Equity, ethics, academic freedom and the employment of contingent academics
By Linda Muzzin (excerpted from Academic Matters, May 2009)
The recent York University strike by contingent faculty has provided a focal point for discussion in my evening graduate course, “Faculty in Colleges and Universities” at the University of Toronto’s Ontario Institute for Studies in Education this winter.
Among us are practising professionals, including a contingent faculty member, a college administrator, corporate lawyer, two high school teachers, and a physician, so it is not surprising that the ethics of professional practice, which I teach, are often on the table. For example, how do we reconcile the need of the administrators to be able to pick up the telephone and call a contingent faculty member to fill in for a class left suddenly without an instructor just before the class starts tomorrow with the reality that these “just in time” faculty are poorly paid and routinely treated as second-class citizens? And what are the ethics of an administrator determining which contingent faculty to recruit to teach a course?. Is the most eligible chosen, the most available or, perhaps, the admimistrator’s favourite? The increasing unionization of contingent faculty might be expected to address such inequities through a seniority system. But isn’t a seniority system incompatible with hiring the “best and the brightest”?
It helps that I recently led a research project that involved interviewing 160 administrators, as well as both tenure-stream and contingent faculty at Canadian universities and that I am currently involved in a similar study in Canadian colleges. As a feminist and anti-racist, I take every opportunity to emphasize the equity aspects of the situations we discuss, in the terminology of mainstream ethics, “social justice.” We distinguish “equality” ( based on individual rights and choices) from “equity” (that prescribes structural interventions when individuals and groups are not on a level playing field in terms of power).
For example, in the first half of the course, we review the faculty demographics that show women are not making it to the upper levels of the academic hierarchy to the extent their numbers would warrant. We also note the growth of the contingent faculty group, which contains fewer white men, proportionately, than there are in the tenured and tenure-stream groups. We deplore the failure of Statistics Canada to gather data on contingent faculty because we would like to examine this inequity. Why isn’t this data collected routinely? Is it merely an oversight? Or is there a conspiracy to hide inequities in postsecondary institutions? Or is contingent faculty just a phenomenon that we didn’t expect to be around much longer than the downsizing of the 1990s? Or is it, as at least one administrator in the class has suggested, that contingent faculty are a small, ephemeral group of people who don’t appear on any institution-wide lists because they are only around for a short time?
We know this last claim isn’t true, because contingent faculty members were a large enough a group at York University to have supported the recent strike. How large is the group? In the U.S., estimates vary, depending on who is included, but experts agree they are well over half of all faculty. Non-tenured academic positions are bewilderingly diverse, ranging from permanent affiliations (teaching stream and clinical faculty) through contractual (full-time term with or without benefits and administrative responsibilities) to sessionals or part-timers (paid by the hour for classroom time only). Arguably, these groups face similar problems with respect to job security and academic freedom, so they can be referred to collectively as “contingent.” This word denotes “of uncertain occurrence” and “incidental to,” in this case, the academic enterprise. The Oxford dictionary explains that a contingent is composed of “troops contributed to form part of an army.” This definition is particularly informative for this discussion, in that military service, distinct from other types of professional work, implies obedience to authority and a lack of autonomy that is necessary in order to function successfully.
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Tags: labour equity
