York U Contract Faculty

‘My Position Became 6 Separate Contracts for 40 Pct. Less Pay’

by Marc Ouellette

(excerpted from The Chronicle of Higher Education, August 28, 2014)

To the Editor:

I have to admit that I have generally avoided writing too much about my own experience as a contract faculty member because, quite frankly, it does always sound somewhat maudlin. Then I realized that it’s not maudlin if it’s typical; rather, it’s part of a pattern. The pattern is one of blame, denial, obfuscation and, yes, the entitlement Catherine Stukel lists in her jeremiad (“Is That Whining Adjunct Someone We Want Teaching Our Young?” The Chronicle, August 25). However, the entitlement is entirely on the side of those like Ms. Stukel who are quick to point out that things went well for them and therefore if it didn’t go well for the rest of us, it’s our own fault. I do appreciate a good example of transductive reasoning when I see it.

To be sure, it wasn’t my fault when my home province added more than 100,000 students across the board in a period during which they deleted more than 1,100 full-time faculty positions. Indeed, I was hired on a tenure-stream-convertible basis, but nobody wanted me or my predecessor—the position had existed for almost a decade, teaching core courses in the second most popular combined honors program in the faculty—to achieve tenure stream because that would mean a loss of teaching. The chair even joked about it with others during department meetings. While I still had to manage the 40-40-20 load on that contract, I was teaching 3+3 instead of 2+2. The part that was my fault was succeeding. To get that job, I still had to interview and later found that I was definitely the darkest horse in what was expected to be a dog-and-pony show to confirm the hiring of a favorite of certain members of the committee. (As an aside, the dog-and-pony-show interview has become something of a pattern itself and I have come up with some questions to ask hiring committees so that I can tell whether I’m the dog or the pony.) My first year, I earned a merit award in the top third while achieving some of the highest teaching evaluations in the faculty. What made the latter more intriguing was the fact that these were large classes. Eventually, after several years of nominations and being a finalist, I did receive the major teaching award.

In the interim, mind you, my department and faculty decided that I was too expensive, as were 9 of my colleagues. So, during a semi-official moratorium on tenure-stream hiring, my position became six separate contracts for 40 percent less pay (at the time) instead of being converted to tenure-stream. To make things worse, when my students found out via a colleague’s reportage of the same scenario, they banded to protest. This, combined with my excellent evaluations made it clear that I was a Rasputin in the process and was only popular because I was easy on students (with Cultural Studies being an easy ride to begin with). While I continued teaching and became a union activist as a result of the increasingly terrible treatment colleagues and I were receiving, the move to right the wrongs was clearly a further misstep on my part, as three separate grievances (two settlements and one unresolved) will attest.

The last was most interesting and came after a round of provincial negotiations (I had attained the position of vice-chair of the committee for the largest union in the province) in which I was told point-blank by the provincial representative for Ontario and by the human resources chiefs for the Council of Universities that adjuncts “are in the way of graduate students.” I had heard this in the department from my chief rival, in particular. What made this most insulting was the fact that they had developed, cultivated, and perpetuated this myth to obscure their own faculty non-renewal process! Their own policies eliminated more than 1,100 positions, let alone the thousands needed to accommodate current and future growth. Instead, the fastest growing employment segments have been post-docs (who can be disappeared after three years, as if they never happened) and executives. An economist at my own institution did the research for the government(s) regarding the need for faculty renewal and expansion. Yet this data was not only ignored, but the the province and the Council representatives denied its very existence. Then again, they weren’t that happy when some of us obtained the actual budget and revealed that the university was misleading people about its surplus.

To read the rest of this letter, click here.

Tags: adjunct faculty, casualization of labour, contingent faculty, crisis, job security, quality of education, union representatives