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Gender, Contingent Labor, and Writing Studies
Composition programs are feminized, devalued, and heavily populated by contingent faculty.
By Deirdre McMahon and Ann Green
It is no secret to most of us who work in college and university English departments that first-year writing is where new students go to be “cleaned up” before they begin the “real” work of upper-level courses. It is also no secret that few institutions that require students to take first-year writing courses staff them with full-time faculty. The class size, the labor-intensive course structure, and the seasonal nature of the work (in many places, more sections are offered in the fall) make first-year writing programs ripe for staffing by part-time faculty. The reality is that, as demonstrated in the 2000 report by the Modern Language Association’s Committee on the Status of Women and the AAUP’s 2006 Faculty Gender Equity Indicators report, women are more likely to be represented in the growing part-time and contingent faculty ranks, “the least secure, least remunerative, and least prestigious jobs among the full-time faculty.” Part-time and non-tenure-track positions thus become a primary place for women academics to live out their careers as “freeway flyers” without the benefit of health care, retirement, or job security. The economics that prompt dependence on part-time faculty reinforce the expectation that teaching first-year writing, exactly because it is labor intensive, underpaid, and supposedly “nurturing,” is less rigorous or intellectually informed work than other areas of academia.
In English departments this convergence of factors produces a significant number of positions, both full and part time, that are off the tenure track, contingent, and more frequently held by women than men. The number of “sad women in the basement” has multiplied since 1991, when writing studies scholar Susan Miller aptly and famously used that phrase to describe teachers of composition. Moreover, the gendering of “off-track” positions has been intensified by seismic shifts in academic hiring, including an overall decrease in the percentage of tenured and tenure-eligible faculty from about 57 percent in the 1970s to about 35 percent in 2006; level or decreased state budgetary support for public institutions; institutional investment that dictates that certain fields receive more tenure-eligible lines while others, including composition, increasingly rely on contingent faculty; and a blocked pipeline in which tenured senior faculty remain in their positions longer, even as fewer replacement lines are made available.
Effects on Women Faculty
The feminization of the field of composition has material effects for women at every level of the writing faculty. Women in tenure eligible or tenured positions are often asked to be “team players” by performing administrative work that does not lead to promotion, institutional or professional recognition, or salary increases. This invisible and thus feminized work includes the supervision and assessment of contingent colleagues, to the point that tenure stream faculty become implicitly aligned with management within the labor hierarchy of individual departments. Women in contingent faculty positions also are often asked to be “team players,” but by extending their job parameters without additional compensation or job security. At the small, comprehensive institution at which one of us teaches, contingent faculty in both official and unofficial capacities have supervised master’s theses, advised students, created new courses, and participated in program development. Who does what in a department is complicated further by the blurring effects of collegiality and the professionalism of those—on and off the tenure track—who work to provide the best education for their students. Equally powerful for contingent faculty, though, are the real and perceived pressures to contribute to the program as a means of currying the favor (or stoking the guilt) of administrators who will make appointments the following year.
As former president of the Association for the Study of Higher Education David Leslie writes in his March 2007 TIAA-CREF special report, The Reshaping of America’s Academic Workforce, “Women have provided the most important source of new talent in the academic workforce, but their gains (and their contributions) may be offset by the dramatic increase in ‘contingent’ appointments—faculty who are hired on short-term contracts without being eligible for tenure, and who now constitute the majority of all who teach in postsecondary institutions.” What Leslie identifies as a specifically gendered concern—the gains and losses of women in academia—carries with it at least two additional and related consequences. First, the fact that women are more likely to occupy contingent positions points to a consistent devaluing of women’s work in the academy. Second, the structural tension between women in tenure-track and tenured versus contingent positions—the implicit model in which one is a supervisor and the other a temporary worker—hides labor concerns shared by women on the tenure track as well as by contingent faculty members of both sexes.
Common Concerns
Academics on and off the tenure track often have strikingly similar concerns, not the least of which is publication. Because the primary means to be recognized as a scholar remains publication, adjuncts and other contingent faculty face the same pressures to publish to secure a tenure-track job as those on the track do to advance. As one of us wrote in the 2001 article “Off the Radar Screen: Gender, Adjuncting, and Teaching Institutions,” the market-driven criteria for institutional success levies a heavy toll on individual faculty members, for as smaller universities “attempt to model themselves after research universities but without the resources for research, expectations for both junior faculty and part-time faculty are rapidly increasing. . . . The increasing expectations to publish while maintaining the same high teaching load place a difficult burden on full-time junior faculty members— and potentially, on adjuncts. . . . There is no ‘teaching-intensive’ track that would not soon be affected by the continuous top-down pressure toward publication.” In fact, the mythic power of publication that still permeates U.S. academic life creates the idea that one can simply “write one’s way” from a part-time position to a full-time one (or from a teaching-intensive to a Research I institution).
However, English departments in particular depend upon contingent faculty to teach writing, and the labor-intensive work of teaching four or five or six sections of first-year writing to 150 students or more each semester is not conducive to publication. The myth of “writing one’s way out” is then compounded by the myth of the “mommy track”: that women have chosen less taxing academic employment (that is, contingent labor) to better balance career and family. Since the contingent faculty member often works for less money and without institutional support to cover the costs of professional memberships, conference attendance, or subventions for book publication, it becomes even more difficult for the woman who is balancing teaching and family to “write her way out” of the part-time position.
While women are most disadvantaged by assumptions of the “mommy track,” the specter of choice—that individuals chose to have children, or chose to teach first-year writing, or chose to work off the tenure track rather than leave the field for which they have trained—obscures the complexities and difficulties of academic life “off track” and further hides labor concerns common to all faculty members. For example, family medical leave would seem to assist all members of the professoriate in negotiating the balance between work and family. However, contingent and part-time faculty members, because of the nature of their employment, are typically not eligible for any official family medical leave. While taking family medical leave (whether compensated or not) is a vexed issue at many institutions, at least tenure-stream faculty can consider their options under the Family and Medical Leave Act. And while various institutions have successfully implemented paid and unpaid family medical leave for tenure-stream faculty, very few have addressed the issue of family medical leave for part-time faculty, many of whom are not even eligible to “buy in” to the group health-insurance plans offered by the institutions where they work.
Another pressure felt by both tenure-track and contingent faculty centers on increased departmental and institutional demands. Education and public policy experts Jack H. Schuster and Martin J. Finkelstein describe how the corporatization of academia has upped the ante for both publication and instruction: “The general pressures on American higher education over the past decade to reduce costs and expand faculty productivity have translated into imperatives for faculty to do ‘more’— especially to ratchet up efforts that contribute directly to the improvement of undergraduate education.” The need to do more with fewer resources compels faculty at every rank to balance increasing publication, instruction, and service demands. While the structures of the university rarely include contingent faculty in shared governance, the expansion of work in the academy—perhaps particularly the obsession with assessment—forces all faculty to work harder with less benefit, and contingent faculty in particular to carry out programmatic goals that they have not had a voice in shaping. This systemic problem undercuts the significance of shared governance for all faculty and thus erodes academic freedom.
Departments, especially those with the least amount of budgetary flexibility, among which we would count composition and literature programs, benefit from the short-term cost-effectiveness of underemploying professionals in the classroom, but they depend upon contingent instructors’ professionalism within and beyond the classroom to do so. Meanwhile, for tenure-stream and tenured faculty the increasing reliance on part-time or contingent labor creates an increasing burden of administrative and supervisory work that cannot be taken on by part-time faculty.
Continuing Myths
While individual administrators may try to protect adjuncts and other contingent faculty from service or research demands, the structural pressures to perform according to a traditional departmental model continue, even though such a model no longer describes most faculty positions. The myth of meritocracy— that the best scholars and teachers secure tenure-track positions, and the next best, full-time temporary positions—places pressure on individual contingent faculty members to prove that they are professionals worthy of annual reappointment, even as their actual working conditions do not adequately reflect their contributions and may undermine the quality of both research and instruction.
Contingent faculty in general, and women contingent faculty in particular, often encounter the further myth that teaching and program development carry such personal satisfaction that their psychic rewards outweigh material recognition or job security. The inverse argument is also common: non-tenure-track work is a luxury or self-indulgence. One of us received a lengthy lecture from a senior colleague who concluded that employment as an adjunct was only for the young, saying, “imagine doing that when you’re fifty.” Another senior colleague at a different institution assumed that the tenure track was reserved for childless women, congratulating one of us with a reference to the mommy track by saying that a new child would mean that the mother would now “of course” be off the job market.
These ways of thinking maintain a veil of ignorance that covers the realities of both classroom staffing and the career concerns of contingent faculty members. They also allow academics in tenure-track lines to contribute, implicitly or explicitly, to the structures that perpetuate inequitably tiered positions within a single department. Whether or not colleges and universities get what they pay for in terms of student satisfaction or learning outcomes, the trend in which the majority of postsecondary teachers are not eligible for tenure and the simultaneous increasing of dependence on these teachers leaves them in an uneasy relation to their institutions. The feminization of the field of composition in particular makes the work—and the potential solidarity between those on and off the track—all the more invisible and vulnerable to the kinds of myths we describe above. If we seek more equitable and thus sustainable solutions to academic supply and demand, we must recognize that gender concerns and labor concerns often are one and the same.
Deirdre McMahon is an auxiliary faculty member of the Department of English and Philosophy at Drexel University. Ann Green is associate professor of English and director of the graduate program in writing studies at Saint Joseph’s University and a member of the AAUP’s Committee on Women in the Academic Profession.
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Comments:
I have linked to this piece on the legal writing professors blog, at http://lawprofessors.typepad.com/legalwriting. Where the authors refer to "universities," if you substitute the word "law schools," you have a clear picture of the lives of many of today's legal writing professors, all of whom have J.D. degrees and work experience as lawyers. There are many published law journal articles supplying the data and information that proves the extent of the problems and suggesting solutions, and also tracking the limited and uneven progress made to date.
Sue L.
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