MLAngry

Suppose the Modern Language Association were a professional organization that reflected the lives of most people teaching modern languages and literatures.  The annual convention would be a very different thing.  Instead of taking place in a cluster of upscale convention hotels in a major American city, it would be centered on a interstate offramp somewhere in the the middle of the country, one with a huge concentration of cheap motels.  Even so, there probably wouldn't be enough rooms for everyone attending, so some people would have to reserve rooms at the next few offramps, but that's okay--a lot of them are used to commuting.  Sessions would take place in the party rooms of McDonalds, Applebees, and the like.  In some cases, tables in the regular seating areas of the Bob Evans or Arby's could be pushed together to accommodate smaller groups. A hat could be passed to cover the cost of ordering enough food to justify taking up the space--and after all, everyone's got to eat, right?

The Noncontingent Labor Crisis

This is mortifying.  Even though I've been blogging about this stuff for some time now, I'm only now starting to get straight terms that I had thought were synonymous.

Adjuncts?  People tell me those are part-time.

NTT?  That's the term (or rather, abbreviation) to use for full-time non-tenured faculty

Contingent?  The all-purpose catch-all phrase except that in some cases, NTTs are on multiyear contracts (it's not tenure, but not all contingency is created equal).  And sometimes people include graduate students in this category.

These terms are particularly confusing when people try to arrive a numbers that will convey just how dependent higher education has become on underpaid people who don't have the job security of the tenure stream. Part-time faculty members are a growing part of the academic labor force, but efforts to address their situation specifically can be skewed by the small (but not irrelevant) number of tenure stream faculty who teach full time.  The oft-cited figure of "75%" comes from this 2009 report by the U.S. Department of Education. summarized by the Coalition on the Academic Workforce in their recent Portrait of the Part-Time Academic Workforce as follows:

Of the nearly 1.8 million faculty members and instructors who made up the 2009 instructional workforce in degree-granting two- and four-year institutions of higher education in the United States, more than 1.3 million (75.5%) were employed in contingent positions off the tenure track, either as part-time or adjunct faculty members, full-time non-tenure-track faculty members, or graduate student teaching assistants.

I have blogged before about some of the confusion generated by the AAUP's 2012-13 chart on the status of the profession, which has yields an "adjunct problem" consisting of 41% of faculty, 57% of faculty, or 76%, depending on how you add up the numbers.

The distinctions between the various ways of being not-part-of-the-tenure-track are vital for purposes of labor organizing.  If the labor law in a given state and the statutes of a particular institution prevent part-timers and full-timers from forming a joint collective bargaining unit, then it's futile to try to do so, regardless of the benefits of solidarity.   They are also useful for building broader coalitions: faculty teaching at institutions where relying on part-timers is the norm have different shared concerns than faculty at institutions with a cohort of NTT full-timers.

The complexity otherwise obscures a crucial question, though: who is doing the teaching? One full professor teaching a handful of graduate students each semester signifies differently for college teaching than one NTT who is teaching 100 students in two classes, particularly if the NTT also teaches two additional classes as a part-timer at another institution.   Faculty head-counts tell only part of the story, and not the part most relevant to the tuition- and tax-paying public.

To demonstrate why the insider-baseball of academic staffing should matter to anyone outside academia, we should be counting contact hours.  Of all the hours of instruction delivered in a given institution, how many of those involve a tenure-stream faculty member interacting directly with students?

Rebecca Schuman has suggested deploying a scarlet "A" for "adjunct":

I propose that the “A” (and everyone else’s faculty rank, too) be codified into every course catalog in America. I propose that we do it in a way students and parents can understand, and that we do it with a link to each rank’s salary range. So instead of CHEM 104 STAFF (most of us adjuncts are, after all, Professor Staff), it would read CHEM 104 ADJUNCT, with a link to the pay range. Instead of CHEM 500 DOE, J., it would read CHEM 500 DOE, J. (FULL)—with a link to the pay range, again. 

What if we could calculate a number for every institution of higher learning: the average number of hours an average student, upon graduation, has spent classes taught by instructors who have (or are eligible for) the protections of tenure?  Or compare averages within particular majors across institutions? The possibility of counting the role of contingent faculty by instructional time rather than a head count (as well as the complexity of whose heads are counted) has been a subject of recent Twitter discussion between @KateMfD, @gerrycanavan, @pankisseskafka, @VCVaile, @josh_boldt, @deandad, @MattBruenig, @JeffreyKeefer, and of course @goodenoughprof.

I suspect the underlying reality would be the same, however.  "Faculty' doesn't mean what it used to mean or imply the norms of status and employment that used to go along with college-level teaching. It is time to bundle the complexities of assistant/associate/full/tenure-track/tenured into the blanket term "noncontingent faculty" and reserve the term "faculty" tout court for what it is: everyone who teaches college classes without the increasingly dubious security of the tenure stream.

Ban Disconnection, Not Laptops

It's a great party, so no one complains when the NewYorker is late to it, but hasn't the issue of laptops in the classroom been fairly well canvassed by now?

I ban laptops, mostly.  In my small (<40 students) discussion-based classes, students build skills in interpretation and analysis.  For the most part, the information that gets delivered can be recorded on post-it notes attached to the relevant pages of the book we're discussing--and that's the method I recommend.  I point out that our classroom as is akin to a nature preserve or national park: one of the few remaining spaces where face-to-face conversation among people who are otherwise strangers is a method of attaining knowledge.

That "We" Again: Who Did We Say We Were?

Warning: this post is very specific to the campus where I work.  The post may be of interest to those who are following the nationwide push to organize adjuncts, but its merits are otherwise site-specific (which seems to be true of union-related things generally).  The post responds to Nicholas Burbules, Gutsell Professor of Educational Policy Studies at UIUC, whose blog, No Faculty Union at Illinois (coauthored with Joyce Tolliver, Associate Professor in the Department of Spanish, Italian, and Portuguese), seeks"to deconstruct the rhetoric and strategies of faculty union advocates." 

Back in April, as academic labor unrest was stirring on our sister campus, I wrote this post about the issues that are prompting many faculty to look anew (and where legally available) at unionizing to solve at least some of the problems besetting higher education.

Now "we" (or at least, some of us) are upset because "we" voted by union card to form a union without telling...well whom, exactly? "Us"?

We actually did tell us. A union card drive for non-tenure-track (NTT) faculty involves speaking, individually, to as many members of the potential bargaining unit as can be located. Nearly every NTT faculty member who could form part of the bargaining unit was contacted, and a majority of those faculty members decided that they wanted a faculty union to represent their interests in collective bargaining. So who is this "we" who weren't told? Precisely those people who are not part of the bargaining unit. "By May 5, when the Senate held its last meeting of the 2013-14 academic year, and when union organizers were intensely engaged in a no-holds-barred attempt to persuade specialized [aka, NTT] faculty to sign union cards, once again no mention was made of the card campaign."

The Diversity Question

"You're a white instructor seeking employment at an institution of higher education where the enrollment of white students and the employment of white instructors over-represents the proportion of white people in the population. We recognize that these numbers are a problem for our institution, and though we may well will hire more white people for this job, we want to make sure that those white people we hire see it as a problem, too. So, what steps might we expect you take in the classroom to compensate for the fact that your sheer presence in no way (you're probably cis and lacking a visible disability) contributes to the diversity of our campus?" 

That's not the question that gets asked in interviews. For examples of questions that do get asked when college teaching staff is getting hired, you can google "interview questions about diversity in the classroom"--but at many institutions, they amount to the one I asked above.

The MLA Task Force on Being Nice to People Leaving Academia But Otherwise Keeping Things the Same

If modern languages and literatures survive as academic disciplines, it will be because students (and the people students become when they graduate: tax-payers, tuition-payers, and folks who make decisions about allocating public resources) recognize that taking these classes in college makes a difference.

But you wouldn't know it from reading the Report of the MLA Task Force on Doctoral Study in Modern Language and Literature.  The document has been well chewed over by now, and the indigestible truth lies strewn in tatters around us: there are far more qualified potential professors than there are jobs for them and Ph.D. students ought to be supported (not vilified) for their efforts to find work outside academia.  The bulk of the report's recommendations, though, have been slurped down like the tasty morsels of cluelessness that they are: alt-ac training?  technological know-how? watered down dissertations?  five years to degree?  Doctoral education confronts a supply-and-demand problem.  As many academic bloggers have pointed out, fantasizing about some alternative demand (that only a retooled supply of literature and language Ph.D.'s can fill) won't fix it.

The Posts Not Written

And suddenly, the number of things I couldn't blog about--too personal, too mired in the concerns of relevant parties, too subject to institutional regulation, too specific to the bitterness of a particular moment, too consequential--left no room for the things I could blog about.  Here are some of the posts not written:

• Work-Life Vertigo, or The Limits of Compartmentalizing.

• Tales from the First Time on a Search Committee (adjunct hiring edition).

• The Plagiarism Smackdown

• The Making of a Faculty Union

• Mercy, Despair, and Sloth: The Truth of Grading Finals.

But the semester has finally washed me up on the shores of summer and I've had some time to catch up on the last six weeks of academic fun on the internet.  Let the blogging recommence!