privilege of the few? This is the only way tenure and justice can rest easily beside one another. It is the only way I’ll ever support tenure.

More on Baker in a moment, because she suggests some pathways forward, but first I want to revisit two pieces I wrote about a year ago. I have tenure. I try to practice good ethics personally within my department and globally as a journalist on higher-education issues. I also believe that, as Warner says, the issues pushing contingency directly threaten my livelihood and job security too, so I have  a personal stake. In my writing, I've been wondering what it might take to get other tenure-stream professors to realize this.

Last April (2014), I started writing for the relatively new space Chronicle Vitae, a sub-set of the Chronicle of Higher Education. In my first piece, I pondered why so many adjunct activists use the language of sharecropper, migrant worker, and slave to describe their position - rather than simply calling themselves exploited temps/contingent workers. I suggested that the fault was because tenure-stream faculty didn't care without such incendiary metaphors. I wrote:

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.
So let’s not be too quick to blame adjunct advocates for invoking historical inequities when trying to change the system. Instead, let’s question why such metaphors seem necessary. I propose that the plight of the adjunct lies squarely alongside that of a long-recognized historically oppressed group: the working class. Why are faculty so resistant to seeing themselves as labor who need to act in solidarity with the exploited adjuncts?

N.B. Also read Tressie McMillan Cottom's response to the use of the slavery metaphor, if you're not persuaded this is a problem.

In my next piece, I argued that when tenure-stream faculty embrace the identity of labor, great things can happen. Alas, our professional rhetoric is designed around avoiding identifying with labor, talking instead about passion, meritocracy, and artisanal craftsmanship. I wrote:

Many academics, especially those in the tenure track, just resist seeing themselves as laborers. Academics, even many adjuncts, continue to think they belong to a loosely meritocratic system in which the best work rises to the top, peer review remains the optimal way to judge the quality of work, and if you work hard enough, you’ll be fine.
Fail to get a tenure-track job? Work harder. Keep your nose to the grindstone, stick with it, and you’ll find a home. Get stuck in a bad position? Publish your way out of it! Worried about tenure? Just say yes to everything, work over 100 hours a week for a few years or more, and you’ll be fine.
We believe this despite all the evidence and anecdotes to the contrary. Everyone in academia knows good people stuck in terrible jobs, or jobless, or burned out, or stricken with serious mental-health issues from the pressure of trying to compete in an irrational system. It’s not their fault.

We're not special.

I suggest we can think even bigger rhetorically, if not necessarily in practice. A recent article in the Minneapolis-St. Paul Star Tribune talked about adjuncts as “temp workers.” That may not be as good at inducing sympathy as “slaves,” “sharecroppers,” or “migrant workers,” but this isn’t about sympathy. We need to recognize that what’s happening to our universities is happening across the North American labor market (and beyond), and that we’re not special. Other highly-trained, specialized industries have turned to contingency work. Higher ed is no different. In fact, we could learn from the industries that increasingly argue that one must treat contingent workers as full members of the community. 

But once we embrace this, then what? What do we do? Fortunately, Kelly Baker has answers:

Confront your own privilege. Understand how you are implicated in the academic system. Make a stand. Treat the contingent laborers in your departments and institutions fairly. Find ways to make their jobs better, not worse. Recognize that landing on the tenure track is a privilege and that you can wield it to help others. Don’t support tenure to save yourself. (Who knows how much longer it will last?) Create a tenure system that will save all of us. Don’t be silent. Don’t look away. Be better. Be brave. And then, maybe we’ll have equity.

Racists on Twitter vs Racists at Public Pools

My book isn't about racists. It's about people falsely accused of racism by people in an ideological fervor. https://t.co/QgaCtWMZdS

— jonronson (@jonronson) June 9, 2015

So my morning on Twitter was interesting.  Apparently, one of the racist women at the pool in violent incident in McKinney TX has been identified, and there's a Facebook page calling on people to call her employer and get her fired.

I am a little skeptical about the ethics of public shaming. At the same time, I understand that for the historically marginalized, public shaming is often literally the only tool they have to effect social change, and to impose penalties on people who perpetuate racism and sexism. As a journalist, I expect at some point to make a mistake, to be shamed for it, and to try to make amends.

That said, Jon Ronson wrote a widely publicized book, including this New York Times Magazine piece he got to write, on not shaming people on the internet. So I wondered: Now that this woman has been identified, what would he have us do about it?

He didn't answer. Instead, he said that this woman is nothing like the people he talked about. Here's a storify of the tweets that followed.

I asked him - how can you tell who is the "real" racist and who is a fake racist (or sexist, as in Mr. Donglegate)? He didn't answer, but spent some time in a huff on his timeline subtweeting me. I suspect I've been muted.

But again - I'd like to know. What's the difference between saying something racist online and saying something racist at a public pool? To me, the answer is - nothing.

Update: I forgot about this fantastic review from Jacqui Shine. Read it!

Ronson’s right, of course, that each of us is a “mass of vulnerabilities,” and we shouldn’t have to face a gauntlet of shame when we make mistakes. But we’re also subjects of wildly disproportionate privileges and privations. In a world where people who have historically been powerless have a new means with which to fight back — or at least make their voices heard — it’s important to notice when this empowerment is made out to be dangerous.

Rules for Online Teaching

I like this Jonathan Rees post about rules for online teaching. At Dominican, we've had many conversations about how to teach online while preserving our relationship-centered mentality. Rees is, similarly, thinking about how to make online teaching more than just a different delivery system.

Here are some best practices he's extracted:

1) They do not try to duplicate the face-to-face experience. Instead, these courses try to emphasize the kinds of online experiences that can only be done online.
2) They make sparing (if any) use of learning management systems. Instead, these instructors have tried to find tools on the open web that will help them teach the kinds of skills that they want them to learn.
3) These courses are very labor-intensive. Rather than use the online experience as a way to automate tasks that face-to-face instructors must do themselves already, the best online instructors actually make work for themselves.
4) These classes are relatively small. Why? See 3) above.

A fine place to start.  

Sunday Roundup - Autism Speaks Didn't Speak to Me

I had three published essays and five blog posts this week.

One of them was on the problems with Autism Speaks, published in the New York Times - Motherlode Parenting section. It was important to me to put this piece in a high profile, high prestige, publication. I keep meeting smart, well-intentioned, people who do not know the controversies surrounding Autism Speaks. So I wrote:

Autism Speaks is a charity which describes itself as dedicated to helping people who “struggle” with autism, funding research into “prevention, treatments and a possible cure.” They have been criticized for their mission, their rhetoric, the makeup of their leadership, and the way they use their funds. To me, the most important criticisms come from autistic individuals, who see the charity as “eliminationist” – seeking to eliminate autistic people. The Autistic Self-Advocacy Network has adopted the motto “nothing about us without us,” in part to criticize the lack of autistic leadership in Autism Speaks. Some autistic bloggers condemn the “light it up blue” campaign for “autism awareness” that takes place every April, because they want acceptance, not awareness. I am unable to find an answer from Autism Speaks to those criticisms; when invited to comment for this piece and given ample time to do so, they did not respond.

Autism Speaks is welcome to respond at any time. I sent an email on 5/21, a few hours after talking to a VP who said he'd offer a comment. I'll publish their response in full. If they believe in their mission, they should believe it strongly enough to publicly debate.

One issue is that they define autism in such a way to exclude any autistic person who contests their definition of autism.

I also wrote a piece for Al Jazeera America on "Inspiration Porn."

In 2014, a disabled woman named Stella Young took the stage at TEDx in Sydney and introduced the audience to the concept of inspiration porn. She explained that disabled people are most commonly seen only in stories and images that pornographically “objectify one group of people for the benefit of another group of people.” She had been writing and speaking about this topic for a while, exploring the various ways that disabled people were used to make other folks think mostly of themselves. For example, inspiration porn sometimes shames the viewer by showing a disabled person overcoming basic obstacles, implying that anyone less disabled has no excuse. Another variant focuses on individuals helping people with disabilities, suggesting that others should help too, centering attention on the helper, not the recipient. In all cases, disabled humans get treated as props.

I also wrote a blog post about  Reading Inspiration Porn Through the Social Model. I think that's going to be a useful tool down the road.

Finally, I wrote another Game of Thrones review for Vice: On Jon Snow as Hero. These are fun to write and I'll do another late next week, before the final episode.

Other posts:

• History and Memory: Crusades Imagery
• Be Not Afraid (Liberal Professor)
• Accessible Conferences - Learning from Fandom Conventions
• Why Bother Developing Down Syndrome Tests?
• In which Peter Singer Fails to Look in the Mirror

History and Memory: Crusades Imagery

Quite impressive: "Crusaders" are targeting the "New Turkey" of Erdoğan. Today's cover of a pro-AKP daily. pic.twitter.com/Aw8dG3O4lC

— Mustafa Akyol (@AkyolinEnglish) June 6, 2015

Wow. "Crusade" continues to evoke such a powerful set of memorializing impulses around the Judeo-Christian-Islamic world.

Update: Mustafa was kind enough to translate for me.

@Lollardfish @rezaaslan It reads, "New Crusaders against New Turkey. Rising powerful Turkey under attack from crusaders & collaborators."

— Mustafa Akyol (@AkyolinEnglish) June 6, 2015

Be Not Afraid (Liberal Professor)

I haven't had time to write about the Vox piece of "Liberal professor scared of liberal students." But I'm pleased to say that Amanda Taub, at Vox, has rebutted the piece published by Vox.

Big websites like Vox are formed of independent turfs, with lots of people having access to the "publish" button (with a process going through edits and fact checks and so forth). So maybe whoever cleared the first piece (I'm not linking to it. Go read Amanda's first, then go back to it if you've missed it).

I find Taub's argument entirely convincing. It echoes my own about the real meaning of student complaints. I also find her critique of the first piece effective: lack of evidence and lack of understanding both drag down the viral first essay.

So why publish it? Who at VOX gave the go ahead? Did they not notice the flaws?

Reading Inspiration Porn Through the Social Model of Disability

I have a new piece out at Al Jazeera America on the concept of inspiration porn.

Inspiration porn still dominates depictions of disability in the news, so her work continues. In the last few weeks, three stories about disability have gone viral. A high school quarterback in Pennsylvania took a girl with Down syndrome to prom, fulfilling a promise he made to her when they were in the fourth grade. A Qdoba employee in Kentucky was filmed feeding a customer with physical disabilities. Madeline Stuart, an Australian woman with Down syndrome, lost weight and became a model.

Each of these stories has been reproduced on news outlets and shared on social media around the world in multiple languages. They all feature people doing good things. There’s nothing necessarily wrong with the content of these stories, of course, but the way they’re told conceals the real issues faced by the disability community. We need stories that illuminate instead.

I talk about Stella Young, the terrible idea that TEDxSydney had to honor her (and now they've flubbed the apology too - READ THIS), and three inspiration porn stories making the rounds lately. At the end, and the part I really like, I re-read the three stories through the lens of the social model of disability.

At its core, inspiration porn demonstrates the need for a broader engagement with the social model of disability. People typically view disability through the medical model, in which diagnosed conditions present obstacles to be cured or overcome. But according the social model, while many people may have all kinds of medical conditions, people are disabled by the lack of accessibility in our society.

Reread these three stories through the lens of the social model. Moser and Lapkowicz are news because stigma makes it hard for people with disabilities to have close friends, especially with someone as iconic as a high school quarterback. The stigma disables.

Stuart is an exception to the social norms that view disabled bodies as unattractive, and she gets to be that exception only by conforming to specific body norms. The perception of disabled bodies as nonsexy is disabling, not the bodies themselves. The anonymous woman in Qdoba is disabled not by her wheelchair but by restaurants that lack automated doors and a society that doesn’t provide sufficient community-supported assistance.

I think this is a useful approach and I'm going to use it when I address such stories in the future. When you see an inspiration porn story, ask yourself - what would the social model say about this?

Accessible Conferences - Learning from Fandom Cons

I am working on a piece about accessible academic conferences and am, intentionally, focusing on academia. But there are two speculative fiction conventions that deserve mention.

Convergence holds a special place in my heart. I've never been deeply involved with it, but have gone and performed there many times, especially in the early years before it exploded and became one of the premier cons in the country (to my mind). I'm pretty sure one of my bands (Tramps and Hawkers, maybe?) played the very first Convergence fundraiser.

Here's their policy. It's excellent overall, while acknowledging that some barrier remain.

WisCon, the feminist speculative fiction convention in Madison, has even stronger language.

Universal Design: Disability Access at WisCon
The Disability Inclusion Services offered by WisCon are informed by universal design and disability rights activism. Universal design benefits people of all ages and abilities, by making schedules, communications, and the physical environment usable by as many people as possible. We strive to create an event that works for members in all our physical and mental variety. We must balance that goal against limited fiscal resources, the paradox that sometimes one member's accommodation is another member's barrier, and an entirely volunteer work force. We always welcome discussion exploring how we can better accommodate our members.

Outstanding things.

1. Embrace of universal design.
2. Acknowledgement of challenges and the "paradox."
3. Desire to always find ways to improve.

Everyone else hosting any kind of professional and/or fan gathering anywhere could learn from this.

More to come!

Why Bother Developing Down Syndrome Tests?

Yesterday I wrote about Peter Singer, my least favorite bioethicist.

Today, here's a bioethicist asking a new question - do we actually need more and more sensitive Down syndrome tests? Chris Kaposy writes:

There is an inconsistency between the lived experience of people who have Down syndrome and the corporate arms race to develop new and better means for identifying fetuses with Down syndrome. Few people who live and work with those who have Down syndrome would describe it as a serious disability. The arms race to develop these tests is not being driven by the needs of people with Down syndrome or the needs of their families. Of course, a great deal of scientific ingenuity is needed to create novel tests, like the one Dr. Iles and his colleagues have recently described. For this reason, creating these tests might require a lifetime’s work. But the social utility of these tests is incommensurate with the effort needed to create them. In contrast to the scientist who devotes her life to the treatment of cancer, Dr. Iles’s devotion to create a test that helps parents to avoid the birth of people who tend to enjoy their lives seems somehow less ambitious, or off the mark.

Worth a full read.

In which Peter Singer Fails to Look in the Mirror

It's no secret that I'm not a fan of Peter Singer. He's a eugencist. Start here with Harriet McBride Johnson. For more recent context, perhaps read this press release from the National Council on Disability.

What may be less clear is that I'm not bothered by him. The world is full of terrible people saying terrible things, and this eugenicist is no worse than Holocaust Deniers, Islamophobes, Antisemites, KKK members, and other kinds of horrific bigots. It's just that most of the other folks don't get big fancy jobs at Princeton in part on the basis of their bigotry. They don't get called "controversial" but treated as if they belong in polite company. They don't get profiled and interviews all around the world. The philosophy and bioethics community, writ large (I know lots of individuals who object), are responsible for the propagation of Singer's deadly views.

I'm not actually going to debate anyone about Singer's views today. Much as I won't debate with white supremacists or Islamophobes.

Last week Singer was interviewed in the New York Times. He said, among other things:

Why do racism, sexism and discrimination against people with disabilities still exist, despite the widespread acceptance that they are wrong? There are several reasons, but surely one is that many people act unthinkingly on the basis of their emotional impulses, without reflecting on the ethics of what they are doing.

So if I get this right, Singer suggests that discrimination against people with disabilities in part continues because people don't think about ethics; if they do think about ethics, on the other hand, says the world's most famous ethicist, we realize it's ok to kill babies with disabilities. And that will solve discrimination.

If Peter Singer really wants to answer why such discrimination exists, he must, in part, look in a mirror. And so must everyone who gives him a favorable platform.