Jun 26 2012

Understanding the Contingent Faculty Workforce

Category: Research — Bob Hanke @ 3:57 am

A Portrait of Part-Time Faculty Members
A Summary of Findings on Part-Time Faculty Respondents to the Coalition on the Academic Workforce

Survey of Contingent Faculty Members and Instructors in the U.S.
THE COALITION ON THE ACADEMIC WORKFORCE, JUNE 20, 2012

Key Findings
While the report provides details on demographics, working conditions, and professional support as reported by the faculty respondents who indicated they were teaching part-time in fall 2010, several key indicators stand out that show how heavily colleges and universities are relying on part-time faculty members while failing to support them adequately.
◆ The median pay per course, standardized to a three-credit course, was $2,700 in fall 2010 and ranged in the aggregate from a low of $2,235 at two-year colleges to a high of $3,400 at four-year doctoral or research universities. While compensation levels varied most consistently by type of institution, part-time faculty respondents report low compensation rates per course across all institutional categories.
◆ Part-time faculty respondents saw little, if any, wage premium based on their credentials. Their compensation lags behind professionals in other fields with similar credentials, and they experienced little in the way of a career ladder (higher wages after several years of work).
◆ Professional support for part-time faculty members’ work outside the classroom and inclusion in academic decision making was minimal.
◆ Part-time teaching is not necessarily temporary employment, and those teaching part-time do not necessarily prefer a part-time to a full-time position. Over 80% of respondents reported teaching part-time for more than three years, and over half for more than six years. Furthermore, over three-quarters of respondents said they have sought, are now seeking, or will be seeking a full-time tenure-track position, and nearly three-quarters said they would definitely or probably accept a full-time tenure-track position at the institution at which they were currently teaching if such a position were offered.
◆ Course loads varied significantly among respondents. Slightly more than half taught one course or two courses during the fall 2010 term, while slightly fewer than half taught three or more courses.

To read the whole survey, click here.

Next Steps
This report is only a beginning. The findings suggest numerous questions for further research. The survey data file is available to qualified researchers, and CAW urges them to probe the data gathered by the fall 2010 survey to produce further reports and insights. CAW will also be exploring how this survey might be regularized to develop trend data on the working conditions of the contingent academic workforce. For information or to request access to the survey data file, please e‑mail CAW (contact@academicworkforce.org).

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Jun 10 2012

Call for Papers — Non-Tenure Track Faculty Conference

Category: Conferences — Bob Hanke @ 5:12 pm

Mid-Atlantic Non-Tenure Track Faculty Conference

“The New Faculty Majority:

Teaching, Scholarship, and Creativity in the Age of Contingency”

October 2012, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania (exact date and location TBA)

This conference will be an opportunity to think more deeply about the state of contingent, non-tenure-stream faculty: the intellectual work we engage in and the struggle to survive as committed teachers, academics, researchers and artists in unstable and unsustainable working conditions. Contingent labor constitutes the majority of faculty, yet we are the lowest paid and most overburdened workers. We represent the front line in academic experiences at the undergraduate level and offer irreplaceable interactions with students. We are artists, scholars, researchers and examples of inspired teaching.  How can we use what we know to create a more sustainable and equitable system, one that will benefit everyone at the university? What change is most needed? What does it mean to constitute the new faculty majority at your college or university?

Papers and panels will be invited on the following topics:

— maintaining a scholarly or creative life in an era of non-tenured faculty invisibility

 — art and creative writing panels (framed by your experience of creating this work under NTT working conditions)

 — documenting the institutional experiences of contingent faculty

 — comparative analyses of salary, contracts, and other aspects of employment

 — histories of academic labor struggles

 — best practices for contingent faculty

 — unionization for contingent faculty

 — the proletarianization of the professoriate

Please email nttfconference@gmail.com if you are interested in presenting at or planning the conference. You will be asked to provide a brief abstract of what you can imagine presenting. Panel proposals in addition to those on this list are also welcome.

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May 01 2012

The Union Against Itself: The Mirror Stage of Contract Faculty Labour

Category: Conferences,Contract Faculty — Bob Hanke @ 3:59 pm

by Bob Hanke
Departments of Communication Studies and Humanities

Paper presented at The University is Ours! A Conference on Struggles Within and Beyond the Neoliberal University,  April 27-29, 2012, Toronto, Ontario

In the Production of Living Knowledge, Gigi Roggero focuses on the relationship between autonomy and subordination. As he writes:

The line of the processes of struggle and of hierarchization is not longer … located on the border dividing those within from those outside of the labour market, but is completely internal to it. In the intersection between life and labour struck by the condition of precarity, it is the quality of inclusion that becomes the object of the practices of exit and of voice. The behaviors of living labour, between the search for autonomy and subordination, self-valorization, and competitive individualism, describe, therefore, the material constitution of subjectivity, becoming at once a form of resistance and of potential conflict (Roggero 2011, p. 103).

I want to draw on this rich passage to describe and analyze how CUPE 3903 was put against itself. In response to the acceleration and intensification of casualization of academic labour, the quality of contract faculty’s inclusion in a member-driven, democratic union became problematic. In the following account, I emphasize how organization and mediation must be considered as constitutive in the production of subjectivity. I will close by raising the question of affective bargaining with the union and the shaping of subjectivity.

Currently, CUPE Local 3903 is the bargaining agent for 1726 teaching assistants in Unit 1 and 691 graduate assistants in Unit 3. In Unit 2 representing contract faculty there are 900 members; of these, 687 hold course directorships, 340 hold tutor positions, and 127 hold both positions. Given the changing composition and orientation of the local towards more graduate students, what was remarkable about the 85-day strike in 2008-09 was that contract faculty and graduate students were in solidarity on “job security.” That strike only ended when the McGuinty Liberals passed  Bill 145 – the York University Labour Disputes Resolution Act – on January 29, 2009. After the employer’s war of attrition against the strikers, the neoliberal government acted to regulate the academic labour market by stripping strikers of their collective bargaining rights.

One episode from this strike illustrates how union communication is enabling and constraining. After the strike had already started, a Unit 2 communication committee was formed to develop a communication strategy to inform and mobilize contract faculty. They started a listserv and produced the inaugural issue of the CUPE 3903 U2 Chronicle. Recognizing their underepresentation in the internal and external media, a subcommittee made plans for a press conference to make contract faculty visible and articulate the relationship between job security and the quality of education. This press conference never happened. The executive committee following CUPE National’s communication officer’s centralized, coordinated communication strategy insisted that this conference be delayed until after the forced ratification results were known. In this way, union communication was structured to foreclose the representation of “hidden academics” (Ragagpol 2002).

This is not to say that the issue of “job security” – through sheer repetition if nothing else — was ignored or unreported. Rather, it is to say that it was not attached to those most affected by casualization. The union’s communication strategy failed to make the connection between “job security,” the two-tier faculty employment system, and the threat that contingency poses to academic freedom and governance. As one senior contract faculty member put it, “At a certain level I feel that efforts to keep U2 out of the media represent an ageist attack on who we are. The lack of our voices and our faces… throughout 3903’s media representations is appalling (as is the lack of racialized bodies, differently-abeled bodies, elderly bodies, female bodies).” To put it in a post-autonomist Marxist framework of cognitive labour, if communication is cooperation and production, then what was at stake for contract faculty in this strike was not just putting a face on public service, educational workers but the production of living knowledge of precariousness.

I want to go on to argue that it is out of the memory of defeat that a new path to self valorization and determination would be tried. The union would be put against itself without being transformed. As Antonio Negri suggests in The Politics of Subversion: A Manifesto for the Twenty-First Century, communication is production. To this, I would add that mediation – the space between the subject and reality – as well as organization must be considered constitutive. Despite its legacy of achievements, resources have yet to be allocated within CUPE 3903 to enhance contract faculty’s capacity to communicate, discover who they are, and to network. Moreover, in 2011, another way was tried – restructuring the local – but it ended up having no traction. This has left contract faculty less able to tackle the problem of casualization and to protect themselves from exploitation.

….

To read the rest of this 9-page paper with references, download
The Union Against Itself — The Mirror Stage of Contract Faculty

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Apr 06 2012

Contract Faculty Representation and Academic Freedom

Category: Academic Freedom,Contract Faculty — Bob Hanke @ 5:30 pm

Contract Faculty Should Agitate For Representation

How and why one professor created a contract faculty committee
by Kane Faucher
(excerpted from University Affairs, April 2, 2012)

In mid-February, I and a group of dedicated contract instructors saw our committee voted into existence as part of the governance structure of our faculty. After several months of meetings that involved itemizing our concerns, and the drafting of our terms of reference aligned with the academic unit’s constitution, we finally attained meaningful representation within our unit. This marks a somewhat unprecedented move in faculty politics, recognizing the heavy debt owed to our most vulnerable and precarious members: the part-time instructors who, in some units, teach a majority of undergraduate courses.

This is not a process that other faculties and departments can easily duplicate, unless there is political will among administrators to enfranchise their part-time instructors to combat institutionalized inequities. The first hurdle many part-time instructors face is fear – that any action they take may be perceived as insubordination and thus limit their employment opportunities. As well, they may suffer a certain degree of learned helplessness, feeling that it is impossible to alter the current structures to allow for meaningful dialogue between contingent faculty and the established members of academia.

In some ways, we can consider such agitation for fair representation according to Pascal’s wager. If one’s labour is contingent and precarious in doing nothing, then pushing for representation at the risk of not being given a contract for the following year may result in the same scenario. Among contingent faculty, there are no guarantees of future employment, and so this group has the least to lose in improving their conditions.

The cynic will be quick to state that being en-franchised within one’s academic governance structure is far from the ideals of attaining job security and benefits. In addition, this service component would most likely not be remunerated.

But, rather than viewing this as a divisive stance, part-time faculty should recognize that forming their own committee and seeking to establish a participatory role in the life of an academic program is good service experience. It also makes the contract teacher more visible in the unit and allows him to become a stakeholder in curriculum development. Moreover, it may bring together part-time members who otherwise don’t have occasion to interact. Organizational health and efficiency is improved by consulting with relevant stakeholders – which would include perspectives from “the trenches.”

What does visibility mean? It means being a welcome participant in the decision-making process, being acknowledged for professional and research contributions outside of one’s contract, having a collegial “hallway rapport” with full-time colleagues and a collective will to end classist labour divisions in academic culture. A collective stance may end instances of arrogance, condescension, outright hostility and any other marginalizing attitude from some faculty members who engage in a practice of discrimination.

To read the rest of this article, click here.

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Mar 31 2012

The Birth of Critical University Studies

Category: Online Publication — Bob Hanke @ 6:38 pm

Deconstructing Academe: The birth of critical university studies

by Jeffrey J. Williams
(excerpted from The Chronicle Review, February 19, 2012)

Over the past two decades in the United States, there has been a new wave of criticism of higher education. Much of it has condemned the rise of “academic capitalism” and the corporatization of the university; a substantial wing has focused on the deteriorating conditions of academic labor; and some of it has pointed out the problems of students and their escalating debt. A good deal of this new work comes from literary and cultural critics, although it also includes those from education, history, sociology, and labor studies. This wave constitutes what Heather Steffen, a graduate student in literary and cultural studies with whom I have worked at Carnegie Mellon University, and I think is an emerging field of “critical university studies.” Often criticism of the university seems a scattershot enterprise. A scholar from almost any discipline might have something to say about higher education, but it’s usually an occasional piece that’s a sideline from normal work. There is, of course, a sizable body of scholarship coming from the field of education, but it largely deals with elementary and secondary schooling. Or it follows established scholarly channels; for instance, it might gather and present data about the student body, or it could deal with administration, or fill in a segment of the history, sociology, or financing of education.

In contrast, this new wave in higher education looks beyond the confines of particular specializations and takes a resolutely critical perspective. Part of its task is scholarly, reporting on and analyzing changes besetting higher education, but it goes a step further and takes a stand against some of those changes, notably those contributing to the “unmaking of the public university,” in the words of the literary critic Christopher Newfield.

To give it a name recognizes that it has attained significant mass and signals a gathering place for those considering similar work. “Critical” indicates the new work’s oppositional stance, similar to approaches like critical legal studies, critical race studies, critical development studies, critical food studies, and so on, that focuses on the ways in which current practices serve power or wealth and contribute to injustice or inequality rather than social hope. “Studies” picks up its cross-disciplinary character, focused on a particular issue and drawing on research from any relevant area to approach the problem. “University” outlines its field of reference, which includes the discourse of “the idea of the university” as well as the actual practices and diverse institutions of contemporary higher education.

To read the rest of this article, click here.

 

 

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