The
so-called adjunct faculty at the University of Southern California has
initiated steps to unionize. Adjunct faculty members are those who are neither
tenured nor on their way there—that is, they are not “tenure track,” here to be
referred to as the regular faculty . No doubt the USC adjuncts will become
unionized teachers in higher education, sooner, in my view, or later.
What do
I, a died in the wool liberal, think? I believe that they are making the right
move, while I also strongly think that there should never have been such
numbers of adjuncts that makes unionization plausible. Indeed, this bifurcation
of the university faculty into regular and adjunct will have far-reaching
consequences.
When I
was dean of Northwestern’s College of Arts and Sciences for thirteen years
ending in 1987, we had adjunct faculty members, but not a great many. The
largest single bunch were the teachers in our writing program—some actually
former high school teachers who were talented in performing a very necessary
job that the professoriate of the English Department found to be beneath its
dignity. In addition, there was a modest variety of folks whose main occupation
was not in the academy, but who taught a course or two, bringing their
expertise to the students of the college.
While I
don’t know today’s Northwestern statistics, I do know that there are enough of
them to warrant the fulltime attention of an associate dean. A recent article by
Dan Edmonds1 offers an insight into this issue for the entire world
of American higher education: “Nearly
three-quarters of American professors are contingent faculty,” with
“contingent faculty” a synonym for “adjunct.” These big numbers have in effect already
significantly changed the university, if only because the two classes of
faculty perform quite different functions. Oversimplifying somewhat (but not
much), the adjuncts teach undergraduates, especially in the liberal arts
subjects broadly understood, while the regulars primarily teach graduate
students.
Yet there is an even deeper
difference between these two classes. The regular faculty is expected to engage
in research and to publish the results of their labors, with their teaching
duties designed to give them time and energy to do perform these tasks. No one
will stop adjuncts from writing for publication, but their teaching work load
mostly does not give them the time to do so, nor are they rewarded for their
efforts if they publish.
Adjuncts are hired to teach. The
regulars are hired to enhance the reputation of their departments and their
university by means of the renown of their publications. (The tenure tracked
become tenured because they have provided evidence that they can do so or are
dismissed if they fail to show that they are likely to have a successful
research career.) Their success in publishing, together with competition among
institutions, gives the regulars the clout to get their compensation improved.
Professorial salaries have risen markedly since my day, while most adjuncts
have to struggle to sustain themselves and their family; the push for
unionization as a means to get their lot improved is one of the results.
What’s going on at USC will surely spread. The odds are pretty
good that USC’s adjuncts will, over time, benefit from having formed a union,
making it very likely that adjuncts at other universities will follow in the
USC’s wake, having learned from changes at a large and prestigious private
university.
It is worth noting
parenthetically, not only that professorial salaries have notably gone up in
recent decades, but salaries of administrators in higher education have shot up
remarkably. That is one component of the general trend of what I have called the
corporization of the university. Board members, the majority of them successful
citizens of the business world, have a tendency to treat universities in the
way they have learned in the companies of which they are high level members.
Indeed, the presidents they appoint are no longer inevitably former faculty
members, but are in effect professional administrators.
In 2004 Derek Bok, the former
president of Harvard, wrote that “Many of the very best institutions pay their
presidents between $300,000 and $400,000, and most of the recipients would
probably serve for less.”2 By way of contrast, in 2013, “E. Gordon
Gee, former president of Ohio State University made more than $6 million in
2012-13,”3 while [t]he president of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute,
Shirley Ann Jackson, was the nation’s highest-paid president of a private
college in 2012, with total compensation of $7,143,312 . . . according to The
Chronicle of Higher Education’s annual survey.”4
The traditional
American university consisted of at most two classes of citizens, the
professoriate and administrators—and I say “at most,” because in some, such as
in the Harvard of Bok’s day professors and academic administrators—deans, not
e.g. bursars—regarded themselves as colleagues with different jobs, with almost
all of such administrators being former faculty members. Just about all such
universities today are made up of three sharply different classes of citizens
because the tasks they are hired to perform are so notably different from each
other.
The difference of assignments of
regular faculty and adjuncts, will ultimately lead to quite different ways in
which they are educated. It now takes a decade, give or take, to obtain a
doctorate in the humanities, say in history or philosophy. What accounts for
such a long stretch of time are first, the “comprehensive” examinations of an
entire field that must be passed, a hurdle that calls for studies in addition
to the required courses. Second, and mostly the most time-consuming component
of doctoral study, there is the work required to produce a competent doctoral
dissertation. All that work is justified or mostly so, because that doctorate
is designed to produce competent researchers in their chosen field and, as
such, as teachers who will pass on the torch to the next generation.
But what if one were only
training teachers who are ready to pass on what has been learned in their field
to undergraduates who are to be trained to become knowledgeable in a particular
subject matter, but mostly not to themselves becoming experts. Teachers of such
students must indeed be thoroughly knowledgeable of their subject and capable
of communicating it to novices, but there is no need for them to be creators of
novel contributions. In short, there is little point for them to spend years
working on a doctoral dissertations, designed to be a portal to membership in
the regular faculty. Indeed, a vastly more compact exercise can readily devised
to help these graduate students to become effective teachers.
There will of course be graduate
students whose goal is to be a member of the regular faculty and work for a PhD
as it now exists. Many others, however, will look at the economics of what the
university now is or is becoming and see that there are far more openings for
adjuncts than for regulars. Moreover, if my predictions make sense and more and
more and more adjuncts become members of unions, it is also likely that
eventualy they will make a reasonable living, as is not now the case, to be
sure, earning far less than successful professors.
I can see that in the new world I
have sketched out many people who are attracted to the academic world might opt
for the lower risk, lower gain alternative and sign up for what I would call
the teaching doctorate.
It will be a brave new world here
envisaged, not in Shakespeare’s sense, but in Huxley’s. It is not at all progress to sever
teaching from research and to essentially do away with the already
ever-threatened collegiality of the American university. I am hopeful that the
person is right who noted that change only comes slowly to American
universities. And perhaps some of the changes I have predicted will happily not
come about at all.
For Corroboration, see: http://www.chicagotribune.com/business/ct-university-of-chicago-union-vote-1210-biz-20151209-story.html
For Corroboration, see: http://www.chicagotribune.com/business/ct-university-of-chicago-union-vote-1210-biz-20151209-story.html
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1 http://www.forbes.com/sites/noodleeducation/2015/05/28/more-than-half-of-college-faculty-are-adjuncts-should-you-care/
2
http://www.baylorfans.com/forums/showthread.php?t=55353
3
http://triblive.com/news/adminpage/6128172-74/university-gee-president#axzz3stM5fCEF
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