The Chronicle: The Value of Forging Alliances
Contingent faculty members need to make common cause with their natural allies on and off campuses, writes Joe Berry, chairman of the Chicago Coalition of Contingent Academic Labor and a part-time instructor at the University of Illinois in the Chicago Labor Education Program, and at Roosevelt University.
http://chronicle.com/weekly/v52/i41/41b01001.htm
From the issue dated June 16, 2006
The Value of Forging Alliances
By JOE BERRY
The majority of faculty members who teach college classes today do not have tenure or prospects for it, and most have no other form of job security, even though they are crucial to the instructional success of their institutions. Luckily, contingent faculty members, of which I am one, have begun to think strategically and collectively about our proper role in the higher-education system and with whom we can join forces to improve work conditions — not just for ourselves but for many other college employees.
I say “luckily” because the need for a faculty voice will increasingly fall upon us, as tenure-track and tenured faculty members become a smaller percentage of the professoriate. It’s also lucky because, given the itinerant nature of our work, a majority of faculty members have had experience at many different types of institutions — much more so than traditional full-time professors. And it is lucky because, by speaking in our own voices, contingent faculty members will force people to confront the reality: Higher education is under attack and facing more substantial changes than at any time since the GI Bill of Rights — and maybe even since the evolution of the academic disciplines in the early 1900s.
Just a quick list of issues confronting colleges today includes declining revenues from traditional sources, especially from the federal and state governments; ideological debates about the value and purpose of much of higher education; attacks on free speech and academic freedom; and ever-increasing pressures on higher education to both emulate and serve corporate businesses and to meet the demands of a capitalist market.
Academe has also experienced internal transformations. The college presidents of today are not like the college presidents of a generation or two ago: They are often appointed more for their ability to raise money and their business acumen than for their academic expertise and credentials. Full-time tenure-track colleagues are also not in the same position as their predecessors were, and they face many more demands. Other workers on campuses — clerical and technical staff members, food- and building-services workers, librarians, counselors, and many others who make colleges run — have seen their work, their status, and their employers transformed in the last several generations.
Many of those groups are still collectively trying to figure out who they are and what their interests are in the brave new world of academe. We are all facing the questions, “Who are we now, and what do we need to do?” Contingent faculty members can collaborate with colleagues and fellow workers to help answer such questions.
An initial list of our potential allies includes:
Full-time tenure-track and tenured colleagues. The status of traditional faculty members in the educational process has been degraded, at least for that majority who are not the academic stars highlighted in the media. Professors in many disciplines have far less discretion to pursue research that interests them. Instead their institutions are pressuring them to become more entrepreneurial and to develop commercial projects to help replace traditional, yet declining, sources of revenue.
Meanwhile teaching loads have remained the same or, in some cases, even increased. On top of that, tenure-track faculty members find themselves having to perform more and more departmental, administrative, advising, and other professional tasks with fewer and fewer colleagues because, without being paid to do so, contingent faculty members cannot be forced to take on such responsibilities. In the biggest systems of higher education — for example, in a number of community colleges — it is increasingly the norm for some departments to have only one full-time faculty member supervising a flock of adjuncts. Almost all full-time, tenure-track faculty members who care about the future of their profession as well as their own daily lives bemoan such changes.
What will they do about it? A substantial percentage of tenure-track faculty members will choose a path other than counting the days until retirement, becoming administrators themselves, or building their own consulting or other commercial businesses. Many, maybe even a majority of them, will work with contingent faculty members to resist the trends that I’ve described in the only way that can be successful: with a united faculty demanding adequate conditions and realistic expectations for individual and collective work.
Graduate teaching assistants. TA’s are, in fact, also contingent teachers. Over the past decade, they have found their voice and engaged in substantial movements of activism and unionization. They have left no doubt as to how they conceive of their interests as teachers, as future academics, and as current employees of the higher-education industry.
Alliances between contingent faculty members and graduate students are not untroubled. Many graduate students fear too close contact with people whom they judge as the failures of academe. In addition, their perches in Ph.D.-granting institutions can give them a narrow perspective on higher education that is at odds with reality and with the perspective of most contingent faculty members, many of whom don’t have doctorates.
Nevertheless, they have joined with contingent colleagues in the past and can profit from such cooperation in the future. The biennial conferences of the Coalition of Contingent Academic Labor were born out of collaboration between the two groups in 1995 and will continue, with a seventh conference planned for this August. Those conferences gave birth to the biennial Campus Equity Week and a large collection of papers and other resources.
Other campus workers. Librarians, counselors, manual-service workers, and dozens of other types of staff members have been buffeted by technological changes, privatization and outsourcing, reorganizations, and plain old attrition and layoffs. They have created their own branch of a resurgent campus-labor movement at all types of institutions — elite private universities like Harvard and Yale, major state university systems like the University of California and the University of Minnesota, and local community colleges.
Campus staff members have clearly demonstrated that you don’t need an advanced degree to have a broad and nonparochial view of your interests and who your friends are. Such workers also care deeply about the mission of higher education. Just because they wash dishes, cut grass, repair buildings, or fix computers or audiovisual systems doesn’t mean that they’re know-nothings. Quite the contrary. Many have made tremendous sacrifices to keep their jobs so that their children can attend the colleges where they work.
Such employees have made it clear that the sheer honor of working in higher education doesn’t pay the rent — and that respect for the institution as a whole does not always translate to respect for those who make it run on a daily basis. With few exceptions, the forces of corporatization, marketization, and privatization that have gained such momentum have not served the interests of campus workers well, and in many cases those workers have reached out to others at their institutions.
Perhaps the most striking example is the truly heroic support that the blue-collar union at Yale, HERE Local 35 (now Unite Here), gave first to clerical workers to help them organize into Unite Here Local 35 and then to graduate assistants in their decade-long struggle to gain recognition. Members of Unite Here have also recently assisted the Yale hospital workers in their efforts to organize. Similarly, at Berkeley, the strike by the clerical workers in the Coalition of University Employees was the spark that allowed the lecturers in the American Federation of Teachers to stage their own systemwide job action and negotiate their best contract since they began to bargain collectively there in the 1980s.
Students. Our teaching conditions are their learning conditions. When our conditions are bad — for instance, having “TBA” or “staff” rather than our names on the class schedules, unstable employment that doesn’t allow for follow-up contact for letters of reference; or no offices, phones, or computers for ourselves — they make for a degraded educational experience for our students.
And the pain is not shared equally, for the people who suffer the worst are those who have the least — both teachers and students. The working-class adjunct at a typical community college who holds her office hours on the trunk of her car before she rushes to her next job is often meeting with a working-class student who is likewise short of time and money. Those students in particular need the intellectual self-confidence that office-hour conversations can build and enhance. They need privacy, confidentiality, and the opportunity for the kind of casual, unhurried, faculty-student contact that was common when most of us who teach today were students.
If we treat our students as we are treated as contingent employees, they will not learn what they should, and they know it. It is no wonder then that, when we as contingent faculty members describe our experiences to our students, they are surprised, then interested, then actively sympathetic with our situation. And when we collectively demand improvements, student groups — like United Students Against Sweatshops and Student Labor Action Coalitions — are strongly supportive.
Off-campus groups. We also have allies beyond the ivied walls. Many alumni fondly remember college experiences that were much different from today’s. Given information and concrete tasks, they can be a force, as the anti-apartheid divestment movement in the 1980s demonstrated when alumni helped force divestiture at dozens of campuses.
We also have allies in the organized-labor movement who have historically fought for free public education for working people and who have also sought to make that education relevant, fulfilling, and useful to all aspects of workers’ lives, not just for the requirements of a particular employer. In point of fact, there would be no teacher-union movement without the historic support of the organized-labor movement.
Within organized labor, our sisters and brothers — especially those in the public sector and in the private nonprofit sector — face many of the same challenges that we do, and can understand what we are fighting for. It doesn’t take a welfare caseworker, a postal worker, or a nurse in a public hospital very long to understand our struggle. It also doesn’t take them very long to understand how we have to fight the battle of ideas: with allies, at the local, state, and federal levels, in the public arena.
If we as contingent academics can get down off our high horses long enough to publicly admit that we are workers who have something to learn as well as to teach, we can gain the support and sympathy of our working-class students and their working-class communities. After all, surveys show that people hold higher education and especially their local public institutions in high regard for the opportunities they represent and the extension services they render. Moreover, colleges are among the largest employers in many communities.
With so much of the work force now in jobs that don’t provide regular, full-time, living-wage employment, we can grow a movement of precarious workers, linked to the rising consciousness of immigrants and their demands for justice and equity. Many of those workers are our students, too, and their hopes include getting a job with a living wage and benefits. Most contingent faculty members teach at community colleges and other non-elite institutions that are populated by adult workers, especially immigrants and those from underemployed minority groups. Such students were prominent in the recent demonstrations for the rights of immigrant workers.
What about the trustees and administrators who govern and lead higher education today? In some cases, of course, we can go to state legislatures together and lay out the need for adequate support for higher education — as we can with local-bond or tax-rate elections for community colleges. We have done it in the past, and we will do it in the future, although such legislative alliances have most often been at the insistence of faculty members, not administrators.
But in the new world of higher education, our goals and those of our close allies are in many cases substantially different than those of top college officials, who now see themselves as CEO’s and business managers more than they do as educational leaders. What’s more, any alliances between contingent faculty members and our employers will be inherently unequal, hence unstable. Fortunately, we can forge partnerships with many other groups to help us weather the storms ahead.
Joe Berry is chairman of the Chicago Coalition of Contingent Academic Labor and teaches part time at the University of Illinois in the Chicago Labor Education Program, and at Roosevelt University. He is the author of Reclaiming the Ivory Tower: Organizing Adjuncts to Change Higher Education (Monthly Review Press, 2005).
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Section: The Chronicle Review
Volume 52, Issue 41, Page B10
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