On Being Invisible

Sometimes I am just not sure how to respond to different ways that contingent faculty respond to their situations.  On one hand their employment situations are often the pits and so developing strategies and rationales for making those situations better is understandable.  On the other hand, I worry about behavior that perpetuates that exploitation and the crummy staffing structure we currently have.  On the other hand, how much responsibility for fighting back against those structures should legitimately fall to the very people being used in the system.  On the other hand . . .okay cue the Fiddler on the Roof music, you get my point.

So it is with that back and forth state of mind that I read (and reread) New Kid on the Hallway's post about being a blissfully nondescript full-time nontenure track faculty member.  She describes how freeing this position is for her:

But as I drove through the crystalline sunshine to campus last week, I just started laughing at the freedom of it all. I show up, teach my classes, and leave. I don't have to worry about whether everyone knows who I am or if I'm making a good impression on them all or if I'm researching enough or doing enough service or or or... I just get to be for a change.

Now goodness knows that we all have moments when we would like to just do our jobs and be left alone, but I can't stop having a reaction something along the lines of: "That's not right."

I don't mean to make this about New Kid. She is clearly a very thoughtful person who is very much engaged with her profession (despite her current euphoria over being invisible at Rural Utopia).  And as Tenured Radical points out it is a very moving post about someone trying to find the right place in the ever-frustrating academic job market. 

That said, I do find it concerning that we seem to be moving more and more to a system where teaching is completely divorced from the other aspects of institutional life.  Doesn't this just lead to faculty taking less and less of a leadership role at our colleges and universities?  Is that something we think is a good thing?  I don't.

And in a nasty little self-fulfilling prophecy, administrators encourage less faculty participation as if they are looking out for the faculty member.  When New Kid considers Tenured Radical's advice to visiting lecturers on becoming more a part of the college they are visiting (that is becoming more visible), New Kid notes that:

I'm not sure my chair even wants me to do such things because she says they feel like they're exploiting me enough as it is.

I guess drawing the line on exploitation is some kind of sympathetic management practice?

But really, what is the right answer here?  Obviously many folks are concerned about how we have created a two or multi-tier system for treatment of faculty, but what about creating these increasingly isolated and specialized responsibilities for faculty.  My feeling is students and colleges lose out when we disaggregate teaching, service and research, but clearly we are heading that direction. 

What do others think?

Comments

[Phil Ray Jack]

There is a line from the tv series "West Wing" that sums up my feelings about the trend toward the disaggregation of our academic responsibilities. I can't remember the details behind the scene, but the line, "Decisions are made by those who show up," has stuck with me.

We all have good, legitimate reasons for not being involved in governance, union activities, or any of the myriad of non-instructional activities that are part of our academic lives. At one point, when we were negotiating language in our contract dealing with "committee responsibilities," I learned that there were more than eighty-three committees on our campus, not counting individual tenure and post-tenure review committees. We have less than one hundred thirty tenured faculty.

That was two years ago, and there have been at least a half-dozen new committees created since then.

Most of us are involved in the activities we feel are important, and we get frustrated because we can never seem to find enough people interested in our cause to do the work that needs to be done.

Unfortunately, it seems that the administration always has the ability to find representatives to serve on the committees. "Decisions are made by those who show up," and there are too many times when we show up for class and discover that a new policy has a direct impact on what we do. By then, it seems like it is too late.

Take something as basic as my syllabus. Not too long ago, I had a two-page syllabus that not only outlined my expectations for the class, but included creative bits of humor and personal insights about what I hoped to accomplish as the instructor.

Then, I learned that we had to include Course Outcomes, which had been created within the division by "those who showed up." Okay, no problem. Next we had to include a section on how those Course Outcomes would be measured. So far, so good. Oh, and don't forget to cut and paste the ADA statement, the Statement on Plagiarism, and the statement on responsibilities. Be sure to use the statements provided by the college to protect us from liability.

Now my syllabus is six pages long and goes unread by most of my students.

Those who are led seldom discover new trails. The more we let others make the decisions that affect what we do as instructors, the closer we get to a system where teachers are little more than templates.

Each of these committees makes decisions that impact all of us. They develop assessment and accountability standards and processes; they create policies that govern professional development and classroom ethics standardsl

[New Kid on the Hallway]

I agree that there's a real tension between what one individual should be expected to do and what works/doesn't work as a system. Right now, for me, personally, this employment situation is working really well. I don't WANT to be involved in anything - it's kind of like a rebound relationship, after being dumped by my previous employer. But that doesn't mean that in a global sense, I think that the system works. (I realize you weren't accusing me of anything - I don't mean this defensively, just wanted to clarify that I was uneasy about this tension even as I wrote that post.)

The other thing is just that circumstances vary so much from institution to institution - unionized campuses are different from non-unionized, the role that contingent faculty play is different in many places; at Rural Utopia (my last-but-one employer, not where I am now) full-time contingent people were absolutely full members of the faculty, and played a significant role in governance/leadership, which was completely faculty-dominated. That was due to a lot of factors, but mostly that there were very few non-full-time contingent people (mostly people teaching music lessions), given the location of the institution, and that the institution was understaffed as it was, so they weren't going to overlook any warm body who might help out with all the work. At my last job, full-time contingent people were also fully incorporated into all the activities of the institution. They played a lesser role in governance/leadership only because faculty in general played a smaller role at that institution (pretty top-heavy administration). These are obviously just anecdotes that don't represent the profession fully, but again, the problem is that there's no one way to characterize the situation of all adjunct faculty (although you certainly can do so much more successfully within a given institution or school system - e.g. California state sytem).

Where I am currently - I don't think that because *I'm* not involved in campus leadership, that translates to faculty not being involved in campus leadership. I'm just not one of those faculty. So in that sense, I don't think disaggragating (some) teaching necessarily leads to a faculty-bereft governance system. (This is not a place where adjuncts are doing all the teaching and the t-t/tenured people are all spending their time researching/teaching grad students and not involved in undergraduate education or service - it's just too financially strapped to fill all the teaching slots it needs with t-t faculty.) It does create two tiers of faculty, but that's not necessarily the same thing as faculty taking less of a leadership role. (It's still not necessarily a good thing, but maybe for different reasons.)

Oh, and FWIW, I do believe that my chair not expecting me to do service activities absolutely is a sympathetic thing. My position may be exploitative, but that's definitely not my chair's fault as an individual and she's trying to live with this system the same way that I am. And in fact, I don't see the position as especially exploitative - for me, in my current situation. Also FWIW, based on various personal things going on in my life, it's not super likely that I'm going to be trying to stay at this institution after this year, and my chair is fully aware of this. If I went to her and asked her about ways to improve my chances of continuing as a lecturer here (which would not be in this department), I suspect she would respond differently.

Luckily, I have not encountered the kind of committee dictates on what I need to do that Phil Ray Jack describes. But then, I have always voluntarily included ADA and plagiarism policies in my syllabi, and my syllabi are regularly over 10 pages long. Because I prefer them that way. ;-)

[Craig Smith]

Hey New Kid—glad you found us! I was hoping we might pull you over to comment as I have been really enjoying your writing and thinking. I could easily tell you were working through that tension and I my the post didn’t come across as judgmental—I really was just trying to use what I thought was your very thoughtful post as a stepping stone to this larger issue.

The real issue is that I (and I think others) find it hard to separate out the individual instances and the larger picture. Contingent faculty ranks keep growing and full-time nontenure track are growing faster than any other category. You are right that the circumstances all vary a great deal, but I am struggling with not trying to shove everyone into one mass category and treat contingent faculty as one homogenous group (which they aren’t) and when do we say enough is enough?

It is true that having some contingent faculty doesn’t mean that faculty are not involved in decision-making. You are also right to point out that in some instances faculty of all types are very involved in academic decision-making. However, the larger trends seem to be headed the other direction—more managerial prerogative, more standardization, more faculty simply “delivering” a set curriculum, etc.—and that is all worrisome to me.

And as far as sympathetic managers—well that just seems to be people making the best of a bad situation. I don’t think we want to count on that, particularly because it clearly doesn’t always happen. So, I am still interested in how we address those system issues while respecting individual situations.

I hope you will continue to engage with us in those discussions, because I think the bottom line is that more dialogue among those of us involved with higher education and more awareness of the situation in the general public is critical—that is really what we are after with our FACE campaign.

Thanks again for your post and for your comments.

[New Kid on the Hallway]

Oh, don't worry, you didn't sound judgmental! And these are important questions. I was in some ways unhappy with writing that post even as I wrote it, if that makes any sense.

And your point about having to rely on sympathetic managers not to make a situation exploitative/terrible - yeah, that's true; I'm lucky my chair is sympathetic, but it's not a good system to have to rely on individual good will.

Anyway, thanks for the discussion!

[Craig Smith]

Great--hope you will let us know if you are writing about stuff we are talking about--and of course we will be watching! (-;