Book Review: Equality for Contingent Faculty
Edited by Keith Hoeller, Vanderbilt University Press, 2014, paperback.
by Deborah Straw
In Equality for Contingent Faculty, edited by Keith Hoeller, longtime academic labor activist John Hess is quoted as saying, “No contingent faculty is ever more than 15 seconds away from total humiliation.” This is one of the strongest and truest statements I have seen written about those I call adjunct faculty. As academic books proliferate about the status of part-time, adjunct, or contingent faculty, the members of this beleaguered group have more to say with fewer holds barred.
As in other anthologies, the essays in Equality for Contingent Faculty descry the situation of adjuncts; the writers despair of poor wages, no office space, virtually no chance for tenure. Contingent faculty, although many are fully as educated as tenured professors, receive little respect from tenured peers or administration. Why do any of us even want to adjunct for a living? And how can we ever rise above this frustrating situation?
This book includes some voices and issues not included in other recent books on related topics: a college in western Canada; a faculty that fought long and hard for tenure for qualified adjuncts; a debate on the necessity of teaching and engaging in and writing original academic research. The essays are written in an academic style. Most are succinct, but one or two seem a bit belabored.
Essays are written by academic activists in British Columbia and Alberta, Canada; and in Colorado, Ohio, California, and Tennessee, among other places. The writers teach in two and four-year institutions; some are lecturers; some are online tutors. Some are published writers of other works; one is an architect; a few have won teaching awards; a few have taught First Nations students. The range and experience is impressive.
One of the most thoughtful and useful essays is by Lantz Simpson, now professor of English at Santa Monica College; he was temporary part-time faculty for fifteen years. He writes of the California three-tiered college system in his piece entitled “The New Abolition Movement.” He proposes, “to abolish the contingent faculty system in the United States…” He believes contingent faculty should be able to achieve full-time tenured status in all states. And he explains how to do this, systematically. The process might take years, but this is a good idea.
First, he notes that although there are now seventy-five percent contingent faculty in the nation’s colleges and universities, in K-12 public schools, there is no such thing. (I suspect this is because of their teachers’ unions.) He gives a brief history of how adjunct faculty came to be, stating “The historical examination of the development of the contingent system reveals that it came about like a thief in the night.” On his way to solutions, he states that the greatest gains for contingent faculty have been made in California, Washington State, New Jersey and New York.
California has three tiers of public higher education: the universities; the state colleges; and the community colleges. Although some progress has been achieved for contingency faculty in that large state, Simpson believes there are three basic problems to overcome to transition contingency faculty into tenure-track faculty. First is the “administrative demand for flexibility”; second is “the necessity of increased funding to pay for a nationwide, fully professional faculty…” and third, “the actual abolition of contingency throughout the fragmented [higher education] system.” Which problem is the most difficult to overcome differs state by state. He goes on to show exact actions California has taken in this direction, writing of laws and collective bargaining agreements, labeling faculty who believe as he does “abolitionists.” Simpson believes that adjunct status can be abolished “through the process of regularization by infinite flexibility when coupled with adequate funding.” This short article might serve as a roadmap for other states to consider as they move forward to attain greater rights for contingent faculty.
“Do College Teachers Have to be Scholars?” written by Frank Donoghue, professor of English at Ohio State University, addresses is an issue I have often contemplated. What adjuncts with little free time or money (or institutional support) decide or want to perform and write up research? Although the author has empathy for adjunct faculty, the author states, “… the use of adjunct labor, especially in the humanities, is one of academia’s most notorious scandals.” For this latter idea, he gives first credit to Paul Lauter’s writing in a collection of published essays, Canons and Contexts, 1991.
Donoghue believes in scholarship, of course, but notes that in a “utopian situation that I don’t believe could ever become a reality,” one of the things to happen would be that teachers of composition and lower-division literature courses would not need to be scholars in the traditional sense. “They need to be good writers and skilled in the techniques of teaching writing… [and for the literature teachers] fine close readers.” He argues that even though upper-level lit. course and graduate course teachers ought to be scholars, “…they don’t necessarily have to participate in that conversation by publishing themselves.” He concludes, as do many writing about adjunct/contingent issues, there are “no easy solutions here.”
As have other recent anthologies, the book is full of astonishing statistics, of how many adjuncts now teach throughout the country, and how the practice of tenure may be disappearing altogether. The existence of for-profit colleges is brought into a few of the arguments. (BTW, these latter colleges’ futures may look rosier under President Trump.) The volume is full of impassioned, frustrated academics’ research and thoughts. At the end of the book is an appendix of Trends in Instructional Staff Employment Status from 1975 to 2011.
These activist teachers and writers are brave. They have faced and overcome humiliation. When I read these anthologies containing verifiable facts and strong opinions, I cannot help but wonder who is reading these books. I, for one, most certainly hope it is the administrations and tenured faculty who need so badly to understand adjuncts’ beliefs, vast knowledge and experience, and legitimate concerns.
