I Do Not Think "Key" Means What You Think It Means, Provost.

If you're non-tenure-track faculty at the University of Illinois, you got an email from the Provost on Friday, with the subject line, "Announcement Regarding Specialized Faculty."  It says, in part:

The campus has been engaged in ongoing contract negotiations with representatives from the NTFC since October 2014. The union recently requested bringing in a federal mediator. We’ve had just two mediation sessions so far and four additional mediation dates are scheduled (April 27, May 11, May 26 and June 11). We have reached tentative agreements on several key items and believe that further progress can be made at the bargaining table. We are disappointed that it appears the NTFC isn’t willing to give that process a chance. We have urged the NTFC representatives to continue mediation so that we may work together toward reaching a fair and equitable contract.

"Tentative agreements" have indeed been reached on thirteen items, mostly boilerplate subjects like recognition and union/management meetings.  Most significant, or "key," has been an agreement on grievance, something members of the union have now that they didn't have in October of 2014 when negotiations started.  So there's that.

We've been at this eighteen months.  Most faculty work on nine-month contracts tied to the academic calendar, so in academic terms we're coming to the end of two years.

Several "key items" on which there are NOT yet tentative agreements are

• governance
• academic freedom
• evaluations
• professional development
• extra-contractual work
• appointment/reappointment rights
• promotions
• international faculty
• multiyear contracts
• benefits
• leaves
• compensation

In other words, almost all the difficult substance of a contract has yet to be bargained.

It would be difficult for NTFC and the administration to have arrived at tentative agreements on some of these subjects, as there have been no proposals from the administration on three that are most important to NTTs: evaluations, multiyear contracts, and reappointment notices. No administration proposals. None.

In case you're wondering: NTFC Local 6546 is asking for

• departments to create an evaluation structure for NTTs within a year of the contract
• 2-year contracts after 5 years of service and 3-year contracts after 10 years 
• timely notification about reappointment so that faculty can know whether they need to look for new jobs while there's still time to find one.  

The union proposes to keep benefits and leaves as they are. With so much unfinished business, the issue of compensation has not been otherwise broached.

The university has had eighteen months to bring their proposals on these issues to the table and they have not done so. The delay is puzzling: NTFC Local 6546 is asking for the same contract that has been negotiated at the Chicago campus for NTT faculty in UICUF. The length of time it is taking, and the lack of movement from the administration on some of the most significant issues suggests that their goal is not to arrive at tentative agreements, but erode the commitment of union members by running down the clock. They've had eighteen months to demonstrate otherwise, and they have not.

It is therefore difficult to know what the Provost means when he says, in the same letter

We value the contributions of specialized faculty members. We have taken major steps over the past few years to demonstrate our support, and we are committed to doing more to address your concerns and ensure that you can achieve your career goals.

There are two recent "Provost Communications" (#25 and #26), which give NTTs the collective name of "specialized faculty," recognize the desirability of multiyear contracts, and offer a path to promotion. They commit the university to nothing. It's hard to know what to say about Communication 26 in the absence of a union contract guaranteeing some of its terms. The proposed promotion structure demands of NTT faculty seeking promotion the same kind of work that earns tenure without offering its corresponding benefits, including increased pay and a multiyear contract, and without the institutional support that helps tenure-stream faculty earn promotion. Those who want to keep the tenure system, and the protections that come with it, at the heart of higher ed should think hard about which is more consistent with those goals: a unionized NTT faculty with a contract that spells out their role or a system of workarounds that will allow the administration to replace tenure-stream faculty with professionals who get no protections at all.

The administration's bargaining team has given the university community no reason to believe that four more scheduled mediation sessions will achieve what eighteen months of delaying tactics have not.

An equitable contract could have been negotiated long before now that would have brought university policy in line with the goals of Provost Communications 25. It's puzzling that the Provost professes himself "disappointed" by those of us who are trying to do that. The NTFC proposals are consistent with those Communications. The university's bargaining position is not.


(both images courtesy Metropolitan Museum of Art.  Top: French, 16th century, iron.  Bottom: French, second half 17th century, iron and steel.)

Academic Freedom 2.0

Steven Salaita is back in the news and our local paper continues to relish his downfall.  There must be readers who enjoy following his fortunes--most people I know are still wondering when AAUP censure will be lifted, mourning the demise of the American Indian Studies program here, and dealing with the brain drain as the combined effects of L'Affaire Salaita and the ongoing budget morass prompt humanities faculty who can go elsewhere to do so.

It's not over, though.  The questions that Salaita's unhiring raised remain unanswered, and it remains unexplained, "the nature of the line that Salaita crossed and the point at which he crossed it so that faculty have some clearer measure than "civility" to know when their passion, rage, ill-considered utterances, profanity, and political expressions become actionable."

One could continue to complain about this endlessly deferred conversation, except that the university has quietly and resolutely sought to end it altogether by eliminating the protections of academic freedom at the bargaining table.

The appointment letters that tenure-stream faculty read include boilerplate language affirming AAUP principles and promising that the university will adhere to them.  The appointment letters that most non-tenure stream faculty offer no such assurances, only a line in the accompanying "Notification of appointment that "This appointment is made subject to all applicable laws and to the University of Illinois Statutes, the General Rules Concerning University Organization and Procedure and other actions of the Board of Trustees. These policies are subject to change from time to time and the most updated version of the policies is applicable."

The Statutes do have an academic freedom article, Article X. However, "faculty" is presumed throughout the Statutes to refer to tenure-stream faculty, leaving NTTs without these protections. The Senate has crafted a set of revisions to the Statutes to make sure that TTs and NTTs count as "faculty" throughout the documents, but they are not yet approved by the Board.  Moreover, the university's bargaining team has shown a general disinterest and disregard in building minimal academic freedom protections into the contract for NTTs.  They seemed surprised that academic freedom should even be relevant to these negotiations and were accordingly unprepared to discuss it.

The future of academic freedom here lies not in in the fortunes of high-profile cases like Salaita's, but in the basic protections afforded to the faculty doing 40% of the university's teaching.  As tenure lines dwindle, the contract available to non-tenure-stream faculty becomes, quite literally, the bottom line.

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.