Nov 07 2014

A Degree of Futility in Fiction

Category: Novels — Bob Hanke @ 11:24 pm

A Degree of Futility

by M.P. Fedunkiw

An Interview by Sabine Dreher

M.P. Fedunkiw is an award-winning writer who obtained her PhD in 2000 and has taught courses at three Toronto-area universities for more than 15 years.  She has been invited to writing workshops at The Banff Centre (2012) and Humber College (2011) and is now writing plays and novels.  A former journalist for The Globe and Mail, The London Free Press, and Maclean-Hunter, she was also part of the team that started The Discovery Channel in Canada during the 1990s.

With post-secondary tuition rates at record highs and full-time posts at record lows, many students are questioning the validity of graduate degrees.  They risk spending their lives as underemployed sessional instructors, going from contract to contract, or being passed over for jobs outside the academy because they are deemed “overqualified”, “intimidating” or “too expensive”.

A Degree of Futility is the story of three friends, Lily, Simon and Greg, as they finish their history PhDs in Toronto at the turn of the millennium and enter the toughest job market ever.  There are advantages including independence, travel, and Oxford postdocs and down-sides, such as no job security, low wages, and lives put on hold. The three friends must look within themselves to find out if it was worth it to sacrifice relationships, family, established careers, and even sex in pursuit of academic careers.

What made you write this book?

It struck me that the glut of unemployed and underemployed PhDs was finally making news in the general media and that was an indication of how bad the situation now was.  Articles in Maclean’s, The Globe and Mail, and The Economist were echoing what the academic press had been saying for years – only a tiny percentage of those with arts (and more recently science) PhDs were getting full-time work.  I’d written non-fiction and stage plays until then and thought a novel would be an interesting challenge to bring the issue to light.  I’ve always enjoyed reading novels that are based in a university setting including Small World and Changing Places by David Lodge and Zinger and Me  by Jack MacLeod – doing an arts PhD is such a solitary experience it was great to read about people who were in the same boat.

Is there any relationship to your own experiences?

They say, “Write what you know” and that did offer me a framework.  Although there are elements that I share in common with Lily or with Simon such as living in Oxford during my postdoc, the joy of writing fiction is that your imagination must be engaged to keep the story moving, especially with three different characters.  The other joy of fiction:  no need for footnotes!

Do you feel betrayed by the system?

Yes and no.  Most graduate students who stick with their program long enough to get the PhD believe they will be the ones to snag the rare tenure-track jobs.  I tried to be competitive by publishing my dissertation before I landed the job, by doing a postdoc at Oxford rather than staying in Toronto and by having teaching experience.  But then I learned the numbers – doing web research earlier this year, I found there are more than 1.5 million graduate students (both Masters and PhD candidates) in Canada, the US and the UK; I also read that approximately three percent of arts PhDs get full-time employment.  We all know that there are not 1.5 million full-time jobs out there and the longer it takes the greater the number of fresh new graduates join in the competition.  The other catch is that the pay scales are keyed to experience and publishing – if you have more teaching experience or publications on your CV, you risk pricing yourself out of the market when compared to someone who is ABD or just finished.

What advice do you have for prospective PhD students?

(1) Do the PhD because you love the topic, not for the job – which may never come.
(2) If possible, stay out of debt – finishing a doctorate takes more time than you think and if you’re teaching one or two courses for years after finishing, paying off debt, eating regularly and paying rent on time will be almost impossible.
(3) Have a back-up plan – best thing I did was have work experience and a journalism degree to fall back on when the tenure-track job never materialized.

What are you working on now?

Another novel, this one about a girl growing up in Toronto in the 1930s for a young adult audience and a new play about two women, one a London-trained doctor and the other a young Canadian who meet while volunteering in Serbia during WWI based on research I did for another play and a paper almost ten years ago.

About the Book

A Degree of Futility (2014) is available for order through all major online book retailers, including FriesenPress’ bookstore, Chapters/Indigo, and Amazon. The eBook is available for iTunes, Kindle, Kobo, and GooglePlay.  The trade paperback is also available at Indigo’s Yonge and Eglinton location in the fiction section.  Sample chapters are uploaded as audio files on her website.

Oct 23 2014

The Precarious Professoriate

Category: Books and Articles,Contract Faculty — Bob Hanke @ 11:42 am

Ivory Tower or Temp Agency?

By Herbert Pimlott

(excerpted from Academic Matters, October 20, 2014)

“I never thought teaching at a university would become a dead-end job.”

Jason Sager, an innovative professor whose courses are very popular with students, made this comment when he told me of his difficult decision to leave academia, after teaching for seven years at Wilfrid Laurier University (where he earned his PhD in 2007).

Dr. Sager, like thousands of highly educated—and experienced—faculty members, working at universities across the country, are learning that our profession is indeed becoming a dead-end job—an unfortunate new twist on the PhD’s description as a terminal degree.

The growing number of precarious academic workers teaching an ever-larger number of undergraduate students is a threat. It is a threat to our profession, with serious implications for our working conditions, our compensation, and the future of collegial governance. It is also a threat to the existence of higher education and the public university as we know it. Indeed, it is also part of the tale of Canada’s shrinking middle class.

A common adjective for contract faculty is part-time. At one time, such an adjective was accurate because universities employed part-time professors—or, instructors with other careers outside of the university—to share their real-world expertise with students. However, the long trajectory of public funding cuts and massive increases in student enrolment has meant a surge in part-time faculty positions, filled with academics who have no other source of income. These part-time jobs for full-time scholars are the increasingly likely future for many graduates of PhD programs.

Most people, including permanent professors, don’t realize that the number of full-time faculty hires have not kept pace with growing student enrolments. They also might not realize how the expectations for tenure-track jobs have changed, becoming more stringent in response to dwindling positions and an increasing number of young PhDs.

I want to address what the growth in contract faculty means for faculty associations in Ontario. To do so, it is necessary to sketch out the rise of precarious academic employment, and the consequences of the growing use of contract faculty for the public university. Then we can examine the implications of precarious academic work for higher education, the tenure-track professoriate, and faculty associations. This issue is not only about the livelihoods of our colleagues in contract positions, but also the future of the public university.

To read the rest of this article, click here.

Tags: , , ,

Sep 07 2014

The Class Struggle Inside the Public University

Category: Contract Faculty — Bob Hanke @ 3:47 pm

Exploitation in the ivory tower

(excerpted from CBC Radio One, September 7, 2014)

It is a black mark on the ivory tower, a story of insecurity, fear, jealousy, thwarted ambition, poverty and inequality. And it’s a reality that university presidents, and many professors, don’t like to talk about.

Universities in Canada – which threw open their doors this week to almost a million undergraduates – are propped up by a huge army of part-time teachers, who are highly qualified and poorly paid. They have no job security or pension, and little hope of ever getting a full-time position. They go by many titles: sessional lecturers, contract academic staff, adjunct faculty.

Today more than half of Canadian undergraduates are taught by these very precarious workers, not by the big-name  – and well-paid – academics that universities like to feature in their recruiting ads. The institutions simply couldn’t function without them.

Higher education has a new business model. And it affects everyone on campus – the administration, the high-end “professoriate”, the lowly sessionals and the students.

To listen to Ira Basen’s documentary “Class Struggle,” click here.

To read the companion CBC News story “Most university undergrads now taught by poorly paid part-timers,” click here.

Tags: , , , , , ,

Sep 05 2014

The Faculty Non-renewal Process

Category: Academic Integrity,Online Publication — Bob Hanke @ 2:55 pm

‘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: , , , , , ,

Sep 03 2014

The Making of a Lost Academic Generation

Category: Online Publication — Bob Hanke @ 1:54 pm

The Academy of Broken Dreams

by Tim Pettipiece

(excerpted from University Affairs, September 3, 2014)

A lot of attention has been paid in recent months to the plight of part-time and non-tenured faculty teaching at North American universities, sometimes known as the “adjunctification” of university teaching. I can comment only on the Canadian experience, which by recent accounts is a far better situation than in the United States, where part-time professors can actually be impoverished.

Still, the reality is that at many institutions in both countries, the percentage of undergraduate teaching being done by non-permanent staff has dramatically increased.

This development is relatively recent. Throughout my entire university education (1996 to 2006) I don’t recall taking a single course that was not taught by a tenured or tenure-track faculty member. Yet here I am, one of the no-longer-silent majority of university teachers with little to no hope of permanent employment.

For a long time, I thought it was just me, that I had somehow failed in some key aspect of my dossier. I know now that I am not alone. An entire generation of scholars and scholarship is being lost due to this dramatic shift in academic hiring. In fact, not one person from my PhD program cohort has managed to land a tenure-track position.

To read the rest of this article, click here.

Tags: , , , , ,

« Previous Page — Next Page »