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Conference on Contingent Academic Labor
By Gwendolyn Bradley
The seventh Conference on Contingent Academic Labor took place in August at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, Canada. The biennial conference brings together contingent faculty activists and others interested in improving job security, compensation, academic freedom protections, and professional-development resources for part- and full-time professors who are off the tenure track. About two hundred people participated in the conference, which focused this year on academic freedom, the casualization and globalization of labor, and organizing strategies.
In the opening session, representatives of the United States, Canada, and Mexico spoke about academic working conditions in their respective countries. AAUP president Cary Nelson described increasing numbers of non-tenure-track faculty working in the United States with few resources in poor conditions with little academic freedom. Greg Allain, president of the Canadian Association of University Teachers, painted much the same picture of Canada. In Mexico, conditions are much worse, said Raul Gatica, a leader of a teachers’ strike in Oaxaca: calls for reform of the educational system are met with violent repression, and several striking teachers have been killed in recent months.
Academic freedom for non-tenure-track instructors is extremely tenuous in all three countries, many participants noted. Several, including Keith Hoeller, a member of the AAUP’s Committee on Contingent Faculty and the Profession, spoke about firsthand experiences of being fired or seeing close colleagues be fired in apparent retaliation for speaking out or for reasons violating their academic freedom. Hoeller emphasized that pushing for incremental changes in working conditions and compensation is not enough; contingent faculty are vulnerable because they lack tenure, and tenure must be the ultimate goal. Flo Hatcher, chair of the AAUP’s contingent committee, discussed the AAUP’s fight to protect academic freedom over the past ninety years, including the recent publication of a draft regulation concerning protections for part-time faculty (see pages 93–94 of the September–October issue of Academe) and a listing of contingent faculty numbers by institution (see story on page 19). Hoeller and Hatcher made their remarks as part of “Temperature Rising: Global to Local Threats Against Academic Freedom,” a panel moderated by AAUP staff member Gwendolyn Bradley, which also included eight other presenters.
Other panels focused on strategies for fighting back. In “Getting Things Done in the U.S. Legislature,” three contingent faculty activists emphasized the importance of tying grassroots organizing and coalition building into lobbying efforts and discussed strategies for effectively lobbying and educating legislators. All three—Marcia Newfield of the City University of New York, Karen Thompson of Rutgers University, and Jonathan Karpf of California State University–San Jose—have been involved with successful lobbying efforts in their states. The panel was moderated by AAUP staff member Erika Gubrium.
The AAUP was a sponsor of the conference. The next conference is tentatively scheduled for August 2008.
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