Month: September 2018

I wrote this essay at the request of the Modern Language Association, as an update to an open letter to full-time faculty members I wrote and published on my blog in 2014, called “Why Buy the Cow?” That letter concerned my personal experiences as a “freeway-flying” adjunct: I was teaching, then, eight courses at three different institutions on four different campuses. At the time (academic year 2013–14), I was thirty-three years old and the exclusively single mother of a three-year-old son. I lived with my parents in the bedroom I had slept in as a teenager.

My life was, by all accounts, weird. During the day, I got by on some sort of magic (manic?) energy. Fueled by caffeine, strange grab-whatever-you-can food (the halls of academia, as you certainly know, are often littered with average-tasting, free fare), and a genuine passion (obsession?) with teaching eighteen- and nineteen-year-olds how to write sentences and connect to language and literature, I raced from campus to campus (sometimes three in a day) in my ten-year-old Volvo. That fall (2013), I arranged my schedule so that Monday through Thursday I taught back-to-back courses, including two supplementary one-hour workshops for the sections of the Accelerated Learning Program composition courses I was teaching at a state community college; that campus, a rural school, was a good hour away from my home, with no good, quick route back. By October, I left my 5:00 p.m. workshop in the pitch black and drove home desperate to relieve whichever generous family member had picked my son, Hank, up from daycare that day. Sometimes the harvest moon rose over the pinelands of southern New Jersey, and then, high in the night sky, shed wild light onto the Atlantic Ocean as the woods opened up into the coast. I noticed these things because, then, I noticed everything—I was almost maniacally attuned to every small detail, trying to think my way through the quandary of teaching 142 students to write six half-decent essays (you do the math) in a single semester while raising a small child. I felt like the speaker in Sylvia Plath’s “Tulips,” who is unable to close her eyes: Stupid pupil, it has to take everything in.

My days and nights vacillated between what amounted to a position of authority and control—teaching—to walking a careful tightrope of forced good nature and humility back at home, with my parents and my son. I moved home in 2012, having fled a disastrous relationship with Hank’s father, whose drug addiction and dangerous, narcissistic behavior had nearly killed both of us. In 2013, I was working to rebuild the familial trust I had destroyed during that relationship, but I was also hard at work to prove that this adjunct gig could lead to a full-time job. I had no idea if I was correct. In fact, I remember that one night in November 2013, after a long week of teaching, I sat up late, grading, at the kitchen counter, in actual despair that I would ever do this full time, that I would ever be, as I wrote in “Why Buy the Cow?,” a “real boy.” “Why Buy the Cow?” is full of witticisms and allusions and poetic language like that—part of the weirdness of my days, then, was that minute to minute, day to day, I was cramming the heads of others, or my own, full of lessons. The boundaries between teaching and living blurred in ways they never had before and never would again. After class, I drove home in the dark and with the radio deliberately left off, quietly reciting a poem I had to teach over and again, feeling like the words were well-lit houses I could enter and leave at will:

. . . Sometimes a whole civilization can be dying
Peacefully in one young woman, in a small heated room
With thirty children
Rapt, confident, and listening to the pure
God-rendering voice of a storm. (Dubie 204)

I was a woman on a mission. I had been an uneven, sometimes lazy student—but I was becoming an impassioned, impeccable teacher.

I had no other choice.

For reasons I probably need a therapist’s couch to fully articulate, I never removed myself from the “part-time faculty” e-mail list of that rural community college. I still regularly receive the messages that go out to their hordes of adjuncts (at last count, during my time there, I was one of almost ninety adjuncts teaching in the English department). These are strange letters—their tone attempts straightforward professionalism but ends up as wheedling condescension. Dear Colleagues, they always begin—and I cringe—before whatever light scolding or request for unpaid labor follows. In the time I have been receiving these—since 2012—I have never once seen an invitation to attend their so-called professional development workshops that included even a modest stipend.

The most recent e-mail came just this morning, as the light broke through my navy curtains and I opened my laptop to work—no longer the “busted” old machine I used to write “Why Buy the Cow,” but a crisp, university-sanctioned one that will, in two years’ time, be replaced by another crisp, university-sanctioned one if I ask. There, in my Gmail, was an “Update for Part-Time Faculty” broken into two parts. The first was the “Welcome Message from the New President” (an interim leader), composed in a dark brown, practically unreadable, cursive font and stamped at the top with a cherry blossom, like a note I might have sent to a friend in the ninth grade after an evening of toying with the new Print Shop settings in Windows 94: Hi Andrea! What’s up? I’m totally bored, so I wrote you this . . .

This particular missive was intended to assure part-time faculty that she was “aware of the trepidation here due to the uncertainty of the future of our county college.” Here, I imagined a long row of tired women, waking early to grade, as I wrote in “Why Buy the Cow?,” “fat stacks of essays,” with one skeptical eye on their e-mail and another attentive one on their students’ work. More than sixty percent of adjuncts, it turns out, are women, while more than sixty percent of tenure-track appointments are held by men (Flaherty; Birmingham). My imaginary women don’t grade with trepidation, and they don’t teach with it—but, once outside the classroom, in the emptying hallways and the faculty lounges, they move quietly, almost as if they want to be invisible, as if, already, their wish is granted, and, as class comes to an end, they are untouched, unnoticed, unseen.

By January 2014, I was tapped to teach a second spring course at Stockton University—an emergency overload, granted by the union’s good graces, which made me a half-time instructor. This—the idea that adjuncts or contingent faculty are used only in emergencies—is part of the way that unions maintain the appearance of being prolabor when, in fact, their adjunct ranks swell every year. According to the United States Department of Education’s 2009 Fall Staff Survey, of the 1.8 million total faculty in higher education in 2009, 1.3 million worked off the tenure track, and more than half of that total number worked as adjuncts instead of in contingent, full-time positions (qtd. in Portrait). In any case, I was now no longer, as I was fond of saying in mock-dramatic tones, a “lowly adjunct.” That spring (2014), I had a senior literature major working as my teaching assistant; he was brilliant, and a writing tutor, and unusually talented in the classroom, and ended up as my functional coteacher. When I would ask him for anything—whether it was to grade a quiz set or to hand me my water bottle—he would say, “Do it yourself, ADJUNCT!” in a faux-British accent, which was our favorite inside joke. He graduated that spring and the following year finished a master of arts in American studies in rapid time.

By then, it was 2016. Fewer than three years had passed since I had laid my head down on my parents’ kitchen counter and sobbed with the dread knowledge that I would never, ever be hired full time anywhere. That I would die penniless under my father’s thumb, without health insurance, like the adjunct martyrs I had been reading about in the news that year (Anderson). Instead, beginning in spring 2014, I had been rapid-fire promoted from half-time instructor to visiting assistant professor to assistant professor to coordinator of the first-year writing program. By 2016, my one-time teaching assistant was looking for work, and we were, as ever, looking for qualified adjuncts. I gratefully hired him to teach developmental writing. And just like that, I co-opted him onto the same wild ride I found myself on all those years ago.

Myths are useful classroom tools. Nothing illustrates the nature of human consciousness to my students quite like the moment in Genesis when God asks Adam, “Where are you?” and Adam replies, “I heard the sound of you in the garden, and I was afraid, because I was naked; and I hid myself” (Genesis 3.10).

At which point I pause and then say to my freshmen, some of whom are listening raptly, some of whom have one earbud in their ear and aren’t even trying to hide it, “Who told you that you were naked?” (Genesis 3.11) It’s partly the word “naked,” it’s partly the sound of my voice, and it’s partly that some of them really get it at that moment, but when I ask them again, “Who told you that you were naked?,” they perk up good.

In academic year 2013–14, I truly believed, at a certain point, that I was a cut above the rest of the adjuncts. My reasoning for this was multifarious and ultimately stupid, but there it was. So much time in the classroom gave me incredible confidence. I figured I could handle anything. One day over lunch, a full-time, tenured colleague and friend said to me, “Grad school proved to me I could solve any intellectual problem,” and I thought, “That’s what adjuncting is doing for me.” I thought I understood the way the university functioned, the problems inherent to it—so well, in fact, that I took precious time away from grading and being with Hank to write “Why Buy the Cow?,” which, at almost five thousand words, on an adjunct’s salary, with eight courses to teach, was no small feat. Looking back at that time, I want to laugh at how obvious it all seems, but back then I was still naive to most of the university’s internal machinations, to the nefarious ways academe keeps minorities and women (and minority women, particularly) in their place. According to a study of the 2013 academic workforce, underrepresented minorities held only ten percent of the tenured jobs in academe (qtd. in Flaherty), which proves that, as per usual, people (and I am one of these people) who claim to hold the most radical and progressive political views in the country help to hold in place a labor force that is ninety percent white.

In other words, my own attempt at systemic change by way of narrative was woefully naive. The situation was, astonishingly, way worse than even I thought. My whiteness, as usual, was getting in the way of everything—and, in the end, would help me onto the tenure track.

I wrote “Why Buy the Cow?” in October, but it sat untouched for months, until just past midnight on January 23, 2014 (my thirty-fourth birthday). I was up late grading (already), and I read quickly through it. I decided it was still unfinished but figured, What the hell? Just post it. So I did. And then I went to sleep.

The next morning, I noticed an unusual number of people had “liked” the Facebook link to it. I checked the stats on WordPress and discovered almost a thousand hits, which was well beyond my usual traffic. Shortly thereafter, Josh Boldt, who at the time was administering The Adjunct Project, which compiled data about adjuncts’ working conditions and salaries and also published work by contingent faculty members, commented, asking if he could publish it there. I agreed. And then it was on Reddit. And then it was in The New Inquiry. And then it was in Salon. And then full-time faculty members were suddenly nodding at me in the halls and asking me in e-mails what I was working on, and I was thinking, teaching and grading and being a mom. But I instinctively knew not to write that in return, and instead I wrote, “I write about adjuncts and Sylvia Plath,” which, to my tenure-track ears, sounds like the words of a bush-league rube, but what did I know?

I was a lowly adjunct.

And then it was September 2014 and I was at the university president’s home for a reception for new faculty. Except I wasn’t new faculty. It was my fifth year teaching there, but my first year teaching there full time. Everyone said things like, “Who was your dissertation adviser?” And, “Are you finished? I still have to finish.” I kept relatively quiet, Chardonnay in hand, exhausted from a hasty move with Hank into a new apartment (good-bye, childhood bedroom), wobbling a bit in my electric blue suede heels. I listened as the dean of each school introduced their new faculty members one by one, with a host of fantastic details: postdoctoral fellowships in Europe, PhDs from Princeton, fellowships at sea studying the North Atlantic currents.

I met Hank’s father in 2009. By 2010, he had moved in, and I was pregnant. Hank was born in December 2010, and three weeks later Will relapsed so badly, he was involuntarily committed to a psychiatric hospital for ten days, only to be released and end up involuntarily committed again, less than two months later. I spent the next year and a half canceling classes and frantically trying not to be fired or drown until, finally, in December 2011, I left him for good.

When it was my turn at the president’s reception, my dean said, “Last year, she wrote something quite critical of the university so we thought, We’d better hurry up and hire her.” And everyone laughed. And so did I.

I have a recurring dream that I went to an Ivy League school. Well, I should clarify—depending on the day, I either went to one, or I am currently attending one, or I was admitted to one, because in the dream I am a young woman, still in high school. Usually, this school is Yale (it does not take a therapist or their couch to know that this is a hangover from my obsession with the show Gilmore Girls). What stays with me, when I wake, is the overwhelming sense I have, in the dreams, of relief. Relief that I no longer have to pretend to be someone I’m not. I went to Yale. I’ve been accepted to Yale. I’m a student at Yale. This is proof that I am as competent and talented and good as I think I am, as I am sometimes told I am. Most of my waking life, especially since I was hired on the tenure track, is a strange neck-and-neck between people telling me “You deserve this” and my trying to prove it to everyone I know, and especially to myself. In the day, I am all blown-out blond hair and general bad-assery. I’m a hard worker and a self-confessed social justice warrior and a loudmouth. I get shit done. At night, when I do sleep, I grind my teeth and wake up breathless, sure I am suffocating and dying.

In my dreams, I am another woman: I went to Yale, people, OK? Leave me be.

Imposter syndrome is a hell of a drug.

And so is the myth of meritocracy, which both my story and my recurring dream heartily prove.

In reality, I went to Emerson College, and then to a small, all-women’s liberal arts college for my MFA in creative writing. In the normal human world, this is hardly to be ashamed of. In academia, however, people cock their heads and say, “I’m not familiar . . . ?” This is not a statement—as my punctuation indicates. It’s a statement disguised as a question, which is often actually a demand. Explain yourself.

I can’t. Or at least, I can’t give them the explanation they’re after. The best I can say is I had no plans to be a professor. I had no plans at all, really—I was living in California. I was working at a nonprofit. I had a moment one night—I was twenty-six—when I thought, I don’t want to wake up one day and think, Writing used to be something I was good at, a long time ago. So I applied for my MFA, and then, when I was doing my MFA, I thought, I should have done a PhD; I should get a PhD. I taught my first class at a community college in 2009, as I began applying for PhD programs with some success. As soon as the director of the English program realized I was both responsible and a half-decent teacher, she gave me three sections for the following spring. I had already applied at Stockton but was turned down for lack of experience. Once, however, I had even the barest minimum of experience, I was hired there, too. By then, I was pregnant, so the PhD idea was shelved. And then I was hired at another community college, and then it was 2012 and I was teaching, as I would for the next two years, twenty-four credits a semester and seven in the summer.

There have been plenty of moments over the years when I looked back askance at the haphazard nature with which I was hired—I have written critically about this, about how it perpetuates a problematic lack of professionalization that adjuncts face; a consistent complaint from full-time faculty about adjunct faculty is how poorly they interview.

Which is no surprise. Given that, with one exception, I wasn’t even interviewed.

Instead, I usually received an e-mail in reply to my own—in which I attached my CV and expressed interest in teaching—offering me a course or two or three at Stockton or Atlantic Cape or Cumberland County, which I gratefully accepted, desperate for both money and experience.

Irony: a state of affairs or an event that seems deliberately contrary to what one expects and is often amusing as a result.

I picked up as many courses as was humanly possible because I thought it would give me a particular kind of street cred. Who could argue against all that classroom time, against the variety of courses I had taught, against the spectrum of students, from rural farmhands to Ecuadorian single mothers to frat boys arriving late to their 8:00 a.m.’s in their sweat socks and Nike sandals? Who wouldn’t want me?

Almost everyone. Every class I taught, I still taught as an adjunct, which lessened rather than increased my credibility. And every year off the tenure track made it statistically more impossible that I would ever get on it. Which made my eventual landing there, to me, all the more incredulous, all the more proof that I was somehow special or deserving or better than the hundreds of other adjuncts I worked side by side with, every day, but whom I mostly barely knew. After all, they, too, were racing from campus to campus in their broken-down cars, which doubled as offices. They were living (mostly) in bizarre situations that seemed impossible but were more impossible to escape. Like me, they had no real space in which to gather, to get to know their colleagues. And since I was the one getting noticed and promoted, the fault must lie with them, right?

Writing this, I’m a little horrified and more than a little ashamed at my hubris, my naïveté, and reminded of how well I now know my adjunct colleagues—it’s my job, now, to schedule them. Mentor them. Hire them. Fire them. Just last night I was briefly on the phone with a woman who sent me her CV, whom I have never met, working out when she can teach the two sections of developmental writing I had already offered her, in e-mail.

I heard the ghost of my old self rearing up angrily to do more for her, ask her the right questions, tell it like it is. But I heard her as I was on the phone with a hopeful young woman—I’m so excited, this is what I want to do for the rest of my life. And I was feeding my (now two) kids. And plotting how to stay up late enough to finish my grading. And finish the edits on the introduction for the anthology I’m coediting. And figure out how to staff six new courses for the fall, because the university has expanded freshman enrollment yet again, but we have no new full-time hires. But there she is again: the Emily of 2013, frantically typing a prolabor screed in her parents’ living room, fifteen pounds lighter, brimming with ideas for change, screaming bloody murder at 2018 Emily to see her, hear her:

I heard the sound of you in the garden, and I was afraid, because I was naked; and I hid myself.

Who told you that you were naked?

When finally I did interview for a full-time job, it was April 2014. I was thrilled. My interview was billed as a campus visit, a term I had never heard before and which made me feel like a superstar.

Or maybe that’s an exaggeration. I just felt seen.

My campus visit had an official schedule, which I had been e-mailed: Campus tour. Lunch with program members. Interview with the dean. Interview with the committee. End scene.

But no one could be produced for the campus tour, and, as I was told when two program members met me for lunch, “Who knows this campus better than you?”

I had imagined a cheeky, in-jokey tour. They would point out the art gallery. We would all laugh, and I could talk about how I used tours of the art gallery as a teaching tool. They would be so pleased to hear of how I utilized the campus in my classroom, how interactive my classes were. I can still see the little tableaux in my head.

By the time I made it to the interview with the committee, I had lunched with two program members who spent the time complaining about having to buy Easter dinner when our spring break didn’t coincide with Easter break and had been asked, during an interview with an administrator, “I don’t know what to ask you, what should I ask you? What’s your favorite book?”

“A. S. Byatt’s Possession.”

“Really? How do you use it in the classroom?”

“I don’t.”

I was tasked with doing a teaching demo for the committee, and I had put together a lesson about using comparison and contrast, which started with Zadie Smith’s profile of Jay-Z from the New York Times. We also watched a brief clip of Jay-Z’s “99 Problems.”

(Years later, I went over to a friend and colleague’s house, who had been on that committee, to borrow a book. It’s in my office, she said. Inside, I saw my teaching materials from the demo slashed in red and poking out of the garbage bin. I’ve never run out of a friend’s house so fast.)

The music blared, Rick Rubin stalked down the Brooklyn streets with his enormous beard, and I bobbed my head out of instinct and smiled—I was used to pressing play in the classroom, where I was typically greeted by a roomful of students happy to be listening to hip-hop. We would use Zadie Smith’s reference to Milton, in her profile, as an introduction to book 9 of Paradise Lost and literary analysis. As the video played, I watched several committee members—all white people—visibly recoil. I hit pause. I began the lesson. Two sentences hadn’t left my mouth before a young, tenure-track professor in his first year raised his hand eagerly and said, “Oh! Oh! How do you cite hip-hop?” I answered smoothly and moved on. Another colleague, a woman I had grown fond of over the past year and whom I trusted, was visibly agitated. Her face was red. She yelled out, without raising her hand, “But how am I supposed to know where to find this? Come on!” and slammed her hand down on the table. Before I could point her to the source, a third committee member, an older man in his sixties whom I had taught with the preceding summer and considered a friend, raised his hand.

“Yes?” I said, nodding at him.

“This song is racist against cops. It says cops are racist, and my uncle is a cop, and he isn’t racist, so what am I supposed to do about this song?”

I must have known they were playacting, pretending to be students. I’m sure I was prepped for that. But in the moment, all I could think was, His uncle’s a cop? He’s almost seventy, how old is his uncle?

I was toast. Thrown for every loop in the book. If they were playacting, I wondered, why on earth were they acting like no student I had encountered? Sure, white kids had said some ridiculous things about race in my classrooms over the years, but rarely with the kind of hostility I had just witnessed. And almost always we were able to have some kind of dialogue. I had been honing classroom discussion skills so carefully, and with such frequency. And no student had ever just upped and yelled at me about wanting a source. What on earth was going on?

In the intervening years since this interview, I’ve thought back to it many times. Yes, they were playacting; but, like all good method actors, they seemed to be drawing on real emotions. The angry woman who had been my friend and champion all year long was likely expecting a tidy lesson on paragraph transitions or introductions and conclusions. I imagine that she had been telling many of the people in the room for a while that I was good enough to get that job, that I deserved a shot—and there I was, proving her wrong. And she was pissed.

Going into my interview for the tenure-track position the following year, I knew better—I did a snappy demonstration about using a timeline to create a complex thesis. There was no open forum for discussion; there was no risky material about police violence against black Americans and its unlikely relation to Renaissance poetry. What happened in the classroom stayed in the classroom. But in the dreaded committee interview, which is ultimately a glorified dog and pony show, girl—you better work.

I left the interview like the proverbial popped balloon. My hair was falling out of its neat bun and my feet hurt. I called my friend Lauren—a fellow adjunct—and cried until I couldn’t cry anymore. I said, They humiliated me, and I think they enjoyed it.

Looking back, it was more than that, though, and it’s endemic to all programs that use adjuncts. I was being asked to excel at a game for which I didn’t know any of the rules. I thought they liked me because I was a little wild and off-the-cuff, because I was passionate about social justice and the humanities, because I wore funky clothes and chunky jewelry. Because I had a loud laugh and a loud mouth and I was dedicated to my students, above all things. That’s why I wore a black blazer with a David Bowie tank top underneath to my interview—for luck, and so I could be myself and be comfortable in my own skin, which is when and how I do my best teaching. But the following Monday, I was told I was too casual. That I needed an outfit that would knock them out, despite the fact that, at Stockton, I have witnessed male full professors wiping ketchup from their hands onto their ratty khakis just before walking into class.

I had failed. But I didn’t even know what I was trying to succeed at.

When I hung up with Lauren that day, she said, “I’ll see you soon.” It was Friday, and my students in Women, Gender, and Sexuality had organized a “SlutWalk” as part of their semester-long activism project, which started in half an hour. She was meeting me there.

When we arrived, I was stunned. There were hundreds of kids there—so many of my students, unrecognizable out of their sweats and jeans and dressed in bras and underwear and wild outfits, waving huge signs that read things like, “I’m Not Asking for It” and “End Rape on Stockton’s Campus.” We marched across campus chanting. I had cried all the tears I could cry that day, but I had rarely been prouder, or more moved. I stood side by side with my students and wished that this was all that mattered.

Coda: What We Talk about When We’re Talking about Adjuncts

In the years since I’ve been hired onto the tenure track, I’ve learned a lot about how the hiring process for everyone, from the supposedly lowly adjunct to the contingent full-timer to the tenure-track instructor to the tenure-track assistant professor.

I could—I am—writing a book about this process, the anthology The Precariat and the Professor, with Jillian Powers, who is now “post-ac,” as they say. We make an interesting duo: Jill is an Ivy League–trained sociologist; I’m a third-tier-public-liberal-arts-college-trained poet. We prove—not that it needed proving—the myth of meritocracy wrong: by all rights, Jill, with her degree, her postdoctoral experiences, and her book contract with New York University, should be on the tenure track. Instead, she walked away when her lectureship was downgraded to adjunct in spring 2016—the same year I was hired onto the tenure track.

That year, I wrote my first peer-reviewed book chapter, for an anthology called Adjunct Faculty Voices, about adjuncts and professionalization, during which I praised Stockton for allowing me, as an adjunct, to attend a summer institute, which ultimately helped me shape a philosophy of teaching that I used in my tenure-track interview the following year. The entire chapter reeks of a gratitude I find, now, disturbing—“they let me,” “they allowed me.” I was in the club.

As someone who regularly reads and writes about, and works with, adjunct faculty members, let me amend my chapter. And if you’re an adjunct and reading this, I hope you listen. And if you’re a full-time faculty member or an administrator who works with adjuncts, I hope you listen.

No one “let me” into that summer institute. They (full-time faculty members) desperately needed me. They (full-time faculty members) desperately need you (adjuncts and contingent faculty members). You do, as I once did, the bulk of the labor. They (full-time faculty members) are, statistically speaking, wildly understaffed and overworked to the point of exhaustion—just read, for instance, Katarina Bodovski’s account of academe literally destroying her body or Carley Moore’s account of her academe-induced nervous breakdown or any number of horrifying blogs, my own included. Every semester, full-time faculty members scramble madly to do the service that adjuncts are barred from doing, despite the fact that adjuncts are literally in the same hallways. Unseen. Unheard. Un- or underutilized for department service, because to include them would mean we have to pay them what they’re actually worth, for the work they’re actually doing.

We are living and working in a system that makes no sense for anyone, really, except the people at the very top of the system. We are servicing them.

If you’re an adjunct and you think you’re not good enough and that somehow not being good enough got you where you are, don’t believe that. You are where you are because higher education diverts money away from full-time faculty lines and into administrative lines and maintaining or improving grounds or any number of other things under the guise of putting students first. Which is nonsense. If it was students first, institutions would invest in the thing we know helps students the most—continued exposure to full-time, supported teachers. That’s the reason you aren’t in a full-time position.

If you’re a full-time faculty member, and you think you’re there because you’re somehow better—

You’re not. I don’t know why you’re there, but I can promise it isn’t because you are somehow more valuable than everyone else from your cohort who didn’t make it onto the tenure track. Those odds are (practically) impossible. Give your adjuncts the chances you aren’t giving them, which are the chances someone once gave you. Stand up to your administration. Reform your union’s practices. Work from the inside to help those on the outside.

See your adjuncts. Hear them. Hire them.

They deserve it.

Works Cited

Anderson, L. V. “Death of a Professor.” Slate, 17 Nov. 2013, www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/education/2013/11/death_of_duquesne_adjunct_margaret_mary_vojtko_what_really_happened_to_her.html.

Birmingham, Kevin. “‘The Great Shame of Our Profession’: How the Humanities Survive on Exploitation.” The Chronicle of Higher Education, 12 Feb. 2017, www.chronicle.com/article/The-Great-Shame-of-Our/239148.

Bodovski, Katerina. “Why I Collapsed on the Job.” The Chronicle of Higher Education, 15 Feb. 2018, www.chronicle.com/article/Why-I-Collapsed-on-the-Job/242537.

The Book of Genesis. La Santa Sede, www.vatican.va/archive/bible/genesis/documents/bible_genesis_en.html.

Dubie, Norman. “Of Politics and Art.” Poetry 180: A Turning Back to Poetry, edited by Billy Collins, Random House, 2003, pp. 203–04.

Flaherty, Colleen. “More Faculty Diversity, Not on Tenure Track.” Inside Higher Ed, 22 Aug. 2016, www.insidehighered.com/news/2016/08/22/study-finds-gains-faculty-diversity-not-tenure-track.

Moore, Carley. “Why I Can’t Have Coffee with You: Saying No to the Patriarchy.” VIDA: Women in Literary Arts, 17 Dec. 2017, www.vidaweb.org/why-i-cant-have-coffee-with-you-saying-no-to-the-patriarchy/.

Plath, Sylvia. “Tulips.” Poetry Foundation, www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/49013/tulips-56d22ab68fdd0.

A Portrait of Part-Time Faculty Members. The Coalition on the Academic Workforce, June 2012, www.academicworkforce.org/CAW_portrait_2012.pdf.

Van Duyne, Emily. “Why Buy the Cow? An Open Letter to the Full-Time Faculty of American Colleges and Universities.” I Will Start This Blog. I Mean It!, 23 Jan. 2014, iwillstartthisblogimeanit.wordpress.com/2014/01/23/why-buy-the-cow-an-open-letter-to-the-full-time-faculty-of-american-colleges-and-universities/.

I.

As Eric Hayot recently noted, the sky is falling. Higher education is in crisis mode: state funding for public institutions is plummeting, the cost of college is steadily increasing, and our graduates are entering into an uncertain economy. One predictable consequence is the public perception that the liberal arts are a waste of time and resources. Fareed Zakaria drolly notes that “the irrelevance of a liberal education is an idea that has achieved that rare status in Washington: bipartisan agreement” (20). Not only are fewer students majoring in English, but humanities programs themselves are vanishing. At the University of Wisconsin, Stevens Point, for example, the administration has laid out a plan to cut thirteen liberal arts majors while adding programs in applied fields (Treinen and Hovoka). It is easy, therefore, for those of us who work in the humanities to feel anxious about our fate within this economic and political landscape. This moment offers—indeed, necessitates—the opportunity for us to consider our discipline’s meaning(s) in these current contexts. Several valuable think pieces in The Chronicle of Higher Education and other venues have approached these questions on a broad scale (see, e.g., Fish; Stover), but I suggest that we also approach these challenges like we approach texts—on the micro rather than macro level. What can our day-to-day experiences in the classroom tell us about how and why college students engage with literary studies? What do they value about their educational experience at college, and how might their learning benefit from engagement with literary texts?

In our day-to-day lives as teachers, many of us in the profession predominantly work with general education students—those who are not majoring in English but are taking our classes in order to fulfill general education and degree requirements. While this demographic constitutes a large percentage of the students we teach, it’s often overlooked or marginalized in our discussions of the future of humanities. Indeed, English professors sometimes view teaching general education courses as a price to be paid for teaching major courses, senior seminars, or graduate students. Students taking literature courses in order to fulfill a general education requirement frequently share this reluctance. Filled with deep anxiety about their financial and professional futures, many of our students approach general education as a series of hoops to jump through rather than avenues for intellectual growth. At the regional comprehensive university where I teach—best known for its engineering programs—the student body tends to highly value applied forms of knowledge and views liberal arts subjects like literature with skepticism, even cynicism. These students struggle to make a link between the course material and their anticipated profession: How, for example, does learning about British modernist poetry help one learn how to succeed as a mechanical engineer? Given the prevalence of this perception, it is advantageous for us in the literary-studies field to consider how we might reorient our general education courses so that these students can understand how the coursework aligns with their personal and professional goals. Such a focus might yield benefits that go beyond individual students or classrooms: it can build stronger support for the study of humanities, both in general education and more advanced study, within American higher education institutions.

One useful context for this classroom shift is the connection between reading literature and acquiring social intelligence. Such a focus aligns with many universities’ mission statements. My own states that students should become “broader in perspective, intellectually more astute, and ethically more responsible” (“Mission Statement”). It also matches employers’ priorities. In a survey conducted by the American Association of Colleges and Universities, 96% of employers agreed that “all students should have experiences in college that teach them how to solve problems with people whose views are different from their own” (Falling Short 4). However, employers are unconvinced that students can do this kind of work: only 18% rated college graduates as proficient when asked specifically about their ability to work with others who are different from them (12). That college graduates might have trouble with these skills is unsurprising, given empirical research on their decreasing social cognition. As shown in a meta-analysis of college student data over nearly three decades by Jean Twenge and others, there has been a pronounced uptick in students’ narcissism—approximately a 30% increase when comparing 2006 scores with a 1979–85 mean (Twenge et al. 884). While Twenge and her coauthors suggest that students might be increasingly self-oriented, the work of Sara Konrath and her coauthors suggests that students are also having more difficulty thinking about other people, let alone understanding them. Their meta-analysis of college students’ scores on the Interpersonal Reactivity Index (IRI) between 1979 and 2009 indicates that students’ empathetic abilities have declined by 40% over these three decades. This decrease is most marked in two subscales of the IRI—empathetic concern and perspective taking—and most sharp after 2000 (Konrath et al. 186). From these studies, it appears that students can benefit greatly from courses that allow them to further develop the sorts of interpersonal and intrapersonal skills that have diminished. Moreover, these findings help us situate literature courses in such a way that allows students to see how our courses’ learning goals connect with broader, highly desirable skills.

II.

In reframing general education literature classes in the context of social intelligence, I don’t mean that we should resort to condescending platitudes—like the humanities teach us “how to be human.” (How many poems do we have to read before we can be recognized as human?) Rather, we can point to recent research in cognitive psychology that has found a positive correlation between reading literature and possessing social intelligence. David Comer Kidd and Emanuele Castano’s widely circulated 2013 study found that reading fiction improves one’s ability to understand the mental states of other people. The work of Raymond Mar and Keith Oatley offers a framework for understanding how reading fiction might improve social intelligence. As they explain in “The Function of Fiction,” a fictional text acts as both an abstraction and a simulation of social experience. Within a fictional narrative, “the specificity of literary characters is maintained,” but “the understanding of the human mentality and action that is depicted becomes more abstract. Because of this, an understanding can, perhaps, be applied to a broader set of circumstances and situations” (182–83). In other words, readers might not have personally experienced a particular social or emotional situation as it is portrayed in a fictional work, but in reading about it they gain broad social knowledge that will allow them to better understand this process. In the simulative world of a story, readers are able to try on different mental states, as expressed through characters; explore motivation; and even predict behavior.

Thus, reading fictional works, as opposed to purely informational texts, can offer an enhanced mode of learning. In one study, Joan Peskin and Janet Wilde Astington added metacognitive language to the picture books in a kindergarten classroom and then compared one group of children that utilized these books with a control group that did not have the added language. The control group actually scored better on a test of false-belief reasoning, which, according to the authors, occurred because students in the control group had to do the cognitive work to try to understand characters’ mental states. In contrast, the other group was directly told what these mental states were through metacognitive language and thus did not have the chance to simulate social and emotional experiences. Apparently, what makes literary texts ripe for social development is not simply what’s on the page but what is left out.

As psychologists have been testing the social benefits of reading literary texts, scholars in cognitive literary studies have been integrating approaches from psychology and neuroscience to explore the mental processes through which we read and understand literature. Lisa Zunshine’s work on literature and theory of mind is especially useful. Building on Simon Baron-Cohen’s and other developmental psychologists’ work on autism, Zunshine defines theory of mind as “our ability to explain people’s behavior in terms of their thoughts, feelings, beliefs, and desires” (6). Readers employ theory of mind because it “allows us to make sense of fictional characters by investing them with an inexhaustible repertoire of states of mind” (20). In other words, readers use theory of mind to make visible the mental processes that are invisible within the text. For example, a reader might try to make sense of a shocking twist at the end of a novel that reveals the murderer to be a previously unsuspected character. If the character does not explain him- or herself at the end of the novel, then readers have to decide for themselves. Why did this character kill someone? What was his or her motivation? How did he or she feel after doing so? These sorts of questions help us create mental states outside ourselves and build our theory of mind.

In some ways, theory of mind can be described as a way of filling in the blanks of a text. H. Porter Abbott more broadly addresses these rhetorical silences in his discussion of narrative gaps. Reminiscent of Peskin and Astington’s study, Abbott asserts that our understanding of narrative relies not on “its signifying marks but its gaps—openings that at one and the same time do and do not contain story material” (“How Do We Read” 104). These gaps might be minor, such as a lack of detailed description regarding a character’s appearance, or more major, such as Wide Sargasso Sea’s silence regarding the relationship between Antoinette and Sandi Cosway. Narrative gaps thus emphasize the “flexibility of cognitive response” in our reading experiences: if you asked a class to create a backstory for Antoinette and Sandi, you would be likely to hear completely different versions (Abbott, Cambridge Introduction 114). Although a robust discussion might arise when comparing these reader-voiced differences, no one version can emerge triumphant because they all exist as what Abbott calls shadow stories.

The kind of shadow stories that readers create often rely on what Suzanne Keen calls narrative empathy, which she defines as “the sharing of feeling and perspective-taking induced by reading, viewing, hearing, or imagining narratives of another’s situation and condition” (“Narrative Empathy”). While Keen acknowledges, like Zunshine and Abbott, that readers draw on their interpersonal interactions with others in their individual understanding of texts, she also highlights the potential complications—even the dangers—of doing so. False empathy, for example, can occur when a reader incorrectly interprets or misunderstands the motivation and psychology of a marginalized character or situation, or when a reader, having successfully interpreted this character, extrapolates this character or situation to be representative of an entire group (e.g., I’ve read this novel about slavery; now I know what it’s like to endure slavery). Failed empathy indicates another problematic reading response: it describes when readers are unable to make the transition from the page to the real world (Keen, Empathy 159). For instance, a high school educator might happily devour The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time and feel empathy for its autistic teenage protagonist but enforce classroom policies that are difficult for students with autism spectrum disorder to maintain.

As Keen’s discussion of empathy indicates, many researchers within cognitive literary studies are skeptical of what they term the empathy-altruism hypothesis. Keen herself is equivocal, remarking that “questioning the causal link between altruism and narrative empathy—such as intense character identification, though there are other forms—devalues neither narrative empathy nor the widespread hope in the socially beneficial yield of novel-reading” (“Human Rights Discourse” 359). Others working in this field are suspicious of the idea that reading literature can make one more empathetic. John Horton, for example, baldly notes that “one can be a highly discriminating reader of such texts while being morally shallow and corrupt . . . one can be a person of considerable moral sensitivity and depth without having the literary skills to fully comprehend the refined and elaborate prose of Proust or late James” (89). This statement reminds us that the assumption of strong reading skills and strong ethics is reductive, even foolish. My own argument is more modest: I assert that certain reading practices can help cultivate students’ social cognition and awareness. By bringing concepts like narrative empathy, shadow stories, and theory of mind into the general education classroom, we ask our students to draw from the same mental process that they use in their interpersonal interactions. Framing this kind of work as crucial to their professional development and future careers—which, after all, is the main motivation for many of our students to attend college in the first place—can help them understand the importance of literary studies in the narratives of their own lives.

III.

Reading strategies oriented toward social intelligence don’t necessarily occur on their own; they must be explicitly brought into the classroom. I’m not advocating that we completely overhaul every aspect of our courses; rather, I agree with James Lang that small changes in pedagogy can lead to significant improvements in student learning and engagement. As a general education instructor, I have found that one of the most effective changes I have made is to do what Hayot advocates—“justify and explain what we do”—with students at the beginning of the semester. Syllabi often come with boilerplate learning outcomes that students have a hard time connecting to their professional development. I have found it valuable in my general education literature classes to introduce data from employer surveys that indicate dissatisfaction with college graduates’ interpersonal abilities and results from studies that show how reading creative narratives can help students to build these sorts of skills. First-generation college students (as are nearly 40% of my university’s demographic) majoring in mechanical engineering, our most popular and populated program, might well be skeptical as to why they have to take an introductory course in literature to earn a degree. Explicitly connecting course content to students’ professional and personal success is an important step in giving students an alternative perspective on the usefulness of general education literature courses.

In my general education courses, I like to introduce the concepts of narrative empathy and theory of mind alongside our first forays into literary texts. Thinking about character psychology and motivation can be especially useful when students are reading a conflict or character too reductively. For example, when I taught Henrik Ibsen’s play Hedda Gabler, many students loathed the titular character. Undoubtedly, Hedda can be unlikable: she’s extremely manipulative and at times mean-spirited, seemingly determined to spread her own unhappiness. Student responses to the play often indicated their frustrations. A common assertion was that since Hedda chose to marry Tesman, she should at least try to be a good wife. Our conversation was beginning to feel unproductive, and so I had students select an action that Hedda performs that they judge unfavorably and write as Hedda, explaining her motivations and point of view. My students offered fascinating, emotionally intelligent ideas about Hedda’s psychology and were much better placed to understand why Hedda might have married Tesman or encouraged Eilert to commit suicide. To be sure, many still expressed aversion to Hedda as a character, but my goal was not to have students like Hedda or to relate to her. Regardless of their emotional response, I wanted them to see her as a complex, troubled character rather than dismiss her as a hollow embodiment of evil. After all, it’s very easy for students, in their leisurely reading strategies, to paint with broad and reductive strokes people, places, and ideas to which they don’t relate. Social cognition involves the reconsideration of our initial impressions so that we can better understand points of view that we find uncomfortable.

Once we have completed classroom activities related to social intelligence, students practice this type of work outside the classroom. One of my writing assignments asks them to create a plausible shadow for a character who has little to no interiority. Using the first person, they also write as their selected character. As students think about selecting a character, I remind them that they do not have to like this character but that they do have to occupy that character’s point of view and create plausible mental states for him or her. The goal of the assignment isn’t to pick sides but rather to show how and why each character acts the way that he or she does. How is this character feeling? Is there a discrepancy between what this character is thinking and what he or she is doing? How does this character view the others who are involved in this conflict, and how does that affect his or her relationship with other characters? Students must also incorporate dialogue and other textual details to ensure that they’re building upon the simulative world of the text.

Student responses to the perspective-taking assignment are generally positive. I’ve had many students say, sometimes in surprised tones, that they really enjoyed writing the essay; several have told me that it’s the only paper they liked writing in their college careers. Some students do express frustration that the paper isn’t a traditional English assignment and therefore they feel more uncertain about how to successfully approach it. However, the students who don’t do well on this assignment fail to do the close and contextualized reading required both for the perspective-taking essay and for a more traditional literary analysis: they typically rely heavily on clichés, stereotypes, and anachronisms and thus are unable to create plausible mental states for the character. On the other hand, students who are successful write papers that demonstrate their strong grasp of several skill sets we want college graduates to have—not only in terms of social cognition but also deep attention, synthesis, and creative flexibility.

Indeed, successful student responses not only demonstrate a strong grasp of close reading but also display the student’s social and emotional intelligence. For example, in a class on African and Afro-Caribbean literature, a student selected Buchi Emecheta’s novel The Joys of Motherhood for the assignment. While students in the class very much enjoyed the novel, they disliked Oshia, the eldest son of the novel’s protagonist. As a reader, I too often felt frustrated by what I perceived as Oshia’s failings—his self-interest, disregard for his mother’s sacrifices, and eventual abandonment of his family. But this student’s paper offered a compelling counterpoint. Having read multiple sources about Nigerian history and politics during the mid-twentieth century, the student presented Oshia’s decision to pursue higher education in the United States not as an abandonment of his family but as a necessary step to becoming a leader once Nigeria obtained independence. The student didn’t erase the more unsavory aspects of Oshia’s character as the novel presented him: he began the character sketch with Oshia matter-of-factly recalling the death of his brother, which Oshia suggests is fortunate given his family’s difficulty in feeding their children. Since The Joys of Motherhood is written from his mother’s point of view, this loss is agonizing and leads to her attempted suicide. But when told by Oshia, readers can understand how this character might feel differently (as we are told in the literary text, Oshia himself almost dies of malnutrition as a small child). I was deeply impressed—humbled, even—by this student’s ability to look beyond what we’re told in the story and envision a plausible but more sympathetic portrait of this character. Such a moment indicates the type of perspective taking that this assignment can engender.

IV.

I began this essay by suggesting the wider contexts that make students suspicious of the value of the humanities. Anxiety about finances and future employment prospects often stifles a general education student’s engagement in a literature course. In this current economic and political landscape, it can be hard for humanities instructors not to feel anxious about their own futures. I want to close, however, with my own sense of renewed optimism having incorporated reading strategies related to social intelligence in my classroom. One of the most satisfying aspects of doing so is witnessing the pleasure that students take from this approach to literature. I’ve repeatedly noticed an increase in student participation in class discussions involving theory of mind, shadow stories, and narrative empathy. Moreover, students are often surprised to find that they enjoy writing papers that involve perspective taking: multiple students have admitted, somewhat sheepishly, that they have gone significantly over the page length because they became so interested in their selected character.

This kind of student engagement is rewarding in and of itself. More broadly, interweaving classroom practices related to social intelligence also suggests a way for us to advocate for literary instruction within the university at a time when both students and external stakeholders question the real-world value of humanities-based courses. We are teaching our students not only content knowledge but also methods of reading that enhance their social intelligence—a highly desired skill in the workplace. Moreover, the classroom environment—with its carefully chosen reading list and the guided instruction it provides—is one of the best places for students to learn these strategies. This approach can help us articulate to our multiple constituencies the continued importance of literature courses in the general education curriculum.

Note

I am grateful to my students for so generously sharing their thoughts and insights during our classes. I am particularly indebted to Adam Mindham, Kayla Miller, and Dalton Miles for their help and their enlightening conversations about literature, empathy, and social intelligence.

Works Cited

Abbott, H. Porter. The Cambridge Introduction to Narrative. Cambridge UP, 2002.

———. “How Do We Read What Isn’t There to Be Read? Shadow Stories and Permanent Gaps.” The Oxford Handbook of Cognitive Literary Studies, edited by Lisa Zunshine, Oxford UP, 2015, pp. 104–19.

Falling Short? College Learning and Career Success. American Association of Colleges and Universities, Hart Research Associates, 2015, www.aacu.org/leap/public-opinion-research/2015-survey-results. PDF download.

Fish, Stanley. “Stop Trying to Sell the Humanities.” Chronicle of Higher Education, 22 June 2018, www.chronicle.com/article/Stop-Trying-to-Sell-the/243643.

Hayot, Eric. “The Sky Is Falling.” Profession, May 2018, profession.mla.hcommons.org/2018/05/21/the-sky-is-falling/.

Horton, John. “Life, Literature and Ethical Theory: Martha Nussbaum on the Role of the Literary Imagination in Ethical Thought.” Literature and the Political Imagination, edited by Horton and Andrea T. Baumeister, Routledge, 1996, pp. 70–97.

Keen, Suzanne. Empathy and the Novel. Oxford UP, 2007.

———. “Human Rights Discourse and Universals of Cognition and Emotion: Postcolonial Fiction.” The Oxford Handbook of Cognitive Literary Studies, edited by Lisa Zunshine, Oxford UP, 2015, pp. 347–66.

———. “Narrative Empathy.” The Living Handbook of Narratology, 14 Sep. 2013, www.lhn.uni-hamburg.de/article/narrative-empathy.

Kidd, David Comer, and Emanuele Castano. “Reading Literary Fiction Improves Theory of Mind.” Science, vol. 342, no. 6156, Oct. 2013, pp. 377–80.

Konrath, Sara H., et al. “Changes in Dispositional Empathy in American College Students over Time: A Meta-Analysis.” Personality and Social Psychology Review, vol. 15, no. 2, 2011, pp. 180–98.

Lang, James. Small Teaching: Everyday Lessons from the Science of Learning. Jossey-Bass, 2016.

Mar, Raymond A., and Keith Oatley. “The Function of Fiction Is the Abstraction and Simulation of Social Experience.” Perspectives on Psychological Science, vol. 3, no. 3, May 2008, pp. 173–92.

“Mission Statement.” University of Wisconsin, Platteville, www.uwplatt.edu/chancellor/mission. Accessed 12 Sept. 2018.

Peskin, Joan, and Janet Wilde Astington. “The Effects of Adding Metacognitive Language to Story Texts.” Cognitive Development, vol. 19, no. 2, 2004, pp. 253–73.

Stover, Justin. “There Is No Case for the Humanities.” Chronicle of Higher Education, 9 Mar. 2018, www.chronicle.com/article/There-Is-No-Case-for-the/242724.

Treinen, Mark, and Alan Hovoka. “UW-Stevens Point Plans to Cut 13 Majors, Add or Expand 16 Programs.” Stevens Point Journal, 5 Mar. 2018, www.stevenspointjournal.com/story/news/2018/03/05/uw-stevens-point-plans-cut-12-majors-add-expand-16-programs/395613002/.

Twenge, Jean M., et al. “Egos Inflating over Time: A Cross-temporal Meta-Analysis of the Narcissistic Personality Inventory.” Journal of Personality, vol. 76, no. 4, Aug. 2008, pp. 875–928.

Zakaria, Fareed. In Defense of a Liberal Education. W. W. Norton, 2015.

Zunshine, Lisa. Why We Read Fiction: Theory of Mind and the Novel. Ohio State UP, 2006.

Two Species of Mentorship

A department where I used to teach as an adjunct held a speaker series immediately following the faculty meetings. While finding my seat before one such talk, I was chatting with a tenured faculty member who opined, “One great thing about being an adjunct is that you don’t have to attend these tedious faculty meetings!” Apparently this comment was intended to be amusing (she seemed surprised that I wasn’t amused), but it’s characteristic of a certain way in which faculty members relate to colleagues who are subordinate to them in the institutional hierarchy. The comment communicates that my exclusion from department meetings (and thus my disenfranchisement of both voice and vote over at least some of the conditions of my employment) was a source of levity and, moreover, that I should feel gratitude for that exclusion. It’s not the kind of comment that argues for a particular proposition (on the contrary, it’s a joke, not an argument—lighten up!); instead it disciplines the affective states of those subjected to exploitation and draws clear boundaries around how they are expected to feel about that exploitation.

While its true character usually isn’t so crudely conspicuous, this interaction illustrates in a dramatic form a kind of mentorship I’ll call adaptive mentorship. We can contrast it with a different illustration from my first day in a (nonacademic) union job: my steward approached me, introduced herself, and welcomed me to the union. She told me that I could come to her with any problems at work and that I had a legal right to union representation in any conversation with a supervisor that might lead to discipline. She invited me to a union meeting—where I would have both voice and vote and where both would matter because the union is directly democratically controlled by its members. She gave me my first taste of an organization in which people address one another as “brother” and “sister”—because we’re not just equals, we are also bound to defend one another even if we don’t like one another. In the union, we learn from the first day to recognize that our fates are not separate but intertwined, that we are stronger together, that we are locked in a conflict with forces that threaten the future of higher education, and that we will not win unless we stand up with and for one another.

This second anecdote is emblematic of what I’ll call transformative mentorship. In what follows, drawing on my experiences as an academic and a union organizer, I’ll flesh out the contrast between the two and then offer some practical suggestions for implementing transformative mentorship, which I believe is not merely better in a narrowly prudential sense but essential to the survival and flourishing of the enterprise of higher education.

I don’t mean for these anecdotes to imply that academics are jerks and nonacademics are saints. In my experience, every workplace has a similar measure of both. But any given person is likely to behave differently in different sets of institutional arrangements, and as a consequence those institutional arrangements have substantial overall effects. We therefore owe it to ourselves to adopt institutional arrangements that are best for carrying out the academic mission, and I would suggest that mentorship arrangements are a key part of doing so.

Similarly, faculty members often feel the administrators are the villains responsible for all of higher education’s problems. But it’s important to distinguish the people who occupy administrative positions (who, in my experience, are mostly perfectly nice, well-meaning people, just like everyone else) from those positions themselves. Administrators have a job to do, and the parameters within which they operate are determined by the array of institutional pressures acting on them. That job, among other things, requires extracting maximum productivity for minimum cost from employees, while maintaining maximum managerial flexibility. It’s those objectives that have produced the problems that face higher education (like the shift away from more-expensive tenure lines to contingent faculty), not some sort of vast conspiracy of demonic administrators. The task of institutional change thus requires changing that array of institutional pressures (or even the positions themselves) to remove the current perverse incentives and optimize the institution for carrying out its core academic mission. Here, again, mentorship arrangements play a key role because that change will happen only from the bottom up.

Contrasting Adaptive and Transformative Mentorship

From the faculty meeting anecdote with which I began, one might infer that adaptive mentorship, even if it’s not consciously malicious, requires a contemptuous attitude on the part of the mentor. But this is not the case. One of its more innocuous forms is advice about getting by or getting ahead. Those who have climbed the ladder tell you what you must do to reach the same height. But the advice, usually earnestly meant to benefit you, is meant to benefit you as an individual. And it presupposes, built into the worldview it drags along behind it, the idea that advancement in higher education is fundamentally about individual achievement: if you are smart enough or productive enough, you’ll make it.

But we can’t all make it when only thirty percent of us are in tenurable lines (“Trends”). To rise alone in that small minority is to gain privilege without any real power, perhaps best symbolized by a vote in a faculty senate—from which contingent faculty members are almost always excluded—but that can offer little more than pleas and advice to the university’s bosses. By contrast, transformative mentorship would aim to cultivate the insight that there is strength in numbers, that if we all rise together we can gain enough power to change how resources are allocated and thereby, for example, break through the artificial scarcity of full-time, permanent faculty lines (Bousquet).

Adaptive mentorship, however, is often grounded in a profound fatalism about the possibility of meaningful change. It’s easy for the status quo to seem immutable in a social institution that is such an old part of European societies—older than the modern nation-state, older than capitalism. Every slab of neo-Gothic architecture on campus seems to signify that nothing ever changes. Consequently, adaptive mentorship often aims to help you acclimate, to fit in. Hiring committees even talk over which candidates are the best fit for the job and seem baffled when a committee member questions whether the conformity built into the idea of fit might not be the opposite of what we should be looking to hire. And the new hire is given well-meaning guidance about fitting in, about unspoken rules of decorum, and sometimes about which colleagues or administrators to avoid being alone in a room with.

Transformative mentorship would treat discomfort with the status quo as a virtue to be cultivated. It’s an intellectual virtue because it brings a fresh perspective and promises to shake up the settled verities, which so often turn out to serve entrenched hierarchies. And that discomfort is also a moral virtue, since we live in an unhealthy society that expects students to mortgage their future for an education, that expects people who do the work of teaching and research to mostly live on poverty-level wages, and that permits the administration to spend lavishly on unsustainable growth, glamor construction, and its own remuneration. Discomfort with this state of affairs is a sign of health and hope for the future.

Transformative mentorship derives its passionate optimism from an analysis of how the political economy of higher education actually functions. Anyone who slogs through the official statement associated with the bond issues that fund construction projects (our tax dollars at work!) can see for themselves that, even though the administration regularly presents the institution as beset by financial crises whenever talking to faculty members, the tune changes completely when the administration is addressing potential creditors. Suddenly they will brag about how much their market is capable of absorbing tuition increases, thus making them more creditworthy and putting smiles on the dour faces at Moody’s—and producing tuition increases at nearly triple the rate of inflation. Similarly, once we begin to see that an endowment is an incubator for financialization rather than a rainy-day fund, we can begin to develop strategies for change that are effective—strategies that worry more about who has power over institutional resources than about MOOCs or about robots grading essays. (If you have real democratic control over institutional resources, then automation frees up more time for you; if not, you’ll be more and more squeezed for time with each passing year.)

In that sense, the power analysis practiced in transformative mentorship has an educational function but also an emotional function. We fear even more what we cannot bear to contemplate. But if we see the way things really are and confront the worst that can happen, we experience in that confrontation itself a kind of overcoming. And once our confrontation with the reality of the situation combines with solidarity, with a plan to win that involves acting in concert with our colleagues, we begin to feel the real hope we must have to take action.

Of course, hope is only possible if we have not just an accurate understanding of the way things are but also an inspiring vision of how things ought to be. Faculty members almost invariably see shared governance as the solution, and the aspiration underlying that desire is for more democratic control over the institution. A union is a natural first step, since collective bargaining permits faculty members to bargain with administrators as equals, rather than from a position of subordination (Benjamin and Mauer; Yates).

But I’d like to suggest that we need an even more ambitious long-term vision. The union gives the faculty more power, and a good union is internally democratic. But having a democratic union doesn’t, alone, fully democratize the institution, which remains fundamentally oligarchic, like most workplaces. (Anderson aptly likens the typical workplace in the United States to a “communist dictatorship.”) Since ultimate authority rests with the board of trustees, the logical next step in democratization would be for trustees to be elected, in equal numbers, by and from four stakeholder groups: faculty, current students, staff, and alumni. The institution could then function just as it does now, but with elected oversight that would ensure that the administration has all the leadership it needs to stay squarely focused on the academic mission.

Once there’s similar democratization across the sector and across other employers in a particular regional economy, it will likely seem less necessary even to hire administrators from outside. Instead, leadership positions can be elected directly by the university community as a whole, from among its own ranks. To maintain real participatory democracy (not a purely representative democracy), those leaders would take their direction from the general membership (i.e., the university community), in whom ultimate sovereignty would be vested. The faculty would, for example, elect the provost from among its own ranks, would deliver the provost’s marching orders, would be able to recall the provost if necessary, and so on. Under these circumstances, all the institutional pressures on the provost would be directed toward advancing the academic mission by properly supporting the faculty, who carry out that mission.

Implementing Transformative Mentorship

In practical terms, then, if we want to reach these lofty goals and need transformative mentorship to get us there, what does transformative mentorship look like? While, like all strategic decisions, it will need to respond to the nuances of the local situation, there are some general prescriptions we can make.

First, mentors should be equals. Much of what is poisonous in adaptive mentorship results from the power imbalance between mentor and mentee. Instead, contingent faculty members should be mentored by other contingent faculty members, junior faculty members mentored by other junior faculty members (who can compare notes over the curiosity shop of conflicting advice about tenure they’ve accumulated in their travels around the department). To suppose that faculty members lower on the hierarchy always need someone higher to mentor them presupposes that faculty members come to the table empty and need to be filled up. On the contrary, bringing something to the table and sharing it is how we make sure that no one goes hungry.

Second, mentors should agitate around real problems, not seek to palliate a mentee’s discomfort or pretend the problems aren’t real. When faculty members are unhappy, there are usually good reasons for that unhappiness—often structural reasons that aren’t going to respond to individualistic solutions. That unhappiness is a reason to do something and should be faced squarely so that it’s seen as a motive for action. A junior faculty member who feels that the tenure standards are unclear should not be told, “Don’t worry, we’ll make sure to see you through.” The vagueness should be frankly acknowledged, and then the conversation should turn to how we might go about clarifying those tenure standards.

Third, mentors should educate colleagues about the real structure of the institution—about who has power and why, about where the money comes from and where it goes. Rarely is this knowledge more than latent in even the most senior members of the faculty; all of us have many cobwebs to clear before we can start looking out the attic window. A deep analysis of the institution in terms of power is essential if we are to distinguish real opportunities for collective action from specious boondoggles intended to keep faculty too busy to organize (“Oh, you’re angry about how the institution handles sexual assault cases? Thank you for your input! Let’s form a task force to investigate the issue and make recommendations to the provost’s office. Perhaps you’d be willing to serve on it and coauthor the report . . . ?”). And that analysis can also reveal the opportunities faculty members have to organize and push back against the institutional forces that keep things going as they are.

Fourth, mentors should create opportunities to participate with their colleagues in building real power. People don’t learn that things can be different by someone delivering an airtight argument to that effect. They learn it through experience. And that means you need to start where they are and ask them to take one step outside their comfort zone. If mentorship is a practice of cultivating participation in a shared process of fixing the problems we all recognize, rather than an exercise in muddling through, we can start moving toward the democratic control that will be necessary for the long-term sustainability of higher education.

Works Cited

Anderson, Elizabeth. Private Government: How Employers Rule Our Lives (and Why We Don’t Talk about It). Kindle ed., Princeton UP, 2017.

Benjamin, Ernst, and Michael Mauer, editors. Academic Collective Bargaining. Modern Language Association and American Association of University Professors, 2006.

Bousquet, Marc. “The Waste Product of Graduate Education: Toward a Dictatorship of the Flexible.” Social Text, vol. 20, no. 1, 2002, pp. 81–104. Project Muse, muse.jhu.edu/article/31918.

“Trends in the Academic Labor Force, 1975–2015.” American Association of University Professors, Mar. 2017, www.aaup.org/sites/default/files/Academic%20Labor%20Force%20Trends%201975-2015.pdf.

Yates, Michael D. Why Unions Matter. 2nd ed., Kindle ed., Monthly Review Press, 2009.

Introduction

Like many PhDs of the last decade or so, I spent countless hours staring at academic job ads and occasionally venting my frustrated amusement with friends at the laundry list of requirements—oh, they want an exemplary scholar and teacher with experience in grant writing and supporting research in the digital humanities, who can administer a program, help students find internships, and run a large annual conference! While such job ads are (rightly) frustrating to individual seekers on the job market, both in the extent and type of skills they require, in the aggregate they offer an interesting provocation to traditional models of graduate school career preparation. If academic job ads routinely ask for a wide range of skills, why does graduate school training often devalue the activities that would build these skills?¹ What does a faculty member do—actually, fully? If graduate students often struggle to imagine how their skills apply to nonfaculty careers, at what point could their training productively intersect with the broader potential careers of the humanities ecosystem?²

The project I present in this article is an experiment in one way we might answer these questions. I analyze a small dataset of one hundred recent job ads (fifty faculty, fifty nonfaculty) and trace the similarities between career paths academia has traditionally separated.³ I break these ads down by requisite skills and responsibilities to find the points where traditional faculty roles are most fully aligned with nonfaculty careers. In addition to showing the broader applicability of research and teaching skills, I identify thirteen transferable skills. These skills are not emphasized in most graduate programs but are in demand in both faculty and broader humanities ecosystem markets.

These points of overlap, I argue, are opportunities to reimagine graduate education in order to more fully prepare graduate students for both faculty and nonfaculty careers. The single-minded focus of most graduate programs on research and teaching does not reflect the breadth of what the world is asking humanities graduates to do. A greater awareness of and training in these transferable skills could ease the transition from graduate school to a first position, whether as an assistant professor or in other humanities ecosystem roles in a college or university, nonprofit organization, or business. I close with suggestions for concentrations of skills that graduate programs could incorporate to better prepare their graduates for all types of careers.

At the heart of this project is the theory that when we fully acknowledge the labor that scholars of all sorts do, the divide between different paths breaks down. Academic researchers are project managers. Teachers are supervisors and leaders. On the flip side, administrators do research. Librarians teach. Therefore, fully appreciating and training graduate students for the real labor of academia will also offer them more solid preparation for the world beyond.

Methodology

All of the one hundred job ads reviewed are job ads posted in 2018, accessed during summer 2018.⁴ To locate a random selection of assistant professor job ads, I entered the following search in the ChronicleVitae job search engine: “English OR Spanish OR French OR German OR Chinese.” Working backward from the most recent postings, I collected all job ads with the words “assistant professor” in the title (or which otherwise seemed to clearly indicate a tenure-track, entry-level modern language position). I found fifty-eight jobs from 2018 still available at the end of the summer. While coding, I discarded two ads that appeared on further review to be for non-tenure-track jobs and later removed six ads to bring the number to an arbitrary but even fifty.⁵ They include a mix of English literature, foreign language, composition, creative writing, and media positions, typical of the types of positions that appear in the MLA Job Information List.

Identifying nonfaculty positions that may be of interest to humanities graduates is a harder task. Since these jobs live in so many different fields, there is no single database of all the opportunities. I used several tools, but primarily relied on Indeed, to identify a list of seventy-four possible positions, mostly collected during a few search periods in early summer 2018. Most of these positions require or prefer a candidate with a graduate degree or other specialized academic experience, which would make a recent PhD or MA humanities graduate a strong candidate. Over the course of analyzing the data, I divided the positions into rough career categories and tried to adjust my choices of the fifty specific job ads to ensure some sort of representation across categories, though the final figures do remain skewed toward the easier-to-find categories. They include the following:

• academic administration (3)
• academic advising (6)
• business or nonacademic (4)
• digital scholarship (4)
• instructional or faculty support (2)
• nonprofits (4)
• other college or university offices—e.g., in development, communications (6)
• program coordinator, usually associated with a particular topic—e.g., centers for humanities, diversity, writing (10)
• special collections—e.g., library positions that usually require training in handling rare materials and experience in relevant academic disciplines (11)

I do not claim that this breakdown of fields is in any way representative of the job market; however, this list, overall, does denote several options that are potentially appealing to PhDs and MAs.

I started by identifying a set of thirteen transferable skills in the faculty list. I chose to focus on faculty ads first to reinforce my point that the changes in graduate school training I am suggesting are triggered not just by the requirements of the broader humanities ecosystem but also by the diverse labor required of faculty positions. I then coded the entire data set with these skills, using NVivo.⁶ This method is, of necessity, somewhat subjective; not everyone approaching the same data set would code it exactly the same way. What it offers is essentially an aggregated collection of close readings and arguments about the one hundred individual texts. After completing and checking this work, I exported aggregated data to determine which skills appeared in which job ads.

Common Academic Skills in the Nonfaculty Data Set

The first and most obvious question to ask of a collection of nonfaculty ads is whether anything in the most common roster of academic skills is useful in nonfaculty roles. I identified and tracked four traditional academic skills in the fifty nonfaculty job ads (fig. 1).⁷ Teaching appeared in forty out of the fifty job ads, reflecting the wide applicability of this skill. I categorized ads with the teaching tag if a job candidate with college teaching experience could plausibly transfer those skills, whether or not the job ad explicitly asked for teaching. In other words, the teaching tag covers both the digital humanities librarian position at the University of Alabama, which lists “University-level teaching experience” as one of its preferred qualifications, and the academic adviser position at San José State University, which states that the position’s duties include “providing information and guidance to students; helping students think through problems and select suitable solutions or courses of action; evaluating student needs” (“Digital Humanities Librarian”; “Academic Advisor”). The latter, and descriptions like it, seem to be a pretty good explanation of teaching, even if the term is not explicitly mentioned.⁸

For research, I was looking for the process of research, whether it was academic or whether it pointed to extensive writing of some kind (e.g., for grants) on academic topics. This skill appeared in twenty-five of the job ads; the high number is not surprising, considering the large percentage of academic positions on my nonfaculty list, particularly those in libraries and discipline-specific centers such as humanities, writing, and special interest centers. For field-specific knowledge (twenty-one results), I was looking for jobs that required knowledge of a particular academic field someone might plausibly focus on in graduate school, such as a field associated with the organization’s special collections (e.g., a position requiring a “PhD with an emphasis on the American West” [“Curator”]), with digital scholarship, or with composition and rhetoric. Together, these two categories—research and field-specific knowledge—suggest that both the practice and content of research can be valuable to a job candidate in the right position. Foreign language skills did not make as strong an appearance; perhaps because of my own blind spots as an English PhD, I did not actively seek out nonfaculty job ads requiring strong foreign language skills. Even so, foreign language appeared in eight percent of the job ads on this list, which is fairly suggestive, even though the number itself (four ads) is small.

Overall, with a little close reading into the language of the ads, the traditional academic skills make a strong showing in a broad range of job ads. This may not be surprising—after all, most of us have been making the case for the meaningfulness and applicability of a humanities education for some time—but it is pleasant to have added confirmation for this. More unexpected, perhaps, are the possibilities offered by skills that appear relatively frequently in both faculty and nonfaculty job ads but which are not consistently emphasized in academic programs.

The Transferable Skills

I tracked thirteen transferable skills in the data set, which I’ve defined as follows:

• Administration: supervising others, leading programs, and maintaining order and accountability
• Advising: offering mentorship and advice on personal or professional matters, usually in a one-to-one situation with someone less experienced (e.g., a student or an employee)
• Assessment: analyzing data, designing assessment structures, evaluating program effectiveness, and working with outside assessment standards
• Business connections: writing professionally for technical, business, or medical fields; coordinating internships or professional development opportunities
• Digital scholarship: engaging with emerging technological methods for research, including working with data or digital exhibitions
• Digital–social media–Web: writing for the Web or social media, designing for the Web, creating multimedia
• Diverse populations: working with people from diverse backgrounds and experiences; fostering diverse environments
• Educational technology: supporting online, blended, or digital pedagogy; learning and teaching tech tools; using specialized software
• Event planning: organizing talks, conferences, and so on
• Grant writing–fund-raising–budgeting: managing finances, supporting fund-raising efforts, or identifying and obtaining outside sources of funds
• K–12: teaching high school, working with future or current K–12 teachers, or otherwise being involved in secondary education
• Program development: creating new curricula or organizing new initiatives, centers, or departmental structures
• Public engagement: forming connections with the public, including through outreach, public-facing programming, or public service

As mentioned, while this list was created with an awareness of common nonfaculty positions, it originated from the faculty half of the list. Each of these skills is requested routinely enough in assistant professor job ads to make a clear, visible pattern (fig. 2). The data reinforce the idea that these skills are, indeed, transferable; by and large, these transferable skills gain even more currency in the market beyond assistant professor positions. By gaining experience in a field like administration, perhaps through leadership in student organizations or a special teaching assistantship, graduate students can set themselves up to be stronger candidates for an assistant professor job while also widening their options more broadly.

Because of the small size of the data set, it is hard to make broad generalizations, and perhaps it is enough to say that this study strongly suggests that graduate students might find developing these transferable skills useful for a range of job opportunities. All the transferable skills that appear most prominently on the faculty list also appear significantly on the nonfaculty list. There are a few categories that appear in a comparatively small percentage of the academic ads but which might be disproportionately useful to nonfaculty careers (specifically event planning and grant writing–fund-raising–budgeting); my sense is that their broad usefulness still makes them strong subjects to be formally added to graduate programs.

Potential Graduate School Concentrations

When starting this project, I imagined that the data would reveal relatively clear-cut connections between certain sets of skills. However, I did not find this to be the case; while some skills do appear more frequently together, each skill appears at least once with every other skill, and the differences I found in frequency were small enough that they could easily be an accident of the particular data set. A quick network visualization from Google Fusion Tables, built to weigh and place each skill node in terms of how many times it appears in the same ad as the other skills, shows the difficulty in determining which skills are most related (fig. 3).



Figure 3

Instead of relying too much on the network analysis, therefore, I propose the following combinations of skill areas that might be relatively easy to gain together. I do not intend for these to be definitive but offer them as potential starting places for integration into graduate programs. I did run a few statistical tests in SPSS and have noted when these tests revealed a correlation between skills based on how frequently they appeared in the same job ad. (There were a relatively small number of statistically significant correlations.)

On the basis of this logic, I propose the following potential concentrations of skills:

Administrators and Leaders

This concentration prepares future department chairs, program coordinators, and leaders of all fields and develops these skills: administration; advising; grant writing–fund-raising–budgeting. Administration is moderately correlated with both advising and grant writing–fund-raising–budgeting, according to a Pearson bivariate correlation test.

Advisers and Counselors

This concentration prepares those interested in supporting and mentoring students or others and develops these skills: advising; assessment; diverse populations. Advising is linked with assessment, according to a principal component analysis.

Innovators and Technologists

This concentration prepares those interested in pushing the boundaries with technology, particularly in research and the classroom, and develops these skills: digital–social media–Web; digital scholarship; education technology; grant writing–fund-raising–budgeting. Educational technology is moderately correlated with both digital–social media–Web and with grant writing–fund-raising–budgeting, according to a Pearson bivariate correlation test.

Librarians and Museum Curators

This concentration prepares those interested in working with old books and physical objects, whether for archival research or special collections positions, and develops these skills: digital scholarship; event planning; grant writing–fund-raising–budgeting. Grant writing–fund-raising–budgeting is correlated with event planning, according to both a Pearson bivariate correlation test (moderate correlation) and a principal component analysis.

Professional Writing

This concentration prepares those interested in scholarly work on writing for the professions, as well as those interested in gaining writing experience outside the academy, and develops these skills: business connections; digital–social media–Web.

Public Humanities

This concentration helps people gain experience for outward-facing projects in the humanities, both within and outside a college setting, and develops these skills: event planning; grant writing–fund-raising-budgeting; program development; public engagement. Grant writing–fund-raising–budgeting is correlated with event planning, according to both a Pearson correlation test (moderate correlation) and a principal component analysis. Public engagement is moderately correlated with both grant writing–fund-raising–budgeting and program development, according to a Pearson bivariate correlation test.

Teaching and the High School–to–College Transition

This concentration prepares those who want to help students navigate the transition to college, whether in the context of first-year programs, community colleges, or secondary education institutions, and develops these skills: assessment; diverse populations; K–12.

Conclusions

While concentrations like these already exist in some graduate programs, currently the bulk of the responsibility of preparing students for nonfaculty careers falls primarily on the individual graduate students themselves.⁹ Trying to prepare for a range of careers in a graduate program not designed for such opportunities is, understandably, a difficult task. A humanities PhD could not expect to immediately step into any of the nonfaculty jobs I have identified without at least some preparation, any more than a seasoned instructor of French could step in one day, with no additional knowledge or preparation, to teach a German class. Entering a position outside the professoriat requires interest, time, and some sort of experience that can be shaped into a convincing story about the candidate’s readiness to take on the position.

However, working for a university (which is, after all, what many graduate students are doing during their studies) could offer ample opportunities to build the experiences needed for both faculty and nonfaculty jobs—if graduate programs are willing to make this type of training a priority. The main obstacles are cultural rather than structural. It will take some reprioritizing for graduate programs to acknowledge, train for, and help graduate students appreciate the full range of humanities labor, much of which has traditionally been invisible or undervalued.¹⁰ With these mental shifts in place, preparation for one career need not come at the cost of preparation for another; instead, graduate students could be poised for success across the humanities ecosystem.

Notes

1. As Kelly Anne Brown and Rebecca Lippman note in a recent Profession piece, students “identify lack of work experience as one of the most challenging barriers to employment beyond the academy” despite their years of experience, a problem exacerbated by the fact that “academic mentors, administrators, and institutional pressures discourage them from translating their academic activities into a language that attests to the rigorous and varied work they perform while pursuing advanced degrees.”

2. I take the frame of the “humanities ecosystem” from the work of Stacy Hartman and others in the MLA’s Connected Academics program. As identified in Doctoral Student Career Planning: A Guide for PhD Programs and Faculty Members in English and Other Modern Languages, the humanities ecosystem is “a vibrant place, full of interesting organizations and smart, capable people doing important work” in which “the humanities and the value of a humanities PhD are, by and large, already understood” (9–10). The job ads I use in this study (including the assistant professor ones) all come from that ecosystem.

3. Like many, I’m troubled by the lack of a neutral terminology to neatly encompass the wide range of humanities graduate career paths, and my solutions in this piece are imprecise. Some roles in digital scholarship or libraries, which we are accustomed to think of as less traditional roles, are technically tenure-track or tenured faculty positions. My choice of the terms faculty and nonfaculty is meant not to minimize this distinction but to avoid broader inaccuracies created by referring to job ads as academic or nonacademic.

4. The raw data, including the text of the job ads, is available at www.bethseltzer.info/100-job-ads.html.

5. The six jobs I eliminated were chosen at random from my category of jobs that did not pertain to the transferable skills. Since this small data set intends no comprehensiveness—it is only an avenue for comparison—these ads had the least useful information. Elsewhere, I have more comprehensively explored the number of academic ads that contain such skills, across a year of the academic job market. For more information, see Jaschik.

6. My final list of transferable skills is based on what I found in this data set, but it does largely align with and is influenced by my earlier research into a full year of the academic market, which is reported in Jaschik.

7. I did not make a comparable study of these skills in faculty job ads, because research, teaching, and field-specific knowledge presumably apply to all academic jobs, and foreign language to all foreign language jobs.

8. For a particularly useful resource on transferable graduate school skills and other ways that they are discussed, including many of the ones I explore in this project, see Hartman.

9. Two examples of graduate programs that have already embraced similar models are the interactive technology and pedagogy certificate at the Graduate Center, City University of New York, and Lehigh University’s literature and social justice–focused English PhD.

10. A study by the Social Sciences Feminist Network Research Interest Group at the University of Oregon notes that the “‘care work’ associated with teaching, mentoring, and advising” is often valued less than the more forward-facing work of administration and grant writing (231). Meanwhile, one Inside Higher Ed commentator argues that “the longer one spends as an alternative academic, the clearer it becomes that most of the work is invisible. Almost all the work of alt-acs is in the service of something beyond their own brands” (Kim).

Works Cited

“Academic Advisor (24552).” Indeed, www.indeed.com/viewjob?jk=60190642d20c33c8&tk=1ch8a3q95a1kocq4&from=serp&vjs=3. Accessed 3 Sept. 2018.

Brown, Kelly Anne, and Rebecca Lippman. “The Work of the Humanities.” Profession, 6 Dec. 2017, profession.mla.hcommons.org/2017/12/06/the-work-of-the-humanities/.

“Curator of the Western History Collections.” Indeed, www.indeed.com/viewjob?jk=3edd6c3bd439a850&tk=1ch8851g5a34pa3b&from=serp&vjs=3. Accessed 3 Sept. 2018.

“Digital Humanities Librarian.” Indeed, www.indeed.com/viewjob?jk=0e2348cf611f4ae1&tk=1ch887tc3a34p9l6&from=serp&vjs=3. Accessed 3 Sept. 2018.

Doctoral Student Career Planning: A Guide for PhD Programs and Faculty Members in English and Other Modern Languages from the MLA’s Connected Academics Initiative. Connected Academics, Modern Language Association, May 2017, connect.mla.hcommons.org/doctoral-student-career-planning-a-guide-for-phd-programs-and-faculty-members-in-english-and-other-modern-languages/. PDF download.

Hartman, Stacy. “Resource: Transferable Skills and How to Talk about Them.” Connected Academics, Modern Language Association, 4 Apr. 2016, connect.mla.hcommons.org/resource-transferable-skills-and-how-to-talk-about-them/.

Jaschik, Scott. “The Ph.D. Skill Mismatch.” Inside Higher Ed, 5 Jan. 2018, www.insidehighered.com/news/2018/01/05/study-shows-academic-job-searches-languages-value-alt-ac-skills.

Kim, Joshua. “If It Isn’t Counted, Does It Count?” Inside Higher Ed, 4 Oct. 2017, www.insidehighered.com/digital-learning/blogs/work-alternative-academics-mostly-invisible.

Social Sciences Feminist Network Research Interest Group. “The Burden of Invisible Work in Academia: Social Inequalities and Time Use in Five University Departments.” Diversity and Social Justice in Higher Education, special issue of Humboldt Journal of Social Relations, vol. 39, 2017, pp. 228–45. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/e90007861.

It is easy to fall into despair about the state of academic labor today. Tenure-track jobs are pitifully few, the competition for them is overwhelming, and adjunct faculty members are grossly underpaid and exploited. Those of us who got tenure-track jobs in the last thirty years are hardly shielded from this reality. Most of us have had experience as adjuncts, many of us have students enduring this situation, and all of us know that our colleagues are at least as qualified as we are, although paid a pittance of what we get.

All too often, calls for tenured faculty members to act with or on behalf of our adjunct colleagues are met with various forms of fatalism: “We wish we could help, but this is just the way it is now”; “We don’t really have any more power than they do”; “We can’t win arguments with administration about working conditions until we have more data about [teaching quality, or retention, or assessment, or . . .].” These reactions are examples of what Rachel Riedner and Kevin Mahoney call the rhetoric of despair: A situation generates moral outrage, people begin reacting to it, a call for slowing down to “be reasonable” disrupts momentum, counterarguments that justify further inaction are made and eventually convince people that nothing can change. Most significant, this pattern allows people simultaneously to declare their powerlessness and to maintain the sense of moral outrage they felt all along (75–79).¹

Frustrated with repeated iterations of this cycle, some of us imagined a new way.

In September 2017, Carolyn Betensky organized a group of tenured faculty members on Facebook into a new organization called Tenure for the Common Good (www.tenureforthecommongood.org). Carolyn’s idea was that we as tenured faculty members could use our secure status to advocate for our contingent colleagues. We were inspired by seeing contingent faculty members working together in advocacy groups and unions, locally and nationally, to create more equitable working conditions. Some of us had been active as tenured allies in the adjunct movement, but none of us had ever come across any organizations that rallied tenured faculty members, as tenured faculty members, to take action to address the contingency crisis. If adjunct faculty members could bravely come together at great personal risk to demand fair treatment, what was preventing us from using our academic freedom and institutional power to follow suit? We rejected the idea that there was nothing we could do about these exploitative labor conditions.

Despite the hesitation of tenured faculty members to act on the problems of contingency, many—maybe even most of us—who are tenured find the exploitation of our peers excruciating in itself, as well as a trend that will ultimately destroy higher education as we know it. As more and more tenure lines are replaced with faculty members who are afforded no academic freedom, no benefits, and no long-term contracts, the university becomes more like Walmart, cutting costs with no regard for quality. Advisers don’t want to encourage undergraduates to pursue graduate degrees and faculty careers when those careers are now so scarce. Graduate students with completed degrees cannot find jobs that pay even for their basic needs. Fewer and fewer tenure-track faculty members do more and more advising, mentoring, and curriculum development, as the percentage of teaching done by exploited contingent faculty members rises and rises. How can the university system sustain itself on this gig-economy model? Higher education depends on its experts (faculty members) to fulfill its primary functions—teaching and research—neither of which we can do well under precarious conditions. Contingent faculty members cannot engage in long-term research projects if they have no long-term support or security. Contingent faculty members cannot experiment with pedagogy if a less-than-successful teaching strategy means getting offered no course sections the next year. And university teaching is no longer a profession if it is delivered as piecework by workers with no professional support from the institution their students attend.

As the participants in the Facebook discussion group for Tenure for the Common Good started to contemplate roles we could play alongside our contingent colleagues, Talia Schaffer shared an intriguing idea:

I have an idea for fighting adjunctification I haven’t seen mentioned elsewhere,² and it occurred to me this group might be the right place to try it out. We need to get US News and World Report to consider the percentage of adjuncts in their annual ranking of colleges. The more adjuncts a college employs, the lower that score is, the worse they’ll fare in the rankings. THAT, I think, would make administrations sit up and pay attention. We know that colleges will do anything to keep their rank up. Make adjunctification hurt that rank, which will deter students from applying there. And it *is* something that should be considered in college rankings; students *should* be wary of a college where their teachers will be demoralized, exploited, exhausted people who are given no time or space or support for teaching (and who manage to perform miracles without it, but one shouldn’t rely on their continuing ability to do so!) Adjunct percentage is a far more important measure of a college’s quality than, say, student SAT scores.

The rest of us liked this idea. We thought that institutions would be more likely to pay contingent faculty members a living wage, increase opportunities for advancement, and offer security if their rankings depend on their willingness to do so. Further research revealed that 20% of an institution’s ranking came from “faculty resources,” of which only 5% reflected the proportion of faculty members at an institution who were employed as adjuncts and 35% reflected salaries of tenured and tenure-track faculty members (Morse and Brooks). We found that bizarre. An institution’s reliance on exploited faculty had far more impact than the 5% allocation suggested, and these severely flawed faculty salary assessments omitted the lion’s share of the faculty! Tenure for the Common Good members thought that it would be an elegant fix if we could convince U.S. News and World Report to reverse the allocation percentages: 35% of an institution’s faculty resources category would reflect labor conditions for non-tenure-track faculty members, and 5% would be devoted to the salaries paid to tenure-stream faculty members.

The group drafted a letter to U.S. News and World Report:

Dear US News and World Report rankers,

We write as a group of tenured and contingent faculty who would like to propose that you consider adjusting the “faculty resources” section of the America’s Best Colleges rankings in order to more accurately reflect current academic realities. Currently you allocate only 5% of this category to part-time vs full-time faculty, while you give 35% to faculty salaries. However, those faculty salary numbers do not affect the majority of college instructors, who are contingent faculty: underpaid temporary workers (see https://www.aaup.org/issues/contingency/background-facts; and http://www.newfacultymajority.info/facts-about-adjuncts/). Contingent faculty conditions powerfully affect the educational atmosphere of a university, while the financial satisfaction of a dwindling cadre of tenure-track faculty is of negligible importance—and we say this even though there are many among us who represent that dwindling cadre. We want to suggest that you switch these two numbers, assigning contingent faculty a full 35% and downgrading the faculty salary issue to 5%.

Consider:

• contingent faculty are underpaid, exploited, and exhausted. Sometimes they are homeless or working several jobs and they generally do not have health care. (https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/sep/28/adjunct-professors-homeless-sex-work-academia-poverty?CMP=share_btn_fb)
• contingent faculty must teach double or triple the number of courses as tenure-track faculty, usually at multiple schools.
• contingent faculty rarely have an office of their own and are not paid to hold office hours, read drafts of student papers, or advise students.
• contingent faculty are hired for a course or a semester, often without oversight, mentorship, or access to basic resources (like access to a copy machine) to do their jobs.
• contingent faculty generally are not allowed to choose which courses they want to teach, and often don’t have any ability to determine the course content.
• contingent faculty are hired and fired irregularly, which makes it impossible for them to mentor students for the duration of the student’s college life, write recommendations, or take a stable role in the student’s life.
• contingent faculty are not generally granted citizenship in their departments, which makes them unable to serve on committees or shape policies.
• contingent faculty are powerless to affect the terms of their employment, which means they can be given enormous classes with far more students than any one person can handle.

As Dan Edmonds points out, “If you are paying for a college education today, you are paying comparatively more money than previous generations have paid—nearly $70,000 in annual tuition, room and board, and fees at America’s most expensive schools—to be educated by a more poorly-resourced, poorly paid, and potentially poorly-motivated group of educators.” In short, “you want to ensure that the college to which you’ll pay tens of thousands of dollars a year treats its faculty well enough to provide the best possible education for students.” (https://www.forbes.com/sites/noodleeducation/2015/05/28/more-than-half-of-college-faculty-are-adjuncts-should-you-care/#66c894a01600)

If 50–75% of the faculty are working under these conditions, it changes the entire environment of the university in ways that the nation’s premier ranking system really needs to register. A university that mistreats its employees this way is not giving its students a good education—no matter how much it may pay its few remaining tenure-track faculty members.

Please consider switching the percentages for faculty salaries and part-timers to reflect the reality of today’s campuses.

As we were revising the text, we started to wonder whether it was worth opening it for signatures in the form of a petition or a sign-on letter. We thought the request might have more of an impact coming from fifty or maybe even—our wildest dream—a hundred signatories than from those who had composed the letter, and members of the Facebook group agreed. Thus, we released the letter in mid-October as a Google document and spread the word through social media. What actually happened astounded us. The letter went viral. Within two days we had over three hundred signatures; at one point, one of us, Seth Kahn, realized that so many people were trying to sign the letter at once that the Google document was crashing, so we had to move the signatures into another document to keep it functional. The University of Pennsylvania student newspaper, The Daily Pennsylvanian, ran a story about it when a reporter searched the document and noticed that four University of Pennsylvania faculty members had signed it (Trustman). Within two weeks, we accumulated over twelve hundred signatures, and although we stopped collecting names at that point, for months afterward people kept trying to sign on.

What surprised us most among the signatures was the variety of disciplines represented. As expected, the large majority were from faculty members in English, writing studies, rhetoric and composition, and comparative literature. We also had signatures from faculty members in social sciences (anthropology, sociology, political science, economics, psychology); lab sciences (biology, chemistry, physics, ecology, epidemiology, oceanography); education; and across the humanities (history, philosophy, religion or theology, modern languages, ancient languages, area studies, women’s and gender studies). Signatories also ranged in rank from adjunct and lecturer to all ranks of tenured or tenure-track professors. Endowed department chairs and two deans had signed on as well.

Clearly there was a tremendous appetite to be part of this initiative. Our petition gave tenure-track faculty members an alternative to accepting defeat. It offered them a venue to begin making a substantive difference, right alongside non-tenure-track faculty members.

At the beginning of November, we sent the petition to Robert Morse, the chief data strategist at U.S. News and World Report who heads the team that compiles the list of annual college rankings. Morse thanked us for our letter and assured us that he and his team would study it. In June 2018, Betensky, Schaffer, Kahn, and Maria Maisto of the New Faculty Majority traveled to Washington, DC, to meet with the U.S. News and World Report rankers. We met with Morse and eight other data analysts to discuss our proposal and to hear directly from them about the rationale behind the current allocations in their rankings for faculty resources.

Although these discussions are still ongoing, we were heartened by the team’s openness to our position and their willingness to learn about the situation of contingent faculty members. U.S. News and World Report is eager to improve the accuracy of its data collection, and we had a fruitful conversation in which we helped them see some problematic assumptions on which the rankings rely. They are considering our suggestions to refine their definitions for part-time and full-time faculty to reflect the real conditions in higher education today; reconfigure the questions they ask of colleges and universities to get institutions to report information about part-time, full-time, contingent, and tenure-track instructors more accurately; and add a specific request for colleges and universities to report full-time non-tenure-track instructor salaries in addition to the tenured and tenure-track faculty salaries they currently ask for. We also explained how much the relation between tenure-stream salary and the notion of faculty prestige had changed since the U.S. News and World Report faculty resources rankings had been developed: with tenure-track jobs so scarce these days, only the tiniest minority of super-lucky candidates have the luxury of holding out for the most highly paid positions. Indeed, faculty salary is unrelated to teaching quality except inasmuch as making a living wage helps faculty members do better work.

U.S. News and World Report has started to consider how to represent the numbers of contingent faculty members more accurately, although it might do this in multiple ways, not necessarily by switching the 5% and 35%, as we had asked. We were pleased by Morse’s team’s keen interest in achieving greater transparency, accuracy, and accountability in the data provided to them by colleges and universities. We were also pleased that the U.S. News and World Report team was willing to learn about the new conditions in academia. As Morse admitted, the rankings were developed when a very different system was the norm. They recognize that their metrics need to be updated. We are going to continue helping them.

We should note that, like most faculty members, we find the project of rating our institutions problematic, especially on such necessarily reductive measures as even the fairest system depends on. But we also recognize the institutional power that such rating systems have and see them as an important venue for asserting labor equity and equality as worthy criteria. Or, put another way, a necessary part of the solution to contingency is to amplify our message about how damaging it is for student learning conditions and faculty working conditions. It’s better having that conversation through U.S. News and World Report than not having it at all. U.S. News may not share our political or social goals, but their interest in getting their research right overlaps substantially with our interest in accurately representing the realities of the academic workforce.

It is crucial not to give in to despair. We must all keep publicizing the crisis of the casualization of academic labor, speaking out in any way we can imagine. Universities will keep hiring adjuncts instead of tenure-track faculty members as long as it seems to save them money. That is why Tenure for the Common Good is working to make the casualization of academic labor economically adverse by telling parents not to send their children to institutions that mistreat their faculty and by helping develop accurate rankings that will hurt the status of institutions that engage in this sort of hiring.³ We are committed to developing creative, strategic ideas in partnership with our contingent colleagues and hope you will join us if you are a tenure-track ally. We are eager to develop new campaigns, and we look forward to new ideas.

Notes

1. In “What Works and What Counts: Valuing the Affective in Non-Tenure-Track Advocacy,” Sue Doe, Maria Maisto, and Janelle Adsit also address the role of despair, exploring how people in contingent faculty movements have had to figure out how to honor and incorporate emotion most effectively into the struggle for solidarity and change.

2. We learned subsequently that we were not the first to consider this angle. Rebecca Schuman had described a similar idea in 2014 in Slate: “[t]o be truly ahead of the game, the ‘percentage of faculty who are full-time’ should be front and center on the rankings list, before even student-to-faculty ratio. Instead, it’s tucked away inside the paid version of U.S. News’ ranking website, so most ‘education consumers’ will never see it—even though it should be the first thing you ask when you and your kid are touring a campus. Whether or not some sports nut who graduated in 1952 gives bank to the football team should matter much, much less than whether or not your professor has slept in a heated house, and thus prepared your lesson effectively.” Researchers with the American Association of University Professors had been working with U.S. News and World Report data analysts to develop more accurate figures for reporting the number of adjunct faculty members employed at institutions of higher learning. Seth Kahn also informed us that a working group at the Coalition of Contingent Academic Labor (COCAL) conference held in New York City in 2014 had proposed the formation of an alternative ratings system to be called the Democracy Index. This index would rate institutions on their inclusive treatment of contingent faculty among other criteria.

3. In our campaign to make universities more answerable to the common good, we see Tenure for the Common Good as working in continuity not only with our contingent colleagues in such organizations as the New Faculty Majority but also with such efforts as James F. Keenan’s University Ethics: How Colleges Can Build and Benefit from a Culture of Ethics and Jerry Gaff and Neil Hamilton’s The Future of the Professoriate: Academic Freedom, Peer Review, and Shared Governance.

Works Cited

Doe, Sue, et al. “What Works and What Counts: Valuing the Affective in Non-Tenure-Track Advocacy.” Contingency, Exploitation, and Solidarity: Labor and Action in English Composition, edited by Seth Kahn et al., WAC Clearinghouse / UP of Colorado, 2017, pp. 213–34.

Gaff, Jerry G., and Neil W. Hamilton. The Future of the Professoriate: Academic Freedom, Peer Review, and Shared Governance. Association of American Colleges and Universities, 2009.

Keenan, James F. University Ethics: How Colleges Can Build and Benefit from a Culture of Ethics. Rowman and Littlefield, 2015.

Morse, Robert, and Eric Brooks. “Best Colleges Ranking Criteria and Weights.” U.S. News and World Report, 11 Sept. 2017, www.usnews.com/education/best-colleges/articles/ranking-criteria-and-weights.

Riedner, Rachel, and Kevin Mahoney. Democracies to Come. Lexington / Rowman and Littlefield, 2008.

Schaffer, Talia. “Idea for Action.” Facebook, 28 Sept. 2017, 10:45 a.m., www.facebook.com/groups/163317600885815/. Accessed 12 Sept. 2018.

Schuman, Rebecca. “Hit ’Em Where It Hurts: The Solution to the Higher-Ed Adjunct Crisis Lies in the U.S. News Rankings.” Slate, 30 Jan. 2014, www.slate.com/articles/life/education/2014/01/adjuncts_in_american_universities_u_s_news_should_penalize_colleges_for.html.

Trustman, Harry. “These Penn Professors Want to Lower the Rankings of Schools that Underpay Adjunct Faculty.” Daily Pennsylvanian, U of Pennsylvania, 28 Oct. 2017, www.thedp.com/article/2017/10/penn-professors-sign-petition-to-change-usnwr.

One of the first lessons I learned as a PhD student was to be nice to the department and graduate secretaries (we were still calling them that). Not just nice, but kind, gracious, and appreciative of all they did to make our lives, as graduate students, go as smoothly as possible. Positive graduate student experiences and completion rates rely on good faculty supervisors, but try to remember all the red tape the administrative assistants helped you cut through. All the affective labor they performed on your behalf. The ways in which they made the program and the institution function.

When I started as an adjunct, the first thing I did was make friends with the department’s administrative assistant. This university was a regional public comprehensive, designated a Hispanic-Serving Institution. Although the faculty was still largely white (at least at the time), when the students came into the department offices they more often than not saw faces that looked like theirs. With no office myself, I would often use the public computer in the main office to check my e-mail before class or finish a last-minute handout or in-class assignment outline. I would hear how some of the faculty members talked to the administrative assistant—disrespectfully, dismissively, and outright rudely. This same person greeted students warmly and welcomingly into the office, offering to help them when no faculty members were around or willing to assist with the administrative confusion that comes with being a first-generation college student.

My experience with colleagues isn’t unique. As the current MLA executive director, Paula Krebs, observed in 2003:

Colleges are set up . . . to encourage faculty members to think of ourselves as the center of the enterprise, the reason all of the others, including the students, are there. The result can be that we end up viewing other college employees the way upperclass Victorians thought of their servants. We ignore them when they are doing their jobs well. We talk in front of them as if they cannot hear us. We assume that they will work consistently to make our lives easier. And we are sure that they understand that the real point of the institution is what we do.

But taking administrative staff members for granted isn’t just bad manners, it’s a strategic failure—a lost opportunity to partner with our strongest allies.

What We Lose When We Ignore Staff

If the university is to be successful in its primary mission of educating students, we need staff. Universities have also decided that adjuncts are a more efficient way of providing the majority of said education to students. Thus, adjuncts and staff members have more in common with each other, and with our students, than we assume. Moving beyond the faculty (even adjunct faculty) and staff divide is essential to improving our working conditions, and thus the students’ learning conditions. Many staff members have stronger contracts than at-will adjuncts and can thus be important allies in speaking up and speaking out about labor conditions on campus.

There are many ways to define the kind of staff members I’m referring to, many of whom are now being placed under the alt-ac umbrella, as more and more PhDs are seeking full-time (and fulfilling!) work off the tenure track as staff. Matt Reed puts it thus:

Professional staff can be characterized as people with graduate degrees who do non-faculty work. They could be counselors, financial aid staff, librarians, registrars, disability-services providers, IT, instructional designers, or any number of other positions, depending on the campus. Some of them may have teaching backgrounds, and some may even teach on an adjunct basis while working as staff. Their positions are usually twelve month, five-day-a-week jobs. Some campuses have a tenure system for staff, and some have tenure for some staff (librarians) and not others.

But this excludes the other kinds of staff members who work at our institution and play an important role in our students’ lives: the cafeteria workers, the groundskeepers, the custodial staff, and so on. These nonprofessional jobs are invisible to us and are increasingly being outsourced, as personnel rotate in and out of buildings, unable to form any sort of connection with the people living or working there. A recent strike by the service workers in the University of California system highlights the fact that we are all affected by the defunding of higher education, and many marched in solidarity with the striking workers (Day). The opening lines of Meagan Day’s Jacobin article say it all: “‘Some of us have devoted our lives to the university,’ said Maricruz Manzanares, a custodian at the University of California at Berkeley. ‘I’ve worked here for nineteen years, providing a healthy environment for students to come and live away from home.’” To look at the faces walking that picket line is to see the black and brown faces of the students who attend these public institutions, particularly in the parallel Cal State system.

Look at the racial and gender makeup of the staff at your institution. There are plenty of women and people of color within higher education, but they aren’t administrators and they aren’t tenured faculty members. They are adjuncts, they are support staff, they are wage employees—often outsourced. If adjuncts are the not-so-new faculty majority, then so too are the staff (and not the highly paid upper administrators) the not-so-new administrative majority. If we want to build a more inclusive labor movement within higher education, then we must organize and stand in solidarity with our colleagues (yes, colleagues) from all areas of the institution.

Why We Need to Stop Devaluing Nonfaculty Professionals and Staff

I find myself right now in a strange and unfamiliar position: I am a part of the fifty percent of adjuncts who are happy with their position as an adjunct (American Academic 10)—I have full-time work elsewhere in the university, and my one class a semester is fulfilling and keeps me in contact with students, doing one of the things that I love. I also have to say that, for the first time in my academic career, I am being treated as a colleague, which says more about the individuals involved in the program I am teaching in than it does about the system in general that exists at my institution.

Regardless, as more and more PhDs and other terminal-degree holders find work inside academia but still work as adjuncts on the side, we need to start thinking about how we can build solidarity across those lines. Staff members are our allies in changing the culture of higher education.

We must also keep in mind that alt-ac staff positions carry their own limitations and challenges, particularly when it comes to extra work. At my former institution, University of Mary Washington, in part because of overtime rules, wage staff members are now barred from working as adjuncts. Many are making very little money and had used adjunct teaching to supplement their wages. My colleague Amanda Rutstein describes her experience this way:

On any given day, I am either treated as an integral member of the university community or reasonably dismissed. I navigate through a stunning array of ever‐changing bureaucracy whose intention is never fully made clear and rarely ever fully realized. I have been urged to advocate for myself and chastised for stepping out of line. I have tried (and failed) not to cry at work.

As a single mother by choice, I have been hugely supported and also felt the sting of impatience and judgement. I am condescended to and deferred to, sometimes in a single interaction. The inherent nurturing nature of a liberal arts atmosphere has boundaries, as I have learned, and those boundaries are relegated to specific spaces on the edge of campus where we discuss fiscal matters, setting precedents and the shelf life of paperwork. (2)

This is just one example of how the institution devalues and marginalizes the people who do the important work of keeping the institution running. This kind of treatment is not uncommon for both staff and adjuncts. As adjuncts, we may declare, At least staff members have a full-time salary! At least they have benefits. If you are at a public institution, however, I challenge you to look up the salaries and wages of the members of the support staff—those people who are at the front lines of serving students, of keeping the mechanisms of the institution running so that you can teach. They are often working in much more dehumanizing conditions than we are as adjuncts, if you can believe that is possible. They, too, are being required to do more with less and acutely feel the sting of budgetary cuts, stagnant wages, and the rigid hierarchies of academia. Researching wages across various positions in your institution is one way to build solidarity but also builds a case for increased wages, job retitling or reclassification, and information sharing within and across institutions. It provides hard statistics, paired with narratives such as Rutstein’s, to counter the simplistic argument about administrative bloat. We are the new majority on campus, for better or worse. And we all care about our students’ success. That shared value must be the core of any work done together, as adjuncts and staff members, to improve the working conditions on campus. If we value diversity, inclusivity, and social justice, then we need to overcome the faculty-staff divide.

Do We Really Need Administrative Staff?

In his Chronicle of Higher Education essay about “BS jobs” in academia, David Graeber attempts to differentiate between “valuable” support staff and “BS” dean jobs, but then for the rest of the piece attacks what could be called the administrative class rather than the support staff class. He ends up painting any nonacademic (i.e., teaching and research) role with the same brush—not to mention focusing on the people who he thinks should be making his job, as a faculty member, easier rather than on the students who may be served by the staff members he so blithely dismisses. If they don’t serve him any purpose, then certainly they must not serve any purpose at all.

Graeber is not the first person to attack administrative bloat in higher education; in 2011, Benjamin Ginsberg published The Fall of the Faculty: The Rise of the All-Administrative University and Why It Matters. He basically makes the same arguments as Graeber but believes there are much more nefarious motivations behind the growth of administrative jobs:

[The administration’s] real goal is to reduce the centrality of the traditional curriculum and to partially supplant it with what might be called a “student life” curriculum consisting of activities, seminars, and even courses led by administrative staff rather than faculty. The traditional curriculum gives the faculty a privileged claim on university resources and decision-making priorities while the new curriculum enhances the power of administrators. . . . (10–11)

What Ginsberg ignores is that this so-called traditional curriculum is not working to retain and grant degrees to students. Browse recent issues of the Chronicle of Higher Education or Inside Higher Ed: if you want to retain students (Field), you need collaborations between faculty and staff members; if you want your diversity and inclusion efforts to work (Alex-Assenoh), you need staff members; if you want to expand online course offerings (Lieberman), you need staff members. We know this in academia—that you cannot expect any kind of initiative on campus to succeed without staff to support it. Unfortunately, there is often very little nuanced thinking when faculty members (or pundits) talk about administrative bloat. The jobs and pay scales of staff members and mid-level administrators (think associate deans [“deanlets”] or vice or associate provosts or presidents) are quite different from each other but are often conflated.

Thankfully, Brian Rosenberg has a much-needed corrective in his piece “Are You in a ‘BS Job’? Thank You for Your Work. No, Really,” pointing out, particularly, how the numbers that Graeber cites aren’t telling the whole story:

Trends in Higher Education, published by the College Board, has collected data on student/staff ratios in higher education over time. From 1995 to 2015, the ratio of students to non-instructional staff members at public institutions rose from 8.6 to 9.2. In other words, there were more students per staff member in 2015 than there were two decades earlier. At private, nonprofit institutions, the ratio rose slightly, from 5.6 to 5.8. At both types of institutions, the number of students per instructional staff member declined over the same period, probably because of an influx of adjuncts and graduate instructors.

Fewer staff members per student. Fewer people to help students with financial aid, with housing issues, with food insecurity, with mental health challenges, with anything that a student may face outside (and sometimes even inside) the classroom. The research has shown that students persist and succeed if they connect with someone at the institution (see, e.g., Kim and Sax). But there are fewer and fewer of us, on either side of the faculty-staff divide, for them to connect with.

How Current Structures Reinforce Racism and Sexism

Graeber ignores the growth of adjunct labor in his piece but does make one important observation about the nature of support staff’s work:

I suspect that bullshitization has been so severe because academe is a kind of meeting place of the caring sector—defined in its broadest sense, as an occupation that involves looking after, nurturing, or furthering the health, well-being, or development of other human beings—and the creative sector.

What he doesn’t acknowledge is the heavily gendered and racialized elements of said “caring” and “creative” work. Again, the majority of the support staff at universities are women and people of color, who are expected to undertake the affective (but heavily undervalued) work of caring, while the faculty members, predominantly male, undertake the important work of being creative. It’s difficult to get numbers on the pay gap between faculty and staff salaries (and even harder to get differences in nonacademic staff salaries) because no one currently tracks them. One recent study, however, shows that

women of color are underrepresented in academe, compared with their representation in the U.S. population at large—especially in more lucrative faculty, professional, and administrative roles, versus lower-paying staff positions. And in three out of four job types (professional, staff, and faculty) women of color are paid less than white men, men of color, and white women. (Zahneis)

Pair this finding with the knowledge that when women and people of color get jobs teaching, they are more likely to be contingent or adjunct positions (Flaherty), and that women make up a majority of the adjunct teaching body (“Women”), not to mention that “[t]he proportion of African-Americans in non-tenure-track positions (15.2 percent) is more than 50 percent greater than that of whites (9.6 percent)” (“Status”). As Tressie McMillan Cottom points out: “Our current anger about class divides in higher education labor cannot be separated from its racist roots.” I would also add sexist roots. But somehow, for too many, these connections do not cross the divide between faculty and staff. By remaining loyal to this divide, we lose the ability to form solidarity, to forge connections to best help students and ourselves.

Building Solidarity within Institutions

While working at the University of Mary Washington, I participated in an on-campus leadership program that was open to anyone in the university community, to faculty and staff members of all levels. Most of the participants were staff members from across the university—custodial staff, bursar, financial aid, registrar, alumni affairs—it seemed no unit on campus was unrepresented. There were no high-level directors or administrators. As a group, we were much more diverse than the professoriat and much more representative of the state that we work in, if not of the student body of our school. We came together and learned a great deal from one another, particularly about how each of us interacts with students and plays a role in their success. We also learned about how budgetary cuts and persistent disrespect from faculty members have worn down morale.

This, I thought, is what inclusivity looks and sounds like in practice.

Members of the staff literally keep the lights on, the e-mail up and running, the students fed and housed and safe and financed—not to mention successful in their courses. They are the first and last people that students (and parents) deal with at the university, from registration to graduation. This year, at my institution, I suggested that all members of the professional staff be invited to attend commencement—not in the general crowd, but up on the stage, in full regalia, to celebrate those students we had a major hand in helping to succeed. I made the case that we deserved to be up there. The administration agreed, and I sat up on that stage this year, in the heat, to celebrate alongside my students and their professors.

As PhDs move increasingly away from working full-time as adjuncts and into alt-ac staff roles, we must not lose our commitment to justice and equity. We must learn the institutional mechanisms available to us, such as staff congress or other advisory or administrative bodies. If the faculty members are unionized but the staff members are not, are there ways to make connections between the groups? Are there ways to leverage shared concerns, speaking to various stakeholders at various meetings? These dual roles that many of us are taking on, adjunct faculty and staff, enable us to bridge the artificial divides and to change higher education.

Georgetown University understands the value of faculty and staff members working together. Annually, the Center for New Designs in Learning and Scholarship offers a Productive Open Design Spaces program, “a series of design-centered workshops giving faculty and staff the time and space to collaborate with colleagues on curricular and pedagogical projects of their own design. . . . More than 40 faculty and staff worked in groups to draw connections between shared ideas, generate design criteria, present a mini pilot, and develop sustainable plans to execute their projects during the academic year” (Pluff). While a number of successful projects have come out of the annual opportunity (“Productive Open Design Spaces”), the feedback from both faculty and staff members shows that this opportunity allows them to understand what the other does for students and that both groups share a devotion to student learning and success. The institutions put in financial and administrative support to nurture and grow these collaborations, fostering a greater understanding and creating better teaching, learning, and working conditions for everyone.

There are things that you can do on your campus. In their article “Organizational Culture: Comparing Faculty and Staff Perspectives,” researchers Bela Florenthal and Yulia Tolstikov-Mast found the following:

A university’s organizational culture influences students’ overall educational experience. One critical aspect of a positive campus cultural experience is the strong sense of community largely established by a constructive working relationship between faculty and staff. The current study focuses on sources of potential conflict in faculty-staff relations that could negatively influence this organizational culture, and thus, inhibit positive student educational experiences. . . . Findings indicate that greater staff involvement in decision-making, clearer communication of roles and responsibilities, and an adequate rewards system can reduce faculty-staff tension. (81)

Note how the researchers directly connect student success with a positive campus cultural experience—faculty and staff members working together. Including staff members in leadership opportunities, as well as explicitly inviting them and making them feel welcome at academic events (like graduation), can be a good way to start. Krebs shows how the faculty worked with the staff for a fairer and more equitable contract for the staff but noted that doing so was challenging without an organization like the Association of American University Professors keeping careful records of staff salaries. The lines between our various roles at the university are, like just about everything, a social construct, and we have to work to try and overcome those imaginary hierarchical structures to achieve positive change.

There are unfortunately too few success stories of faculty and staff members working collaboratively to improve labor conditions, beyond unionized strikes in solidarity. In unionized institutions, members of the faculty and staff are often represented by different union bodies. Could we instead imagine one union that represents all knowledge workers employed by the university? That a PhD is a PhD regardless of whether the person is in a tenure-track job and thus should be compensated accordingly? That people are rewarded according to their contact with students? Or that there are paths forward for workers in all sectors of the university? These proposals all have their flaws, but can we think bigger than how we have usually thought about union representation and negotiation?

Remember those staff members who made a difference during your education, or when you were an adjunct. Remember that they were and are precarious workers making less than they should. These are the same people who are making a difference in your students’ educations, in the same way they made a difference in yours. As a faculty member, thank them. As an administrator, pay them. And finally, listen to them. Treat them like the colleagues they are. They are the front lines for students, and they see and hear the issues that keep students from being as successful as they could be every day.

Works Cited

Alex-Assenoh, Yvette M. “Hiring a Diversity Officer Is Only the First Step: Here Are the Next Seven.” The Chronicle of Higher Education, 5 June 2018, www.chronicle.com/article/Hiring-a-Diversity-Officer-Is/243591.

American Academic: A National Survey of Part-Time/Adjunct Faculty. American Federation of Teachers, 2010, www.aft.org/sites/default/files/news/aa_partimefaculty0310.pdf.

Cottom, Tressie McMillan. “The New Old Labor Crisis.” Slate, 24 Jan. 2014, www.slate.com/articles/life/counter_narrative/2014/01/adjunct_crisis_in_higher_ed_an_all_too_familiar_story_for_black_faculty.html.

Day, Meagan. “UC Workers on Strike.” Jacobin, 9 May 2018, www.jacobinmag.com/2018/05/university-of-california-strike-public-education.

Field, Kelly. “A Third of Your Freshmen Disappear: How Can You Keep Them?” The Chronicle of Higher Education, 3 June 2018, www.chronicle.com/article/A-Third-of-Your-Freshmen/243560.

Flaherty, Colleen. “More Faculty Diversity, Not on Tenure Track.” Inside Higher Ed, 22 Aug. 2016, www.insidehighered.com/news/2016/08/22/study-finds-gains-faculty-diversity-not-tenure-track.

Florenthal, Bela, and Yulia Tolstikov-Mast. “Organizational Culture: Comparing Faculty and Staff Perspectives.” Journal of Higher Education and Practice, vol. 12, no. 6, Dec. 2012, pp. 81–90.

Ginsberg, Benjamin. The Fall of the Faculty: The Rise of the All-Administrative University and Why It Matters. Oxford UP, 2011.

Graeber, David. “Are You in a BS Job? In Academe, You’re Hardly Alone.” The Chronicle of Higher Education, 6 May 2018, www.chronicle.com/article/Are-You-in-a-BS-Job-In/243318.

Kim, Young K., and Linda J. Sax. Different Patterns of Student-Faculty Interaction in Research Universities: An Analysis by Student Gender, Race, SES, and First-Generation Status. U of California, Berkeley, Aug. 2007. ERIC, files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED502857.pdf.

Krebs, Paula M. “The Faculty-Staff Divide.” The Chronicle Review, 14 Nov. 2003, www.chronicle.com/article/The-Faculty-Staff-Divide/4741.

Lieberman, Mark. “No Consensus Yet on Online Community College.” Inside Higher Ed, 30 May 2018, www.insidehighered.com/digital-learning/article/2018/05/30/california-online-community-college-proposal-divides-legislators.

Pluff, Christa. “From PODS to Canvas: College Deans Move Advising Manuals Online.” The Prospect: Teaching, Learning, and Innovation, Georgetown Center for New Designs in Learning and Scholarship, 24 Oct. 2016, blogs.commons.georgetown.edu/cndls/2016/10/24/from-pods-to-canvas-college-deans-move-peer-and-faculty-advising-manuals-online/.

“Productive Open Design Spaces.” Teaching, Learning and Innovation Summer Institute, Georgetown U, tlisi.georgetown.edu/productive-open-design-spaces/. Accessed 25 Aug. 2018.

Reed, Matt. “The Faculty-Staff Divide.” Confessions of a Community College Dean, 24 Oct. 2011, suburbdad.blogspot.com/2011/10/faculty-staff-divide.html.

Rosenberg, Brian. “Are You in a ‘BS Job’? Thank You for Your Work. No, Really.” The Chronicle of Higher Education, 29 May 2018, www.chronicle.com/article/Are-You-in-a-BS-Job-/243522.

Rutstein, Amanda. “Dream Adjacent.” Women in Higher Education, vol. 27, no. 3, Mar. 2018, pp. 1–2.

“The Status of Non-Tenure-Track Faculty.” American Association of University Professors, June 1993, www.aaup.org/AAUP/comm/rep/nontenuretrack.htm. Accessed 25 Aug. 2018.

“Women and Contingency Project.” New Faculty Majority, www.newfacultymajority.info/women-and-contingency-project/. Accessed 25 Aug. 2018.

Zahneis, Megan. “Women of Color in Academe Make 67 Cents for Every Dollar Paid to White Men.” The Chronicle of Higher Education, 11 June 2018, www.chronicle.com/article/Women-of-Color-in-Academe-Make/243636/#.Wx_CQCd0PWJ.twitter.