THE ADJUNCT TRACK

Let's Talk Equity — Later

When will we realize it's time to take advantage of the economic turmoil and restructure the faculty labor system?

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By STEVE STREET

For far too many tenured and tenure-track professors, the issue of equity for adjuncts is a matter of no great consequence. Sure, it's something they have an opinion about — like beauty or its opposite, chocolate or vanilla, Pepsi or Coke. It's a matter they can debate forever with a modicum of attention, and then easily dismiss.

But academe's use of contingent faculty labor, though born of economic conditions, is perpetuated with the same kind of scorn, unreasoning prejudice, willful ignorance, and apologetic inaction usually reserved for the treatment of any number of oppressed groups. Many such apologies surface in online responses to articles on part-time and non-tenure-track faculty members. I haven't seen anyone write "Yes, but adjuncts have tails," so I won't refute that one until it comes up. In the meantime, however, allow me to dispose of some straw people that are routinely offered up as reasons why we can't, or shouldn't, resolve what the American Federation of Teachers has called a crisis:

"Adjuncts sign a contract; they agree to the terms." You might order a $10 blue-plate special and enjoy it, too, until you see a party at the next booth receive the same plates piled twice as high for $5 each. "Well, of course," the waiter might say, "they ordered from the green menu; you ordered from the blue one. You reached for it yourself!" Oh, fine, then?

"Adjuncts can always go somewhere else." That's verbatim from a department chair who was also a member of a union local's executive board. It's true that many adjuncts do go elsewhere, often back and forth several times in a workweek. Others can't move or don't want to; that's why they're adjuncts, hired locally. They have family nearby or other reasons for staying put. Adjunct work, poorly paid and insecure as it might be, becomes less frantically precarious as part-timers build relationships with departments and acclimate to campus culture. In that way, employers gain something from contingent faculty members, at no cost, that's often touted as the immense advantage of full-time faculty members: familiarity with, and investment in, the college community.

"Adjuncts can always do something else." Not really, considering how little value the nonacademic sector places on experience in higher education. A more pertinent issue is this: In many career sectors, experience and familiarity with workplace culture are considered assets, not detriments. But the two-tiered professoriate favors the freshly credentialed, and values promise over experience.

Roger Rosenblatt, a noted novelist, columnist, and professor, said in a PBS interview about his new academic satire, Beet, "It takes a long time, at least in my case, a long time to know what you're doing in the classroom." Yet the American Association of University Professors once reported that only 8 percent of new tenure-track faculty hires had previously worked as part-time instructors — an indication of what is common knowledge on the academic job market: Search committees deem adjunct experience to be worse than none at all.

I've taught for a department that spent more than a year searching to fill exciting new tenure-track lines to replace adjuncts, vetting candidates, fretting about acceptances, feting some, and then having to hold basic-pedagogy workshops to teach the new hires what the contingent faculty members had been doing for years. Forget unfair — how inefficient. To replace adjuncts who'd proven committed as well as effective, that department spent, and is still spending, money on national searches and six years of on-the-job training.

No matter how fine the credentials of the new hires, no matter how high we can get our assessment scores, our system is failing the test of the rolled eyes. That's why experience in higher education gets so little respect in its own job market, not to mention in the culture at large.

"But tenured faculty members have to do so much more than teach." True enough. But that needn't be the case. Why not trust contingent faculty members to do some of the committee work, governance deliberations, and service tasks — and pay them for it proportionately? Equity works both ways. Imagine there's no difference in working conditions except for the percentage of each faculty member's workload. Imagine consistently applied measures of advancement and promotion. It's easy if you try. Save tenure by extending its base.

"But some part-time faculty members don't want to work full time. Some might turn down more money, too: those whose tax bracket would change if their adjunct salaries went up, or who might disqualify themselves for benefits from other sources. Let those in exceptional circumstances arrange exceptional terms. What human-resources department would refuse to draw up a special contract at a lower rate, or a nominal one? You don't stop a lifeguard from going after drowning victims by pointing out that other swimmers appear to be floating along quite happily on their backs.

"We need more data." We do need more information about contingent faculty members, who are a varied lot, as varied as institutions of higher education are. Even the comprehensive AFT-commissioned report released last October relies on data from the U.S. Department of Education that are as much as five years old to conclude that contingents now teach 38 to 58 percent of classes in American higher education, depending on the type of institution, the type of adjunct, and other factors.

But any institution can compare its relative salaries for tenure-line appointments versus contingent ones. How much data are needed to compare full health insurance with none; multiple titles and salary steps with one title and one salary step; $2,000 or $2,500 a course with $50,000 or $60,000 a year to start? Why not start with simple arithmetic?

For various reasons too tedious to get into here, in over a decade on one campus I taught some of the same courses as a part-time adjunct, then as a full-time contingent, then as a part-time adjunct again. The full-time contract was for eight courses a year at some $32,000; the part-time contracts were for around $2,400 a course, a semester at a time. Even a provost in a labor-management meeting could see the difference: I earned an extra $1,600 a course, or 40 percent more, with a full-time contract. And when I reverted to part-time status, I was teaching those same courses better, coming off of several years of full-time experience on a single campus, and yet I was paid less.

Data have a role but shouldn't be given the run of the place.

"Adjuncts hurt educational quality; the numbers prove it." Of course teachers with offices, phones, computer access, stable schedules, peer support, a living wage, and a possible future with an institution might well do a better job than teachers without any of those things. But for all the reasons above and then some, beware the recent spate of studies linking part-time faculty members with such indicators of educational quality as graduation and transfer rates.

I went into greater detail about this in my December column (see http://chronicle.com/jobs/news/2008/12/2008121101c.htm) but suffice it to say: Anyone who's ever stood in front of a class knows that any given lesson's success depends upon variables ranging from the lesson itself to the mix of personalities assembled, the lighting in the room, and the situation outside the classroom, both in the world and in each student's life. The very attempt to draw a straight line between any given teacher, much less a certain type of teacher, and a single outcome up to four years later seems to indicate, most conclusively, a research team with too much grant money or time on its hands. Such studies find what they want to find.

"Don't we have any full-time faculty to cover those sections?" I overheard an administrator moan over the teaching schedule for a pilot program. But the full-time faculty members resented the new duty, and the program was a disaster. Assess quality with your head, not your calculator.

"Adjuncts are just adjuncts, especially those who complain about the lot of adjuncts." In freshman-composition courses, we routinely teach students to avoid ad hominem arguments or circular reasoning. But a combination of both is what we contingent faculty members most often hear from our entrenched colleagues when we raise equity issues.

"Help," says the adjunct, "I've been doing adjunct work for six years, and now I have no job security, no governance input, no academic-freedom guarantees, and no benefits."

"Of course not," says the tenured professor, "adjunct jobs have no job security, no governance input, no academic-freedom guarantees, and no benefits. And you're an adjunct."

Maybe they question our qualifications because tenure is, by nature, a personal compact. As the AAUP's Cary Nelson describes it, "I know my colleagues' published work. I know the subjects of their current research. I am familiar with their course syllabi. I have built (or avoided) personal relationships with them over time." That's all to the good of departmental balance and cohesion, but from the outside, the dynamic of establishing such a tight-knit community is essentially the same as that of a street gang, albeit one with a formalized, six-year initiation. Everything is subordinate to the ultimate decision on tenure — in or out, and those on the outside don't count.

Imagine the conversation if two tenure-track professors were sharing their honest opinions about adjunct hiring:

"They're saying there's something wrong with our system."

"Yes, but look who's saying it. They're not in the system."

"But they make up almost 70 percent of us now."

"Seventy percent, maybe; 'us,' no."

"Maybe you're right. If we treated them like us, who'd be the adjuncts?"

"I, for one, certainly wouldn't want to be an adjunct. Would you?"

"Ew. No way!"

"See? It'd be a whole different system, wouldn't it?"

"Long live our system!"

That two-tiered system is so out of whack it's like no system at all. Let's take advantage of the economic turmoil now to restructure it.

Steve Street, a lecturer in the writing program at the State University of New York College at Buffalo, has taught writing and literature in colleges and universities since 1980, never on the tenure track. He will be writing regularly for The Adjunct Track column. For an archive of previous columns in this series, see http://chronicle.com/jobs/news/archives/columns/the_adjunct_track.