On Unstable Ground: Academic Freedom and the Future of the University Work Force
Special Session 166, 2013 Annual Meeting
On Saturday, October 12 at 11:00 am
Special Session Description
The academic work force in the United States is in deep crisis. Over 70 percent of courses at US institutions of higher education are now taught by adjunct professors or others ineligible for tenure. It is an almost complete inversion of the tenured-to-untenured ratio in 1969. Adjuncts and their non-tenure-track peers face the problems of other contingent workers in the contemporary economy -- little or no job security, low wages, poor working conditions and minimal leverage with employers. Most pay out of pocket for health care; many commute long hours to multiple campuses to make ends meet. Time (and funding) for research is scarce, as are tenure-track opportunities. As universities rely more and more on contingent labor, in fact, everyone's job security may be imperiled. In 2009, the Modern Language Association said that the trend "threatens the integrity" of the academic profession. This special session will address several questions: What is the true scale of the problem and what does the future hold? What are the implications of this crisis for academic freedom? How have non-tenure-track professors been able to improve their lot in the past? What such efforts are underway now -- and what can we all do to help?
MESA is an excellent venue for a presentation on the movement for adjunct and contingent equity because of 1) the salience of the marker "Middle East" and 2) MESA's disciplinary diversity. In regard to the first, MESA's members should be natural antagonists of a duplicitous political and managerial rhetoric that promotes the value of higher education as a general public good--and never more so than in regard to "critical" topics--and at the same time minimizes or flatly denies evidence of a forty year trend toward the disempowerment of higher faculty, largely through the technique of "adjunctification." In this presentation I will explore the dimensions and power of this trend, and hope--this in line with the second point--that awareness of it is carried back into departments and programs in which MESA members can be crucial actors in a growing movement, on multiple fronts, to reverse the damage--to faculty and students as well--that has been done by inequitable labor practices in our profession
Faculty in every department employing contingent faculty should carefully examine their personnel practices to make sure that they are not party to what they often condemn in their publications and lectures: the exploitation of the powerless. We face a monumental battle to reclaim lost ground in higher education generally, but locally there are specific steps we can undertake to make a difference. Case studies shared will underscore both the problem and some impressive local solutions.
Robert Micallef will address the issue of tenure/non-tenure faculty in foreign language departments. Building on her own case, and other data she will address how some universities are dealing with adjuntification and the implications of the reliance on non-tenure or part-time faculty for program quality and program building as well as the work-place environment.
