Time to Pay Attention to the Man Behind the Curtain

It was probably the weirdest moment of my professional life to date: telling students in my "Career Planning for Humanities Majors" class that we probably wouldn't be meeting next week because I would be on strike.

They looked at me, nonplussed.  "NO WAY!" one blurted out.  Yes...way.

I scribbled my non-university email address on the board and said I'd be happy to email or talk with them about the reasons for the strike outside class, and I pointed them to a website and a stack of fliers they could consult for additional information.  Then we got on with the business of the day: another lesson in finding a professional post-graduation job.

My students see me, week after week, in all my dark-skirt/drapey-cardigan/colorful-scarf matronly professorial glory, dispensing hard-won professional wisdom, advice, and grades.  I am a lesser angel in their personal pantheon of authority that stretches all the way up to God and Mom. "Strikes" are something they associate with workboots and insulated hoodies, building workers and trades. Their bewilderment meshes with the cognitive dissonance many of us feel, finding ourselves preparing to strike.  

My graduate assistant gamely offered to take over next week's class.  Her graduate student union has a contract with a no-strike clause, so she has to put in her requisite hours working for me, whether I'm there to supervise her or not.  That would have been fine, except that the class for next week is organized around a guest speaker.  Our planned speaker worked for 30 years as a writer for an industrial corporation. For a variety of reasons, personal and professional, she decided to switch tracks.  She went to grad school and got the credential that now has her teaching courses and running a first-rate internship program in an adjacent department that draws on her deep knowledge of her writing field.  However, she and I, unlike my graduate assistant, have been working for nearly two years now without a contract.  She's part of the same bargaining unit.  The strike affects her, too, and I cannot in good conscience ask her not to withhold the same labor I'm withholding.

What students don't know is that much of the undergraduate faculty operates like the Wizard of Oz. If you pull aside the curtain on many instructors' and lecturers' labor, the edifice revealed is not the stable timeless wizardry of institutional respect, academic freedom, history and longevity, research support and professional remuneration.  These things, which are widely assumed to be funded by tuition dollars to sustain college-level teaching, are not there.  It's just a man or woman, with (in many cases) a nine-month contract, no guarantee of employment beyond the semester, a salary suitable for the entry-level jobs our students apply for with their brand-new BAs, a tenuous relationship with their home department, and no research support.

Unlike the Wizard, non-tenure-stream faculty still manage to deliver the goods.  It's a mighty amplifying system we have, here behind the curtain: love of one's subject, commitment to students, the knowledge that comes with the requisite graduate credential, and a willingness to behave as if the edifice were in place even though it's not.  These things go a long way to produce the college experience students seek at our institution.

It's not fair to the students, though, who think their rising tuitions are paying for genuine wizards with all the institutional power that comes with the role. It's also not stable, particularly as the support for wizards declines and the university's reliance on jerry-rigged smoke-and-mirrors illusions grows.  Is it "unprofessional" to go on strike, as some detractors may claim?  At the point where "professional" is only being sustained by willingness of faculty to uphold the illusion, the question becomes meaningless.

What Do Lieutenant Governors Do All Day?

Kentucky's executive leadership lives in a Richard Scarry picture book.  

In their Kentucky, every furry creature that earns a four-year diploma ought to wake up the morning after graduation and go to a building where the offices are labelled with jobs people do all day, and where those labels align with the words on the diplomas that they received.  

There are doors--whole buildings even!--that say "engineer," so that's a good diploma to have. Institutions of higher education in Kentucky can go on encouraging students to get diplomas that say "engineering."  

Search as much as you want over the Kentucky landscape, but there are very few doors, buildings, name-tags or even drawer labels that say "historian" or "French literature."  So diplomas that say those things are bad things to have students ought to stop trying to obtain them.  Silly bunnies!

The Richard Scarry world where diplomas and job titles neatly align does not quite track with the life experience of Kentucky's top elected officials.  The labels on their doors say "governor," but oddly enough neither Lt. Gov. Hampton, nor Gov. Matt Bevin have formal education in government or politics.  Lt. Gov. Hampton's  undergraduate degree is in industrial engineering.  She's done a lot of other things that don't obviously get labeled "lieutenant governor": serving in the Air Force as a computer systems operator, working for nearly two decades in the corrugated packaging industry, and earning an MBA.   

Governor Matt Bevin?  Even worse!  He got one of those unnecessary degrees in East Asian studies! Fat lot of good his fluency in Japanese has done him, eh?  Did he really need all that language study to enlist in the Army?  It sounds from his Wikipedia page like he didn't even get posted to Japan. Maybe he used it in that financial consulting he did in between leaving the army and taking over his family's moribund bell manufacturing business.  Those bunnies.  He could have just majored in some kind of engineering that would help him make bells.

However much one may dislike their politics, both Lt. Gov. Hampton and Gov. Bevin have served their countries, worked hard, and improved the businesses that have employed them. Both of them have a rich diversity of education and experience that no doubt informs their leadership.  They've made successful careers in politics without studying political science.

In the buildings where Hampton and Bevin do their work, they no doubt encounter offices with labels like "fundraising," "human resources," "data analysis," and "strategic development." They work with "project managers" and "content strategists" and "speechwriters."  It's hard to find an institution that offers any of those job titles as undergraduate majors.  However, even if the state of Kentucky could exclusively hire human resources managers who had studied human resources and speech writers who had studied speech writing, would they choose to do so? The criteria for selection is often not the label on the diploma, but the cluster of skills and experience for which the label is, at best, a directional arrow.

Much of a day's work gets done in a world that, unlike a Richard Scarry illustration, is rich in words conveying complicated concepts and difficult information. Every organization, including the state government of Kentucky, needs employees who can navigate comfortably in that world, who can manage in the absence of labels, who can adapt to unforeseen contingencies, who use the information at hand to figure things out as they need to and know where to look for additional resources.

Sometimes, the best person for the job is a history major.  Or a French literature major.  Or a, how you say, east Asian language major.  

The Mission, Not the Budget, Is in the Red

UPDATE (since I'm getting some readers from the shout-out on Inside Higher Ed): for information about the non-tenure-faculty labor action at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, see the student newspaper's coverage, the local newspaper's coverage, and the union website.


The strike vote was tallied last night for NTFC Local 6546, and the members authorized the union leadership to form a strike committee and take labor action.

It's still not about the money.

Although the union's wage proposal does include a salary floor, the key issues over which negotiations have collapsed are not salary structure: it's job security, academic freedom, and shared governance.  NTFC wants to have structures in place that will hold NTT faculty to the guiding values listed in the university's mission statement:

• Aim high
• Strive to control our destiny
• Be accountable for our actions and exercise responsible stewardship
• Be inclusive, treat each other with dignity and respect and promote citizenship
• Value excellence, quality and service
• Foster innovation and creativity

Except that, in a state currently undergoing budget meltdown, everything is always going to be about the money. All the regional state universities are in funding freefall as a result of the budget stall-out, and (one is given to understand) even the state flagship will soon be suffering--all of which makes a certain intuitive sense, until you look at the numbers.

The state's support for the U of I has been steadily declining for years now, prompting the U of I to steadily increase tuition. Tuition is now 300% of what it was when state appropriations started falling, and the institution now has more money coming in than it would have if state appropriations had stayed steady.

Money talks, and in a manufactured crisis, the lack of money talks even louder. NTT faculty are often brought on board to fill in the gaps that (one is, again, given to understand) can't possibly be filled by creating a tenure-stream line.  Those gaps get wider all the time as the numbers of NTT faculty grow, and with them the absurdity of their year-to-year positions. Some members of NTFC have been "visiting" faculty for upwards of a decade; many more have been on de facto multi-year contracts that get parceled out one year at a time.  As the administration uses the state's budget woes as an excuse to enact large scale changes, these situations will multiply.

The administration wants to negotiate a contract in which NTT faculty must "aim high" in their teaching and scholarship without institutional agreement about the extent to which they can count on the protections of academic freedom, in which NTT faculty can only control their destinies by finding work elsewhere, and where "accountability" depends solely on the initiative and good will of the individuals empowered to hire and fire them.

In no way do the administration's proposals convey an institutional commitment (which some think NTTs should have faith in, in place of a contract) to treat NTT faculty with dignity and respect.  NTT faculty continue to provide excellence, quality, and service because they are professionals who take pride in their work, even if the university doesn't. Does any of this foster innovation and creativity? Again, innovative and creative professionals will go on doing what they do--but excellence in spite of institutional neglect is not what the U of I should be striving for.

Walkers Unite!

Nicholas Maes, Death and the Miser, 1650/55.
Image courtesy National Gallery of Art

The conversation went something like this, as I came upon a couple of acquaintances talking today.

Colleague in another UIUC college: "Do you watch the Walking Dead?"
Me: "No, my family loves it, but I can't stand anything with an apocalyptic, end-of-the-world premise."
Colleague...: "Wow, and yet you're supporting the NTT union contract negotiations?!?"

Ba-dum-BUMP.

Sigh.

I laughed, as one does, and the conversation about TV resumed.

I've already declared "The corporate university has won" on this blog, but this is the part where faculty themselves start dig the grave of the thing it has replaced.

The options, for everyone still on the faculty when classes resume on the fall, will be either (1) to sustain the relevance of the humanistic liberal arts in terms that can be understood and respected by an institution that has at its heart business values rather than the traditional academic ones, or (2) find other ways to leverage the strengths of the humanistic liberal arts, including collective union action.

It would be a "which side are you on?" moment, except that the genius of the corporate university is to meld the sides into a single self-interested glob of relentless activity. My job at the moment (helping English majors with internships and career planning) sits squarely within (1), even as I try to keep the dream of (2) alive by blogging and increasing the numbers of English majors.  The world is moving forward in ways we can't imagine, the first-world injustices of the R1 university are already being dwarfed by the mass layoffs and closing institutions around the state, and the whole enterprise of higher education is only a few decades away from being engulfed by global climate change.

However, a public university, like a union, is made up of people making choices about how and to what end they do their jobs.  Though in the case of the university, the workers are public servants for the state higher education system.  None of the nouns in that sentence mean what they did when the land-grant universities were founded in the nineteenth century. We each of us working here contribute to their redefinition.

If and when you face the decision about whether to cross your colleague's picket line, know that the issue is not money; it's the terms on which teaching at the University of Illinois happens. As you decide whether to treat your colleagues' labor actions as a meaningful collective gesture or as a quixotic act of futility, think about what happens next. Financial exigency will always be there as a reason to reason to let go of faculty who are not protected by tenure, and it will always be there as a reason to let the numbers of tenure-stream faculty dwindle. Who then will do the teaching?  On what terms? What will you have done to make sure that the conditions under which your work has thrived are available to others? What will you have done to make sure that the teaching workforce is professional, effective, and accountable?

Whose university is it?

You Want to Know the Really Crazy Part?

Pushing for collective bargaining concessions when the state budget is in free-fall and other public institutions are preparing to be mothballed is insane.  Right?

The back story: NTFC Local #6546, the certified union that represents non-tenure-stream (NTT) faculty on the University of Illinois flagship campus, has been trying to bargain its first contract for more than a year. Faced with yet another round of negotiations in which the university resisted moving forward, NTFC called for mediation last week, and yesterday had the second session with a mediator.  Short version: things are not looking good, and there will be a strike vote next Tuesday.

There's a part of this that's even crazier, though: it's not about the money.

If it were, we wouldn't even be in this position right now.  Shortly after NTFC was certified as a union, the university froze its wage program for NTT faculty.  Making up collective bargaining rules as they went along, they declared that they could not go ahead with the proposed wage increases while negotiations were underway and then refused to begin collective bargaining. Nearly two years later, wages remain frozen. If union members were in this for the money, the organization would have collapsed by now. It's been a long time, and whatever wage increases one might expect a contract to yield are not going to be big enough to offset the loss of planned raises these past two years--particularly since (as everyone points out) it's not clear these days where the money for anything is going to come from.

Besides, contract negotiations have not even broached the subject of wages yet.  Really.  After 29 bargaining sessions, wages remain in the list of matters still to be discussed.

It's not about the money.  It never was.

This is not a line of work that people go into if they're motivated by money.  People with the smarts and stamina to earn a Ph.D. or other terminal degree can generally find an easier path to a large salary, if that's what they're after.  People go into college level teaching and continue to do it as NTTs because they care about the subject matter they teach and want to impart it to others.  Furthermore; many NTTs pay for themselves: the tuition dollars their teaching brings in dwarves the cost of their salaries.  The university isn't going to make a additional revenue by diminishing the professional role of these faculty members.  

Don't get me wrong: NTT faculty have the same needs as everyone else.  Who couldn't use more money? If a fiscal fairy godmother suddenly brought peace and compromise to the Illinois statehouse and showered public higher education in Illinois with money, NTT faculty would cheerfully accept a salary bump.  But negotiations haven't ground to a halt because NTT faculty are greedy; they've ground to a halt because the administration refuses to make the concessions that are necessary for NTT faculty to do their jobs, regardless of what they're paid.

These faculty are not the mythic tweed-jacketed, six-figure-earning, never-darkening-the-door-of-a- classroom, retiring-on-a-bloated-pension, ivory-tower figures that haunt comment threads on higher education.  If you've been a student in at the University of Illinois, NTTs are the faculty who marked multiple drafts of your first-year-composition papers, got you through a required math course, taught you a foreign language, lectured in fields ranging from political science to computer science.  They might have worked with you on an honors project, written you recommendations, and talked with you in office hours.  If you're not sure which of the faculty you encountered during your four years here were NTTS and which were on the tenure stream, there's a reason for that: NTT faculty do much of the same teaching work as tenure-stream faculty, only for less money with less job security and fewer resources.

NTT faculty know they're not going to be tenured, and they aren't looking for equivalent salaries to tenure-stream faculty.  They do, however, want the current hazy and capricious set of hiring and promotion guidelines to be replaced by procedures that hold both themselves and the university accountable.  Annual reviews--of all things!--have been a sticking point in negotiations.  Some NTTs get them; others teach here for many years without any evaluation of their work by a superior. One would think it would be in the university's interest--as it is in the interest of most employers--to make sure employees are meeting their standards on a regular basis, particularly when (as is currently the cases) NTTs are on year-by-year contracts.  But providing this minimal quality control is not something the university wants to do. 

Note those words, "others teach here for years....," above. Even though many NTTs have committed themselves to this state and these students, and bring a wealth of institution-specific experience to their jobs, the administration is loathe to codify and regularize the hiring and retention practices that, in fact, structure much of the teaching faculty of the university. NTFC Local 6546 wants it to be the case that five years of proven, documented success on the job lead to a two-year (as opposed to one-year) contract.  It's not a lot to ask, and it would improve Illinois teaching if the faculty that departments rely on didn't have to spend part of every year preparing an exit strategy, and if retention decisions were based on quality.

The issues at stake go beyond these matters of working conditions.  As the ongoing budget crisis increases the institution's reliance on NTTs to fulfill the university's teaching mission, they want the guarantees of academic freedom and shared governance that are central to fulfilling that mission. It's not overreach: NTTs are happy to refer the question of how much academic freedom and what role in shared governance to the fellow faculty who adjudicate these matters.  NTTs are asking for a seat on the Committee on Academic Freedom within the faculty senate, and within a year of the negotiated contract they want individual departments and unit bylaws to include language that explicitly addresses NTT roles in shared governance (or lack thereof). But again, the administration is reluctant to apply the principles of good educational practice to the special case of NTT faculty: even as the budget crisis swells the numbers of NTTs doing the teaching work of the university, the administration does not want those faculty adhering to expectations that are meant to hold their teaching to the highest standards of academic excellence.

Want Low-Cost, Performance-Based Higher Ed? Give It a Contract.

Here are some of the radical things that NTFC Local 6546 wants in a contract:

• regular performance reviews
• consistent, enforceable standards for promotion
• multiyear contracts
• a wage agreement

Here's what happens when non-tenure-stream faculty don't have those things:

• employees have no idea from year to year whether they're meeting performance expectations -- or even what those expectations are
• employees devote time and energy that could go into teaching to preparing a yearly fall-back strategy, so that if they are not rehired at the end of one academic year, they will have another job to begin in the following fall.
• decisions on retention from year to year reflect everything BUT teaching excellence: the vagaries of enrollment patterns, the wish to employ favored graduate students, spousal accommodations (yes, I am a spouse who benefits from the current system), department politics 
• the salaries that teaching NTTs earn bear no relation to the tuition dollars they draw, particularly relative to the salaries of tenure-stream faculty with similar teaching responsibilities.

If higher education in Illinois can only be preserved by replacing the shattered remnants of the pre-Rauner way of doing things with a "performance-based" system of funding, then supporting an agreement between the NTT union and the University administration is a step towards that bold new world of fiscal responsibility and financial stability.  An NTT contract would do what the present system does not: build accountability into the work of much of the teaching faculty and reward the ability of NTTs to fulfill the fundamental teaching mission of higher education without the high overhead of equipment like telephones, laptops, books, and internet connections (many teaching NTTs, lacking these amenities in their offices, do much of their work from home where they pay for them themselves). 

Oh, right: except that Gov. Rauner is holding the entire state budget hostage to the dream of eliminating collective bargaining. So much for NTTs leveraging their very cost-effectiveness into a better education for the taxpayers of Illinois.

The point is, when NTTs jostle and agitate for a contract agreement, they're not pulling the state deeper into the red. NTT teaching faculty already operate in the black and they want to hold their institution accountable for the instrumental role they play in upholding its mission to educate the students of Illinois (as well as the out-of-state and international students who also help to balance the books).

What English Majors Don't Know

A short list of things that we can convey to our students.

1. It doesn't have to be like this.  Students who graduate without skills they can market to employers may have made bad choices, but majoring in English wasn't one of them.

 

 2. Few people end up working in a profession directly related to their major.

 3. Even fewer people end up doing the same thing for their entire lives. The statistic of "seven careers in a lifetime" may be mythical, but one doesn't have to search far for anecdata that people change, circumstances and values change, the relevance of particular jobs changes: it's highly unlikely that any industry-specific technical competencies that one gains in college will serve all of one's needs over a lifetime.

4.  Employers care about skills, not majors.  Majoring in English (or other "impractical" disciplines) will make you smarter in a number of ways: able to cope with complex information, comfortable with uncertainty, adept at encouraging inclusivity and diversity, talented at communicating in a variety of ways, skilled at hearing what is not said as well as what is said, experienced in framing problems and seeking out information to solve them, and, yes, good at writing.

6.  Many employers don't know that English majors (and their ilk) have the skills they're looking for. It's on us to get that message out and to help our students learn to make the case for themselves to employers.

5. Few employers care if you're good at going to school.  Granted: maintaining a high GPA is key to landing entry-level jobs at some large companies, and students who have their sights set on law school or other elite graduate study should focus on keeping their grades as high as they possibly can. Outside those specialized circumstances, students may be better served by a mediocre GPA that represents a willingness to take risks, struggle with difficult material, or explore the other kinds of intellectual opportunities that a college campus has to offer.

6. College is a great time to flounder. Students who graduate without a clear professional career path may flounder for a few years before landing in a stable and satisfying job. Students who chose narrow "practical" majors leading directly to a career may flounder once they realize that their eighteen-year-old selves lacked the knowledge to anticipate what their twenty-something selves would value. The more purposeful floundering students can do amidst the extensive resources of a college campus, the better: internships, a wide range of classes, volunteer programs, part-time jobs, student organizations, activism of various kinds, leadership roles.