Inside the Current Issue

Reports from the Front: The Adjuncting Experience

In this special section... The Tensions of Teaching Marriah Star Critical Adjuncting Kimora Reflections of an Adjunct Teacher Daphna El-Roy On Love, Hate and Adjuncting Dan Skinner Graduate Students: Sign your Union Cards! Andrea Morrell Against Tuition Remission, Against PSC Adjunct Unionization Spencer Sunshine The Value of Student Evaluations Jonathan R. Wynn Experts Ask: Do We Need Adjunct Pedagogy? Mark Wilson The New Proletarian Academy James Hoff Teaching Shakespeare with an Eastern European Accent Szidonia Haragos

The New Proletarian Academy

Book Review: Reclaiming the Ivory Tower: Organizing Adjuncts to Change Higher Education, by Joe Berry

James Hoff

Adjunct: something joined to or connected with another, and subordinate to it in position, function, character, or essence; either as auxiliary to it, or essentially depending upon it.

Contingent: subject to or at the mercy of accidents; liable to chance and change.

Although the term contingent labor is becoming more and more the standard epithet for part-time faculty across the US, there seems to be little real difference, as each of the above definitions makes clear, whether those who teach part-time are referred to as adjunct or contingent faculty. The bottom line is that they are as a group, regardless of what they are called, generally seen by college administrators and trustees as subordinate, auxiliary, and - despite the fact that according to the American Association of University Professors they make up as much as 45% of college faculty (and teach a disproportionate amount of classes) - inessential and radically expendable. Since the early '70s, the academy as we know it has taken a series of decisive steps toward the corporatization of all levels of academia including the public universities, the liberal arts colleges, the professional colleges and especially the two-year community colleges that so many working class and lower income students depend upon to get a foot up in the economy. The days of hard working, freshly minted PhDs happily heading off to tenure track positions in comparable universities is increasingly becoming a thing of the past. The number of tenure track faculty positions available in the US, especially in the humanities and social sciences, has dropped considerably over the last three decades. Meanwhile the number of temporary and part-time faculty laborers employed by these institutions has increased steadily from a small, truly contingent group of specialized non-academic professionals teaching within their field, to a massive pool of underpaid, overworked, and increasingly harried professional teachers who move from campus to campus, like migrant workers, teaching six and seven classes a semester, trying to piece together some semblance of a salary. As Joe Berry points out in his book Reclaiming the Ivory Tower: Organizing Adjuncts to Change Higher Education:

"In 1970, 68 percent of new PhDs got university or college full-time tenure-track positions. Post-1980, only 51 percent did, even though enrollment was up 41 percent between 1970 and 1980. The prospects have not improved since. Looked at a different way, from 1917 to 1986 the number of part-timers increased 133 percent while the number of full-timers increased only 22 percent. Sometime in the 1990s the majority of teachers became contingent, either part-time or full-time temporary. If graduate employees, employees of for-profits, and teachers of non-credit classes were counted here, the "contingent majority" date would be earlier and the percentage much higher now."

This "new-majority faculty" has unfortunately become the stepping stool for an increasingly fetishized, commodity-driven university system, where students purchase their degrees, pop-star professors are rewarded with endowed chairs with little or no teaching requirements, and administrators run the university like commercial CEOs, competing with other universities and driving down wages and benefits while investing in large scale campus projects likes gyms and stadiums that attract tuition paying undergraduate students but do little for faculty. Essentially the market in academic labor has become a free market, dictated only by the needs of administrators who see their sole responsibility in "growing" the university like a corporation, without regard to the deterioration of the quality of the institutions they have been given the mandate to uphold and defend. This corporatization of the academy has led to an overdependence on adjunct faculty, who sometimes make, when all is said and done, as little as $10 an hour for the services they provide. These trends are also largely responsible for what Berry refers to as a "casualization"--but which is really a proletarianization--of most college and university faculty from self determining and securely middle-class professionals to a majority of temporary working class wage earners. "The casualization of the faculty workforce," says Berry, "is the leading edge of this corporatization. It represents one of the few recent instances in the United States economy (another is taxi driving) where an entire occupation has been converted from permanent career status to temporary, often part-time, status in the space of a single generation of workers. This casualized majority is less uniform than the old professoriate and includes part-timers hired class by class, full-time temporaries on contracts of varying length, and graduate employees."

The effects of this change on the university have been enormous. Students, whose tuitions have increased exponentially even as faculty wages have declined, rightly expect to receive a solid education from qualified and attentive instructors, but all too often find only overworked, overburdened adjuncts who have neither the time nor, because so many do not get paid office hours, the inclination to meet with them outside of class.

The situation, Berry shows, is bleak. But the book is not meant to be a polemic about the plight of the adjunct faculty worker. Nor is Berry's book a fact sheet on the inequities that so many part-timers face: from extreme low wages to lack of job security, resources, office space, administrative control, respect from chairs and tenured faculty, and overcrowded classrooms. Berry claims his book is "a fundamentally happy book, [because] despite many stories of suffering, abuse, arrogance, duplicity, exploitation, and downright evil that are part of [adjuncts] daily lives...there is a movement out there to learn from and join, and... when we fight, we are winning."

Instead of looking backward, Berry asks: now that we know what's wrong, what can we do to fix it? For Berry, the answer to this question lies in the very practical, methodical, and time consuming process of unionizing contingent faculty and a growing movement to fight for adjunct faculty rights. But the goal of this book, as the title suggests, is not only to organize for better working conditions for adjuncts, but to organize for the betterment of the universities and colleges that employ and exploit those workers, as well as the communities in which they live. We have all heard the stories of adjuncts commuting from one school to another, day in and day out, with barely enough time in-between classes to get from campus A to campus B. The increased commute time and workload leaves little if any real time for substantive interactions with students or community activity. Although many adjuncts are dedicated to their students and are as good as most tenured and tenure track professors when it comes to teaching, the conditions under which they labor only hinder their ability to be good educators, which hurts universities, students, and their communities. Despite these clear inequities, one of the main impediments to unionization and change, however, is what Berry describes as a dual consciousness among many part-time and temporary full-time faculty:

"As individuals being thrust full bore into the working class and at the same time often facing downward mobility, in aspiration if not always in material reality, contingent faculty naturally exhibit a dual consciousness and behavior. On the one hand, our years of graduate education have instilled in us a belief in individual merit, the "Protestant work ethic," and higher education's version of the Horatio Alger myth: Work hard and smart and you will succeed. Throughout this education we are close to those who occupy a position to which we now aspire (secure, well-compensated faculty status). This intensifies our beliefs and leads us to pursue, sometimes for years and even decades, the search for individual solutions and personal recognition of our "'merit.'"

Rather than recognizing the plight of the average adjunct and banding together to fight, many adjuncts, suggests Berry, become caught up in their all too competitive and sometimes narcissistic drives to achieve career success. It seems that many adjuncts just do not recognize their status as exploited workers. This recognition is one of the most important steps for moving the unionization process forward.

This is why Berry's approach to the perennial problem of organizing contingent faculty stresses the importance of understanding both the "objective" and "subjective" factors at play in unionization, including working conditions, salaries, politics and the ins and outs of human psychology. For example, in addition to a troubling double consciousness, many adjuncts are also politically, economically, or ideologically opposed to unions for various reasons, not the least of which is the fact that most adjuncts have little or no job security, and since there are few legal protections for contingent labor, they can have their reappointments denied without any explanation. This makes organizing contingent faculty something like trying to organize a Wal-Mart. Contingent faculty live in fear of losing their jobs each semester and few are willing to put their livelihoods on the line without some sort of guarantee that they will be protected. To help alleviate these concerns, Berry suggests that organizers first seek out, through personal contacts and low level organizing, those adjuncts that seem most radical, most engaged, and most likely to be willing to take a risk on principle. He also suggests that early unionization efforts focus on creating a group of activists that most closely represents the diversity of the faculty on campus, including across disciplines.

Indeed, much of Berry's book is about exactly this kind of hands on problem solving from the bottom up and the book is ideal for those interested in organizing on campuses where contingent faculty are not organized.

What is most interesting about Berry's book, despite the scant space he affords it, is the call it makes to move beyond the campus and to execute a plan that provides information and education to the public about the struggle and the working conditions of adjunct labor. After all, despite the new proletarian status of most college educators, the majority of Americans, students included, still think of university and college faculty as a thoroughly middle-class, and sometimes privileged elite, and are thus often unsympathetic to unionization efforts, especially when they seem focused only on increasing wages. Despite the dismal conditions of adjuncts, the corporate media has done a horrible job of helping publicize their plight, focusing instead, when they do choose to talk about universities, on the poor quality of education rather than the working conditions of the educators. If there is one advantage when it comes to touching the hearts of the public that contingent faculty unions have, it is the degree to which these members may be rightly thought of as working class. Just as there is still a disconnect, as Berry suggests between working conditions and self perception among contingent faculty members, there is an equally striking disconnect between what most Americans think about the conditions of faculty labor and the realities of those actual conditions. It is clear that explaining this disparity and educating the public about the real inequities and social costs of adjunct labor should be at the center of all unions that represent these workers. As Berry explains at the end of his book:

"...it is important to periodically think about how our struggle for justice for contingent faculty fits into the broader labor movement and the broader society. If we win greater equity for ourselves within higher education, but at the same time the entire enterprise of higher education is de-funded or turned over to profit-seeking corporations, our victories will be hollow. If tuition gets so high and wages so low that nothing but job training is accessible to most working-class students, our campus-based struggles won't matter very much. The reason there is a broader labor movement is because over the years millions of workers have learned that what you win on your own job can easily be taken away by government policy, the broader economy, or other forces. Right now the labor movement is weaker than it has been in decades, but it is still the only force that speaks for workers, and it is still one of the largest groupings in society. We have an obligation to do our part to help revitalize it."

James Hoff is a PhD student in the English department.