Thursday, September 26, 2013

Organizing Labor Thoughts




I have never been an adjunct. I think it's crucial to say this at the beginning because this means I am writing about an incredibly important issue in higher education from a perspective that is not informed by the direct experience of being an adjunct. Sure, I have been a teaching assistant for a total of seven years, and those seven years were interrupted by a three-year stint as a lecturer. Neither of these positions were permanent, and it was always clear that they were not supposed to be permanent. But these were not adjunct positions. When I was a lecturer, I had health benefits and a 401k. When I was a teaching assistant, at least during my doctoral degree-seeking years, I had something that resembled health benefits and the pay was, at least for a position of that sort, not awful. Both of these positions fall quite firmly in the contingent labor category, but they were not adjunct positions.

In addition, until two months ago, I have never taught in a department that relied on adjunct labor to meet the majority of its lower undergraduate needs. The other two institutions where I have taught depended on precisely the two kinds of positions that I've held, and while all forms of contingent labor present their challenges, this means that I am now working in what for me is a brand new environment. And based on the national trend in higher education, that makes me an oddity.

The English department I just joined as a tenure-track faculty member in August does not have a graduate program, so we do not have a readily available supply of graduate students to teach courses for a stipend. We do employ lecturers (all of whom are currently ranked as senior lecturers), and it is heartening to see that those positions provide long-term stability, positions that have enabled those lecturers to become active participants in shaping the policies and curriculum of the English department, especially the writing program. But we do not have very many lecturer lines, nor do we have many tenure-track lines.

What we do have, as most colleges and universities in the US do as well, is a writing program that provides courses that all students must take. And the math is really very simple. If there aren't that many full-time faculty members available to staff the classes we are obligated to fill, then that means either we advocate for more full-time lines or we start hiring part-time instructors. My purpose for this post is not to focus on the complicated (well, not that complicated) economics of higher education, so suffice it to say that it is easier to hire short-term, part-time instructors than it is to run searches for and provide full benefits for full-time faculty.

So what is my purpose for this post? As most readers of this blog will be aware, last week, a long-time adjunct at Duquesne University named Margaret Mary Vojtke died, impoverished by her struggle with cancer. Daniel Kovalik, a lawyer who represents the United Steelworkers union, published an op-ed that harshly condemned the university for propagating a system of labor that makes it possible for Vojtke, a college instructor, to make so little that she could not support herself. This op-ed has acted as a spark that has ignited a national discussion about the exploitative system of adjunct labor that higher education now depends on.

The question I find myself asking, over and over again, is what can I do about this? What can I do to help to find a way to improve the material conditions of instructors, both full-time and part-time? How can I, as a junior faculty member who will soon administer a writing program that is absolutely dependent on part-time instructors, provide those instructors with opportunities for professional development? How can I advocate for more full-time lines when universities are slashing budgets, especially for any unit even remotely associated with the humanities, that word that has become almost as dirty and decadent in common parlance as liberal? How can I be content being one of the 25 percent as a tenure-track faculty member, when most reports indicate that nearly 75 percent of college instructors have little or no job security?

I want to end this post with those questions rather than answers, mostly because I really don't have any answers. I would offer a shrug and say "I'm new," but, for as tragic as Margaret Mary Vojtke's death was, this isn't a new problem. My own field has sought ways to answer these questions for decades, from abolishing first-year writing courses to disbursing writing instruction throughout the university. Writing program administrators have long tried to balance the pragmatic and immediate needs to make sure courses had teachers and the ethical needs to make sure those teachers are both well-trained and well-compensated.

When I set out to write this post, I had many other points to make--not all people become and remain adjuncts for the same reasons; national efforts to organize adjunct labor already exist--but as I began to write this, I realized that what I find most immediately pertinent about this issue, and what seems most in keeping with the very notion of this blog, is that I need to figure out how to make a stand on adjunct labor that is neither patronizingly protective of adjuncts or dismissive of the very real problems that this situation presents. What is certainly clear is that I will write about this again.

Please share your thoughts in comments below.

Monday, September 23, 2013

The Profession and Blogging


 
 
Those readers who are familiar with scholarship in rhetoric and composition will recognize that the title of this blog is a riff on David Bartholomae's oft-cited, "Inventing the University," an essay in which Bartholomae asserts that undergraduate writers, specifically first-year students, must engage and struggle with academic discourse in order to become members of academic discourse communities. Students make mistakes and confuse conventions because they are, in essence, learning how to function in a new environment--the university--and they are learning the rules of that new environment while they are simultaneously expected to function within it.

When I was a PhD candidate, I maintained a private blog where I would write through issues that I was having with my dissertation. It was a private space for talking to myself about the problems of producing a dissertation as quickly and cheaply as possible. And, because it was private, that blog provided a space to express all my anxieties and angst. It was effectively a safety valve. A graduate school colleague asked me to write a guest post for his blog, Constructing the Academy, about my private blogging practices.

But when I decided to start a professional blog, I knew that it should be a public blog. That blog I maintained for two years while I was writing my dissertation and, for that least year, going on the academic job market, was important for me because I needed privacy to develop ideas. This new blog, however, needs to be public. In some ways, this blog will meet many of the needs that my previous blog met, but I want to write for a public audience that is interested in many of the same academic current events and ongoing concerns that fascinate and frustrate me. But I want this blog to be public because I think it is vital to explore these professional problems in ways that I would feel comfortable with my fellow faculty members, my students, a Dean, or--and who can imagine?--a stray university president or chancellor finding and reading.

So who am I, anyway? I have modified Bartholomae's title because, like first-year students who have to engage in new discursive practices that sometimes baffle them but can also excite them, I am in the infancy of my career. I'm new. And while I've had years of academic and professional training, through both my MA and PhD program as well as three years as a full-time lecturer, I have started a position that offers the promise of permanence.

I am now an assistant professor of English at Indiana University Southeast, in my first year on the tenure track. More specifically, since "English" is a very big disciplinary moniker, I am a specialist in rhetoric and composition. I teach writing courses and contribute to the programmatic development of the writing concentration within the English major and the undergraduate writing program that provides courses required of all undergraduates at IU Southeast. My research focuses on the historical development of the discipline of rhetoric and composition, and I see myself as what Maureen Daly Goggin called a disciplinographer.

IU Southeast is a small regional campus located in New Albany, Indiana, just across the Ohio River from Louisville, Kentucky. It is primarily a commuter campus, although initiatives over the past decade or so have resulted in the construction of a handful of lodges (as I was told once, "dorm" is a four-letter word here) that have provided space for roughly ten percent of the student population to reside on campus. As part of the Louisville Metroversity system, a loose gathering of public and private institutions in the greater Louisville metropolitan area, IU Southeast draws on students from both urban and rural areas. The student body seems to be especially aware of the cultural capital of a college degree, since many of them already work full-time and want degrees to improve their economic situations. I have no doubt that in this blog, my institutional setting will influence how I conceive of these issues.

Now, to wrap up this inaugural post, what are the kinds of issues I want to write about on this blog? The answer is deceptively simple: anything related to my profession. For example, blog posts in the very near future will focus on the development and adaptability of teaching personae and the production and maintenance of a research agenda. The next blog post, which should appear later this week, will address the latest outcry regarding adjunct instruction in American colleges and universities.

I will not promise that this blog will always be brilliant and illuminating. Instead, I envision a blog that provides a public space for considering many of the issues that I think about when I'm driving to work or when I'm walking back to my office from class.