Don't Pit Tenure Against Contingent Faculty Rights

Tenured faculty have to stop seeing contingent faculty as a threat and start seeing the ways we are all interdependent.

By Steve Street

By August, Steven D. Levitt’s March 3, 2007, entry on his Freakonomics blog, titled “Let’s Just Get Rid of Tenure (Including Mine),” had sparked sixty-eight responses, ranging from applause to scrutiny of his facts. But only one response addressed the concept of tenure as it affects the 68 percent of faculty nationwide without it: the untenured and untenurable. A similar silence greeted a call posted around the same time on the AAUP’s electronic discussion list for thoughts on academic freedom as nontenured faculty members have (or have not) experienced it; an observation about the irregular tenure clock at Yale University and other Ivies elicited more responses, none of them even from those institutions. All of this lends weight to Roger W. Bowen’s appeal in the March–April 2007 issue of Academe for “more oblige, less  noblesse,” as does this barbed response to Levitt’s blog entry from a tenured associate professor: “one of the greatest threats to intellectual freedom in academia today is—other tenured professors.”

Though tenure is widely assumed to be the sole insurer of academic freedom—John W. Curtis and Monica F. Jacobe categorically state that “part-time faculty do not have academic freedom” in their introductory article to the AAUP Contingent Faculty Index 2006—many contingents have found that their institutions’ very lack of commitment to them has provided another kind of freedom. Contingent faculty are free from career constraints and the long-term institutional and programmatic concerns to which Curtis and Jacobe point out many adjuncts aren’t privy. In the absence of financial or professional incentives, contingent faculty tend to be driven solely by a love for their subjects and students, so they can focus on what still must be—despite assessment programs and distance education and other technological innovations—the essential pedagogical interfaces between student, teacher, and subject matter.

Nurturing or Gatekeeping?

During a discussion forum at the 2007 State University of New York Council on Writing Conference in Albany, a few adjuncts did relate the occasional run-in with a supervisor. But for many more, including a film instructor in his fifties who said he’d never felt constrained in the classroom in any way, academic freedom was a surprising topic to be asked about. Greater energy was generated in discussing realms of student-teacher interaction that more institutionally entrenched faculty might rarely dare, bother, or be able to touch. Adjunct writing teacher Mario Hernandez of the State University of New York College at Cortland said at the conference that he identifies less with his tenured peers than with students, especially marginalized ones, “with whom I share a reality in common”; he added, “because of this, I hear things that would be irrelevant to the professional class.” He told of students who learned to articulate experiences of want and abuse and of their complex perceptions of what it meant to go to college—once he had assured them that honesty and truth could be virtues in a for-credit class (by no means a message the institution had conveyed to them).

The value of such cases depends on whether you think education is about the guardianship of standards or about the nurturing of curiosity and the capacity for self-discovery. But who can deny that those students moved from a dark to a lighter place, from a closed to a more open one? And that discovery, which provided students with tools for responding to the difficult world that college is, and the even more difficult one that is beyond, took place outside the realm of tenure.

Complex Realities

Along with the commotion about the threat to tenure, another, more curious phenomenon seems to be taking place. Partly because of the very fight over tenure, and because of the conditions that have made the fight necessary, the nature of those seeking tenure has changed, or at least the fundamental assumptions with which they enter the workforce have. In a paper titled “The New Academic Labor System,” former AAUP associate secretary Richard Moser cites the anthropologist Clifford Geertz, who said in a 1999 address to the American Council of Learned Societies that he used to tell students that if they “take risks, resist the cleared path, avoid careerism . . . and remain alert, optimistic, and loyal to the truth,” they might expect to “have a valuable life, and nonetheless prosper.” But Geertz went on to say that in “the Age of Adjuncts,” he didn’t “do that anymore”—because the career path had gotten too narrow, he implied, and the penalties for falling off it too severe.

In departmental break rooms these days, how much of the talk is lively discussion of books and ideas, and how much is about committees, assessment figures, advising duties, program proposals, deans’ pronouncements, and provosts’ task forces, with maybe a few mortgage woes or car-repair crises thrown in? Doesn’t the ratio of the former to the latter seem about the same as the ratio of nontenured faculty to tenure-track or tenured faculty? Not that the split is down those lines, exactly, but from my admittedly biased perspective after twenty years as a nontenured faculty member, it does seem as if contingents have contributed a disproportionate amount of the joy. Talk about complex realities.

Yet another wrinkle: at the 2007 State University of New York Council on Writing Conference, the director of a first-year composition program said the adjuncts she appoints are the only ones who will assign the kinds of papers required by institutional assessment initiatives; tenured and tenure-track faculty, who on her campus also must teach composition, are bored by the likes of “comparison contrast” essays and want to pick their own content. She can’t challenge them because of their departmental status; she’s tenured herself, but with her administrative duties, she’s not even considered a full faculty member. In other words, these faculty, many of them newly appointed, are circumventing the standards of the institution that’s spending more money on them than on adjuncts under the assumption that tenure-track faculty will uphold the institution’s standards better than part-timers—who, fearful for their jobs, are following instructions and actually addressing the program’s requirements!

Such contradictions and reversals of expectations contribute to a much more complex set of variables and problems than the simple equation of tenure with high-quality education can account for. Not only can  tenure exclude such individual interactions as those described by Mario Hernandez, but for at least seven years it can also reinforce the very careerist, limited view of the world against which those who decry the encroaching corporatization of the academy hold out tenure as a shield. Tenure is an institutional mechanism, a symptom of our own very particular corporation. It’s not freedom itself. That’s too simple an equation.

Only Two Kinds?

But maybe students understand more than we think. Consider this statement from a first-year learning-disabled student in an open-admission public university:

College began as a place of higher education and now has become an entirely different establishment. . . . The truth is that college defines who is who; it separates the winners from the losers. It does not mold a person, it defines a person into a strata of a given hierarchical system. To create a better image, colleges cover up their institutional hierarchy and make it appear less harsh.

What a mirror held up to our red faces! Was it tenured or nontenured faculty members who gave her these ideas? Didn’t it take us both? What condescension on our part to think students wouldn’t notice the elephant in our lecture halls: hyperaware of dress and social cliques, they must be able to discern groups among their teachers, if not distinguish particular winners from losers among us. Students see the institution first; what a shame that what college showed this student was not an array of exciting possibilities for the next four years and her life beyond, but a threshing machine. Her dualistic perception reflected the two tiers of the professoriate.

The whole academic discourse is shot through with the division. Even “tiers” is an upper-tier word. “Adjunct vernacular runs deep,” says Hernandez in distinguishing himself from “the landed faculty,” and contingent activist Joe Berry points out that “our class position has changed.” And how. Though I’ve been a faculty member at more than a dozen American colleges and universities—for several years I taught on three campuses at once—when a new dentist removed her mirror from my mouth recently to say in impressed tones, “So you’re a professor?” my correction was automatic: “I’m a teacher.” Decades ago I’d have hesitated, at once flattered, hopeful, and apologetic, not so much for having to decline the grander label as for not wanting to get into explaining a distinction that makes the most difference, after all, to those between whom it’s drawn. Now my reaction is the visceral one of an enlisted foot soldier mistaken for an officer; I’m saving my nuanced responses for my students and the literature we explore together.

“In the pursuit of maximum profits,” Moser says in his paper on the new academic labor system, “the search for the truth, intellectual creativity, academic standards, scientific invention, the ideals of citizenship, and the practice of community have been discounted in favor of vocational training, material success, applied research, and bottom-line considerations.” Even my perceptive student might not have fathomed all that yet, and many younger faculty of both tiers are at first only vaguely aware of the terms of their own employment, let alone the dynamics of the institution and its effects on what and how they teach.

But will an institution composed entirely of “winners” lead to more truth? What are the truths of the privileged? Of course, even the head that wears a crown lies uneasy, but how reflective is guaranteed lifetime employment of any other reality at all? Joe Berry points out that longtime adjuncts entered the academy with the common American faith that hard work will pay off, but the reality is that few full-time job openings are filled by former adjuncts. For many of us, the only payoff for hard work is the work itself, and more of it if we’re lucky. Similar discrepancies are part of our nation’s larger socioeconomic realities, which it might well be healthy for our institutions to reflect —but do huge socioeconomic gaps in the nation as a whole justify huge gaps in our institutions?

More Equitable Models

To insist on traditional tenure models alone is to rigidify the institution of higher education back to the tenure models of 1915 and 1940, the dates of the AAUP’s still-standing documents—a time when global politics as well as academia might have seemed more clear-cut than they do now. Such a return would entail fighting administrations, boards of trustees, state governments, and other purse-string holders to overcome the momentum of thirty years during which, according to the “Trends in Faculty Status” chart published in the January–Feburary 2008 issue of Academe, full-time tenured and tenure-track faculty have been reduced from almost 60 percent of total faculty to just under 32 percent in all degree-granting institutions nationwide. Contingent appointments during that same period have risen to almost 70 percent of the national total.

So why not instead use our energy—and some of the hard-fought money secured for more tenure-track lines—to adapt to change by developing new and more equitable ways of incorporating contingent faculty into the institutions they’re already serving? Why not use that energy to search for new models, as the Canadian Association of University Teachers has done with its proposal for part-time tenure, or as the University of Colorado’s Association of Teaching Faculty is currently doing with its Instructor Tenure Project? Or to explore models for dual-career tracks like the ones Georgia State University and New York University have recently instituted? The AAUP’s 2003 policy statement Contingent Appointments and the Academic Profession and its 2006 recommended institutional regulation dealing with part-time faculty appointments, while continuing to support tenure for part-time faculty, also describe basic protections that should be afforded to all part time faculty members—tenured or not—and additional protections for long-term part-time faculty members. Similarly, the most recent campaign of the American Federation of Teachers calls for legislative as well as collective bargaining measures against both the overuse and the abuse of contingent faculty, not just for simplistically upping the percentage of the tenure-track faculty.

It’s you, the tenured and tenure track faculty, who can effect such change. Adjuncts need you to, just as you have needed and will continue to need us. We need not just your expressions of empathy but your help in bringing us in—your votes on budget issues that can get us equitable pay, benefits, and job security—because you understand how the institution works outside of the classroom in ways most of us don’t; you have the institutional power. You need us to open up your students and acclimatize them to the institution so that they can focus on college learning. We both need to disprove Henry Kissinger’s claim that academic infighting is so fierce because the stakes are so low: we need to fight less, precisely because the stakes are so high.

Steve Street has taught at Clemson University, the American University in Cairo, and the Rochester Institute of Technology as well as for public university systems in Wisconsin and New York. He now teaches on part-time contracts in the writing program at the State University of New York College at Buffalo. He has published short fiction, reviews, and essays in The Quarterly, The Missouri Review, In Posse Review, September 11, 2001: American Writers Respond, and elsewhere.

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