Naming the Problem
by Renee McGarry
Adjuncting
RENEE McGARRY
They say when it hits the New York Times Sunday Style section you know the trend is over, and probably has been for at least a year. I have a distinct memory of such an event, the moment when the Style section did a photo essay on Doc Martens. I think it was 1995, and if I know the paper of record, it wasn’t ironic.
I wish this axiom could be applied to everything in the paper, because it would only mean good things for higher education. From a February 18 article on grade inflation in colleges to a March 6 article outlining the difficulties facing those of us searching for jobs, to Stanley Fish’s blog detailing what he called Neoliberalism 101, it’s not hard to see that Stanley Aronowitz was right when he stopped by the Adjunct Project table in the lobby to tell me that “this is a horrible time in higher education” and that it’s time for “adjuncts to take to the streets.”
I wish it was as easy as Professor Aronowitz made it sound.
If Fish’s blog made anything clear to me, it was the real reasons tenure-track faculty, adjuncts, graduate students, and undergraduates aren’t taking to the streets: many of us in the academy are in denial. I don’t think it’s a denial about how bad the problem is. Most of us will admit that we are overworked and underpaid, and those of us at the Graduate Center may see that as a stepping stone to getting a coveted tenure-track position. (In fact, many of us are fed that exact line by our programs. If I had a dime for every time someone told me that the most valuable piece of my CV isn’t my research or publications, but the lengthy section on undergraduate teaching, I wouldn’t need to scramble for fellowships to write my dissertation.) Most of our undergraduates know that their classrooms are overcrowded and they aren’t getting the attention they deserve. Most tenure-track faculty understand that hiring an army of adjuncts means fewer colleagues, a smaller academic community, less intense and engaging conversation about their scholarly work, fewer and fewer opportunities for collaboration, and an erosion of academic freedom.
It’s not that we can’t see the problem, or that we can’t see how bad the problem actually is. Many of us refuse to name it, and without a name we can just pretend that the problem doesn’t exist.
Fish’s opening to his blog anecdotally reports exactly this: “I’ve been asking colleagues in several departments and disciplines whether they’ve ever come across the term “neoliberalism” and whether they know what it means. A small number acknowledged having heard the word; a very much smaller number ventured a tentative definition.” Luckily in the first half of his post, Fish put together a brief, user-friendly, and relatively unbiased definition of neo-liberalism. He also cites many excellent sources that can teach us more.
When the Adjunct Project first started planning CUNY Equity Week (CEW), we had no idea that the national conversation might turn in a direction that would highlight the neoliberalization of the university, even if articles in the New York Times and the Chronicle of Higher Education don’t apply this label. But any time we read of the difficulties of new PhDs finding full-time and tenure-track positions or lowered expectations of undergraduate students or harried and over-worked instructors, the conversation is essentially about neoliberalism. Call it what you want: neoliberalization, adjunctification, Walmartization. Our goals in CUNY Equity Week are to educate our students and each other enough so that we can, and do, call it something.
We are educators after all, and we can find power in using our skills. CUNY Equity Week does not aim simply to help us learn facts and figures and regurgitate them to our students. While it is meaningful that 57 percent of the faculty at CUNY are contingent employees, facts and figures themselves do not empower. Nor is Equity Week an outlet for our laundry list of complaints: I hate grading papers on the train, I work three jobs, it’s taking me nine years to complete my degree because I have to teach so much, I don’t have an office, they took away my mailbox. Complaint does not empower. Recognizing ourselves and our students as victims of a systemic attack that seeks to further oppress those already oppressed, racial, gender, ethnic, sexual, and economic minorities, by disenfranchising those who might help them the most will create a class of active social participants with real power to make changes. CEW serves to inspire faculty, tenure-track and contingent, and students, graduate and undergraduate, to act on a looming social issue that continues to devalue our education system from kindergarten through post-graduate education.
The Adjunct Project invites you to join us in naming the problem of neoliberalization and educating our students and colleagues about how it impacts us here at CUNY. During the week of March 30 through April 3 we ask that you participate in a collective effort to use these unspeakable words, neoliberalization, adjunctification, Walmartization, as much as possible. Use them in your classrooms. Use them with your colleagues. Use them with support staff. Use them with your supervisors.
We also ask that you spend at least fifteen to twenty minutes of one class during CUNY Equity Week engaging your students in a conversation about the CUNY edu-factory and ask them (and maybe yourself) to question our current paradigm of education. Does the university need to be a credential factory? And how can we change the university to meet our needs and demands?
Stop by our table in the Graduate Center lobby during the week of March 23 to sign up to teach this in your classes or have a team of students come in and talk to your class about it. Join the Adjunct Project for two workshops that will discuss the specifics of how to teach this topic on Thursday, March 19 and Monday, March 23, both at 7pm in room 5409 of the Graduate Center. There you can sign up to teach this yourself, join a team of presenters at the campus of your choice, and join an ongoing conversation about classroom strategies for equity week. At both the table and these workshops we’ll have teaching tools and materials available, including a large color poster (like the one seen opposite) that we hope will serve as a conversation starter and an illustration of the current state of our CUNY edu-factory. For more information or to download these materials now, visit our website (adjunctproject.org.)
Our fear of naming the neo-liberalization of CUNY and universities throughout the country allows the process to continue by sustaining its invisibility and furthering the myth of its inevitability. Stanley Fish might think CUNY Equity goes too far, removing us from our isolated cocoon of esoteric pursuits and bringing politics into the classroom. Stanley Aronowitz might think it doesn’t go far enough, that we should march down the streets and demand equity. These are important conversations to have and we have important decisions to make as a community. How do we demand we be treated fairly and that we are offered the same opportunities as those who grew up in Fish’s and Aroniwitz’s generation? And how do we demand that our students are treated fairly and that they have the same opportunities we do?
