The Collapse of the Tenure Track
by Alison Powell
Recently, a subcommittee of the Committee on Contingent Faculty and the Profession disseminated a report on the dire state of tenure-track positions in American universities. Considering that by 2007, almost 70 percent of faculty members were employed off the tenure track, it has become crystal clear that the original goal of tenure — established to ensure adequate compensation and encourage research and academic freedom — is applicable to fewer and fewer faculty. American universities must consider how they make use of contingent faculty and reassess not only the compensation and benefits of adjuncts, associate instructors, and the like, but also the status these faculty members are given within their departments. Some universities maintain a standard set of tenured faculty within their departments, only to rely increasingly on contingent employees in satellite campuses, online course offerings, and campuses overseas. The individuals staffing these positions work for low pay with few or no benefits, and they correspondingly have less say in how a department is run and what decisions are made regarding upcoming hires. Relied upon heavily for the majority of labor within these departments, yet with no job security or prestige, contingent faculty are the outcast step-child within their profession.
These issues are familiar to us at CUNY, and the Adjunct Project has consistently worked to bring the concerns of adjuncts to the forefront of conversations about how CUNY will face the 21st century. Yet the country-wide shift toward heavier reliance on contingent faculty goes beyond mere cost cutting. As the American Association of University Professors’ 2009 Report on the Economic Status of the Profession explains, the erosion of tenure-track positions is due in part to the “fundamentally flawed premise” that faculty “represent only a cost, rather than the institution’s primary resource.” The report continues, pointing out that the increasing reliance on contingent faculty who are underpaid and overworked “represents a disinvestment in the nation’s intellectual capital precisely at the time when innovation and insight are most needed.” Too true: that the general quality of American university education has been in sharp and consistent decline over the past few decades has become conventional wisdom. Grade inflation, and a decrease in challenging curricula are frequent topics during the happy hours of university faculty; they are problems we acknowledge with genuine dismay, yet really have no idea how to address.
Part of the issue may be that our attention is in the wrong place. Rather than being only the reflection of the state of ournation’s public schools, or the current consumer-model many universities seem to follow, the problem is also a result of the heavy reliance on graduate students and adjunct employees who — rightfully so — have an ethical obligation to invest only as much in their classes as they are compensated. Of course, many, if not most, contingent faculty put in well over the amount of hours for which they are actually paid. Grading, conferences with students, pedagogical training (formal or informal) means additional hours which we “volunteer” in our departments. Nationwide, it is nearly impossible for contingent faculty to live on the low pay they receive, and many individuals must seek employment outside of their departments; depleting their resources and the time they can offer to students. The committee reports that “a broad and fast growing front of research shows that the system of permanently-temporary faculty appointments has negative consequences for student learning. In many cases this is not due to the quality and professional training of the faculty serving in temporary appointments — they may be highly qualified and superb teachers — but to the terms and conditions under which they are employed.”
As many of you are aware, due to clerical and human error, many GC adjuncts failed to receive paychecks for two pay periods at the beginning of this year. The problem was widespread, and it is not an overstatement to say the economic ramifications for our graduate students — who live paycheck to paycheck as it is — were severe. Increases in credit card APRs because of missed payments, fees from landlords and other financial pressures highlight the tightrope many of us walk day-to-day as we try to survive on our paychecks.
There were many ideas about how to handle the problem, and the Adjunct Project, along with the Professional Staff Congress and Doctoral Students Council, worked around the clock to ensure that the Provost’s Office and President Bill Kelly were taken to task for the inexcusable failure. One suggestion, aimed toward publicity and a desire to use the paycheck debacle as a “teaching moment,” was to encourage adjuncts to make a statement to students about the event (the suggested statement was circulated over email). The idea was that our students benefit from understanding more fully how the university system works and that such knowledge helps them become more active and sophisticated participants in their university; in addition, it was argued that our students deserve to know how the education they pay for is being compromised by overworked and under-paid contingent faculty.
The idea was met with some criticism. Adjuncts were hesitant to subject their students to the discomfort of listening to their teacher “complain” about not being paid. There is obviously room for debate about the strategy; the desire not to discuss with our students the disheartening working conditions we labor under demonstrates our genuine commitment to our classes. Eager to create a professional and top-notch classroom environment, we’re reasonably hesitant to broach the subject. But their ignorance, much like the ignorance of the rest of the country, doesn’t serve them well. Rather than being fully equipped to articulate the kind of education they expect or to participate in the ongoing conversation about the state of the nation’s universities, our students passively run through the system. Their disengagement reflects, in fact, the disengagement of many contingent faculty from their own departments. No one can deny that the system we work under requires, in part, the ignorance of our students to the problem. “Mindful that their working conditions are their students’ learning conditions,” explains the Committee, “many faculty holding contingent appointments struggle to shield students from the consequences of an increasingly unprofessional workplace.… Institutions that serve the economically marginalized and the largest proportion of minority students, such as community colleges, typically employ the largest numbers of nontenurable faculty. We are at a tipping point. In addition to the injuries to students, campuses that overuse contingent [faculty] show higher levels of disengagement and disaffection among [all faculty members], even those with more secure positions.”
It’s difficult to know how to proceed, how to begin to address such a wide-spread and systemic problem in American colleges across the country. The Committee “believes that the best way to stabilize the faculty infrastructure is to bundle the employment and economic securities that activist contingent faculty are already winning for themselves with the rigorous professional peer scrutiny of the tenure system. The ways in which contingent teachers are hired, evaluated and promoted often bypass the faculty entirely and are generally less rigorous than the intense peer scrutiny applied to faculty in tenurable positions.” This makes sense, if the idea that increasing scrutiny for contingent faculty will be accompanied by reward — that is, an increase in compensation, especially those who have worked within the department for some time, the potential for more benefits, and a shift in the marginalized position these individuals feel when it comes to the development of their respective departments.
The Committee concludes its report with a summary of those institutions which have “adopted provisions that fall well short of tenure but that offer contingent faculty some protection and the institution some stability. Often, these take the form of improved job security, protections for academic freedom, or provisions for inclusion of contingent faculty in academic citizenship and governance.” One of the universities they consider is CUNY, and they point out the improvements in job security for contingent employees recently won through collective bargaining by the PSC. It must not escape our attention that these hard-fought victories fall short in one key way: none will result in the increase of tenure-track positions within departments. This is a question we must all consider, a concern we must all have, as graduate students and as contingent faculty. How do we both advocate for improved working conditions, job security, and compensation, and also stop the increasing decline of tenure-track positions available? We can do both — but it’s just one more thing to add to
our plate.
