What the *#@% is an Adjunctocracy? (or Karl Marx, Margaret Spellings, and Myself Do a Little Dance, Make a Little Love, Get Down Tonight . . . I mean, Reinvent The Future of Higher Ed.)
by Matthew Henry Hall
As Karl Marx once said, “Keep the baby, but when you chuck the bath water, toss out that nasty old bathtub too.” Okay, Karl Marx never said that, but it does, metaphorically at least, get at my first overarching point. Higher Education doesn’t need just a few policy changes; it needs a whole new bathtub. Margaret Spellings, the U. S. Secretary of Education, concurs. Her dream tub and my dream tub may differ, but we both agree the current tub’s gotten kinda nasty.
Over a year ago, Spellings, and her “Commission” of experts issued a report titled, A Test of Leadership, Charting the Future of U. S. Higher Education. Although finding some good in the present state of our country’s higher ed institutions, Spellings and her commission found some basic problems. Colleges tend to be too expensive for many would-be undergraduates and aren’t accountable for whether or not the students—many who will go into debt to attend—learn anything. The solutions the commission offered, which I don’t entirely agree with (i.e., standardized tests), can be argued one way, then another. What seems more important is that although Spellings and company got some of the problems right, they entirely missed the biggest problem of all. Teachers, the people who perform the primary function of any school, usually have little to no say in how their school is run, that is to say, governed.
Governance is not the most enticing of subjects to be sure. But before you grab your pillow, take a look at my first illustration. Not being particularly poli-sci savvy, I never thought much about the suffix -ocracy. Turns out pretty much everyone but me knew that if you slap anything in front of ocracy, that’s a kind of government. Here then are a few possible, if absurd, ocracies for higher ed.
Quickly realizing the absolute pointlessness of these and other fanciful ocracies, I considered the more familiar ocracies. Well, I Googled them. For instance, I’d seen the word plutocracy before. Who hasn’t? It’s always floating around the pages of old British novels, making appearances in the columns of the New York Times. But I’m a busy guy. I don’t have time to loll about, paging through a dictionary. I knew a plutocracy wasn’t a government run by Mickey Mouse’s dog. But who, besides those smarties who put out the dictionaries and all the people (again pretty much everyone) who scored higher than me on the SATs and GREs (see my distrust of standardized tests above), would know the Greek word for wealth and power is ploutokratia? So hence, ergo, or whatever, the word plutocracy means a government by the rich and powerful.
It may seem as though I’m digressing, but I’m not. A plutocracy, particularly a bloated mismanaged one, fits a little too perfectly the usual organizational hierarchies at today’s colleges—which leads me to my next illustration/diagram:
The board members elect and appoint each other to the board (as well as the college president, often an ex officio board member), and then they make the decisions which effect everyone at a college. Where do all these board members come from? The short answer seems to be the business community! I read quite a few college board members’ bios and compiled this fictional one: “Biff Remmington Constantinople Remmington VIII is the current VP of Sales at Colossal Inc., the current senior consultant at Gobs of Money Investments and former CEO and current board member of Giant Moo-lah Multinational. In his spare time, Biff likes networking at corporate and college board meetings.” If you’re a struggling adjunct, you probably don’t have a lot in common with Biff and his ilk. Yet if you’re a teacher—doing, again, the primary work of a school—Biff and his pals ultimately control your pay, benefits, workplace conditions, and so on. Sure, the AAUP, NEA, and AFT have all advocated for “shared governance,” but the typical power structure at most American institutions of post-secondary education is decidedly not democratic. There’s a kind of business aristocracy going on here, a college-biz-plutocracy.
That said, today’s higher ed institutions (with the exception of entirely for-profit schools) cannot be called businesses in the truest sense. They’re more akin to government bureaucracies (see above illustration) with ludicrous amounts of paperwork and employees who do the minimum to earn their keep. I remember my days as a full-time university library staffer with benefits, when I would sit reading Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas while my staff of student workers reshelved all the microforms and helped patrons with the nuances of the microfiche printer. That’s not to say all college employees are do-nothing parasites like I was. Many college staffers work very hard. But how many of us, past and present adjuncts, have noticed full-time college staffers (with full benefits) goofing around when we hustled by in route to teach our next class. How many of us have thought at that moment, When do I get to loaf and still get paid? You don’t. You’re an adjunct teacher.
That’s, in part, why my recommendation for a new bathtub is The Adjunctocracy! “What the *#@% is an Adjunctocracy?” you might ask. And “Are you a moron? Is that something you just made up?” Umm, yeah. I mean, about that last question. But please, hear me out. As I’ve mentioned now several times, the function of any school is to teach. Therefore the teachers should have the biggest say in how things are run. So why not a faculty-ocracy? Because I’m writing this for the Adjunct Advocate, and adjunctocracy sounds better. Plus, there’s other reasons I’ve hinted at above to run colleges entirely by adjuncts.
For the most part, adjuncts tend to make stellar employees. Why? To survive as an adjunct you’ve got to become one of the most efficient people on the planet. There’s not a moment to waste if you’re going to grade all those papers, create your lesson plans, go to class and somehow get to the daycare center on time to pick up your kids. Adjuncts know the value of a good paycheck and benefits since they have neither. Adjuncts understand that too much paperwork for simple things like getting paid is a waste of everyone’s time. Adjuncts know that paying for a parking sticker is a waste of money. (I teach here; I deserve a free place to park.) Adjuncts realize what classes and times they’d like to teach and so should make their own schedules. Adjuncts know who’s a good teacher and who’s not. Tenured teachers, I’m sorry to say, aren’t always accountable teachers. Having no job security may actually help keep teachers on their best pedagogical toes. In short, everyone in an adjunctocracy would get paid the same, maybe even with benefits, but on a semester-by-semester basis.
Okay, maybe I don’t have all the particulars right. All I know is I’m with Spellings in that some things are greatly amiss in higher ed., and I’m with Marx in that the workers should control the workplace. Yet I’m confident that armed revolution isn’t the answer, (nor standardized tests). I am therefore throwing my half-baked idea out into the winds, hoping a few enterprising adjuncts will band together and create the first accredited adjunctocratic university run entirely by adjuncts, where only the bath water will need to change, like the students, periodically. To misquote Lenin . . . I mean, John Lennon, “Power to the teachers! Right on!”
