The Silence of the Grads
Academe has its own version of ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’ when it comes to adjunct faculty members
by Steve Street (excerpted from the The Chronicle of Higher Education, July 9, 2009)
I wore red to class on April 30, in honor of the first New Faculty Majority Day called by the National Coalition for Adjunct and Contingent Equity. I had on my red T-shirt from a previous union rally over a checkered oxford — obviously a statement not of the fashion kind. But I didn’t explain the red shirt, and no students asked, and in a way, that was good for education: My classes were about my classes.
But in another way, that silence illustrated something about the presence of so many contingent faculty members in academe — something less quantifiable about their effect than the graduation rates or other criteria that have been used to assess quality. Education is ultimately an inner experience, but schools are its communal interface, and when they create more silence than talk, less education is going on.
Not that I would have introduced my own working conditions into the classroom (although telling one’s students about contingency is not really like involving children in a dispute between parents, as a colleague’s false analogy put it, because the parents are equal partners). Faculty working conditions are indeed student learning conditions. But the economy, the culture, and life itself already provide too many distractions in the classroom; the last thing students need is another passion getting between them and what they are supposed to be learning.
One colleague, however, likens a teacher’s decision not to mention his or her adjunct status to the military’s “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy on homosexuality. Of course that policy is no real solution to anything, whether it be gay rights or any of the issues arising from the two-tiered faculty system. So contingent faculty members who want to consider their teaching jobs a career or a livelihood, albeit one at a quarter of the salary of their tenure-track colleagues, can’t. They must either constantly protest their inadequate working conditions or be tacitly complicit in the very system that exploits them.
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