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| Image from the Campus Equity Week website |
The CEW website has an extensive (and ever-growing) listing of events, suggested activities, and resources. Many of the suggested activities are very simple, awareness-oriented ones, such as changing facebook or twitter avatars to the CEW logo (which is why I'm pretty sure it's okay to share it here; there's also an "I am Margaret Mary" version in memory of Margaret Mary Vojtko ), and wearing red/scarlet on Wed. Oct. 28 (tying in with the idea, also represented in the logo, of A for Adjunct as the new scarlet letter).
Of course, it will take much more than awareness to change the present situation, but at least it's a start. So, I'm wondering:
Are you planning to do anything for Campus Equity Week specifically, and/or are you working in the long term for greater equity on your campus? Do you wish you could, but you're just too exhausted being a contingent faculty member (or a tenure-track faculty member holding down an ever-increasing service load, because contingents don't usually do service, at least not in proportion to the amount of work their/our hiring, evaluation, etc. create)? Does it all seem silly to you, or futile? Maybe those of us not on the tenure track should just quit? What would happen then? And how in the world do we argue for higher, more equitable salaries for all faculty when students and parents are already feeling overwhelmed by college expenses?
And how in the world do we argue for higher, more equitable salaries for all faculty when students and parents are already feeling overwhelmed by college expenses?
ReplyDeleteOne way is to increase class sizes.
At some institutions that's already happening. But at small institutions that are dependent on both adjunct faculty and the expectation that students will have their noses wiped for them, student expectations might have to take a hit.
My SLAC doesn't use many adjuncts -- mostly for off-campus offerings; and the student-faculty ratio is small. But we make up for that by paying faculty less than most of our competitors.
This is certainly the solution that administrators at my school prefer, and I'm not sure it's *always* a bad idea. However, there's a real limit to how many students per semester professors in some subjects (e.g. writing) can handle before the quality of the course and/or feedback suffer. And if we're supposed to be teaching them critical thinking, and similar skills that require hands-on grappling with problems that have no right answers, professor-student interaction is key. Yes, one professor can supervise a certain number of TAs, or less-qualified adjuncts, but the supply of those will eventually dry up if those jobs cease to be stepping-stones to running one's own class (see dead-end jobs, below).
DeleteMy faculty recently advertised for a teaching fellow position (not adjunct but still, this person will teach at least double what the regular faculty do, and not be funded to research so they will find it hard to do the research they need to do to return to a regular faculty position. I was on the shortlisting committee - and read 20 applications from people who clearly did not understand that this is a dead end position (research-wise). Some of them are presently in regular faculty positions, albeit in far less prestigious institutions. I feel so guilty. I want to tell them "dont walk away, RUN"..
ReplyDeleteSo long as there is an expectation that such a person will be permanent, this shouldn't be a problem -- tenure would be nice, though.
DeleteFor a job to be satisfactory over the long term, there needs to be room for growth -- in salary, and also in responsibilities. The latter leads to greater job satisfaction, and also to the ability to get another job if/when necessary. Unfortunately, many long-term full-time contingent jobs, though they're certainly better than part-time/adjunct work, offer neither, because they're designed to get as much teaching done as cheaply as possible while still having the benefits to the university of a full-time faculty member (which are real; as I indicated above, there are substantial costs to managing part-time faculty members, which are mostly borne by other faculty members, which is probably why they don't get figured into the cost-benefit analysis, but I have the feeling, talking to TT colleagues, that that burden is reaching a critical point in some departments/institutions).
DeleteI'd say that Dream-Killer's description is correct; this is a dead-end job, especially since it sounds like it's in a field where decent library resources alone aren't enough to do research (though even those resources won't help much if one is teaching a double load, plus, mostly likely, summer teaching to make up for a lower salary). It's hard to see why someone in a TT position would want it, unless their present school and/or department is really dysfunctional, or they have very strong geographic reasons for wanting to come to D-K's institution. I hope you'll find a way to be clear with them somewhere along the way, D-K (though it's really on them to read the ad and ask the right questions, and the existence, and the downsides, of such positions shouldn't really be news at this point -- but I think it still is to some).
I believe that the semi-pro football team in Tuscaloosa, Alabama and its affiliated university have trademarked the script A.
ReplyDeleteI'll leave them to sort it out with the ghost of Nathaniel Hawthorne.
Deletethere is no tenure at all at my institution.
ReplyDeleteEquine equity now!
ReplyDeleteI decided to first get informed, so I've done a little survey: we have 25 non-TT full time lecturers (including 5 "senior lecturers") , compared to 35 TT. The senior lecturers serve on committees, and of course have heavier teaching loads than TT, by a factor of two. The average salary of a senior lecturer is about 70% of the average of our TT assistant professors (which is essentially the same as the average for our associate professors.) Apparently the only part-time faculty we have are faculty spouses with PhDs (male and female); weak solutions to two-body problems. Our graduate students teach one section (sometimes two) per semester (which means most sections of "remedial stuff" are taught by GS.)
ReplyDeleteNow, as my contribution to "equity week" I'll tell the following amazing story, to see if there is any parallel elsewhere. My dept chair decided he needed a change in the bylaws, to deal with his "problem faculty" (me). It turns out the definition of "voting faculty" in the bylaws includes all our 25 full-time lecturers. The change in question would affect only the consequences of annual performance reviews for TT faculty. So we had the situation in which lecturers were eligible to vote on a personnel issue affecting TT people, but not themselves! A lecturer asked, and got confirmation that, indeed, they were free to do just that. And at least five of them did vote. Who says non-TT faculty are disenfranchised?
Wait, it gets better. Coincidentally, during "campus equity week" we'll have another vote for a change in the bylaws, this one to change (reduce) the default "teaching load" for TT faculty. And, again, our full-time lecturers will be eligible to vote on this. I'm curious about how they will vote. For a lecturer, would it be better to have the TT people teach more, or teach less?
That's an unusual situation. In my experience, non-TT faculty are barred from voting on a number of matters that affect them directly, as well as on matters that affect only TT faculty (there are also things on which we're allowed to vote, but we don't serve on committees, which means that that power, in practice, means the power to say "yes" or "no" to plans others have already worked long and hard on -- not, in my opinion, the ideal way to influence departmental policy). Ideally, I'd say that all continuing members of the department (whether that status is evidenced by tenure eligibility or by a certain number of years of service) should have a say/vote in all matters that affect the welfare of the department as a whole. Especially if your lecturers do service, and thus have a reasonably clear view of the larger picture (lack of which is another danger of not doing service), then it probably makes as much sense for lecturers to vote on TT loads, salaries, etc,, as vice versa. There is, of course, the danger that the non-TT faculty will vote their individual interest, rather than the department's collective interest, but that's a danger than applies to TT faculty, too (and that danger is a pretty good argument for putting the maximum number of faculty on the tenure track, so that interests and perspectives coincide more closely).
DeleteAs far as the teaching load question goes, at least at my own school, reduced teaching loads for TT faculty seems to have gone hand in hand with a growth of lecturer-type positions. I'd prefer a system where many more people are TT, but/and TT faculty can have more teaching- or research-oriented focus (either permanently or -- my preference -- for a particular period of time).
At your school, given lecturers' degree of influence, it sounds like one possible danger of reducing the TT teaching load (and potentially increasing the number of lecturers) might be that at some point the lecturers could outvote the TT faculty. That would be interesting (and in fact such a situation has already occurred at NYU, which resulted in the TT faculty trying to rescind the non-TT faculty's voting rights).
There's a whole lot of shaking up of the way things have been done out there, and it affects TT as well as non-TT faculty. Personally, I think one major danger is that the faculty spend so much time fighting with each other that we're in no position to present a united front when administrators make unreasonable demands.
Maybe your whole department (TT, lecturers, and those few adjuncts) needs to have a conversation about what, as a group, you're trying to accomplish, and what distribution of course loads and pay would best accomplish that? Of course you're still subject to the preferences of higher administration, but it might still be instructive.
I think a situation where one group of people in a department can vote on a personnel issue (performance reviews) that affects a second, disjoint group of people, but not themselves, when there is no hierarchical relationship between the groups, is unheard of (ridiculous, even). I tried to bring this up before the vote, and heard crickets. No interest in this discussion at all. I work at a very strange place .
DeleteAlso, everything in my dept is up to the head (all votes are "advisory"). TT faculty has no say on teaching loads or salaries, their own or anyone else's. (The scheduled vote is pro forma , the head wouldn't really need it). More than a third of the TT faculty is already on a reduced load, but who they are (and which criteria were used) is a secret. Strictly old-boy, as I said recently. The head plans to sell the reduction by claiming for more TT slots, with the argument that we're both understaffed (TT) and with heavier teaching than TT faculty (in my field) at Us with comparable size and research standing. We'll see how successful he is.There's always the option of exploiting graduate students a little more (again, all the head's decision, no faculty vote required.)
If I understand what you're saying, it could go in the direction of approaching the responsibilities and rewards of non-TT and TT. It's dangerous to make the distinction less sharp, since this could be used as an argument to hire more non-TT people. I think in my field the main role of the TTs should be research and upper div/grad teaching, and salaries depend for the most part on "market realities".