Tue, 22 Sep 1998 14:56:52 -0700 (PDT) Tue, 22 Sep 1998 14:49:54 -0700 (PDT) Date: Tue, 22 Sep 1998 14:49:54 -0700 (PDT) To: (Recipient list suppressed) From: Michael Eisenscher Subject: CHE article: response to CPE (fwd) Forwarded message: From: hjulien@email.gc.cuny.edu Date: Sun, 20 Sep 1998 16:36:28 -0400 (EDT) To: e-grad@nwe.ufl.edu Subject: CHE article: response to CPE Sender: owner-e-grad@nwe.ufl.edu a version of this is forthcoming in October in the Chronicle. MLA Graduate Student Caucus Response to CPE Report Mark R. Kelley, President-elect, Graduate Student Caucus. City University of New York, Graduate School. William Pannapacker, VP Liaison, Graduate Student Caucus. Harvard University. Ed Wiltse, VP Publicity, Graduate Student Caucus. Tufts University. The View From the Bottom: Part-time Academic Labor and the Future of Higher Education In September of 1997, the American Historical Association invited representatives from eight disciplinary associations (the AHA, the American Mathematical Society, American Philosophical Association, American Political Science Association, American Sociological Association, Modern Language Association, National Council of Teachers of English, and the Organization of American Historians) to discuss the growing use of part-time and adjunct faculty. The collective, cross-disciplinary conclusion was that although institutions may justify the use of part-time and adjunct faculty appointments, the terms and conditions of these appointments--too often inadequate to support responsible teaching or a career--weakens the institutions capacity to provide essential educational experience and resources (Statement from the Conference on the Growing Use of Part-time and Adjunct Faculty, September 26-28, 1997). The Statement noted that the majority of part-time faculty members, when compared with their full-time colleagues, teach under flagrantly substandard conditions, including a typical per-course fee of between $1,000 and $3,000, a rate far below pro rata compensation for what is essentially the same work performed by full-time faculty. In such an environment, student access to faculty, cohesive curricular development and implementation, the intellectual community, and faculty governance are increasingly not a part of the educational experience. Hence, the Statement recommends that excellence in higher education now depends on equitable provision of salary for part-time teaching based on a standardized policy that remunerates for commensurate qualifications and is indexed to full-time faculty salaries, aiming for pro rata compensation. Yet, while overuse of part-time faculty occurs in all areas of academe (as the eight disciplinary associations make clear), the relative use of part-time faculty is greatest in the humanities. The Modern Language Association's Committee on Professional Employment (CPE), formed in the summer of 1997, attempted a detailed analysis of the higher education system in the United States since World War II as a basis for better understanding and addressing the present crisis in higher education--and specifically the increasing and exploitive use of part-time academic labor. The Report argues that the escalating reliance on corporate models for the university, where profit overrides considerations of academic excellence, has eroded the ability of the institution to provide academic excellence. As a consequence, the "disturbingly heavy reliance on part-timers in American higher education today contributes directly and indirectly to the failures of our academic system," and thus excellence in education for present and future students "depends on an increase in full-time tenure-track faculty positions" (5). The CPE concludes by proposing a set of recommendations designed to adjust the job system so as to balance the number of jobs available with the number of qualified PhDs; to ensure that all faculty members are recognized and compensated as trained professionals; and to improve the quality of postsecondary education at every level but particularly in lower-division courses, which are increasingly taught by overworked, under-insured, and under-paid adjunct faculty and graduate students (4-5). As the MLA constituency most directly and negatively affected by the employment crisis, graduate students have a natural and intense investment in the organization's response to it. The Graduate Student Caucus (GSC) in particular has long advocated for the formation of a body like the Committee on Professional Employment and for many of the positions and actions the CPE Report recommends. In the months since the release of the Report, graduate students in language and literature throughout North America have organized meetings within their departments to discuss its implications. This response synthesizes the results of some of these discussions as well as that among leaders of the GSC. First, we wish to emphasize that our overall response to the Report is positive. We recognize that the MLA has accepted its responsibility as a leading academic disciplinary organization to confront the job crisis, and we are proud to have been part of the impetus to the formation of the CPE. We look forward to working with a newly constituted standing body within the MLA to ensure that the momentum for real change that this report represents is not lost. We are encouraged by the inclusion in the Report's opening pages of hard numbers documenting the near doubling of the percentage of part-time faculty in the U.S. between 1970 and 1993, from 22% to 40% (8). Shocking as it is, this latter number--already five years out of date--under-represents the real proportion of part-time teaching on which universities have come to rely, which might more accurately be measured by numbers of credit hours taught rather than numbers of part-time faculty. We are further encouraged by the shift in language in the Report's opening sections, from discussion of a job "market" to a job "system," suggesting as it does the inadequacy of simple "supply and demand" logic to account for the complex evolution in patterns of academic labor. Rather than a free-market dynamic independent of outside forces, the academic job system is a series of interlocking social, political, and cultural forces that complicate and often obscure the simple economic relations of a two-tiered employment structure, comprised of a downsized full-time faculty and an outsourced, part-timed, underpaid teaching force. The job system builds from the prestige and cultural capital accreted around ideas of "the professor" and "the scholar," and from an "apprenticeship" model of graduate education (which is further mystified by the emphasis on scholarship over teaching in graduate training). The job system produces ever-larger applicant pools for PhD programs, despite widespread awareness of the awful job market those starting graduate programs now are sure to face. Further, it produces an ever-larger pool of recent graduates who are willing to hang on year after year, teaching part-time at any number of institutions (we know of an adjunct in the Chicago area who taught 8 courses at 6 schools in one semester), scraping together a meager living while desperately hoping that this may be the year they defy the odds and catch the brass ring--a full-time job with a salary and benefits. The budget squeeze in higher education has both produced and been produced by a corporatist mindset in academic administration that sees faculty salaries as the least painful place to cut costs. (It's worth noting, for instance, that the recent, radical increase in use of part-time faculty described above has occurred at a time when many college and university endowments have doubled or even tripled thanks to the stock market boom.) This approach to cost-cutting intersects with the sociocultural forces that maintain a steady supply of exploitable, part-time labor to produce a kind of circular, self-feeding system, which the CPE Report rightly identifies as something much more complex than a simple "market" (for further analysis of the job system, see the GSC's on-line journal, Workplace, Vol. 1:1, , February, 1998). Given this promising opening, we are dismayed to find that when the CPE Report turns to the history of the current crisis in academic hiring, the language of the market resurfaces, and the significant change in the percentage of part-time teaching over the past few decades slips from view. Instead, we find the familiar argument that the current crisis is an old story--not the product of recent corporatist employment practices, but the inevitable consequence of past policies and recent demographic changes. The result of this shift in perspective is an inordinate emphasis in subsequent sections of the Report on a perceived "oversupply" of PhDs. We cannot emphasize strongly enough that, were it not for the radical increase in part-time faculty, there would be no "oversupply" of PhDs. Indeed, if all college and university teaching were performed by degreed, full-time faculty, we would be facing the undersupply of PhDs predicted in 1989 by Bowen and Sosa (Prospects for Faculty in the Arts and Sciences: A Study of Factors Affecting Supply and Demand, 1987-2012, Princeton UP). Ironically, it was that publication's predictions, widely disseminated in the popular media, that led so many current graduate students and new PhDs to abandon other careers and pursue doctoral study. It is that history that leads us to respond with skepticism and some anger to blithe recommendations that we pursue "alternative careers." Many of us had "alternative careers" that we gave up for an underpaid, overworked decade of our lives gaining credentials for a profession that has allowed a two-tiered employment structure to grow up in its midst, a structure which offers a living wage, basic benefits, and a modicum of job security only to an ever-shrinking elite. Hence, while we recognize some utility in the calls for placement assistance in non-academic careers for new PhDs, for smaller graduate programs, and especially for full disclosure of support and placement data to prospective students, we insist that the primary thrust of our efforts to redress the job crisis must be directed at reducing the use and abuse of part-time faculty. We strongly support the Report's recommendations with respect to fair treatment for part-timers and conversion of part-time to full-time positions (33-4). The great sticking point remains how to give any force to these recommendations. We accept the point of Elaine Showalter's comments about the limited efficacy of MLA sanctions on member departments--but only to a point, as it remains incumbent on the MLA to remind its membership that a central tenet of professional ethics is equitable treatment of all who work in the profession (MLA Newsletter, Summer 1998). But in practical terms, there is a far more effective mechanism for persuading institutions to mend their ways with respect to part-time instructors: simple collection and dissemination of information. We want to make a college or university's full-time to part-time ratio--measured in terms of classroom hours taught, and broken down by department--as much a part of the professional and public discourse about its quality as are its students' median SAT scores, its faculty's publications, and its library's holdings. The MLA is in an ideal position to lead a campaign toward public awareness that high levels of part-time teaching within an institution and abusive treatment of part-timers erode the quality of that institution at every level, a campaign directed at everyone from accreditation boards to state legislators to alumni, parents, and students themselves. An annual publication from the MLA, presenting the results of a survey of departments on levels of and compensation for part-time teaching, along with a list of departments that fail to respond (which could be presented as tantamount to admission of poorer performance than any of the departments that did respond), would be a significant step in bringing this crucial issue into the public discussion of what constitutes academic quality and integrity. We believe the ongoing crisis in academic employment is inseparable from the lack of confidence the public now places in educators and professional organizations like the MLA. The public face of higher education is no longer the secure, accessible professor devoted to a single institution but the harried, elusive part-timer who must juggle positions at several institutions. The victims of this job system are not just these marginalized faculty members; it is also a generation of students who hardly know what it means to interact with an actual professor while internalizing the pervasive institutional contempt for the non-tenured faculty they meet every day. Our collaborative task is not simply a matter of implementing fair employment practices, it is the larger responsibility of restoring the quality of higher education and the respect accorded to it by the culture at large. It is imperative, therefore, that we begin to recognize and admit our complicity in an exploitative job system so that we can collectively act to change it. To this end, at the next MLA Conference in San Francisco, the Graduate Student Caucus will propose a resolution to create an Implementation Committee for the proposed system of reporting. No doubt, it will take a few years for the Implementation Committee to register an effect on the quality of higher education and employment within it, but the present crisis did not materialize overnight. The activities of the GSC are just one patch in a larger fabric of activism spreading from the humanities to the hard sciences. Throughout academia, graduate students and part-timers, once an excluded and patronized minority, are becoming an organized plurality capable of wielding power. Contrary to the suggestions of the MLA's CPE Report, this plurality will not quietly resign itself to careers other than those for which it has trained, only to make way for another crop of exploited "apprentices." As the future of the profession, nearly five thousand members of the Graduate Student Caucus now call upon the entire membership of the Modern Language Association--and the profession, political leaders, and the public at large--to break out of apathy and work to implement real reforms in the abuse of part-time teaching, to create a more equitable academic workplace, and to reverse the ongoing decline of higher education in North America.