An ex-adjunct’s view to this year’s fun at the MLA

I gather from Twitter that there was a panel on “the most important issue facing our discipline” and hardly anybody came. Reading around the various conversations, it’s easy to see the usual blaming and complaining. Blame the people who scheduled such a panel across from receptions! Blame the gatekeepers for making it hard for people to get in (and by the way, from what I can tell, the person who organizes the MLA badge police is way too into it — sheesh!). Complain that really, there’s no point anymore; people have just given up. Throw in the towel. Infer from the lack of attendance that no one gives a shit.

People new to this blog might not know that I started writing it when I was trying to get my career back together after taking a really, really long time to finish the thesis, during which time I’d taken jobs working outside academia, trying to be a married person with a kid, etc. I started blogging when one of my best friends was also contingent faculty, and when the much-missed Invisible Adjunct blogged regularly. In fact, this blog is in its twelfth year, and a lot has changed in my life. Not much has changed, except for the worse, in terms of the academic labour market and increasing reliance on contingent faculty. It occurred to me this morning that the reason some of us bloggers might seem less sympathetic than we should be to the plight of today’s adjuncts is that we’re well over the shock. In my case, I’m a bit weary of seeing the same old battles being fought over and over again, between the wrong people, in ways that are not likely to do much good. And to be honest, I get tired of inaccurate hyperbole.

Let me be clear on this: the problem of adjunct labour is not an issue facing anyone’s discipline, unless you buy into the idea that adjuncts are less qualified than those who got the brass ring of T-T/’permanence’. It’s a labour issue. It’s one of the three most important issues facing higher ed, in my opinion, along with decreased funding, and the effects of decreases in K-12 spending and NCLB on the current and future generations of students. But it isn’t a disciplinary issue. Moreover, I think treating it as a disciplinary issue is one of the reasons that we haven’t been able to do much about contingent faculty issues. It’s fine for the AHA and the MLA and whatever other professional organizations have done so to issue statements and urge their members to do their best to beat back the tide, but it’s not really very sensible to think that, on any campus, TPTB are going to listen to the faculty in any single discipline, especially if it’s in the Humanities or Social Sciences. It’s a systemic problem, and needs to be treated as such.

That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t talk about it at professional meetings. But we also need to think about why people attend those meetings and how the system works. The problem with conferences like the MLA and the AHA is that they’re hybrids that don’t necessarily serve everybody in their respective fields very well. They’re pretty good for the modernists, but there isn’t a year that goes by where the pre-modernists don’t mention the dearth of panels that are aimed at them. It’s not surprising that you find medievalists leaders at DH and pedagogy panels — hell, we have to get on the programme somehow. And yes, we tend to be interested in those things, because frankly, it’s hella difficult to get our hands on a lot of our sources, and digitization helps make the playing field hilly, rather than Himalayan. Anyway, for a lot of pre-modernists, it makes a lot more sense to go to specifically Medieval, Med-Ren, and Classics conferences.

I think that how we see our professional meetings, and how we see conference attendance in general, has a lot more to do with lack of attendance at ‘state of the profession’ panels than does a “nobody cares” attitude. In no particular order, here are some perfectly good reasons why a panel on an admittedly important — in fact, vital — issue might not get the attendance it deserves:

• It’s a panel at a huge meeting, and it would be a pretty crap meeting if any single professional panel could draw people away from what might be the only panel that seems really relevant to their research.
• It’s across from receptions, and people are just tired. One way of avoiding this is to get the organization to offer a hosted bar with better booze at the end of the session.
• Conferences are relatively short, and big, general meetings are often the only times people can catch up with old friends in different fields. Or network. Or see something in a city they’ve not visited before.
• A lot of the attendees of such meetings are stuck in interview rooms and/or discussions with fellow search committee members, or are prepping for/recovering from interviews.
• After a couple of decades, some people don’t really see the point of discussing contingent labour: they’d rather see something that looks like an action plan.
• Conferences are expensive, duh. That’s not just true for grad students and adjuncts. So we gravitate to the things that are most immediately interesting to us. For some people, conference funding is not only contingent upon presenting, but upon giving some sort of report on the panels in their field that they attended.

The list above is certainly not all-inclusive, nor will every one of those reasons suit every conference. But they do exist, and they are valid reasons why it’s wrong to infer that a lack attendance indicates that no one cares about contingent faculty and the state of higher ed. People care. People who got the brass ring care. They try to change things. They are not the enemy. But honestly, in my own experience looking for jobs while an adjunct and as a ‘tenured’ faculty member, it’s thinking in terms of disciplines that undermines even the best-thought-out attempts to address the contingent labour issue.

Universities are organized by disciplinary groups and disciplines. More importantly, funding and staffing are organized and allocated along these lines. At places like SLAC, of which there are many, the choice is seldom whether or not to add adjuncts or FT lines: the number of FT faculty justified by enrollments is far less than the number of funded positions made available. I can think of a couple of departments at SLAC with FTEs so high that they have to hire a number of adjuncts would seem to justify at least one, and probably two, other permanent faculty, even though there aren’t many students majoring in those fields. But then you look at other departments that not only rely on adjuncts to meet their FTEs, but also have a ratio of 70-90 majors per permanent faculty member. That means a much heavier workload for the faculty in those departments in terms of advising, etc. So who gets the lines, which are never enough? </p?

Some people, like me, are always going to mention, out loud, in front of the administrators and the rest of the faculty, that the number of lines that have been approved is nowhere near what we need, and that over-reliance on contingent faculty and/or overloading courses prevents us from carrying out implied promises of our mission statement. A few others will agree, but we all know that won’t change things this time around — unless some miracle gets people in the professional schools to forego part of their significantly higher salaries. Others are just going to defend their disciplinary turf. More permanent faculty = more money for a department and a more consistent workload for the permanent faculty. It takes milliseconds for a systemic problem to become an issue that directly affects individuals. In other words, an issue that is a real problem for higher ed is, once it hits the ground of any university, is no longer systemic, but personal: faculty have to weigh a general principle against immediate costs to their own lives and careers. No one who is already overloaded is going to give up the possibility of hiring contingent faculty if that’s all they can get. If they’re smart, though, they’ll track the long-term costs and benefits of searching for, interviewing, hiring, and working with adjuncts to justify permanent positions.

That’s just one of the more understandable ways that thinking of contingent labour at a disciplinary level undermines addressing it as a systemic issue. I think that, in many cases, it’s the biggest problem at the level of individual institutions. But it’s a problem that isn’t transparent to most people. For any number of good reasons, we don’t really talk to the outside world about turf wars on our own campuses, or the clashes in departmental or divisional meetings where long-standing feuds may have set patterns that won’t be changed till the dinosaurs are extinct. We can’t talk about parallels to Supreme Court nominations, where faculty desperate for a new line nevertheless pray they don’t get it while certain people might dominate the search process. Take any of those things and add them to other factors, like finding out that the brass ring needs constant polishing in order to keep it, or people who have deluded themselves into believing that academic hiring depends entirely on merit, and thus are entitled to their jobs and somehow better than contingent faculty, or that faculty governance is dying in the face of growing overpaid, non-academic bureaucracies, and it seems clear to me that accusations of not caring, or of academic haves willfully ignoring the have-nots are just too simplistic.

Am I saying that it’s a hopeless situation? No. Am I saying that people with permanent jobs have no ethical obligation to stand up for contingent faculty and try to reverse the tides of the academic labour market? absolutely not. But this situation is not new. And it is less a situation of haves and have-nots than a situation of haves and have-mores. There needs to be national (and probably international, especially in terms of the UK) organization to address the issue. In the US, where accreditation agencies have a lot of clout, faculty need to come up with ways to use their assessment reports to show how a reliance on highly-qualified contingent faculty nevertheless has a negative effect on student learning, e.g., because it’s hard to track consistency in addressing outcomes amongst a constantly changing pool of instructors; because contingent faculty can’t be expected to interact with students at the levels needed to achieve those outcomes, etc. Parents and students need to know that the person whose teaching was instrumental for a student’s changing majors or turning their study habits around might be gone without notice. Government funding agencies should be lobbied to give more funding to those institutions that commit to better hiring policies.

Those are all things that can be done without resorting to collegial cannibalism. I’m not sure how, and I’m not offering to lead. I’m just saying that a couple of decades of knowing that there’s a problem, and knowing it’s systemic gives the issue of contingent labour a history. And since I’m a historian and all, it kind of seems like a good idea to try to understand the history, see what’s been done, and what hasn’t and go from there, rather than (to throw in yet another overused metaphor) re-inventing complaints and resentments that keep the focus on the trees rather than the forest.