What is true for the armed forces is often equally true in other areas of life.  In this case the quest to reform the conditions of teaching and learning in higher education.  To achieve any kind of victory, it is first necessary to understand what exactly you are up against.  Good data can save lives on the battlefield and it can shape for the better (or worse) the future of students and teachers in the college classroom.

The task to gather accurate intelligence on Adjunct labor conditions began with a vengeance last week as Josh Boldt, an Adjunct Professor of English at the University of Georgia and fellow attendee of the New Faculty Majority summit, created a Google docs spreadsheet where Adjunct faculty can list their salaries, benefits, and working conditions.  Here for the first time the general public can see in one place how much Adjunct faculty make at institutions throughout the United States and (in some cases) the world.  I’ve added my information to the spreadsheet.  I’d encourage you to do so as well.

Reading through all the information on the spreadsheet is a bit daunting and at some point it will need analysis and visualization to work as an organizing tool, but I anticipate some great coalition building campaigns emerging from out of this data.  Administrator’s can easily dismiss claims based on ethos and pathos but they can’t dismiss the logic of numbers.  A quick scan of the data on this sheet shows that the median salary for Adjunct faculty is well below the suggested MLA guidelines and is far lower than the amount needed to sustain oneself let alone a family.

In a recent post to her Inside Higher Education Blog, College Ready Writing, Lee Bessette extols the benefits of this “crowdsourced” project on behalf of Adjuncts everywhere and I am inclined to agree with her.  My only quibble is with her use of the word “hero.”

At the New Faculty Majority summit I was frequently the annoying pragmatist who pointed out the need for data and clear talking points not simply to push our adversaries back on their heels but also to energize the people we hope to form into a coalition to change higher education.  Call it lamenting, kvetching, carping, whatever you like–the fact remains, I have been witness to and participant in ALOT of failed organizing campaigns.  I’d like to think that I have learned something from those experiences and what I was saying came from that perspective.

We don’t need heroes in the quest to reform higher education.  Instead we need patience, perseverance, and clarity of vision.  These are the qualities that inspired Srdja Popovic in his campaign to topple Serbian dictator Slobodan Milosevic and later guided uprisings in places such as Tunisia, Egypt, and Libya.

Let’s not kid ourselves.  The status quo works for the people in power.  If it didn’t, contingent labor wouldn’t be expanding and it wouldn’t be invisible to the general public.  To make it stop working will require thousands of micro-strikes against it rather than one dramatic lunge.  We are small but mighty.  Non-violent guerilla war against corporate higher education has begun.

The first session began with a discussion of the origin, development, and scale of the shift from tenured to non-tenure track labor in Higher Education.  Much of the material in this panel has been covered by writers such as Marc Bousquet (http://howtheuniversityworks.com/wordpress/) and will be familiar to those who have been working and researching Adjunct and Grad student labor.  However, given the nature of the coalition that NFM seeks to forge, joining Faculty, Staff, Students, and Parents, it was necessary to first set the context for the discussion before we could proceed.

Following this opening session the summit moved on to examine successful campaigns for adjunct’s rights (see in particular Vancouver Community College’s Program for Change http://www.vccfa.ca/program-for-change/index.html), effective strategies for coalition building, and ways to change attitudes towards Adjunct faculty on campus.

The post-lunch sessions involved small group meetings where each room examined NFM’s own Program for Change draft and made suggestions for what to change, add, or leave out.  Summit participants closed the day with a reflection on the results of their break out sessions.

If it’s possible to be energized, daunted, and disappointed all at the same time that is where I am at following the close of this summit.  I think Josh Boldt’s recent post (http://karmaslide.com/2012/01/29/nfm-12-post-two-stop-looking-for-the-treasure-map-and-start-laying-bricks/) describes my emotional state as well.  Perhaps you should read his words before proceeding to finish reading this post.  Of course, he puts me to shame as a writer in that piece.  So maybe you should wait to read it until later.

I really loved the energy generated early in the day and gained some really useful insights, many of which ended up in my twitter feed under the hashtag #newfac12.  These included:

1. You don’t need to form a Union to organize.  Something of a revelation for this Chicago Democrat.
2. Coalitions should include more than one interest group.  This relates to point one.  Unions only allow those seeking a labor contract under the law to join.  A non-union coalition isn’t hampered by this.  Parents, students, staff, and even administrators could join.  As Joe Berry put it during the summit, to have a successful coalition you need both “insiders” and “outsiders.”  The outsiders raise hell and the insiders create a framework to make sure that changes stick.
3. Changes in Adjunct labor begin with attitude.  In particular, Adjuncts should act “as if” they were not contingent but stable members of a department.  Show up to social events, colloquia, open meetings.  Have conversations with tenured faculty over coffee and tell them what you are working on in and outside of the classroom.  And don’t be afraid to keep looking for a better job.  We are devoted workers but we shouldn’t be martyrs.  (Shout out to Karen Kelsky goes here.  See her website and in particular this post:  http://theprofessorisin.com/2012/01/24/adjuncting-and-stockholm-syndrome/)
4. Not all Adjuncts are teachers.  Don’t forget the Alternative Academic community.  Librarians, Technical Support, Laboratory workers, Research Assistants, etc.
5. Educate yourself.  coalition building and advocacy depends on accurate information, which includes budget numbers, faculty appointment data, and documented working conditions across campus.  We should also relearn the old fashion skills taught in civics class such as how to lobby our congressperson and get legislation introduced at the local, state, and federal level.  It’s your government.  Find a way to make it work for you.

Ok, now for the disappointed and daunted part of my post.  As Josh Boldt expressed it, I was hoping for some concrete goals to take back home at the end of NFM.  Some things that NFM wanted me to do to get the national coalition off the ground.  I didn’t get that direction.  Reading through their Program for Change draft (http://newfacultymajority.info/PfC/?page_id=2) I couldn’t help but fear that I’d be another “guy with a clipboard.”   You know, the person on the sidewalk trying to sign you up for a worthy cause for reasons that as yet remain unclear.

There are just too many petitioners for our time and money in realtime and online.  How and why does NFM stand out from this large number of social activist groups?   My hunch is that NFM’s niche is as a higher education advocate whose special focus is Adjunct labor rather than simply a labor focused organization. Unfortunately, this strength does not stand out in the current Program for Change language.  This puts the would-be organizer for NFM at a daunting disadvantage.  Not only do they have to create the coalition but also create the language to convince it to come into being.

The lack of direction in most break-out sessions reflected the overly “squishy” (Lee Bessette’s word) nature of the Program for Change document.  I fully understand why it was made general–to allow for variances at campuses across the United States.  However, this decision puts too much pressure on local groups to create the NFM message without proper guidance from a national office.  To borrow the metaphor from Peter Brown (cited by Josh) we only have the walls of the building.  But I would argue there are not four walls (a full shell).  Instead, we have two.  Give me two more and I can put up a roof and start filling the interior.

What would those two walls consist of?  Here are two suggestions.  First, an organizer’s kit with “suggested” talking points and statistics gathered by NFM on Adjunct labor.  Some of the materials from the summit (contained in the tote bag) might double in this role.  I need to read through it all before I can come to a conclusion on this.  Sorry, I was busy tweeting all day yesterday.  Second, some mechanism to check in on locals and see how they are doing.  Even if you don’t plan to mandate standards for local NFM groups, you still need to make sure they are doing something to justify the affiliation.  An occasional request for a status update would help.  This information could then be uploaded to the NFM website to demonstrate progress (even of the smallest nature) and would help boost morale in other parts of the NFM network.

I can’t end this post without expressing my immense gratitude to NFM for inviting a relative nobody like myself to take part in the summit and paying for my travel as well as part of my hotel expenses.  Let’s face it, Washington, D.C. isn’t cheap.  To show my gratitude I will continue to write on NFM’s behalf through twitter, Facebook, and my blog.  I will also get to work on coalition building here in Chicago with groups such as P-Fac, Occupy Chicago, IFT, and CACHE (the Coalition Against Corporate Higher Education).  Most importantly, however, I’m going to put my money where my mouth is and join the New Faculty Majority.

If you’ve read my post and want to get involved in shaping and sustaining the great work being done by NFM, you can donate online at their website (http://www.newfacultymajority.info/national/).  I’ll be doing that tonight.

The first portion of the book is largely devoted to the life of Junius Brutus Booth who was not only a Romantic in every sense of the word, he considered himself a pantheist and was fiercely vegetarian, but also a drunkard.  By doing so, Nora strives to illustrate the environment from which the president’s assassin emerged.

John Wilkes Booth was forced to live as a boy with great economic privation and shame as his father’s first wife found out about Mary Anne and moved to Baltimore expressly to taunt and expose her through the courts as an adulteress.  The first Mrs. Booth would follow the family around the city’s streets screaming ”whore” at the family as they went about their daily chores.

Nora also exposes a Oedipal struggle of sorts between the father and his two most famous sons, Edwin and John Wilkes, which later metamorphosizes into a struggle between the two brothers.  Edwin was by all accounts the son who inherited his father’s theatrical talents while John Wilkes merely obtained his old clothing and stage props.  Yet John Wilkes refused to concede that he would forever be outshone by his older sibling.

By the time that Nora reaches the last chapter of the book and the fateful night of Lincoln’s death at Ford’s Theater, we are already prepared to see this horrendous tragedy as in fact another dramatic play in the struggle for ownership of the Booth name.  Through killing the president, she implies, John Wilkes did not so much seek to influence the southern cause as he did to win the struggle that began between him and his father and then continued with his older brother Edwin.

Hindsight suggests that John Wilkes won the contest that Nora outlines as his name remains far better known than that of his brother Edwin or his father.  The great tragedy, however, that becomes apparent in this book is that John Wilkes could no longer distinguish between life and life on stage.  The two had merged towards the end of his days into one tragicomic stream.

My only complaint with the work is how long it takes the narrative to begin.  In her quest for proper contextualization, Nora runs the risk of losing the reader in the early sections of the book.  Nonetheless it is refreshing to see that “well-researched” popular history is alive and well as a genre.  Here is a work that is both authoritative as well as fun to read once you get past the first 30 pages.  Who would have imagined that in killing the president John Wilkes was actually killing the image of his brother?

Think I’m making this up?  Well, I’m not.  It really happened.  I was one of the three people in the audience at the above named conference panel and I felt bad for the presenter.  I did my best to ask her insightful questions but I couldn’t help wondering where the other attendees had gone.  Where was the loyalty to intellectual inquiry and more important where was common courtesy, which should have dictated to the panel chair that he contact his panel in advance to let them know he would be absent?

Although I have no way of knowing exactly what led this scenario to occur, it is possible to make two assumptions.  The first (in the venerable tradition of Stanley Eugene Fish) is based on the Convention program which was well over 1,000 pages long and listed hundreds of events each day starting at 8am and ending around 8pm. Even the most dedicated audience member couldn’t help but crash after about four panels.  I tried to listen in on five or six a day but found myself succumbing to the “museum effect.” All of the talks started to merge into one huge cluster of meta-discourse in my brain.

Some professional organizations such as the MLA (Yes, I am complimenting them.  Try not to gasp too loud.) have made positive steps to ameliorate this effect by implementing new conference presentation formats.  The dominance of Digital Humanities at this year’s MLA convention made this change much more prominent than it might otherwise have been as presenters in these fields are quite frankly much better at using audio-visual equipment than traditional humanities scholars. They also seem to have learned how to be succinct without omitting essential information in their talks.  This allows more time for discussion and is less overwhelming for the audience.

The second assumption  I gleaned from listening to conference attendees talk in the hotel lobby.  As I sipped a coffee and prepared for my own presentation, it became clear that cost concerns or job pressures forced many to attend simply for the day of their talk.  It was also clear that some convention attendees were more interested in sightseeing than their were in listening to the latest scholarship in the field.

Bearing all of this in mind, it is worth asking–What exactly is the purpose of the large academic conference in 2012?  In the age of social media such as Twitter and Google + why not simply hold a “tweet-up” or create a “google hangout” for scholars in a particular field of study?  These virtual arenas would cost participants far less and could be used at any time during the year.

The short answer to these questions seems to be career networking.

Now don’t get me wrong, I understand the value of face to face interaction with scholars in my field.  I value it greatly.  However, $800, which is the average amount I’ve spent attending academic conferences, seems a steep price to pay for networking.  Almost as much, in fact, as my monthly rent.  That is why I make a habit of attending conferences only if I’m either presenting or chairing a panel.

I wonder how many make the same choice and are thus shut out of the opportunity to network and exchange ideas in real-time.  Yet another way that non-elite faculty are prevented from full participation in the discipline they help sustain.

Among the many changes that I hope will take place as the discipline of English is forced to evolve or disappear is a reexamination of the annual convention model.  It seems at best overly bloated (a point made by Fish that most of his readers conveniently ignored) and at worst hopelessly out of date.  Fewer panels of shorter duration, new presentation methods, new division structures, less pressure to conduct face to face membership business one time a year.  These changes are all desperately needed.  Maybe regional conferences affiliated with national ones could pick up the slack.  Or perhaps a lot of the work needed could be done online.

In any event, if we want all the members of the profession to have a say in its future, we need something better than the traditional annual convention.  The premium for attendance is too steep.  Even if you might get to shake hands with Michael Berube.

Why do I say this?  One reason is the shockingly high incidence of bad faith evident in the discourse on academic labor.  Those in the upper tiers of the profession are more than willing to descry oppression out “there” in the world but are willfully ignorant of the part-timer down the hall grading papers in a walk-in closet sized office with two other adjuncts squeezed in.  These are the workers who shoulder the heavy burden of the undergraduate curriculum so that tenured and tenure track faculty in the Liberal Arts and Sciences have the time to research and teach more graduate students to enter the already saturated market of MA’s, MFA’s, and PhD’s.

This same group is ever so cautious about what to call “undocumented workers” from Latin America but are more than willing to sneer at the “contingent faculty” who have failed to make it in the profession.  I remember once as a Graduate Student being told to not speak with the Adjuncts as they were all losers.  Because I’m a humane student of the humanities, I refused to listen.  I guess I caught their disease.  Ha!  No canyon is as deep as the one that separates the promising Grad student from the wan cheek of the Adjunct.  At least, that is,  if you listen to the myths propagated by a certain breed of senior faculty.

Luckily for the profession, this attitude towards Adjuncts is slowly lifting.  But the reason is simply that of crisis.  The Age of Austerity has hit the Humanities particularly hard and even tenured faculty are starting to realize the implications of these changes.  Yes, your job can be outsourced to.  It can also be turned into a contract gig that can be changed or cancelled at any time for any reason.  What works for the goose works for the gander.  Now if only that message would shift up to the rarefied air of Professional organizations like the MLA.

Added to this circus of bad faith is an incivility that would make a Congressional Lobbyist blush.  One angry writer went so far as to dissect my CV to show why I was unqualified to have an opinion on the issue.  Most simply called me a whiner and suggested that I shut up and look for a full-time job outside of academia.  In all honesty, Grumpy Reader, I’m giving it serious thought.  But I happen to like teaching and am quite good at it.  My only regret is that I can’t seem to do what I love and pay the rent at the same time.  So much for the recurring trope of the “teacher shortage.”  Seems to me more like a cheapness epidemic among employers.

When respondents weren’t busy engaging in personal attacks, they instead decided to patronize me.  One writer suggested that the issues I brought up had already been addressed “before my time” while the other argued that only massive social change would alleviate the condition of “contingency.”  I don’t know what bothers me more.  A direct personal attack or a pat on the head by the sympathetic bystander.  Both are demeaning but at least the former has some degree of sincerity to it.

All of this leads me to conclude that I was barking up the wrong tree in addressing my concerns to a scholarly circle like the MLA.  Prince Prospero is happy in his castle.  Blissfully unaware of the imminent arrival of the Red Death.  Consequently, I’ll leave him to his happy ending and move on to arenas where people are actually doing something to save the profession.  One is the New Faculty Majority Summit, which will be held in Washington, D.C. this January.  The other is in my local union chapters (NEA/IEA and AFT/IFT).

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again #leadorbeleftbehind.  The times they are changing and if we don’t take an active role there may come a day when language and literature are only taught by Kaplan for workplace communication and witty rejoinders at corporate events.

WE, AS NON-TENURED FACULTY, CALL FOR REFORM FROM WITHIN THE CURRENT SYSTEM. WE DEMAND THAT OUR ADMINISTRATORS ADOPT THESE CHANGES:

• All hiring and firing of adjunct faculty will be handled by a non-partisan committee composed of tenured and non-tenured faculty in the same discipline, a union representative (if applicable), and a human resources staff member.

• All adjunct faculty will be hired on a contract that is a minimum of one year and a maximum of five. No longer will adjuncts be hired by the semester or the class.

• Tenure will be opened to all faculty. The current system treats adjuncts status as a stigma and blocks advancement from within. Even in corporations, this does not align with common practice.

• Evaluation of all faculty for tenure and promotion will be based on three components: a dossier of research and/or educational materials, teaching evaluations, and a classroom visit report from a senior member of the faculty in their discipline.

• Governing bodies of an institution, such as departmental committees and faculty senates, will be comprised of representatives in a ratio that mirrors that of the faculty.  For instance, if adjuncts represent 77% of the total faculty at a college of university, they must account for 77% of the departmental committee appointments and faculty senate membership.

• Courses will be assigned based on expertise. Many of us hold degrees and experience that allow us to teach courses at the intermediate and advanced level, yet because we are deemed “contingent,” we are only assigned introductory-level classes. Not only is our current system of course assignment arbitrary and unfair, but it shortchanges our institutions. By adopting this practice, our institutions will be supporting greater diversity and innovation of instruction.

• Salaries will be based on experience in a field of study, evidence of quality teaching practices, adoption of innovation in instruction, job performance, and length of service.

• Terminology will be clarified to more accurately reflect the expertise of existing faculty. MA and MFA holders will be referred to as Instructor or Senior Instructor, regardless of their employment status. PhD holders will be referred to as Assistant, Associate, or Full Professor, with the prefix “Visiting” added to those not on the tenure track.

These are just a few of the solutions that came to mind.  I encourage readers to think of their own and also to offer suggestions about how to improve those listed above.  We are but a handful thinking and speaking on these issues for the first time.  Add your voice to the conversation and turn these musings into realities.  Once we gain critical mass, perhaps we can motivate those organizations that supposedly represent our profession to take action on our behalf.

Don’t get me wrong, I love Pozzo and Lucky.  I’d invite them to dinner if I could and, of course,  make them wait an insufferably long time for their food.  But too much is at stake to continue the hand wringing and finger-pointing that has thus far passed for action on the problems in Higher Education.  While we wait for Godot, our professions are increasingly marginalized.  Many schools have already consolidated individual language departments into one massive campus unit and it is only a matter of time before those mega-departments are deemed “too costly.”  Then work can be outsourced to private contractors to tutor students in foreign languages.  Much maligned First Year Composition programs, quite frankly, are the only reason most English departments have remained intact.  However, in some schools English is now part of a new department of Media and Communications or is blended with History or Language study.  Seismic changes are coming soon to a humanities program near you and yet not many in the professions are agitating to be at the helm of these changes.  Or, if they are, they have been shut out due to their marginalized place in the academy.  As I’ve said before, the most active and engaged members of the profession right now are the non-tenured who are easily fired for making waves.

And so, at the risk of sounding monotonous, I ask again:  WHAT IS TO BE DONE?  My recent tiff with the MLA shows that their idea of action is a committee report.  We don’t need any more data.  There are probably giant warehouses along the Potomac filled with statistics and studies that no one has ever read let alone used.  Picture the final scene in Raiders of the Lost Ark.   The problems we face in Higher Education have not changed that much since I entered school as an undergraduate fifteen years ago.  They have merely intensified.

When it comes to taking action, HASTAC and THAT Camp are among the few groups who seem to be getting it right.  Embracing technology rather than fearing it or treating it as a fad, they are looking at how that aspect of Higher Education is changing the ways in which we understand grad school in the humanities and the nature of the profession as a whole.  Also, unlike legacy organizations such as the MLA, they are doing something to make sure that students (both undergrad and grad) are learning the knowledge they need for the 21st century.  If you haven’t been following these two groups, you should.  HASTAC is holding a conference in Ann Arbor, MI as I write this post and I’m sure that more learning will take place there than at the MLA in Seattle this January.

Despite my frustrations with the current system in Higher Education, it would be foolish to deny all that I have gained from my experience as a student and a teacher.  Among the lessons learned are two key truths.  The first is how little I actually know and that I am dependent upon others to help me fill in the complete picture.  This is something that Cathy Davidson addresses in her own way through examining attention blindness.  The second is that keeping silent is not an option for intellectuals.  The state paid a lot of money to educate me and I have a duty to society to share what I have learned.  That is what I try to do both in the classroom and out.  Scholarship is either vital, active in the world around us, or it dies in a sub-basement somewhere.  What I do is of value to the non-academic community and I am proactive in asserting this.

In my next post, I’m going to address a specific set of solutions in Higher Education that affect me directly, listing some suggestions that I have for changing work conditions for Adjuncts.  Until then I encourage you all to think about solutions rather than problems, changes that might be applied to whatever you do in the academy. And yes, I am looking squarely at you Occupy MLA.  Your heart is in the right place, but some of your tweets make me want to scream.  If you have any solutions specifically relating to Adjuncts that you’d like to see in my next post, send them along.  We’re all in this boat together.  We can either collaborate to fix the leak and survive or drown alone.

http://spectrum.sfstation.com/2011/11/28/interview-kevin-whiteley-founder-of-criminal-class-press-2/

Kevin is touring the west coast with a number of writers who have contributed to the journal in the past, including Windy City Story Slam founder Bill Hillman.  If you’re in California, they’ll be at Book Soup in Hollywood and Edinburgh Castle Pub in San Francisco this coming week.

Check out the journal’s website http://criminalclasspress.com/ for more information.

One of the more recent entrants in this growing circus of bad faith is the Modern Language Association (MLA), whose President just issued a statement today condemning the actions of police on the UC campuses and calling for greater vigilance in the protection of free speech.  As another member of the Twitterverse notes, “Search all your parks in all your cities / You’ll find no statues to committees.”  You also won’t find great historical changes effected by words alone.  Without the Union army, what good would have the Emancipation Proclamation done the slaves?  Faculty are either blind to their power to effect change on campus or choose not to use it.  Either way, they are letting students down during their hour of need.

Here in Chicago, somewhat ironically, violence has not been a problem on our campuses as much as crushing student debt and cutbacks to services.  But again, faculty inaction has proved a plague to meaningful change.  The only members of the faculty who seem willing to agitate are also the most vulnerable members of the institution–the Adjuncts.  When I go out to Occupy Chicago and Occupy Colleges related events, I see hardly any tenured or tenure track faculty amongst the ranks.  Instead they seem content to live in a bubble, writing and teaching on issues of social justice and freedom without actually participating in their defense.  What are they so afraid of?  Tenured faculty in particular have a job security of which I can only dream.  Yet I put my livelihood on the line because I am scared for the future of my country as education becomes a scarce resource available only to the superrich.  What will it take to stimulate them to action?  Does their job have to be outsourced too?

Sometimes it seems like the majority of those in academia are indeed sitting in an Ivory Tower, looking down upon the current dysfunction in the land.  I refuse to be one of those who simply shakes his head and waits for Godot because he’s not coming.  We are Godot.  The time to act is now while there is still something left to save.

Warren, according to Blight, focused mainly on the need for soul-searching in the postwar South and how it had largely been avoided.  Catton, in contrast, created a mythology of the Union soldier that highlighted the hardships they had endured for cause and country.  Wilson exposed the hypocrisy surrounding the war’s ideals and hoped to shake American’s from their sense of smug uniqueness as a nation.  Baldwin, in Blight’s view, held the most tragic vision of the war as it remained part of his day-to-day experience as a Black man.

I wanted to like Blight’s book more than I did, but it really comes across as a rushed job.  Perhaps this might have worked as a series of lectures.  The best portions of the book are in the middle where Blight examines the source of Catton’s fascination with the war and attempts to rescue him from charges of mindless hagiography of the Boys in Blue.  His reading of the eclectic scholar Edmund Wilson is also quite cogent.  Yet despite these bright spots, the author proves himself to be better at description and cultural analysis than he is as a close reader of literary figures and texts.  In this respect the book underscores the limits of interdisciplinarity.  Blight tried to write a work of literary criticism and in the process ends up reminding us that he is a historian.

If nothing else, this book has succeeded in making me want to reread Robert Penn Warren and I will definitely pick up a copy of Catton’s memoir Waiting for the Morning Train.  American Oracle serves as a reminder that the primary source, full of life and meaning, is the point for writing secondary texts such as Blight’s in the first place.  So that what we have loved you may love as well.  Thanks David for sharing these texts you love with me.