Category: Uncategorized

Our introduction’s title, “Facing the Data,” signals the twofold aim of this special section of Profession: to assess the statistics documenting people of color in humanities doctoral programs, given in the MLA report Data on Humanities Doctorate Recipients and Faculty Members by Race and Ethnicity, and to bring into focus the faces of those composing the report’s data. Initial engagement with the report began with meetings of the MLA Committee on the Literatures of People of Color in the United States and Canada (CLPC) and continued in Seattle with the 2012 MLA convention panel “The Faces behind the Data,” sponsored by the CLPC (of which we are both former cochairs). Inspired to continue the dialogue begun in Seattle, we invited a number of respected scholars to “face the data” while speaking to the faces behind the report in short responses thematically fashioned by their own design. This section is indeed part and parcel of the report as “a call and a context for textured anecdotal reports from faculty members and campuses” (1).

The three essays that follow thus make a range of critical arguments about underrepresented communities in the humanities and in the profession more broadly. In her contribution, Dana A. Williams offers an insightful view of the interrelation between the humanities and historically black colleges and universities (HBCUs). Answering what she considers the report’s call for “more contextualized and textured narratives to accompany the data as text,” she proposes that we take seriously the curricular strategies offered at HBCUs to help “lead the way to critical reforms of American higher education.”

Although HBCUs are clearly accounted for in the data, Robert Warrior ponders the lack of Native American representation in them, a lack symbolized by “double crosses” or “double daggers.” He sees in the report an alarming reflection of Native American “statistical insignificance” in United States government data. In response to the discouraging data with regard to Native scholars, Warrior offers recommendations (such as allocating resources specifically dedicated to studies on Native participation) to ensure those scholars’ continued representation in literary studies. The anecdotal information he tenders counterbalances the glaring numerical absence and thus bolsters his insistence that statistical insignificance must not “limit the extent to which MLA refers to diversity in the profession.”

Despite the minimal gains made in diversifying the ranks of the academy, indicated in the report, Frances R. Aparicio challenges us to consider the delicacy of encouraging students of color to pursue doctoral work by asking, “How can we, scholars in the humanities and foreign languages, urge minority students to join us at a time when the economic crisis steers students toward more lucrative fields?” She has worked with students who, notwithstanding the challenges faced in the academy, aspire to “become producers of humanistic knowledge” and whose careers we have a hand in building.

Each essay, although distinct in concern and approach, is linked to the others by the anecdotal impulse its author embraces in addressing the data. Where do those people of color who go on to become faculty members earn their undergraduate degrees? It is this question posed in the report that we wish to answer with the help of some thick description. Therefore, in the spirit of the Seattle panel and in line with the contextual and textured narrative approach taken up by the contributors, we each offer a short response of our own, given the relation of the report to our respective careers as professors in the humanities.

Response 1: Nwankwo

“You’ll go on to graduate school and become an English professor.” So said Professor Donald B. Gibson to me during my sophomore year at Rutgers, the state university of New Jersey. The idea sounded remotely interesting, emphasis on remote because I really had no idea how I would do that or even whether I wanted to do that. After all, I was in INROADS, the internship program with the mission statement, “to develop and place talented minority youth in business and industry, and prepare them for corporate and community leadership.”1 I was majoring in economics and Spanish. Becoming an English professor had never crossed my mind. Correction: it had never crossed my mind until Dr. Gibson mentioned it.

By the end of my sophomore year I had declared a double major in English and Spanish. Economics was gone. My senior year came down to a choice: Was I going to accept the job offer I had from a corporation or one of the offers I had from PhD programs in English? I felt confident that I knew what it would take to do well at the corporation. I didn’t really know what I would need to do or be expected to do in the PhD programs. That prospect was intellectually exciting but daunting. I knew I loved poetry. (I had been performing the work of Louise Bennett and Federico García Lorca since the beginning of high school and dreamed of comparing Phillis Wheatley’s verse with that of Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz.) I knew I loved learning about new cultures and languages. (By the age of thirteen, I had taken two years of French and three of Spanish. In addition, I had grown up with a grandfather who regularly regaled me with the Portuguese, Spanish, and other words he had picked up during his years as a Jamaica Railway stationmaster.)

As I talked with my mentors at Rutgers and reflected on my long-held passions, I became progressively more excited about pursuing a PhD in literary studies and becoming a professor. Would I be able to think about, read, learn, teach, and do research on literature day in and day out and get paid for it? Would I have the opportunity to spend my days creating programs and projects that would help circulate information about issues of literature, locally and globally? How could I not jump at the chance? The sage Donald Gibson was right. I graduated from Rutgers in 1994, went on to earn my PhD in English, and in 1999 joined the ranks of tenure-track faculty members. As the years went on, I realized that when Dr. Gibson made that statement, he was also announcing his commitment to doing all he could to help me achieve that future.

Rutgers is fifth on the list of institutions of higher education whose black baccalaureate degree recipients went on to obtain PhDs in the humanities between 1997 and 2006. I am one of the sixteen faces behind that piece of data. As I look back on my years at Rutgers, it is no surprise to me that my alma mater ranked so high in the MLA report (Data, table 1b): faculty members and administrators at Rutgers fought to create and sustain an environment that nurtured and nourished students of color as human beings, as intellectuals, and as citizens. During my years at Rutgers, crucial elements of this environment were the presence of noticeable numbers of black and Latino/a faculty members, junior and senior; faculty investment in the growth of undergraduates so that as citizens they could think critically about the world around them as well as about texts; faculty members of color who embodied a diversity of models for political engagement and took divergent positions on the degree to which academic work was or should lead to it; an approach to degree requirements that made it easy for students to gain in-depth knowledge in their majors while also engaging in sustained course work in interdisciplinary and ethnic studies programs; support for student organizations and other on-campus spaces in which students could gain, hone, and refine their understanding of what being an engaged and productive citizen means; the presence of administrators of color at a range of levels in the institution; the willingness of university administrators to mentor students of color and to work with them in innovative ways to develop, exercise, and refine the students’ critical thinking, community engagement, and leadership skills. There were professional and psychological costs to faculty members and administrators entailed by this labor, sacrifices that were not apparent to me as an undergraduate student but that I now recognize and deeply appreciate.

The presence of several black faculty members, junior and senior, in the English department at Rutgers made seeing—and, by extension, thinking about becoming—an English professor a perfectly natural thing for my fellow black students and me. Among the department faculty members were Donald Gibson, Cheryl Wall, Wesley Brown, Abena Busia, and Judylyn Ryan. Renée Larrier, of the French department, had an important influence on me, even though I never met her while I was at Rutgers. Just seeing her walk across campus every day mattered, reminding me that a black woman could be a professor of French—or of any field. These faculty members taught us, whether they knew it or not, by what they did professionally outside class as well as in class. Busia, for example, organized and hosted the annual African Literature Association conference during my time at Rutgers. This event intensified my interest in becoming a scholar, in being able to do research about Africa and its diaspora, publish that research, and participate in thought-provoking conversations like those I heard at the conference.

In addition, that all English majors were required to take African American literature made it clear to everyone that black writers mattered, in the literary world in general and at Rutgers in particular.

Thanks to the way the degree requirements were constructed, I was able to take life-changing classes in other departments and engage in conversation with black faculty members in other departments, including Deborah Gray White (history), Kim Butler (Africana studies), Gayle Tate (Africana studies), and Karla Jackson-Brewer (Africana studies). My taking classes in interdisciplinary programs and departments also played a role in leading me to graduate school.

The relation between blackness and Latinidad interested me. Like many other anglophone Caribbean people, I had grown up hearing that I had ancestors who journeyed to Latin America early in the twentieth century to find work. What I didn’t know was that exploring that relation could be the focus of a career, the subject of one’s scholarly research and teaching. Gerard Aching’s presence in the Spanish department opened my eyes to this possibility. My awareness was heightened by courses in the Puerto Rican and Hispanic Caribbean studies department, including one that introduced me to José Luis González’s powerful analysis of race in Puerto Rico, “El país de cuatro pisos” (“The Four-Storeyed Country”). My regular conversations with Tom Stephens about bilingualism as well as about race and ethnicity in Latin America stoked my intellectual fires. Marcy Schwartz’s seminar Latin American Displacement and Exile further enriched my intellectual toolbox by introducing me to critical theory from and about our America.

The Spanish department was crucial to my growth, because faculty members like Margo Persin were supportive of and invested in students who were excited about their courses, regardless of their race or areas of interest, regardless of whether her time spent with these students would advance her career. George Kearns in the English department was Persin’s twin soul in this respect. Ronald Christ, then English department chair, supported my interest in crafting an independent study that would help me research various university-linked career paths. Along the way, he gave me a copy of the special issue of World Literature Today he had edited, and it was my introduction to academic journals.

Supportive administrators were vital to creating the environment that led me to pursue a PhD. Marie Logue, dean of students, was open to student ideas about new ways in which her office could support their dreams. Her openness made it possible for Dean George Ganges to create a student affairs internship for and with me. One of the programs we developed allowed a faculty member and a small group of students to attend a play at Crossroads, a world-famous black theater company. The help of administrator mentors like Wally Torian, adviser to the Paul Robeson Special Interest Section, which I chaired for two years, and Ed Ramsamy, residence coordinator for the dorm that housed this section, was important.2 (Ramsamy was a doctoral student himself at the time and eventually ended up becoming a faculty member in the Africana studies department.) The value of having high-level university administrators of color invested in connecting with and mentoring undergraduates became most clear to me with the arrival of Roselle Wilson, a black woman who joined the university as vice president for student affairs. Wilson regularly and willingly spent hours with me sharing her wisdom, answering all my questions about the life of a university administrator of color, and challenging me to think critically about the world around me as well as about my vision for my future.

The report Data on Humanities Doctorate Recipients and Faculty Members by Race and Ethnicity provides valuable numbers—among them, the number of black Rutgers alumni who earned PhDs between 1997 and 2006 (table 1b), which indicates an environment that encouraged black students to pursue graduate study. It also hints at the difficulties faculty members of color face when they endeavor to create an environment that will nourish both them and their students. It shows, for example, disparities among faculty members by race and ethnic identity: in average age at tenure (39.3 for white, 41.5 for black, 42.2 for Hispanic [table 9]), in average hours per week spent on unpaid tasks (4.8 for white, 6.0 for Hispanic, 7.5 for black [table 11]), and in average hours per week spent on paid tasks (46.3 for white, 41.5 for Hispanic, 40.1 for black [table 11]). These numbers demand that we dig deeper, that we gather and listen to the stories of the people behind the data. It is only through that kind of work that we will be able to understand the productive actions and painful sacrifices that led to the data points. Only then will we be able to reduce the disparities and make the sacrifices unnecessary.

The data quantitatively encapsulate the actions of individuals and institutions, as well as the interactions between them. We, the individuals behind the data, now have the opportunity and, many of us would say, the obligation to try to inspire our students the way Dr. Gibson inspired me. The institutions represented in the report also have opportunities and obligations before them. The data present a multitude of possible departure points for institutional conversation and action, including attending to the aforementioned sacrifices. No individual or institution is perfect. The commitment showed me by Dr. Gibson and the many faculty members and administrators at Rutgers was an index not of perfection (mine, theirs, or Rutgers’s) but rather of an unrelenting determination to make a difference in the lives of students in general and of students of color in particular. We, individuals and institutions, can and should all strive to be as committed and determined.

Response 2: Rodríguez

When I first read the MLA report Data on Humanities Doctorate Recipients and Faculty Members by Race and Ethnicity, what caught my attention especially and held it longer than any other item was the table documenting the institutions that sent the most undergraduate students to graduate school in the humanities between 1997 and 2006 (table 1). Under the category “Hispanic” (a term by which I often find myself interpellated despite its historical and identificatory complications), the institution boasting the highest number of students who went on to pursue doctoral study is the University of Puerto Rico, Río Piedras. This fact calls for a discussion of the socioeconomic differences between Puerto Rican students from the island as compared with those from places like New York and Chicago, but here I focus on the second institution on the list, the University of California, Berkeley, which is where I obtained my bachelor’s degree in English.

I arrived in Berkeley in the summer of 1989 as a student in Summer Bridge, a program designed to give underrepresented students a running start before their first semester. I don’t recall the precise number of Summer Bridge students enrolled that summer, but I do remember thinking that the university was indeed as diverse as the materials in my acceptance folder declared (this perception was significantly altered once the fall semester began). Being almost four hundred miles away from home in Santa Ana without a friend or relative nearby, I came to rely on peers who became friends and eventually extended kin after the eight-week program. What also sustained me was the willingness of graduate and advanced undergraduate students to provide healthy doses of mentorship that I consider the key to my baccalaureate success. And despite being told by a high school English teacher that Berkeley professors would be unapproachable, I soon met a number of them who were generous with their time and saw the importance of undergraduate mentorship.

Before the spring semester of my first year, I came to realize that Berkeley was the ideal place for a future scholar of ethnic and Latino/a literary and cultural studies because of the professors working there. I enrolled in four literature courses (and as a result deferred taking many general education courses until later in my undergraduate career). Why so many literature courses for a first-year student? I learned that I could get a degree in doing what I loved most, reading and writing, and that there was institutional value in writing about the things I was passionate about. Scholars and mentors like Genaro Padilla, Barbara Christian, Norma Alarcón, and Alfred Arteaga made sure that their students, many of them first-generation students of color, were aware of the possibility of pursuing a career in the humanities. Informing us about opportunities such as the Minority Summer Research Exchange Program (MSREP), they also provided the guidance and mentorship required for us to transition from undergraduate to graduate studies. They taught us how to take thinking and writing to the next level and demonstrated that academic labor demanded serious commitment and the acceptance of responsibility.3

I can’t name every student of color with whom I shared classroom space during my four years at Berkeley and who went on to earn a doctorate in the humanities and eventually tenure at places like the University of Southern California; the University of California, Santa Cruz; Princeton; California State University, Los Angeles; the University of Illinois, Chicago; and the University of California, Los Angeles—the very students who make up the statistics documented in the MLA report—but I will say that we were all fortunate to have faculty members of color guide us toward doctoral study. From providing frank advice at Minority Undergraduate Students in English (MUSE) gatherings to delivering lectures at weekly meetings of Other Voices, a faculty-supported course for which advanced undergraduate students facilitated discussions on the topic of that week’s lecture, the Berkeley professors we studied under were pivotal in sending us to PhD programs.

The vibrancy of the campus community at this historical moment had a great deal to do with my and my peers’ decision to pursue literary and cultural studies. Berkeley at the time claimed an ethnically diverse first-generation student population, which of course would diminish with the passage of Proposition 209, the ballot initiative ending affirmative action in public education. The steadfast encouragement and backing of my undergraduate professors—preparing me for advanced study, suggesting suitable doctoral programs, and writing many letters of recommendation—was the key factor that landed me on table 1c of the report as one of the seventy-two students from Berkeley who went on to complete a PhD in the humanities. For me, mentorship took shape in Arteaga’s willingness to read multiple drafts of my statement of purpose (and in turn asking for comments on a freshly composed essay about to be sent out for peer review), in Padilla’s sage advice to contact faculty members with whom I wished to work in Latino/a and queer studies, in Alarcón’s gentle but firm prodding for me to master the terms of critical theory, and in Christian’s willingness to share personal stories about the highs and lows of academic life. These are but a few of the many mentoring strategies that I’ve learned from senior scholars in my field and that I have adopted with my own students.

A Deep Accountability

In her essay “But What Do We Think We’re Doing Anyway: The State of Black Feminist Criticism(s); or, My Version of a Little Bit of History,” Christian writes, “Although black women are not the only ones who can do feminist criticism, it would be a significant loss if they were absent from this enterprise” (73). We wish to echo Christian, who in her essay responds to the consistently low number of blacks receiving PhDs in English with the argument that the absence of United States students of color from working-class origins in the academy perpetuates the profession as a bastion of racial and economic privilege, despite the frequent—if not obligatory—lip service paid to educational access and social justice. As our contributors illustrate, the MLA report might make faculty members and administrators face the data and work to increase the number of underrepresented scholars at their institutions and in the study of languages and literature more broadly. As Nellie Y. McKay has noted, the presence of faculty members of color “has changed the face of American education and revised the premises of accepted knowledge in material content, philosophical approaches, and interactions with and between students and faculty” (64). It is essential that we sustain and strengthen this presence at a moment when concerns of race, culture, and difference in the humanities matter more than ever.

Christian asks, “To whom are we accountable? And what social relations are in/scribing us?” (74). We believe that those of us working in the humanities should keep asking these questions no matter what our field or focus may be. The “we” and “us” to which Christian refers might help us consider who is included and who excluded in the profession and allow us to take stock of the faces that populate spaces from graduate seminars to professional meetings. Bringing affirmative action back may be an increasingly difficult feat (as we are currently witnessing in Texas), but a proactive stance and a deep accountability to underrepresented students are required if we are to provide mentorship similar to what we received as undergraduates. We must not forget that well-prepared and well-informed undergraduates—academic job market opportunities notwithstanding—will eventually become our most stellar graduate students and invaluable colleagues. It is our hope that this special section will prove instructive for how, in the midst of the complex social relations in/scribing us, we can work toward a humanistic inquiry that requires diversity in both intellectual perspective and faculty composition.

Notes

The authors wish to thank Deborah A. Miranda, Debra K. S. Barker, Thabiti Lewis, Chandan Reddy, and Doug Steward for their participation on the panel at the 2012 MLA convention in Seattle and all members of the Committee on the Literatures of People of Color in the United States and Canada, past and present, for making this special section possible.

1. The mission statement of INROADS now uses the term “underserved” instead of “minority.” ↩

2. It important to note that at least three of the students living in that section in those years ended up pursuing and earning a PhD—one in English, one in history, and one in counseling. ↩

3. MSREP, an intensive research exchange program sponsored by various institutions on the East and West Coasts in which students were paired with faculty mentors to produce a scholarly project of their choice, has ceased to exist, but other opportunities—for example, the Ronald E. McNair Scholars Program and the Summer Research Opportunities Program—continue to aid underrepresented students in transitioning from undergraduate studies to graduate school. I was a MSREP fellow at the University of California, Los Angeles, and studied under the tutelage of Raymund A. Paredes in the English department during the summer of 1992. ↩

Works Cited

Christian, Barbara. “But What Do We Think We’re Doing Anyway: The State of Black Feminist Criticism(s); or, My Version of a Little Bit of History.” Changing Our Own Words: Essays on Criticism, Theory, and Writing by Black Women. Ed. Cheryl A. Wall. New Brunswick: Rutgers UP, 1989. 58–74. Print.

Data on Humanities Doctorate Recipients and Faculty Members by Race and Ethnicity. Modern Language Association. MLA, Apr. 2010. Web. 9 Aug. 2013. <http://www.mla.org/data_humanities>.

González, José Luis. “El país de cuatro pisos” y otros ensayos. Río Piedras: Huracán, 1980. Print.

INROADS. INROADS, 2011. Web. 14 Aug. 2013. <http://www.inroads.org/>.

McKay, Nellie Y. “Minority Faculty in (Mainstream White) Academia.” The Academic’s Handbook. 3rd ed. Ed. A. Leigh DeNeef and Craufurd D. Goodwin. Durham: Duke UP, 2007. 62–76. Print.

Ifeoma Kiddoe Nwankwo is associate professor of English at Vanderbilt University. Richard T. Rodríguez is associate professor of English and Latina and Latino studies at the University of Illinois, Urbana. Both are former cochairs of the MLA Committee on the Literatures of People of Color in the United States and Canada, which organized this special section.

Posted November 2013

In her recent On Being Included: Racism and Diversity in Institutional Life, Sara Ahmed concludes her reflections on dealing with the challenges of creating diversity in European universities with the image of a brick wall as a metaphor for institutional inertia. She exhorts scholars to continue “insisting” that our institutions need to be transformed (26, 173–87). In the United States, engaged minority scholars have been insisting on diversity, collectively, for almost half a century. Yet the numbers continue to be dismal. The MLA’s Data on Humanities Doctorate Recipients and Faculty Members by Race and Ethnicity reveals that there has been little gain in the number of scholars of color in our fields and departments. As regards United States Latinos/as, the focus of this essay, only 4.4% of faculty members in the humanities are Hispanic (Data, table 6), while Latinos/as constitute nearly 17% of our nation’s population and are the majority minority in this nation (“People QuickFacts”). (Hispanic is the official term created by the federal government for census purposes, yet I use Latino/a throughout this essay.) There are different preferences in how to label this identity, but Latino/a has been consistently embraced by academics to name the field: Latino/a studies. While both Hispanic and Latino/a are umbrella terms and tend to homogenize what is a most heterogeneous community racially, socioeconomically, nationally, and in terms of migration history, Latino/a has become more relevant in reference to social encounters and transculturations among various national groups of Latin American descent in the United States. (Recently some scholars have argued that it is used as a racial label, although Latinos/as in the United States are a multiracial community.)1 This significant and increasing gap between our presence as professors and the demographic changes nationwide augur a widening schism between faculty members and students, an emerging academic divide of sorts. As the MLA report indicates, “[I]t is dispiriting to see that, after years of effort to improve the pipeline for doctorates of color, the cohorts of several groups remain out of proportion to the United States population” (Data 3). A report by Arthur Coleman and others shows that, in the context of the demographic shifts in United States schools, “minority students will account for practically all of the growth among high school graduates over the next decade, with Hispanic graduates alone almost completely offsetting the decrease in white, non-Hispanic graduates” (4).

The implications of the divide between population numbers and representation in academia are serious and even dangerous. Despite the growth of students of color nationwide, our humanities departments continue to be overwhelmingly white. While there are strong efforts nationwide at diversifying the STEM fields, the humanities are being neglected, partly because administrators assume that they are already diverse. The data celebrate Hispanic studies units as diverse locations on campus but do not distinguish among Latinos/as as United States racial minorities, other United States–based Latin Americanists, and Spaniards. Those of us who have taught or studied in Spanish departments know firsthand the intense power struggles at play in them. Latino/a graduate students and faculty members, when there are any, usually reside in the lower echelon of the hierarchy.

The academic divide suggests a lack of mentoring; very few, if any, role models; and a curriculum that does not reflect the lives and experiences of Latino/a students. It is true that individual nonminority faculty members can have and have had significant influence on the academic careers of students of color, but it is also true that whiteness in departments and disciplines continues to cement institutional racism. When policies are created, rules are imposed, and norms are established, the needs and interests of students of color (and faculty members of color) will not be considered, let alone addressed. For instance, in a predominantly white department, it is difficult for undergraduate students of color to have access to role models who will exhort them to consider completing a PhD in the humanities. Students of color may be stigmatized for their writing styles, hybrid linguistic practices, and bicultural or working-class perspectives that are censored or curtailed in their writing assignments. The students thus receive lower grades and end up with a less competitive academic standing. Required readings and topics in course syllabi may not reflect the racial, ethnic, class, or gender experiences of many of the students, thus limiting their ability to identify with the course material. These practices of marginalization can limit the motivation of minority students who enter the humanities. Such students may feel that they are “space invaders” in the literature classroom (Puwar, qtd. in Ahmed 13), or they may perceive humanities courses as merely another category in the distribution requirements for graduation rather than as entryways to a possible career.

The data offered by the MLA report on the humanities exhort us to reflect once again on our historical moment, on the factors that impede the growth of faculty members of color in our fields, and on how institutional policies and resources can open up our disciplines and universities to transformation. The semantic shifts of the term diversity, since it began circulating in institutional discourse in the 1980s, have redefined the term away from race, ethnicity, and gender subordination to include all forms of difference, including intellectual and emotional. Many universities have reframed diversity as intellectual heterogeneity, which is more easily associated with institutional excellence. I have heard discussions in diversity committees in which courses about emotional intelligence are being considered to satisfy the diversity requirement. Moreover, racial diversity has been put in the context of globalization. Thus the oppositional values of a project that was grassroots‐driven has become a public relations tool for administrators. As Ahmed suggests, diversity ends up reinforcing whiteness and aestheticizing equality by marketing such institutional efforts in ways that render some differences more acceptable than others (151).

What does it mean, then, to write about the need for increased numbers of faculty members of color in the humanities? How do we support talented minority undergraduates at a time when affirmative action has been under legal attack and now is at risk of being revoked? How do we counteract the market forces that dictate the reduction of graduate programs? Demographic changes and the growth of minority high school graduates should prompt universities to support initiatives that increase the presence of minority students on campuses, yet budget constraints, limited resources, color‐blind policies, and postracial discourses are enlisted to justify ignoring such initiatives.

In this essay, I share personal memories of the contradictions, tensions, and challenges that minority graduate students and assistant professors have faced in the humanities. Quantitative data show patterns, but the numbers should be complemented with experiences as well as with a candid analysis of the policies and factors that continue to fuel the marginalization of intellectuals of color. If “to talk about racism is to become the problem you pose” (Ahmed 153), then I risk once again (as I did in the 1990s) being described as the angry Latina (not the “wise Latina” [Sotomayor]) who speaks out in criticism of our disciplines and institutional life.

That scholars of color question the inclusion and exclusion of writers, traditions, or communities in established Eurocentric and United States canons suggests that their presence will trigger discussion and revision of these canons. I have witnessed the dismantling of reading lists for master’s exams in Spanish departments after graduate students of color demanded inclusion of United States Latino/a writers. Instead of adding these voices, faculty members decided to eliminate the required reading list altogether and restructure the goals of the master’s exam.

Any attack on racial and ethnic minorities is an attack on the interdisciplinary scholarship central to Latino/a studies. I am conscious of the risky homology between faculty members of color and interdisciplinarity, for it elides the work of many scholars of color who specialize in a mainstream field of study. Such scholars are more easily integrated into departmental life and curricula, yet they can influence their units if they speak out about inequality and exclusion. Most of my memories of the struggles of graduate students of color since 1990 involve their efforts at validating and legitimating their proposals for dissertation projects that challenged the discipline methodologically and in terms of its canon. Although literary studies has been profoundly influenced by discourses on race, ethnicity, and gender proposed by scholars of color, a cursory look at most literature departments across the country reveals a limited number of minority-focused courses in the curriculum. When scholars of color engage the humanities in interdisciplinary modes, literary texts no longer serve as the primary source of data. A literary text becomes one of many discourses, which are interwoven to answer social questions regarding cultural and racial inequality. This methodological maneuver is not always clearly understood by traditional scholars.

Research and teaching related to minority issues continue to be deemed as exotic or secondary, as a subfield at best, not central to the discipline. We are currently witnessing attacks on liberal arts education’s inability to provide marketable skills. The humanities have historically been associated with nonlucrative jobs. Yet by expanding the traditional curriculum and connecting the humanities with the new social, racial, cultural, and linguistic demographics of the United States, the presence of minority students in our disciplines could constitute a meaningful, long-term investment for the humanities.

During my career, I have faced several incidents of discrimination. On one campus, although I was approached by more than the usual number of students for mentoring, I was told that few students would be interested in my field of study and that those studying with me would not get letters of recommendation from other colleagues. It was an instance not of “microaggression” (Wing Sue) or even of a “decidedly chilly work environment” (Sotello, Myers, and Creswell 28) but of outright hostility toward me as a scholar and toward the field that I represented. Despite these threats and disciplinary violations, I ended up mentoring an excessive number of students of color who are now tenured, published professors in liberal arts colleges and public universities. I now consider it a major achievement of mine and a contribution to the field of Latino/a literary and cultural studies that I prepared those students for the professoriat, but this work was a direct result of the lack of faculty members of color in the College of Arts and Sciences on that campus. I mentored graduate students in ethnomusicology, English, sociology, anthropology, gender and women’s studies, American studies, and Spanish. I could have easily refused to work with these students on the grounds that I was not trained in their discipline or that I was not familiar with their research interests. Yet my willingness to mentor them was a central factor in their eventual completion of the PhD.

Hiring scholars of color was a painful struggle at one of the campuses where I taught. For ten years we identified senior and junior scholars as candidates but to no avail. Departments had to approve them, and most professors did not welcome people who they thought would rock the disciplinary boat. In contrast, at another institution where I taught, my unit had the ability to hire 100% full-time equivalents (FTEs) and evaluate them for promotion and tenure. The program grew from five faculty members to thirteen in ten years. However, because most minority scholars are clustered in interdisciplinary programs, most departments still lack a diverse faculty body. There is a clear correlation between policies and structures of hiring and recruitment and the curtailing or making impossible the hiring of minority scholars, not only in the humanities but in the social sciences as well. Minority scholars must also be hired by mainstream departments if diversity is to be legitimized on any campus, and interdisciplinary programs must also be equal partners with departments in curricular and hiring decisions. Many young scholars of color who have been trained in interdisciplinary ethnic studies programs may not desire a departmental affiliation. Universities or colleges that allow only departments to hire are clearly limiting the possibility of increasing the number of their faculty members of color who engage in interdisciplinary scholarship.

There is a strong relation between the presence of minority faculty members and graduate students and curricular transformation. At one of the campuses where I taught, many Latino/a graduate students in Spanish were frustrated at the lack of available graduate courses that addressed their interests in popular culture, the diaspora, and race and ethnicity. They were successful in their request to the dean for one more faculty position in those fields of study, but only after preparing a report that revealed the gaps between the most requested fields of study in the job market and the existing graduate courses in the Spanish program. The program offered most courses on Peninsular topics, but the report clearly indicated an increasing interest in interdisciplinarity, United States Latino/a literature and culture, and postcolonial and subaltern studies. I have taught on campuses where some departments informally express interest in hiring Latino/a scholars but never prepare a job announcement in that field. Other departments, recognizing the increasing number of Latino/a undergraduates in their classes, ask Latin Americanists to prepare new courses in United States Latino/a literature and cultures (as if there were no differences between the two fields in training or literary corpus) instead of requesting a new FTE focused on Latinos/as. Such empty rhetoric shows a lack of respect for a field of study that has developed for more than fifty years and that has contributed to our understanding of identity, hybridity, colonization and empire, immigration, language and bilingualism, literary studies, and the politics of representation. I will never forget a Latin Americanist historian who once told me, in passing, that he could teach a Latino/a studies course very easily if he spent two months reading the bibliography. I would never have considered undermining his field of study in that way.

Graduate students interested in pursuing Latino/a literary and cultural studies face major obstacles in completing their PhDs. At universities with generous financial aid to minority graduate students, many departments welcome graduate students of color as freebies, even if they do not have faculty members who match the research interests of those students. This lack of scholars of color exacerbates the already alienating experience of graduate school, for the minority students have to spend much more energy and effort in finding viable mentors, inside or outside their departments. Then, when the work of meeting the departmental requirements begins, so does the power struggle over disciplinary legitimacy.

A graduate student in ethnomusicology, for instance, who wanted to write an interdisciplinary, cultural studies–based dissertation on Mexican American music, was told that she was enrolling in too many interdisciplinary courses and not completing enough courses in her own department. Yet that department’s curriculum did not address her intellectual needs. Only one faculty member from her department, given the interdisciplinary nature of her project, ended up being on her dissertation committee. Another student in Spanish had to postpone her PhD exam dates for almost a year because the graduate committee in her department constantly changed its mind about approving the fields of study that this student had proposed for her exams. It insisted, in the name of the canon, that she prepare herself in one area that had no relevance to her dissertation. Yet, having created these obstacles, and only after her graduation, the department, for marketing purposes, listed her dissertation as an example of the cutting‐edge research by graduate students. Most graduate students I have mentored experienced this kind of struggle and tension. Even in the interdisciplinary programs where I taught, some were told that their research projects were too interdisciplinary. Because they were contesting disciplinary boundaries, these students ultimately enhanced their dissertations, but their departments would still refuse to recognize the importance of studying United States Latinos/as or would advise students earlier to change to a more traditional area of study.

Many students left academia altogether. The MLA report indicates that humanities doctorate attrition rates generally hover around 50%, while the “Hispanic doctoral students have an especially low ten-year completion rate of 37%” (Data 1–2). Dominant narratives argue that this attrition rate is natural and that students depart by personal choice, but I maintain that institutional factors explain their departure. The departmental work climate, the lack of faculty mentors who are familiar with the scholarly interests of graduate students of color, limited financial aid, and admission but no strategies for support or retention all play a role. In one instance, a student completed his master’s degree in Spanish but was told that he could not be admitted to the PhD program because his proposal to examine, from a gender and sexuality approach, the life and works of a poor minority poet was not considered acceptable by the graduate committee, although the poet’s literary significance had been highlighted in a biopic film. After repeated attacks against this student and his project, he left the academic world and is now teaching in a public school. He is an outstanding elementary school teacher yet to this day visits Spanish department Web sites, social media, and other forms of communication that update him on the latest Latin American novels and on literary news. He continues to be an avid reader. He would have made an excellent literature professor but was rejected and damaged to such an extent that he could not continue in the academic world.

I have witnessed female minority graduate students who dropped out of doctoral programs because no faculty mentor was interested in their research projects. Their departments admitted these women but, once they were in, offered little to no support for the women’s projects. The less support the students had, the less productive they were. Less productive, they received less funding and fewer teaching assistantships. This vicious cycle led to their departure. One student approached a woman of color faculty member to see if she would be interested in working with her, but the faculty member said no. Given the challenges that faculty members of color, particularly when they are women, have in balancing research and teaching demands with the service expectations on our campuses, this refusal was not surprising. Yet it is our collective responsibility to address the challenges that these students face and to get our departments, colleges, and universities to help. The MLA report states that faculty members of color spend more hours per week working on “unpaid tasks outside their institutions and more hours per week with advisees” (Data 4), which documents the significant needs of our communities and students. The burden of one body representing “her whole ethnic group” is not shared by many other colleagues in the humanities or in other scholarly areas (Sotello, Myers, and Creswell 42).

The MLA report’s figures indicate that between 1997 and 2006 not much has changed in terms of the numbers of foreign languages and humanities doctorates awarded to Hispanics. In the humanities, we gained seven more PhDs in nine years, while in the foreign languages, we gained four. These numbers show the stagnation that has characterized institutions of higher learning when it comes to diversifying. They suggest that diversity is being “managed” (Ahmed 53) and not truly associated with the inclusion of minorities. In the United States, the legal environment around affirmative action has led to the passage of laws that eliminate considerations of race, ethnicity, and gender from decisions about conferring benefits on students in higher education. (According to the American Council on Education, California, Washington, Nevada, Michigan, and Florida have enacted those laws [Coleman et al.]). Yet if we want to avoid a national scenario of academic segregation in which higher education is accessible only to the children of the elite, then we must educate and mentor our students of color. Demographics are a compelling reason for universities to reconsider their curricula and make the humanities and foreign languages spaces for the empowerment and inclusion of minority voices. English departments, for instance, need to include Arab American literature in their teaching and scholarship. How are we integrating religious studies into our analysis of racialization and subordination? If we think of diversity as a “narrative of repair” and as a means of recovering from racism (Ahmed 163–71), then it is up to scholars and administrators to make diversity a leading value that will transform the university and society as well.

Much has been said about the pipeline, both as a means of producing new scholars of color and as a problem, because those students drop out (Sotello, Myers, and Creswell). Yet the undergraduate years are when most college students make career decisions. If I had not had faculty members during my junior year who praised my analytic skills in literary studies, I may never have applied to graduate school in Spanish. If I had not had the mentors who spent substantial time with me reviewing my senior thesis and taking my work seriously, I may not have imagined myself as a future thinker and intellectual, as a producer of knowledge. The sense of empowerment that undergraduate students of color, particularly women, experience as the result of developing a scholarly voice can play a central role in helping students of color make decisions about their future professional lives. Teaching at the university may not grant a lifestyle of wealth, but it grants a status that increases one’s sense of respect and legitimacy. For students of color, many of whom are from working-class and working-poor families, earning a PhD must become a viable option as they consider their future careers.

How can we, scholars in the humanities and foreign languages, urge minority students to join us at a time when the economic crisis steers students toward more lucrative fields? In major Latino/a urban centers, such as Chicago, many students come from immigrant families where higher education is a channel for social mobility. Not many students (or their parents) may seriously consider the humanities as a way of moving up. I have encountered many parents who were not happy about their son’s or daughter’s long-term investment in a PhD in the humanities. They privileged manual labor over intellectual labor, they measured their child’s professional success in terms of salary and years in school, and they felt some urgency in having their son or daughter begin “real work.” Educating parents and students about the importance of the humanities in an increasingly global world and in the United States national context is crucial if we are to secure a strong pipeline of students who will pursue the PhD.

Making our society understand Latinos/as is in itself a much‐needed task. Departments, programs, colleges, and universities continue to alienate students of color and impede their progress. While quantitative data serve as important reminders of our long-term failure, they cannot contextualize or explain the specific hurdles and human decisions that produce institutional racism. People, committees, departments, and disciplines can make changes that will influence positively and include students of color. At a time when liberal arts education has been criticized for not being pertinent or pragmatic, humanities and foreign languages departments should revise their curricula and literary and critical canons by identifying, nurturing, and mentoring undergraduate students of color who wish to gain the skills they need, and the vision, to become producers of humanistic knowledge.

Note

1. See De Genova and Ramos-Zayas. For a more recent and continuing debate on the question of race and ethnicity in the United States census, see Prewitt and the response to Prewitt by López. ↩

Works Cited

Ahmed, Sara. On Being Included: Racism and Diversity in Institutional Life. Durham: Duke UP, 2012. Print.

Coleman, Arthur L., et al. A Twenty-First Century Imperative: Promoting Access and Diversity in Higher Education. University of Southern California. Coll. Board Advocacy–Amer. Council on Educ.–Educ. Counsel, Oct. 2009. Web. 12 Aug. 2013. <http://www.usc.edu/programs/cerpp/docs/ArtColeman-Diversity_Imperative.pdf>.

Data on Humanities Doctorate Recipients and Faculty Members by Race and Ethnicity. Modern Language Association. MLA, Apr. 2010. Web. 12 Aug. 2013. <http://www.mla.org/data_humanities>.

De Genova, Nicholas, and Ana Yolanda Ramos-Zayas. Latino Crossings: Mexicans, Puerto Ricans, and the Politics of Race and Citizenship. New York: Routledge, 2003. Print.

López, Nancy. “An Inconvenient Truth: ‘Hispanic’ Is an Ethnic Origin, Not a ‘Race.’” The New York Times. New York Times, 24 Aug. 2013. Web. 2 Oct. 2013.

“People QuickFacts.” United States Census Bureau. US Dept. of Commerce, 2013. Web. 6 Nov. 2013.

Prewitt, Kenneth. “Fix the Census’ Archaic Racial Categories.” The New York Times. New York Times, 21 Aug. 2013. Web. 2 Oct. 2013.

Puwar, Nirmal. Space Invaders: Race, Gender and Bodies out of Place. Oxford: Berg, 2004. Print.

Sotello, Caroline Viernes Turner, Samuel L. Myers, Jr., and John W. Creswell. “Exploring Underrepresentation: The Case of Faculty of Color in the Midwest.” Journal of Higher Education 70.1 (1999): 27–59. Print.

Sotomayor, Sonia. “A Latina Judge’s Voice.” 2001. The New York Times. New York Times, 14 May 2009. Web. 3 Sept. 2013. <http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/15/us/politics/15judge.text.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0>.

Wing Sue, Derald. Microaggressions in Everyday Life: Race, Gender, and Sexual Orientation. Hoboken: Wiley, 2010. Print.

Frances R. Aparicio is professor of Spanish and director of the Latina and Latino Studies Program at Northwestern University. This essay appears as part of a cluster from the Committee on the Literatures of People of Color in the United States and Canada.

Posted November 2013

As an academic-unit administrator in a high-quality, public institution of higher education in this era of dwindling resources, I have come to a sort of peace with the way deans, provosts, chancellors, and their minions (of which, I guess, I am one) make data-driven decisions. Thus, I read reports like the MLA’s Data on Humanities Doctorate Recipients and Faculty Members by Race and Ethnicity with appreciation for the careful work reflected in it, and I understand how such reports are useful to those of us who advocate better and more attention to the needs of the humanities in the emergence of new models of higher education. Indeed, in crucial ways, data and analysis of them are the ticket to a seat at the table and the discussion around it.

Having reached this pleasant (albeit restive) peace, I want to also point out that over the past two decades I have read through reports like this one and become accustomed to the regular fact of Native American statistical insignificance in quantitative studies of American higher education. This report uses double crosses, or double daggers, to note that insignificance, and I can’t help exploiting the irony. Cross me once, shame on you; double-cross me, shame on me. Stab me once, shame on you; stab me twice, I guess I didn’t run away fast enough. Nearly every report like this one I have read over the past two decades double-crosses or stabs me with the persistent reality of Native American statistical insignificance in American higher education.

This is the first time anyone has come to me and asked me to address the meaning of Native statistical insignificance, so let me express my appreciation for an opportunity to do some venting. I have a criticism to make of this particular report, but I make it in the context of ongoing support of the MLA’s openness to criticism. Let me start, then, with a recent example that illustrates how I read this MLA report.

Last year, the University of Illinois, where I work, placed an ad touting its commitment to diversity on the same page of the Chronicle of Higher Education’s 2011 “Diversity in Academe” annual statistical report on the state of higher education that reported the percentage of Native American and other groups of faculty members on our campus. The ad reads, “At Illinois, it’s all about our commitment. … The University of Illinois is committed to cultivating a campus in which students, staff, and faculty are welcomed, valued, and celebrated.” In the table alongside the half-page ad, Illinois lists American Indian faculty as 0%.

I would, perhaps, be less sensitive to such slights if my campus and our program were not as overdetermined as we are. Illinois is, as you may recall, a campus that treated the country to a controversy of nearly two decades over its sports mascot, which was eventually and spasmodically retired in 2007. The university spent millions of dollars defending the rather backward and embarrassing position that having a student dress up in Northern Plains–style clothes and perform dance moves like aerial splits to obviously fake Native-themed music could be construed to honor Native Americans, specifically those from this decidedly non-Plains region of the Midwest. The flimsy argument didn’t work despite those millions.

Thanks to the hard and resolute work of Native and non-Native students, staff members, and faculty members on our campus, Illinois created an American Indian studies program a decade ago. That program, oddly enough, has become regarded by people around the world as a leader in global Indigenous studies. I came to Illinois to direct the program five years ago, largely because of the terrific people who had assembled in it. I am proud to say that we have got even better since then. I don’t know if we are the best, but I do not hear anyone saying that some other program or department is better. So, given this odd confluence, what does it mean that we are in a conversation about having the best program studying Native Americans while also having statistically no Native American faculty members?

As a program director responsible for administering an academic unit with tenure-granting rights, I have participated in meetings at which departmental requests for new faculty lines are vetted. In those meetings, I have sat looking at data projected on a screen detailing how many majors a department has and how many instructional units (at Illinois, an instructional unit is earned for every hour of paid tuition for a particular class) a department produces for every full-time faculty member on its roster. The logic is simple: one can gain a decent picture of what an academic unit will likely produce with a new faculty member by looking at what it’s doing with its current roster.

In my experience, which includes more opportunities than most people in our profession have had to be inside the conference room for this sort of process but which is still limited in comparison with the experience of bigger fish in the academic pond, data that drive this simple logic are part of a longer, often much more complex discussion that involves peering into memos, spreadsheets, and other media to create a context for understanding how to make a decision about a particular academic unit in a particular institution at a particular time. But, however complex that discussion becomes, those data are almost always the entry point for the discussion and can come to represent a trump card for or (much more often) against deciding in favor of a unit’s request to grow.

If you have ever had to compare faculty members across a large department, or if you have ever been part of a tenure and promotion committee, you have probably had a similar experience with teaching evaluations. Those evaluations obviously say something about a course and how a professor taught it, but most MLA members, I would guess, would argue that a quantitative presentation of evaluations provides only one, highly limited view of what happened across the span of time in a course. Was the professor a tough grader? Did she pitch the course at a level slightly higher than the average student in a room? Did the reading list go one notch above what students on that campus could endure? Such questions, none of which are reflected in the data, can affect a decision.

In graduate admissions, I have never been part of a discussion that started with a candidate’s GRE scores (though I have to say I have been in discussions in which admissions decisions unfortunately hinged on those scores). Recently I had the pleasure of being on a graduate fellowship board focused on providing support for underrepresented students—the pleasure coming in part from the shared sense of the experienced board members with whom I have worked that GRE scores rarely say anything significant about a candidate unless they are incredibly high or incredibly low.

So data are for me something worth considering, and I am open to considering the reasons why my colleagues in measurement-based disciplines trust them much more than I do, especially when they are open to my suspicions that we trust quantifiable scores too much. Which brings me to the MLA report.

The first time American Indian or Alaska Native people show up as a number higher than 4 in Data on Humanities Doctorate Recipients and Faculty Members by Race and Ethnicity is in the table listing foreign languages in which doctorates were earned from 1997 to 2006. The total number in that decade is 13, slightly more than one per year, representing 0.2% of all doctorates earned (table 3a). The next chart, table 3b, indicates that 68 American Indians or Alaska Natives earned PhDs in English in the same period, including 10 in 2001 (0.5%). Table 3c tells us that 153 American Indians or Alaska Natives earned doctorates in the humanities during that same decade (0.4%).

Table 4 provides a snapshot of where scholars of color who graduated from English PhD programs found jobs in 2003–04. Only four Native people graduated that year: one found a tenure-track position, one got a non-tenure-track position, one got a postdoctoral position, and one got a job in government, business, or a not-for-profit organization. By contrast, 46.6% of white PhDs in English found tenure-track jobs, and 67%–74% of other people of color found tenure-track positions.

Soon after, the double crosses or double daggers appear. These crosses or daggers, according to the footnotes, represent “[t]oo few cases to report statistically significant information” (table 7). They appear in the American Indian or Alaska Native column of the following categories in the report: research activities of full-time faculty members at four-year institutions by race or ethnicity, hours per week worked by full-time humanities faculty members at four-year institutions by race or ethnicity, overall job satisfaction of full-time humanities faculty members at four-year institutions by race or ethnicity, opinion of full-time humanities faculty members at four-year institutions by race or ethnicity in response to the statement that faculty members who are members of racial or ethnic minorities are treated fairly, and responses by full-time humanities faculty members at four-year institutions by race or ethnicity to the question of whether they would choose an academic career again.

So, what do I learn from this report about how institutions are doing in providing opportunities and support for Native American scholars, and what can you learn? Beyond the basic set of very low numbers, let’s be honest and say that we learn only that language departments have not provided enough opportunities for Native American scholars to even register as significant in this study—despite the fact that the MLA has been involved in the development of Native literature as a legitimate academic field for more than four decades.

To elaborate, the MLA has been involved in Native literary studies more extensively than it has been in any field in race and ethnicity except for African American literary studies. American Indian literatures gained divisional status well ahead of Chicano/a literatures or Asian American literatures. The Association for the Study of American Indian Literature (ASAIL) provided further opportunities for sessions in the association’s structure at an early juncture.

The field’s whiteness surely had something to do with the speed with which American Indian literatures became a structural part of the MLA. Without the non-Native scholars who took the lead in legitimizing the field in their departments and in the MLA, Native literary studies would have had neither the numbers nor the expertise to push forward. Yet a field focused on Native literatures but having the vast majority of its practitioners be non-Native leads to perceptual and representational problems. With so few Native scholars around, non-Natives have been the face of the field. Non-Native scholars do not, by definition, experience the field in the same way Native scholars do, and non-Native and Native scholars necessarily represent Native experience differently.

Twenty years after the initial moves toward the field began, when I first started attending MLA conventions in the 1990s, Native scholars were statistically insignificant in their own division: three to five Native scholars being able to find one another at a session was the status quo. Efforts to make things different eventually helped bring as many as twenty-five Native scholars to the same convention, and for a couple of years in a row, every member of the division’s elected leadership was a Native scholar. Those couple of years when twenty-five showed up created parity of a sort in the division, and to the great credit of nearly all the non-Native scholars who had been integral to the building and development of the division, Native scholars in both small and more equal numbers have been welcomed as colleagues and leaders.

I don’t intend my criticism to imply that the MLA’s four decades of support mean nothing, but none of that work is captured in a report like this one. My question, then, is, What does the MLA plan on doing to reflect its long-standing commitment to this field? The focus or methodology of the report may be fine, but the report’s stance toward data about Native American responses reads like a shrug of the shoulders. Is this “Oh, well, we tried,” or does it open the door to some other avenue along which we all might learn something about what four decades of supporting a field means?

The overall bad news of the report makes me wonder about the extent to which language departments have grown complaisant about the recruitment and retention of students of color in our profession. Thus I offer the following recommendations for the consideration of those who remain concerned about Native participation in the work of Native literary studies.

• Acknowledge the statistical insignificance and characterize what that means for the MLA. The basic problem is not statistical insignificance but lack of characterization. After forty years, shouldn’t the MLA have something meaningful to say when its own studies don’t capture information about a constituency to which it has, in various ways, committed itself? Do the data, even if they are not statistically significant, point to anything? If not, okay. But let us at least discuss the fact of their insignificance.
• Consider dedicating association resources to gaining a statistical-quantitative understanding of this field. The MLA’s Language Map uses aggregated data from the 2006–10 American Community Survey to display the locations and numbers of speakers of thirty languages commonly spoken in the United States, and its Language Map Data Center provides data about over three hundred languages spoken in the United States. Beyond these tools, I know of no quantitative project the MLA has sponsored that captures Native participation in the profession. Why not sponsor studies that focus on Native American participation in the profession? At worst, such studies would establish a baseline of how close or far we are to being able to quantify Native experiences of teaching language and literature. At best, they would capture data that other studies have not.
• Do not allow statistical insignificance to limit the extent to which the MLA refers to diversity in the profession. Instruct all those who speak for the association and those who work with them to include Native Americans, Alaska Natives, Native Hawaiians, and First Nations people in their discussions about diversity. Anytime someone speaks for the MLA and lists underrepresented groups, Native Americans should be able to expect those speakers to include Native Americans.

I hope these recommendations prove useful to the association’s leaders and staff members as they consider what it means to be inclusive of Native people in policy and practice. Action on these recommendations would make the double crosses or double daggers a little easier to endure.

Works Cited

Data on Humanities Doctorate Recipients and Faculty Members by Race and Ethnicity. Modern Language Association. MLA, Apr. 2010. Web. 6 Mar. 2013. <http://www.mla.org/data_humanities>.

University of Illinois. Advertisement. “Diversity in Academe.” Chronicle of Higher Education 10 Sept. 2011: B50. Print.

Robert Warrior is professor of English and American Indian studies at the University of Illinois, Urbana. This essay appears as part of a cluster from the Committee on the Literatures of People of Color in the United States and Canada.

Posted November 2013

When W. E. B. Du Bois wrote “The Field and Function of the Negro College” in 1933, the “Negro” college, still in its youth, grappled mightily with its ability to introduce unique curricular approaches to enhance higher education in America and to help the country meet its potential as a democracy. Echoing remarks he had been making about the Negro college since 1906, Du Bois implores it to position itself on the “high ground of unfaltering facing of the Truth” (130) and to provide for the world a lens through which to interpret all history, one that looks to Africa “to interpret and understand the social development of all mankind in all ages” (125). By 1950, Du Bois’s peer, Alain Locke, in response to Harvard’s 1945 report General Education in a Free Society, had begun to argue for a new method of university education that would not only change the scope of liberal arts or general education but also use liberal arts training to change the way of intellectual thinking (268)—in other words, Locke proposed that we change not just what we study but also how we think. In an attempt to exorcise parochial thinking and to correct traditional culture bias, he proposed a methodology he termed critical relativism, which called for an evaluation of world cultural values or ideas about humanity while avoiding the two extremes inherent in such an evaluation—relativism and dogmatism. In its acknowledgment of values as relative to their culture, critical relativism would situate them in the contexts out of which they are birthed and concurrently acknowledge, with reciprocity and tolerance, the diversity of values and cultures that populate the world, all the while subjecting cultural values to objective criticism. A curriculum model grounded in critical relativism would make clear how course content from seemingly disparate disciplines and cultures connects one to another and, significantly, to the formulation and articulation of solutions to problems of the human condition and social culture. Central to the development of such solutions is an awareness of the limits of the narrow confines of the nation-state as governing or underlying concept and a corresponding commitment to require the liberally educated to imagine themselves as citizens of a world of many coequal cultures.

While Locke, as a multiculturalist and interdisciplinarian avant la lettre, envisioned the implementation of his proposed curricula for all colleges and universities, not just historically black ones, the Harvard-trained philosopher and Howard University professor was fully aware of the history of black intellectual traditions, which by necessity developed at historically black colleges and universities (HBCUs). HBCUs would lead the way to critical reforms of American higher education. Absent such transformation of liberal arts ideals, “an external dislocation in the relationship of knowledge to the problems of social culture” and “a breakdown of the culture itself,” Locke predicted, could and should be anticipated (265). After revisiting the 2010 MLA report Data on Humanities Doctorate Recipients and Faculty Members by Race and Ethnicity with an eye toward answering its call for more contextualized and textured narratives to accompany the data as text, I found myself turning, again, to Du Bois and Locke as the intermediaries through whom I might best explain the report’s acknowledgment of “the continuing prominence of HBCUs [as the undergraduate institutions] among African American doctorate recipients” (1).

A pulling back of the layers of Locke’s proposal for a core curriculum for liberal arts or general education training reveals that undergirding that proposal is a keen awareness of the significance of the humanities—which concerns itself foremost with the exploration, analysis, and exchange of ideas that inform the human experience and human condition—to the well-trained student. In the broadest interpretation of the idea of the humanities, it is impossible to completely dissociate traditional humanities disciplines from fields more interested in empirical articulations of data, despite the accepted demarcation between science and the humanities. As Cathy Davidson suggests, “The humanistic turn of mind provides the historical perspective, interpretive skill, critical analysis, and narrative form required to articulate the significance of the scientific discoveries of an era, show how they change our sense of what it means to be human, and demarcate their continuity with or difference from existing ideologies” (707). Our failure in recent years as scholars and critics to provide, with adequate integrity and saturation, the variables Davidson cites here and, conversely, the failure of the American public to understand and demand that this need be met have, in unfortunate ways, rendered Locke’s prediction of a breakdown in social culture a near foregone conclusion. More than fifty years after his caution and perhaps in an effort that seeks, at least in part, to mitigate the breakdown, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, in An Aesthetic Education in the Era of Globalization, offers a remarkably similar admonition and posits that an aesthetic education is of utmost importance in what the American education system has finally come to accept as a global era. The MLA report, Du Bois’s admonishment that the HBCU accept its role in the innovation of moral consciousness, and Locke’s curriculum proposal, especially when considered in the light of Spivak’s argument, implore us to consider again the HBCU in rethinking the humanities fields and in meeting the demands of that rethinking. At least two related questions come to mind: In what ways does the HBCU, with its commitment to fostering and extending black intellectual traditions especially, advance humanities ideas and ideals? What role does this commitment play in preparing African American undergraduates to become doctorate recipients?

The HBCU, since its inception, has been engaged simultaneously in acts of inclusion and subversion. As M. Christopher Brown and James Earl Davis indicate, “Understanding the fundamental characteristics that shape historically Black colleges serves as a framework of analysis for meaningful equity and access” and inclusion; yet, in its commitment to help the disempowered interpret and engage the “competing roles of knowledge construction, information transmission, and status allocation” (32), the HBCU participates steadily in the undermining of accepted thought as truth, especially in relation to peoples of color, and prompts us to interpret more broadly what we know and how we come to know it. Data on Humanities Doctorate Recipients and Faculty Members by Race and Ethnicity reveals that African American students who earn doctoral degrees in humanities fields (identified as English, literature, modern languages, religion, history, philosophy) are being trained at the undergraduate level overwhelmingly at HBCUs—Spelman College, Howard University, and Morehouse College being the top three. Research suggests that there is a definite correlation between higher educational aspiration and African Americans who attend HBCUs.1 Factors relevant to the correlation may include student-student interaction, which increases leadership aspirations and thus a desire for additional education, and student-faculty interaction, which Kevin Cokely suggests is the best predictor of academic self-concept among HBCU students (while GPA, Cokely asserts, is the best predictor of academic self-concept for students at traditionally white institutions). Undeniably, student-faculty interaction provides encouragement to pursue further study. It was what led me to become a professor.

Research still says little about how curriculum informs self-concept and about the relation of self-concept to educational aspiration in humanities fields and success at the doctoral level in them. Research is clear, however, that emphasizing teaching and valuing it as equal to scholarship, even valuing teaching-based scholarship, have a long-standing history at HBCUs. As Du Bois announced at the turn of the century, curricular innovation must be the hallmark if not a mandate of the HBCU, considering that dominant narratives tend to be less than forthright and inclusive in their dealings with peoples of color. At Howard and at Morgan State, for example, introductory humanities courses have been reimagined both to make evident an Africanist presence in traditional humanities texts and themes and to recognize the ways African beliefs, themes, and cultures anticipate time-honored mythologies, thus highlighting that the relation between African cultures and traditional Western ones is reciprocal at the very least. Such reimagining helps undergraduates, as early as their freshman year, understand how humanities texts teach us about ourselves and our relation to others, about values and beliefs, about creativity and democracy.

The most astute humanists consistently recognize the relation of humanistic inquiry and analysis to ideas of self and other, to ideas about what constitutes right and good, and to ideas about culture and meaning. The requirement of curricular change at the HBCU from its inception and the unrelenting tendency toward curricular innovation ever since encourage humanities departments, especially at HBCUs, to position themselves as vanguards and to prepare their students for the rigor of the multilayered exploration of texts as cultural productions. At Spelman College, the all-women’s liberal arts college that ranks highest among HBCUs as the undergraduate institution of students who go on to earn doctoral degrees in humanities fields, English majors are expected to demonstrate critical thinking about ideas and texts and understand the role of literature in the development of culture. But they must also show that they can “recognize and engage the conflicts and tensions in values and belief systems” embodied in literatures from different cultures and “examine and analyze the representations of women, especially Black women, depicted in literature and visual culture” (“English Goals”). To help meet these objectives, students are required to take the standard Introduction to Literary Studies and Introduction to Critical Theory Studies courses along with others. They are also required to take two courses in category 1, “African American and US Literature” (esp. Seminal Writers in the African American Tradition), two from category 2, “British Literature,” and two from category 3, “Gender Studies, Critical Theory, and International Literature.” This curriculum is buttressed by a required two-semester course in the African Diaspora and the World Program, which places particular emphasis “on the intersections and connections among the various communities of African descent globally” and seeks to have students “examine, interrogate and deconstruct dominant knowledge systems about Africa and its diasporas” and “identify how Africa and African diasporan communities have shaped the modern world” (“ADW”).

Students majoring in English at Howard are similarly required to take at least one course in the African American cluster (a requirement for all undergraduate students, as is the two-semester course in the African Diaspora and the World Program at Spelman) in addition to African American Literary Foundations, a course that examines representative African American literary discourses (including folk traditions) from the colonial period to the present. More than twenty courses in humanities fields with an emphasis on African American and African diaspora cultures are offered each academic year, and students take six such courses on average. In addition, many courses in African literature, Caribbean literature, and African diaspora literatures are offered regularly as electives. The department’s mission is to train its students in ways that are informed by African American and African diaspora critical strategies and intellectual discourses.

At Morehouse, in addition to traditional courses on authors like Chaucer, Milton, and Shakespeare, students can take a two-semester sequence in African American literature and single-semester courses on the Harlem Renaissance, the contemporary African American novel, the Caribbean novel, and major authors in African American literature. Like the English departments at Spelman and Howard, the Department of English at Morehouse encourages students to use their special position at an HBCU to understand ideas and concepts and their histories through texts and movements that adopt a liberal worldview informed by African diaspora traditions. Most English departments would argue that they too embrace the aim of fostering in their majors “an abiding appreciation of world literatures and cultures” and of providing them with the intercultural skills “necessary to succeed in advanced studies in the humanities” (“Department”), but there persists among these HBCUs a distinctive commitment to a culturally responsive pedagogy that aggressively expands the Western world’s values, literatures, and cultures to include those from classical and modern African and African diaspora civilizations. The logical (even if only anecdotal) by-product of this commitment is the development of a self-identity rooted in black intellectual traditions that are at once expansive and inclusive and confined and unique. In the best of circumstances, students are exposed to a range of global traditions and texts that transmit both culturally specific and universally applicable humanistic heritages. The goal of the core courses in the Humanities Division curriculum at Howard, for example, is to help students feel at home with all peoples of the world. Plato’s and Socrates’s inquiries about morality and the greatest good are contextualized among wisdom literature of classical African civilizations. Mephistopheles’s role in Goethe’s Faust is read through the lens of the African trickster, and Faust’s lament that two souls live within him is considered alongside Du Boisian double consciousness. A broad base of knowledge about the world and its cultures and the awareness of being heirs to this intellectual and cultural genealogy create in students a self-definition informed by their traditions and heritages and a confidence that abides with them under circumstances good and bad. They understand fully, through theory and practice, the significance of graduate study’s contribution to knowledge production—its project of making critical interventions in traditional and nontraditional spaces alike. They survive graduate school and go at a pace comparable to that of their white peers: “only African American and white doctorate recipients show completion rates over 50% at year 10” (Data 1–2). Although African Americans received less than 5% of total doctorates earned in English between 1997 and 2006 (table 3b), in 2003–04 they found tenure-track placements in English departments at the high rate of 73.9% (table 4) and earned competitive salaries (table 8). Finally, more than 80% reported that they were either “very satisfied” or “somewhat satisfied” in their roles as humanities faculty members (table 12).

As the 2007 report “Affirmative Activism” (published in Profession [ADE Ad Hoc Committee]) and 2010 report Data on Humanities Doctorate Recipients and Faculty Members by Race and Ethnicity make clear, there is much work to be done to increase the pitifully low number of African American faculty members in English. The cluster of essays “African Americans and the Doctorate in English” in the fall 2006 ADE Bulletin offers meaningful suggestions that speak candidly of possible solutions. Like my colleagues, I recognize that the HBCU is a vital source for feeding the pipeline of African American faculty members in humanities fields, English in particular. We would agree, however, that the HBCU is no panacea for a problem deeply rooted in historically practiced institutional and cultural discriminatory customs within the profession and without. So when Doug Steward astutely notes that there are stories the data do not index about the “pathways by which black Americans enter and succeed in, or walk away from, advanced study in English” (33), we should consider that among those stories are those that remind us that content matters, that what we know and how we come to know it are as meaningful as what we do with what we know and who we are.

Conversations about curriculum in which broad-reaching, full engagement with African diaspora traditions is posited as a saving grace (as Locke posits it) and in which acknowledgment is made of these traditions (as Du Bois makes it) as critical to enhancing the ways we think of ourselves in relation to the world might be seen by some as divisive. But as Wole Soyinka argues in Of Africa, the query, What is Africa? is best answered in the negative: “it is not a hegemonic construct, nor one that aspires to be” (24). So the approach by HBCUs to African diaspora studies tends to avoid fictionalized representations of the continent and to deconstruct the histories that emerge to perpetuate them. Their approach avoids imposing oppression or suppression on its methodology. Instead, HBCUs seek to expand the “existing boundaries of apprehension, one that transcends the mere cataloguing of external phenomena and attempts to delve into the nature of others, emerging (hopefully) with enhanced knowledge of one’s self and place in an enlarged and more complex universe” (Soyinka 35). Using texts to explore solutions to problems of the human condition and expand our view of the world and our relation to it is what these top HBCUs and other peer institutions have in common with the humanities. In fact, it’s their shared “field and function.”

Note

1. See especially Wenglinsky for commentary on the influence of HBCUs on educational aspiration. ↩

Works Cited

ADE Ad Hoc Committee on the Status of African American Faculty Members. “Affirmative Activism.” Profession (2007): 150–55. Print.

“ADW Creates Global Citizens (Continued).” Academics: Majors and Programs. Spelman College. Spelman Coll., n.d. Web. 24 July 2013. <http://www.spelman.edu/academics/majors-and-programs/african-diaspora-the-world/african-diaspora-the-world-(continued)>.

Brown, M. Christopher, and James Earl Davis. “The Historically Black College as Social Contract, Social Capital, and Social Equalizer.” Peabody Journal of Education 76.1 (2001): 31–49. Print.

Cokely, Kevin. “The Impact of College Racial Composition on African American Students’ Academic Self-Concept: A Replication and Extension.” Journal of Negro Education 71.4 (2002): 288–96. Print.

Data on Humanities Doctorate Recipients and Faculty Members by Race and Ethnicity. Modern Language Association. MLA, Apr. 2010. Web. 6 Mar. 2013. <http://www.mla.org/data_humanities>.

Davidson, Cathy N. “Humanities 2.0: Promise, Perils, Predictions.” PMLA 123.3 (2008): 707–17. Print.

“Department of English.” Morehouse College. Morehouse Coll., n.d. Web. 24 July 2013. <https://www.morehouse.edu/academics/eng/>.

Du Bois, W. E. B. “The Field and Function of the Negro College.” The Education of Black People: Ten Critiques, 1906–1960. Rev. ed. Ed. Herbert Aptheker. New York: Monthly Rev., 2001. 111–33. Print.

“English Goals and Objectives.” Academics: Majors and Programs. Spelman College. Spelman Coll., n.d. Web. 24 July 2013. <http://www.spelman.edu/academics/majors-and-programs/english/goals-and-objectives>.

Locke, Alain L. The Philosophy of Alain Locke: Harlem Renaissance and Beyond. Ed. Leonard Harris. Philadelphia: Temple UP, 1989. Print.

Soyinka, Wole. Of Africa. New Haven: Yale UP, 2012. Print.

Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. An Aesthetic Education in the Era of Globalization. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2012. Print.

Steward, Doug. “The Status of African American Faculty Members in English.” ADE Bulletin 140 (2006): 32–34. Web. 23 July 2013.

Wenglinsky, Harold H. “The Educational Justification of Historically Black Colleges and Universities: A Policy Response to the U.S. Supreme Court.” Educational and Evaluation and Policy Analysis 18.1 (1996): 91–103. Print.

Dana A. Williams is professor of English and chair of the Department of English at Howard University. This essay appears as part of a cluster from the Committee on the Literatures of People of Color in the United States and Canada.

Posted November 2013

Half a century ago—at a forum on nationalism, colonialism, and United States foreign policy—James Baldwin cautioned, “We are misled here, because we think of numbers. You don’t need numbers; you need passion” (12–13). I am grateful to Frances R. Aparicio, Ifeoma Kiddoe Nwankwo, Richard T. Rodríguez, Robert Warrior, and Dana A. Williams for the thoughtful passion that they bring to their responses to the report on available data on faculty members of color in English and foreign languages, where I note that numbers do not speak for themselves but call out for interpretation and narrative frameworks. Baldwin did not think terribly interesting the hypothetical day on which an African American would become president, but he did think we needed to realize that “no other country in the world has been so fat and so sleek, and so safe, and so happy, and so irresponsible, and so dead” (10). I doubt that he would think differently today, when the United States has an African American president but also, in Michelle Alexander’s words, “imprisons a larger percentage of its black population than South Africa did at the height of apartheid” (6). That Baldwin no doubt meant the term passion to resonate with its Christian usage, as he so often did, suggests that we need to pass through a difficult trial that will strip us of the complacency Baldwin saw around him. The point is compelling, but I think, too, that in the bureaucratic terms that govern our lives nowadays, we are not misled to think that we need some numbers. Baldwin meant that numbers could be compensatory tokens, in the dismissive sense, but numbers can also be exchangeable currency in a bureaucratic economy. Humanists are widely suspicious of many of the numbers industries, and this suspicion finds fine, subtle form here in Warrior’s contribution. But data can give an advocacy campaign some common currency to spend in answering opposition that proceeds from different premises. Faculty members might find that they do not share the priorities and premises of their upper administration, for instance. But then the question becomes, Can they move the conversation to a place where they share some facts, where they agree on some data points? It’s my hope that the data report clears such a conversational space for those who seek it and that they will find in that clearing a more secure footing from which to leverage their institutions.

By way of update to the report, I draw attention to the supplement from the American Council on Education (ACE), Minorities in Higher Education. I am heartened to say that these findings are not wholly dispiriting, but most of them are no cause for celebration. For instance, the report finds generally that “[t]he younger generation in the United States no longer achieves a much higher level of education than its predecessors. . . . Only two groups, Asian Americans and whites, made notable gains over their elders. . . . No gains were observed for African Americans and Hispanics. . . . For American Indians . . . attainment rates for young adults were lower than their older counterparts” (Kim 1). “Young Asian Americans marked the highest rate of college enrollment (63 percent) in 2009, while American Indians registered the lowest rate (23 percent)” (2). The gender breakdowns continue to show stagnant or even bad news for men of color: “[Y]oung racial/ethnic minority men, except Asian Americans, have fallen behind their predecessors in postsecondary attainment,” and “African Americans and Hispanics showed the largest gender gaps in college enrollment rates” (1, 2). Unfortunately, these data show a lack of progress toward equity.

The news is better if we turn our attention toward graduate education, which is where the MLA has directed several of its efforts through the work of groups such as the ADE Ad Hoc Committee on the Status of African Americans in the Profession and the Group for Underrepresented Students in Humanities Education and Research, which began as an MLA project and has since migrated to other institutions. The ACE supplement finds that “[b]etween 1998 and 2008, the total number of master’s and doctoral degrees conferred rose by 51 percent and 30 percent, respectively. At each of these levels, the growth in degrees conferred is attributable largely to minorities. Their gains are notable especially at the master’s degree level, where the number of degrees conferred to students of color nearly doubled” (Kim 3). This information is encouraging for graduate education in English when we consider that about sixty percent of Hispanic and about seventy percent of black PhD recipients in English find tenure-track jobs in their first year on the market, while the overall rate is less than fifty percent (MLA Survey, table 2). However, the MLA Survey of Placement of 2006–07 Graduates from Doctoral Programs in the United States and Canada shows the rate of placement to tenure-track positions is very uneven across ethnicities and across English and foreign language fields, and the statistical difficulties of very low numbers that Warrior so eloquently discusses are evident: with only three American Indian graduates in English and two in foreign languages represented among the 2006–07 PhD recipients, the percentage values are on a different order of magnitude.

In Reading Machines, Stephen Ramsay suggests, “The scientist is right to say that the plural of anecdote is not data, but in literary criticism an abundance of anecdote is precisely what allows discussion and debate to move forward” (9). In this spirit, I close by quoting Valerie Lee, of Ohio State University, on the usefulness of quantitative data on and for faculty members in the humanities:

We care about individuals, their unique characteristics and motivations, etc., but if we tried to understand phenomena in terms of unique, individual causal factors, we could not predict, shape or change our world. By analyzing quantitative data, we are able to transcend individual or randomly-distributed factors to recognize patterns and relationships among observations. These relationships inform our understanding of processes and outcomes.

Works Cited

Alexander, Michelle. The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness. New York: New, 2010. E-book. Kindle ed.

Baldwin, James. “From Nationalism, Colonialism, and the United States: One Minute to Twelve—A Forum.” The Cross of Redemption: Uncollected Writings. New York: Pantheon, 2010. 10–18. E-book. Kindle ed.

Kim, Young M. Minorities in Higher Education: Twenty-Fourth Status Report: 2011 Supplement. University of California, Santa Cruz. Amer. Council on Educ., Oct. 2011. Web. 9 Aug. 2013. <http://diversity.ucsc.edu/resources/images/ace_report.pdf>.

Lee, Valerie. Message to the author. 13 Oct. 2011. E-mail.

MLA Survey of Placement of 2006–07 Graduates from Doctoral Programs in the United States and Canada. Modern Language Association. MLA, Dec. 2011. Web. 9 Aug. 2013. <http://www.mla.org/pdf/survey_phdplacement_0607.pdf>.

Ramsay, Stephen. Reading Machines: Toward an Algorithmic Criticism. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 2011. Print.

Doug Steward is associate director of programs and of the Association of Departments of English at the MLA. This essay appears as part of a cluster from the Committee on the Literatures of People of Color in the United States and Canada.

Posted November 2013

The 2013 MLA convention in Boston featured the first Presidential Forum panel consisting entirely of faculty members off the tenure track. “Avenues of Access: Non-Tenure-Track Faculty Members and American Higher Education” sought to put non-tenure-track (NTT) faculty issues front and center at the MLA convention, both for MLA members and for the national higher education press. The MLA had not neglected these issues beforehand—on the contrary, it had taken the lead, among scholarly organizations, in collecting data on the employment conditions of college faculty members and issuing guidelines and recommendations for their working conditions on and off the tenure track. But as we learned over the course of my presidential year, those guidelines and recommendations are still insufficiently disseminated and understood; and of course their implementation and enforcement can be undertaken only at the local level, at individual institutions. Still, the MLA believes that part of its mission is to address and try to improve the working conditions of faculty members teaching off the tenure track, not only because so many in English and the modern languages are doing so but also, and more simply, because it is the right thing to do.

Josh Boldt’s essay, “Free-Market Faculty Members,” opens with a chilling report of a contingent faculty member teaching at two institutions and learning, only one week before the start of the term, that his only assigned class at one of those institutions had been canceled. “What bothers me,” writes the anonymous faculty member, “is that no one had the decency to tell me that my only section was being cancelled.” Here, the job loss is understandable; what is inconceivable—and unforgivable—is the affront to professional dignity.

This story has become part of Boldt’s Adjunct Project, a grassroots (and social-media-driven) attempt to crowdsource information about the working conditions of contingent faculty members nationwide. Boldt began the Adjunct Project on learning of the 2012–13 MLA recommendation (which has since been updated) that NTT faculty members be paid at least $6,920 for each standard, three-credit, semester-long course, and the project went viral; it has since been picked up by the Chronicle of Higher Education, and insofar as the project allows (or, better, encourages) all faculty members to share information (anonymously) about salary, benefits, governance, and policy, Boldt suggests that it might contribute to “a new era of strength and solidarity for university faculty members.” Together with the MLA’s Academic Workforce Data Center, which serves a similar purpose while providing national data from 1995 and 2009 for every institution of higher education in the United States, Adjunct Project 2.0 invites contingent faculty members—who usually cannot speak about their working conditions for fear of losing their jobs—to create a collective voice and become a national force.

Maria Maisto’s essay, “Addressing the Scarlet A: Adjuncts and the Academy,” offers strategies for contesting the representation of contingent faculty members as less competent and talented than their tenure-track and tenured colleagues. As Maisto acknowledges, when people find out about the staffing ratios at many colleges, they are likely to respond in ways that reinforce neoliberal student-as-consumer rhetoric: “So you mean I’m paying for steak and getting hamburger?” It is an understandable, if regrettable, reaction: for twenty years, tuition has been skyrocketing even as faculty salaries remain stagnant and the ranks of underpaid contingent faculty members expand. What am I getting for my money? seems an appropriate question, and few students or parents are pleased to hear, You are getting more administrative positions, athletic facilities, sponsored-research buildings, and student-life amenities. Maisto’s reply is deft: “No, you are getting steak, but you need to call the health department, known as accreditors in higher education, to expose colleges’ lack of safe food-handling practices.” The point, of course, is not that contingent faculty members can give you salmonella or E. coli poisoning but that the academy is not observing what should be basic industry standards for its employees. In that respect, institutions of American higher education are behaving like many other post-Fordist employers.

Maisto wittily adduces a contrasting example of a post-Fordist employer: the National Football League, which hired replacement referees during the lockout that ran from June through September 2012. That labor dispute produced the usual competing narratives: the referees insisted that the league had planned to hire replacements all along (jeopardizing the integrity of the game, as they saw it), and the league maintained that it had negotiated the collective bargaining agreement in good faith. Unlike most labor disputes, however, the NFL referee lockout was resolved partly because it became painfully obvious that the replacement referees were unable to do their jobs. That kind of manifest professional incompetence can’t be found in the work of contingent faculty members, because they are real faculty members; they’re just not treated like real faculty members. Maisto thus urges all faculty members—tenured and nontenured—to inform themselves about unemployment insurance policies at their institutions and to become literate in the distinction between exempt and nonexempt employees under the Fair Labor Standards Act. Additionally, all should be vigilant about the possibility that institutions may cut back the hours of contingent faculty members to avoid having to provide them with health insurance under the Affordable Care Act.

Beth Landers reminds us, however, drawing on experience at her former institution (she now has moved to a tenure-track position) and with the MLA Committee on Contingent Labor in the Profession (CLIP), that even in the context of national politics all policy is local: treatment of contingent faculty members varies widely from institution to institution, precisely because the contingent labor markets, unlike the tenure-track system, are local. The difficulties Landers and other committee members encountered reflect my own experience with NTT issues: the well-meaning desire that contingent positions be decreased in favor of more tenure-track hires runs into the stubborn reality that the faculty members in those contingent positions will not be considered for the new tenure-track jobs and may resist the otherwise unimpeachable change in policy; the well-meaning desire that all contingent faculty members be converted to the tenure track runs into the stubborn reality that many contingent faculty members hold the MA as their highest degree and may resist the idea that they have to complete a doctoral program in order to be rehired at their current institutions; and the well-meaning desire that all part-time positions be converted to full-time positions runs into the stubborn reality of contingent faculty members who report not wanting to teach full-time.

The experience of Landers on CLIP leads her in two directions: nationally, to “make contact with accrediting agencies in hopes of encouraging them to take academic staffing practices into consideration during the accreditation process”; locally, to improve the university system in Missouri, where she taught at the time she presented her paper. Over the past ten years, the Missouri system has been reviewed and overhauled by the Interfaculty Council of the four Missouri campuses and Deborah Noble-Triplett, assistant vice president for academic affairs. That review-overhaul resulted in what I might call (with some hesitation) a new form of benevolent bureaucracy for NTT faculty members in the University of Missouri system: NTT faculty members were assigned to four promotable ranks (where none had existed before): research, teaching, clinical, and extension. In the teaching track, where most humanities NTT faculty members reside, there are protocols for promotion from assistant teaching professor to associate teaching professor to teaching professor. Landers acknowledges that “the NTT titling system re-creates the hierarchy that exists in the tenure system [and] is unattractive to some NTT faculty members, who found the former lack of hierarchy to be more collegial”; on the other hand, instituting a review process for NTT faculty members can enhance the professionalization of positions that are too often created ad hoc, without any significant institutional forms of peer review. Moreover, Landers reports, the new system had unexpected advantages with regard to benefits. “Almost immediately,” she writes, “the definition of faculty became more inclusive. When the Missouri system instituted paid family and medical leaves for faculty members in 2008, both those who were on the tenure track and those who were not were covered by the provision.”

Robert Samuels rounds off the forum with a comprehensive, ambitious proposal for American higher education. Opening with the claim that “[t]he problems facing higher education cannot be resolved in a piecemeal or institution-by-institution process,” he proceeds to set forth an overhaul of the entire funding system at the national level. The foundation of his proposal involves making all public higher education free. It sounds utopian—and, like all utopias, thoroughly unrealistic—until Samuels does the math, whereupon it becomes clear that a $128 billion federal subsidy for public higher education would actually constitute a savings compared with the $35 billion we now spend on Pell grants and the $104 billion we spend on student loans, not to mention the $40 billion in lost revenue due to tax subsidies and credits. “[R]eplacing the current mix of financial aid, institutional aid, tax subsidies, and grants with direct funding for public institutions,” Samuels argues, “would give the government a way to control costs at both public and private universities and colleges.” Of course, it would give the government a way to control costs that seems directly at odds with what the Obama administration has in mind when officials (including Obama himself) address themselves to higher education: reduction in labor costs—in other words, cuts to the faculty. Under a Samuels administration, by contrast, the University of California system would be extrapolated nationwide, not only because “this system is known to have the best contract and compensation structure for non-tenure-track faculty members in the United States” but also, and more broadly, because such a national system “would increase the pay and job security for most teachers in United States higher education—yet it would be less expensive than the current haphazard use of graduate students, part-time teachers, and research professors.” That such a system is unrealistic—it is extremely unlikely to be adopted by any administration currently conceivable in the landscape of American politics—is not a principled argument against it with regard either to justice or to efficiency. One is tempted to brush off the old Situationist slogan and conclude that Samuels’s plan asks us to be realistic and demand the affordable.

My thanks to all these colleagues for their work, in this forum and in American higher education at large.

Michael Bérubé is Edwin Erle Sparks Professor of Literature and director of the Institute for the Arts and Humanities at Penn State University, University Park, and a past president of the Modern Language Association.

Posted October 2013

The following story was posted on the Chronicle of Higher Education’s Adjunct Project Web site by an adjunct who identifies himself only as dancesintheruins, for fear of retribution by his institution:

I’ve been teaching at two institutions for a few years. I’ve had four classes every term for that entire time; either two at each institution, or three at one and one at the other. Some terms I taught as many as six sections, which I discovered was more than I could take on. Just bought a house not too long ago. For the coming term, however, both institutions offered me only one section, citing “terribly low enrollment.”

The term begins this week for one institution, next week for the other. While trying to get ready for the term beginning next week, I looked up my room assignment and saw the word “cancelled” next to the only section I had been assigned.

I understand that as adjuncts we are at the mercy of forces beyond our control and beyond the control of our department chairs. I understand that I should have seen this day coming—and maybe I did. What bothers me is that no one had the decency to tell me that my only section was being cancelled.

This professor learned that he was unemployed a week before classes started, and no one had even bothered to tell him! It would be nice to dismiss the incident as isolated, but this kind of thing is happening at colleges all over the country. People are being treated with complete disregard because of the corporate university model, which places money above all else.

The new career track for university faculty members is that of the disposable professor. As we rely more and more on adjunct labor, we slowly surrender our power on college campuses. Contingent faculty members are powerless. Replaceable. No tenure, no bargaining rights, no contract, no voice. Adjuncts—who are faculty members—become products for consumption in this new free-market university economy that, like the free-market business economy, places the bottom line above all else.

What effect does this powerlessness have on important concepts like academic integrity and freedom?

Introducing the Free-Market Educational Economy

With the rise of massive open online courses (MOOCs) and other new educational entrepreneur programs, the integrity of American higher education is at risk. To be clear, I do see value in some of these developments, but only if we professors take an interest in their implementation. We must monitor their progress and push back when we see that the free market of educational entrepreneurship begins to compromise the integrity of the systems and of the people it purports to advance.

Because compromising is what the free market does. Regardless of any benevolent intentions, when it becomes all about making money and when a product enters the cutthroat world of pinching pennies to beat a competitor, it’s easy to toss integrity out the window. It’s easy to cut corners and compromise best practices to outmatch one’s opponent, which is essentially the definition of free-market competition.

Adjuncts have seen this kind of competitive compromise for a couple decades now—been the victims of it, that is. To stay competitive in a global education market, especially when the federal government is cutting funding left and right, university administrators have had to make some difficult decisions. Unfortunately, the easiest way to control costs is to cut the labor budget. Because it’s easy, many leaders often mistakenly take this path, at the expense of morale and productivity. Labor will accept these cuts, but only to a certain point.

Up until the past year or two, we adjuncts have accepted cuts and subpar working conditions for the good of the company, so to speak. We have continued to teach because we care about it and know that someone has to do it. And we have persevered through the meager pay, the removal of benefits, the layoffs, the cutbacks, because we believe in the system and want our students and our educational system to succeed. So we have listened quietly to the reasons given explaining why we lost a class or why we won’t be eligible for health insurance this semester. But, as you may have noticed, labor is beginning to get restless. Those of us working off the tenure track love what we do, but it’s time we start making a living doing it.

My “it’s time” is not a threat but a call to action. In no way do I mean to suggest that the nontenured are in some kind of competition with the tenured. Sometimes we forget that and get caught up in a false “us versus them” dichotomy, to which I refuse to adhere. There is no zero-sum game that takes from one to give to the other. Sometimes it is framed that way, but this framing is by design. Be careful not to fall into that trap of thinking.

Tenured and nontenured faculty members have been working together for years toward building a more equitable and sustainable future for all of us, and that collaborative spirit has continued with the growth of the Adjunct Project. Tenured professors like Seth Kahn, of West Chester University, have devoted themselves to this cause and demonstrated that helping one another helps us all.

Nor do I wish, despite some of my rhetoric, to threaten administrators. I know times are tough and budgets must be balanced, and I don’t have any illusions about the difficulty of that task. All I am suggesting is that using the labor budget as the first line of defense against making cuts is destructive. We need to find other ways. We adjuncts have begun to work on finding them.

Paulo Freire writes that “it is the great humanistic and historical task of the oppressed to liberate themselves and their oppressors as well. Only power that springs from the weakness of the oppressed will be sufficiently strong to free both” (44). Unfortunately, things won’t change without pressure from below, but this is a process—a negotiation—and everyone can walk away satisfied. There is now a critical mass of faculty members who are interested in finding these answers. Freire again: “When they discover within themselves the yearning . . . they perceive that this yearning can be transformed into reality only when the same yearning is aroused in their comrades” (47).

This yearning in my adjunct colleagues has taken root in the study I developed known as the Adjunct Project, which I designed to gather information on this shift toward the commodification of the faculty. The data from the project are entirely crowdsourced. That is, they were gathered collaboratively as adjuncts entered information about working conditions at their respective colleges on a live Google document. To date, over two thousand entries have been added, and the document has been viewed close to two hundred thousand times.1 Here I explore the Adjunct Project’s data, as well as a look at the ramifications that data might have on future discussions of the university’s precarious status as a commodity of the free-market economy.

Adjunct Project Background

According to the American Association of University Professors’ latest report on the economic status of the profession, more than 70% of American professors are now off the tenure track (It’s Not Over Yet). In other words, almost three-fourths of higher education faculty members are employed in untenured—tenuous—positions, having no job security and no voice. Most work for unlivable salaries and receive no health insurance, no retirement contribution, or any other benefits commonly associated with professional jobs in the United States. And each year it’s getting worse. Non-tenure-track appointments climbed 7.6% in recent years alone (It’s Not Over 7). The profession of college professor is becoming less and less sustainable.

But we all know that; it’s old news. The question I ask you now is, How do we fix it?

This trend is not going to reverse on its own. It took me only one year as an adjunct, during which I observed the warning signs and witnessed the mistreatment of my adjunct colleagues across the country, to recognize that something needs to change. Stopping a pattern this pervasive will not be easy. It requires a collaborative effort, consisting of discussion, data collection, and action.

In late January 2012, I was invited to attend a summit meeting in Washington, DC, hosted by the New Faculty Majority (NFM), a national coalition dedicated to “improving the quality of higher education by advancing professional equity and securing academic freedom for all adjunct and contingent faculty” (“NFM Mission”). It was at this summit meeting that I first met Michael Bérubé and Maria Maisto. I was to cover the weekend on Twitter and on my Web site (“NFM ’12 Post Two”).

After the summit, I returned home to Georgia pondering the problem of how to connect adjuncts both nationally and locally. A large component of this problem is the relative invisibility of adjuncts. Because adjuncts are often prohibited from participating in departmental meetings and governance, they rarely have an opportunity to connect with one another or with their department. On top of that, many teach at more than one school to piece together a living, so they aren’t able to spend much time on any one campus socializing. Finally, like dancesintheruins, adjuncts are afraid to become visible or to speak up because their jobs almost always depend on keeping quiet and doing as they’re told.

Finally, I came up with an idea I thought would address these issues of subalternity, disconnectedness, and anonymity: to create a collaborative Google document that would be completely open and editable for anyone who viewed it (Boldt, “Crowdsourcing”). I would crowdsource information that had been swept under the rug for decades (pay, benefits, contracts, etc.) by asking the adjuncts themselves to report it. No one knows a person’s working conditions better than the one who lives them every day. I set up the document as a Google spreadsheet, entered my own information for adjunct conditions at the University of Georgia (which, incidentally, are quite good compared with those of most schools), and began sharing. When I created the spreadsheet, I remember thinking how great it would be if we could get a sampling of one to two hundred different schools.

To my surprise, the response was overwhelming. Within a week we had crossed the thousand mark. It was strikingly clear that adjuncts across the country were eager for a data repository such as this one. Social media fueled the spreadsheet’s rapid expansion; people wanted to add their schools and to see how they compared with others.

We know now, based on the data gleaned from the spreadsheet, that the national average for instructor pay is less than $3,000 per course. In many cases, it is far less: a quick scan of the spreadsheet reveals that there are adjuncts who earn closer to $2,000. Calculating these per-course pay rates annually exposes the stark reality that the average adjunct who teaches a 5/5 course load is barely earning $20,000 a year. And that’s without health insurance or a retirement package.

Free Market and Loss of Bargaining Power

The data gleaned from the Adjunct Project indicate that the university faculty labor system is headed in the same direction as mainstream, profit-driven business culture—toward free-market competition. People—teachers—matter only to the extent that they possess an exchange value. Most colleges will release fully employed adjuncts heedlessly, even if the adjuncts have garnered stellar teaching evaluations. I have seen it happen. I’ve talked to adjuncts who lost their jobs with less than a week’s notice and no severance.

In this new free-market faculty model, which necessitates the exploitation of human capital, we are presented with an obvious problem to any department that relies heavily on adjunct labor—a department of English or other languages, for example. The whole department’s existence is subjected to the mercy of market forces and to the budget in a way that is not true for departments with mostly tenured faculty members.

The rise of MOOCs and of other forms of online learning poses a serious threat to the preservation of departments that are not made up mostly of tenured faculty members, because MOOCs capitalize on the vulnerability of faculty members entering this free market of educational entrepreneurship. If an entire department can be cut and replaced by a MOOC or absorbed by other departments under the guise of writing-intensive or cross-disciplinary composition, it will eventually happen. When that time comes, if 75% (or more) of the department is made up of adjuncts, there will be nothing anyone can do about it. By allowing our departments to be staffed contingently, we become complicit in their dismantling.

Beyond that, running a department full of underpaid and exploited adjuncts is really just a disgraceful business model. The new composition department, for example, might as well be a temp agency. It’s time to stop it and take back our departments and our dignity and to show some respect to our teaching colleagues.

The first step toward turning this trend is to demand contracts for our faculty members. We should never accept or offer anything less than an annual contract. Contract length should rise with seniority—one year, then three, five, and so on. Adjuncts are professionals, so they should not have to reapply for their jobs every semester and wonder whether they will be able to pay their rent in January.

The other part of the equation is simple. Adjuncts should be paid a living wage in exchange for their work. In the past, most adjuncts were otherwise employed and taught one or two classes to supplement that income, but not now. If universities are going to employ adjuncts with a full-time course load, those adjuncts should be paid accordingly. Again, it’s time to stop pretending that these people are receiving a living wage.

The MLA has recommended $7,090 for every semester-long course (“MLA Recommendation”), which is more than double the national average, according to the Adjunct Project data. Clearly, adjunct pay will vary according to region, cost of living, and institution, but there is no excuse for any school to pay an adjunct less than $4,000 per course.

What Happens If the Precariousness Continues?

Some statistics taken from the Adjunct Project give an idea of how bad things are getting.

• English departments. Almost two-thirds of all the respondents listed their department as English, composition, writing, humanities, or some variation of these fields—well over a thousand entries. The next most cited department is sociology, with about a hundred.
• Lack of contract. Only 86 people out of 1,891 said that they have a contract longer than one semester or term. In other words, over 95% of the adjuncts who participated in the project are working with basically no contract.
• Average pay. The figure of $2,900 per course is skewed slightly by a few of the high-paying outliers, but even taking that into consideration, average pay for a 5/5 course load is less than $30,000 a year. Keep in mind that the MLA recommends more than double that.
• Health insurance. Just 318 out of the 1,891 respondents have health insurance either immediately or eventually. So about 83% of respondents indicated that they do not have health insurance through their employer.

English departments are by far the worst offenders in the exploitation of adjunct professors. To make matters worse, we English departments have created for ourselves a workforce that has no security and no long-term future, thus we have effectively built on a foundation of sand and have zero bargaining power in the university economy.

The MLA has taken steps in the right direction. The recommendations, this forum—all good things. The Chronicle of Higher Education has also begun to get involved in the cause. We have collaborated on the development of an Adjunct Project 2.0 that takes the data to a whole new level, making them searchable and sortable.

The point is that we are building toward something here: a new era of strength and solidarity for university faculty members. We’ve taken some good steps. Now we need to advance beyond the dialogue and start making changes.

Can we turn this trend around? Yes, we can. I don’t pretend to be an expert in university politics or in collective bargaining—I’ve never participated in either. In fact, as you may know, this is only my third year as an adjunct. I am new to the system, but I can tell you what I have observed and that if something doesn’t change, our departments are going to end up in serious trouble. I can tell you that universities are looking to save money every way possible in this new economy, which includes cutting entire departments, absorbing them into other disciplines, or replacing them with cheaper online alternatives. Finally, I can tell you, on the basis of data from the Adjunct Project, that thousands of our colleagues are being mistreated and exploited as victims of the encroaching free market and that this mistreatment threatens not only adjuncts but entire departments.

The key to solving this crisis of faculty labor is collaboration, as we have seen with the Adjunct Project. Thousands of adjuncts and their tenured colleagues have joined together to declare that the situation is not acceptable. One might not expect tenured faculty members to support the project, considering the rhetoric that often pits full-time professors against part-time professors, but the game is not zero-sum. Arguments espousing that logic are merely propagating the “divide and conquer” method of dominating faculty politics.

Faculty members have a common interest, the pursuit and the sharing of knowledge, so a threat to one of us is a threat to all of us. The Adjunct Project has opened an international forum for discussion, and that forum welcomes anyone who is interested in joining it—tenured and nontenured alike.

Notes

This essay is based on my “First-Year Commodity: The Adjunct Professor Labor Crisis in Composition Departments”; Order of Education; Order of Educ., 19 Oct. 2012; Web; 22 July 1013; <http://www.orderofeducation.com/first-year-commodity-the-adjunct-professor-labor-crisis-in-composition-departments/>.

1. These and other figures were accurate at the time of the MLA convention in January 2013. ↩

Works Cited

Boldt, Joshua A. “Crowdsourcing a Compilation of Adjunct Working Conditions.” Order of Education. Order of Educ., 2 Feb. 2012. Web. 15 May 2013. <http://www.orderofeducation.com/crowdsourcing-a-compilation-of-adjunct-working-conditions/>.

———. “NFM ’12 Post Two: Stop Looking for the Treasure Map, and Start Laying Bricks.” Order of Education. Order of Educ., 29 Jan. 2012. Web. 16 July 2013. <http://www.orderofeducation.com/nfm-12-post-two-stop-looking-for-the-treasure-map-and-start-laying-bricks/>.

Dancesintheruins. “Flash Tales.” Adjunct Project. Adjunct Project, 27 Mar. 2012. Web. 16 July 2013. <http://www.adjunctproject.com/flash-tales/>.

Freire, Paulo. Pedagogy of the Oppressed. New York: Continuum, 1970. Print.

It’s Not Over Yet: The Annual Report on the Economic Status of the Profession, 2010–2011. American Association of University Professors. AAUP, n.d. Web. 15 May 2013. <http://www.aaup.org/sites/default/app/uploads/sites/3/2010-11-Economic-Status-Report.pdf>.

“MLA Recommendation on Minimum Per-Course Compensation for Part-Time Faculty Members.” Modern Language Association. MLA, Apr. 2013. Web. 16 July 2013. <http://www.mla.org/mla_recommendation_course>.

“NFM Mission.” New Faculty Majority. New Faculty Majority, n.d. Web. 16 July 2013. <http://www.newfacultymajority.info/equity/learn-about-the-issues/mission-a-identity/nfm-mission-statement>.

Joshua A. Boldt is instructor of English at the University of Georgia. A version of this paper was presented at the 2013 MLA convention in Boston.

Posted October 2013

From June 2009 to June 2012 I served on the MLA Committee on Contingent Labor in the Profession (CLIP), chairing the committee during my last year. One of the greatest benefits of working on a professional committee of this sort is the opportunity to learn about the profession as a whole, beyond one’s own experience in specific appointments and institutions. Before I served on the CLIP committee, my beliefs about contingent labor had been formed while I taught French in a full-time non-tenure-track (NTT) position at a public university in the Midwest. Some of these beliefs were confirmed during the committee’s work, but I had to revise many of my assumptions as the committee studied national data and grappled with the diversity of experiences in higher education. I came away with a better understanding of what a voluntary membership organization like the MLA can and cannot accomplish on behalf of its members. While the MLA can collect and disseminate information at a national level and advocate certain professional norms, it became clear to me that tangible improvements to contingent employment in departments of English and modern foreign languages could be implemented only at the local level. Accordingly, in this essay I share national perspectives gained from three years of MLA committee work, then present a local illustration of employment practices in the university system where I worked for ten years.

The Committee on Contingent Labor in the Profession was created by the Executive Council in 2009 at the request of the Delegate Assembly of the MLA, and it was constituted through the year 2014, when it is certain to be renewed for a second term. The committee was charged with considering a range of issues, collecting information, and organizing convention sessions and publications regarding NTT faculty members and the departments that employ them. Four years after its inception, I can report that the committee has in fact done all of the above, but from the beginning it was not easy to decide what initiatives to pursue, nor was it obvious what actions would have the most positive influence on the profession.

Institutions of higher education across the United States are extremely diverse, and this diversity was reflected in the selection of our committee. The initial eight people were tenured and nontenured and worked both full- and part-time as instructors and administrators in departments of English and foreign languages. The committee included faculty members from a community college, from top-tier and middle-tier public research universities, from a large private university and a small liberal arts college. Some of us worked in unionized settings, and some did not. We had one Canadian member. There was only one way in which we were not diverse: we had all come through PhD programs. Two of us were ABD in 2009, and the rest held PhDs, whereas national demographics show that only about half of all faculty members in higher education hold the PhD. Most faculty members are now NTT and hold terminal MAs or other degrees (2004 National Study of Postsecondary Faculty [qtd. in Laurence]).

That we came from different institutions and appointments was immediately apparent as committee members introduced themselves and spoke about their working lives and concerns. We each had a different vocabulary: our Canadian colleague talked about “sessional faculty,” and the titles lecturer and adjunct carried different rights and responsibilities on different campuses. Committee discussions revealed that the highly unionized Canadian system did not correspond easily to the United States system, even in United States settings where unions were active. We all had varying degrees of access to information about our own institutions: committee members working at nonunionized public universities frequently had easy access to staffing information and other institutional data, whereas those working in unionized settings or private schools had less access. What each of us considered to be progress or good news for contingent labor varied considerably. When a community college administrator proudly said that her school had just eliminated a number of NTT positions to create a larger number of tenure-track positions with benefits, a committee member working off the tenure track replied that this scenario was his worst nightmare, because it meant that many like him were likely to be out of a job. Finally, what each of us hoped to accomplish on the committee varied: committee members with administrative responsibilities, accustomed to working through an institutional framework, returned more frequently to the idea of establishing practical recommendations related to hiring and evaluating NTT faculty members, whereas those who did not have access to administrative channels expressed skepticism that change could be effected through such institutional means—they hoped rather to find ways to empower individual faculty members. Given these differences, it was not easy to decide what action the committee should take to fulfill its charge.

One of the first steps we took was to inform ourselves about the national context for contingent labor. David Laurence, director of the ADE, was the MLA staff member assigned to our committee. As the MLA’s resident statistician, Laurence is adept at using government data sources to uncover pertinent and important information about the profession. At the committee’s first meeting in 2009, he reminded us that our experience on individual campuses was deep but narrow and not necessarily representative of national trends. To help us gain an overview of contingent labor, he presented us with an extensive PowerPoint presentation that included employment figures drawn from the Department of Education’s Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System (IPEDS) and National Survey of Postsecondary Faculty (NSOPF).

We learned that although it is very common to talk about the declining number of tenure-track faculty members in the United States, data show that overall there has been a decline in percentage but not in number (fig. 1b and fig. 2). Student enrollments have steadily risen in the United States since 1975 (fig. 1a). One would expect that there would be an increase in tenure-track faculty members to meet the instructional needs of these students, and that is indeed the case. The number of these teachers has risen since 1995 but not as fast as the number of NTT faculty members, of whom part-timers increased more than those working full-time. There are some notable disciplinary differences. English experienced a decline in the number of tenure-track professors (from 29,100 to 26,000 between 1993 and 2004 [fig. 3]). In foreign languages, there was an increase in that number (from 11,100 to 14,200 between 1993 and 2004 [fig. 4]). In both fields, however, there was a large increase in the number of NTT faculty members.

The total number of English faculty members teaching in two-year institutions, for every employment status and Carnegie classification of institution, is nearly equal to the number of English faculty members teaching at doctoral, master’s, and baccalaureate institutions combined (fig. 5). Significantly, most of those teaching at two-year schools—68%—are teaching part-time, off the tenure track, which suggests that efforts focused on community colleges will affect the lives of the largest number of NTT faculty members. The committee did not choose this route, however, probably because so few of us were involved with community colleges and because we knew there was considerable work to be done in the four-year institutions where we worked. Nonetheless, programs that grant MAs and PhDs in English should keep these figures in mind when thinking about where their graduates end up teaching.

If we look at comparable charts for faculty members in foreign languages, we see that employment outcomes are quite different (fig. 6). Nationwide, fewer foreign language than English faculty members teach in a two-year institution. It also appears that foreign language faculty members are less likely to wind up in part-time NTT positions than English faculty members (with the exception of two-year institutions, where the percentage of part-time faculty members is higher for foreign languages than for English). Individual experience may not follow the national norm: I was working in a language department that had gradually become staffed almost exclusively by NTT faculty members, and before serving on the MLA committee I thought that my department represented a general trend in the discipline.

In the early days of our work as a committee, discussions occasionally touched on whether we should issue a call for conversion to tenure for all NTT faculty members. This impulse was checked, however, by information on the types of terminal degrees held by faculty members on and off the tenure track. In both English and foreign languages, more than 90% of tenure-track faculty members in four-year institutions hold the PhD, whereas less than a third of NTT faculty members in four-year institutions have this credential. This same proportion holds for faculty in two-year institutions (fig. 7 and fig. 8). This difference in credentials was an important consideration for the committee: it meant that to convert NTT faculty members to the tenure track, the credentials required for tenure-track positions on most campuses would have to be changed. In the end, we felt that tackling the definition of tenure was simply too large an issue for us to deal with and so channeled our energies in different directions.

We also wondered whether it would be desirable to issue a call for reducing the number of part-time faculty positions and creating more full-time positions with benefits. Data culled from the 2004 NSOPF made us reconsider: they show the percentage of part-time faculty members in English and foreign languages who would prefer full-time employment. Overall, roughly half in both fields reported that they wanted to keep working part-time. There was a notable difference in this response by gender. About 60% of male part-time faculty members in both fields wanted to move to full-time work, but only about 40% of female part-time faculty members did (fig. 9 and fig. 10). These figures were a reminder to the committee that part-time employment meets the needs of many faculty members. A general call to convert part-time positions to full-time would therefore not be universally appreciated.

The data drawn from IPEDS and the NSOPF confirmed the diversity of experience that was represented among our committee members. Our problem was to identify initiatives that would be relevant for the profession as a whole, for both instructors of English and of foreign languages, in all types of appointments and institutions. Between 2009 and 2012, we undertook the following activities:

• We revised “MLA Recommendation on Minimum Per-Course Compensation for Part-Time Faculty Members” and provided a justification for the recommended figure, to explain the rationale for what remains a largely aspirational salary ($7,090 for a one-semester, three-credit course).
• We produced a policy document titled Professional Employment Practices for Non-Tenure-Track Faculty Members: Recommendations and Evaluative Questions, a nonprescriptive checklist designed to help departments assess and develop employment policies and to be useful to faculty members and administrators in different institutional settings.
• In an attempt to make the MLA convention more accessible to NTT faculty members and recruit new members, we invited a limited number of local NTT faculty members to a focus group social event at the 2012 MLA convention in Seattle. This initiative was repeated in Boston in 2013. In both cases conference registration fees were waived for attendees, and the committee gained valuable insights from the comments of its guests. It is expected that this event will be repeated at each annual convention in years to come.
• We organized a special joint issue of the ADE Bulletin and ADFL Bulletin that will appear later in 2013. The issue presents several case studies of employment practices and initiatives related to contingent labor across the country.

The committee’s work continues under Karen Lentz Madison, the 2012–14 chair. In its most recent initiative in fall 2013, the committee began to make contact with accrediting agencies in hopes of encouraging them to take academic staffing practices into consideration during the accreditation process.

We found it difficult to effect tangible change on contingent labor issues at the national level, but there are examples of local initiatives where an institution implemented an improved employment policy—usually driven by the particular culture of a campus or department. One example comes from the university system in Missouri, where I worked for ten years. It is imperfect but pragmatic, and it was developed with input from human resource officers whom Maria Maisto, president of the New Faculty Majority, has identified as promising allies in efforts to improve academic staffing practices.

The Missouri model grew out of a new titling system for NTT faculty members that was developed through a collaboration begun in 2004 between the Interfaculty Council of the four campuses of the University of Missouri system (Columbia, Saint Louis, Kansas City, and Rolla) and Deborah Noble-Triplett, assistant vice president for academic affairs. Noble-Triplett holds a PhD in industrial-organizational psychology and previously served on the business faculty of the University of Missouri, Kansas City, where her research dealt with human resource issues in the private sector. When the council decided to acknowledge the contributions of NTT faculty members and improve inconsistencies in the employment practices affecting growing numbers of them in the University of Missouri system, Noble-Triplett was assigned to facilitate the necessary gathering of information, understand the diversity of experiences of this faculty population, and work with the council and with the campus provosts to develop new policies.

After two years, in November 2006, this collaboration resulted in a change to the rules and regulations of the university. Executive guideline 35 established four categories of NTT appointments, where there had been none before: research, teaching, clinical, and extension (“310.035”). (In the humanities, most are on the teaching track.) The ranks in each category follow the same logic as the tenure track and have similar titles. On the teaching track, for example, an instructor can be promoted from assistant teaching professor to associate teaching professor and finally to teaching professor. But while tenure-track faculty members must be active in three areas—teaching, research, and service—NTT faculty members are expected to be active in only two: teaching and service.

Executive guideline 35 goes on to specify many conditions of employment for NTT faculty members. It imposes clearly defined expectations for each position from the day of hire, states that searches for NTT faculty members should be similar to those done for tenure-track colleagues, provides options for contract length, and requires units to develop guidelines for annual performance evaluations based on a dossier rather than teaching evaluations alone. The guideline also specifies rules and time lines for reappointment decisions, provides for the creation of NTT promotion committees on each of the four Missouri campuses, and guarantees the academic freedom of NTT faculty members and urges their participation in faculty governance.

All these features of the Missouri model involve general employment practices that can be implemented regardless of discipline. They may seem self-evident, but before 2006 many departments had no policies of the sort. Whereas staff appointments and tenure-track appointments had always been highly regularized in the Missouri system, NTT faculty appointments had been left to individual department chairs who usually had little experience with employment law or conventional protocols for hiring and evaluating employees. This is where the expertise of the human resource office was particularly helpful.

I see several advantages to the Missouri guideline for NTT faculty members:

• The titling system is cheap to implement, and costs are generally slow to accrue.
• To a considerable extent the guideline has standardized appointments across the University of Missouri system, so that all NTT faculty members have an annual review and a contract.
• The possibility now exists for three-year contracts for some NTT faculty members, although this option has been discouraged in some units since the recession of 2008.
• Even without three-year contracts, a history of positive annual reviews and successive promotions contributes to a feeling of job security and gives a long-term career perspective for NTT faculty members.
• The new titles (e.g., assistant teaching professor instead of lecturer) are perceived as adding prestige and have helped in the recruitment of new faculty members.

There are several disadvantages to the guideline:

• It takes time for faculty members to document their NTT colleagues’ performance or evaluate their progress toward promotion on an annual basis. The rewards or consequences of NTT promotion are limited in comparison to those of the tenure track. For example, there is no raise stipulated for promotion. Many NTT faculty members who are promoted do receive a raise that is separate from and greater than the annual merit raise, but there is no guarantee of it.
• That the NTT titling system re-creates the hierarchy that exists in the tenure system is unattractive to some NTT faculty members, who found the former lack of hierarchy to be more collegial.
• Because of the decentralized approach to implementation, the rights and responsibilities granted to NTT faculty members can differ dramatically from one department to the next. (I’m not sure how this inequity can be avoided, since universities are highly decentralized organizations.)
• These NTT positions do not reward research unless a faculty member is on the research track. There are legal reasons for this division, but in practice many faculty members on the teaching track have the same credentials as research faculty members and would like to be able to pursue projects for which they were trained. In the absence of support such as sabbaticals and course releases or recognition in the form of raises and awards, many are unable to pursue research projects on a continuing basis.
• The guideline does not yet address the working conditions of other groups of NTT faculty (e.g., part-time faculty members).

There have been some unexpected outcomes since the implementation of this new system in 2007. Almost immediately, the definition of faculty became more inclusive. When the Missouri system instituted paid family and medical leaves for faculty members in 2008, both those who were on the tenure track and those who were not were covered by the provision. NTT faculty members have also become more visible. On the Saint Louis campus, they have begun to serve on review teams for five-year departmental reviews, and these teams frequently meet with full-time and part-time NTT faculty members, just as they meet with tenure-track faculty members of different ranks. The experience of NTT faculty members is thus documented and assessed in official five-year review reports, becoming part of the public record.

Much work remains to be done on the University of Missouri campuses regarding academic staffing and the employment of NTT faculty members. The improvements I witnessed between 2003 and 2013, however, make me cautiously optimistic for the future, as do the many nationwide initiatives that came to my attention while I served on the MLA Committee on Contingent Labor in the Profession. I confess that, despite all the work that the committee put into its early endeavors, I have only a thin feeling of accomplishment. I am uncertain whether any of these activities has concretely improved the lives of faculty members working off the tenure track. I encourage colleagues around the country to take advantage of the documents generated by our committee and others at the MLA and to use them to implement change on their own campuses. To this end, I would like to draw attention to the resources available in the MLA Academic Workforce Advocacy Kit, where a wealth of information about current models and practices for academic staffing has been assembled for the benefit of colleagues in the profession. These tools can be used to improve the way academic labor is managed in a variety of institutional settings.

Note

I would like to thank David Laurence, director of ADE, for the figures included in this essay. Many thanks as well to Deborah Noble-Triplett, assistant vice president for academic affairs for the University of Missouri System, for helping me understand the Missouri guidelines for non-tenure-track faculty appointments.

Works Cited

Laurence, David. “A Profile of the Non-Tenure-Track Workforce.” ADE Bulletin 153–ADFL Bulletin 42.3. Forthcoming.

“MLA Recommendation on Minimum Per-Course Compensation for Part-Time Faculty Members.” Modern Language Association. MLA, Apr. 2013. Web. 12 Aug. 2013. <http://www.mla.org/mla_recommendation_course>.

Professional Employment Practices for Non-Tenure-Track Faculty Members: Recommendations and Evaluative Questions. Modern Language Association. MLA, June 2011. Web. 12 Aug. 2013. <http://www.mla.org/pdf/clip_stmt_final_may11.pdf>.

“310.035 Non-Tenure Track Faculty.” Collected Rules and Regulations. Inside UM System. Curators of U of Missouri, n.d. Web. 22 July 2013. <http://www.umsystem.edu/ums/rules/collected_rules/faculty/ch310/310.035_non-tenure_track_faculty>.

Beth Landers is assistant professor of French at Dominican University in River Forest, Illinois. A version of this paper was presented at the 2013 MLA convention in Boston.

Posted October 2013

The title of my essay was inspired by the fact that around the country, adjunct faculty members—and not exclusively those in English departments—have seized on The Scarlet Letter as an allegory of what they have experienced in their contingent appointments. Through media as diverse as buttons, T-shirts, signs on office doors, and digital and traditional scholarship, faculty activists have invoked the novel’s themes and appropriated its symbol of shame to expose the way that the adjunct faculty member recalls Hester Prynne. (Not surprisingly, it is the still predominantly female contingent faculty that is drawn most readily to the Hester Prynne analogy.)

Contingent faculty members and their supporters have found The Scarlet Letter to be a good conversation starter because its place in American culture makes it a useful point of reference for explaining contingency to nonacademic audiences. For example, my friend and colleague Sue Doe referred to the novel in her testimony before the Colorado state legislature in support of a bill—which passed—allowing multiyear contracts at state colleges and universities. She explained that “once a person has worn the Scarlet A for Adjunct for even two or three years, it becomes increasingly difficult to have any opportunity for a different kind of appointment.”

Faculty activists’ clever use of The Scarlet Letter in their advocacy represents an increasing awareness of the importance of accessibility in and to the movement for contingent faculty equity. I offer three strategies for making our communication more accessible to the wider audience we know we need to reach and thereby making it more effective. I’ve articulated them in language that we often use when we give feedback on our students’ essays, in part as a reminder that what we do is intricately connected to what we do for students. However, my suggestions are also the result of the effort by the New Faculty Majority (NFM) to construct our strategies intentionally, through constant reflection on the theory and process of change.

My suggestions are that we must revise the argument, tell the stories, and be attentive to language.

Revise the Argument

If you review the history of activism on behalf of contingent faculty members, it becomes clear that the fundamental argument for reform has always had as its primary warrant the immorality of exploitative practices. A good example of this rationale is the Wyoming Resolution of 1986, later adopted by the Conference on College Composition and Communication. It begins:

WHEREAS, the salaries and working conditions of post-secondary teachers with primary responsibility for the teaching of writing are fundamentally unfair as judged by any reasonable professional standards (e.g., unfair in excessive teaching loads, unreasonably large class sizes, salary inequities, lack of benefits and professional status, and barriers to professional advancement). . . .

(Wyoming Conference Resolution)

It is no surprise to me that the authors of this resolution were attuned to the injustice of contingent employment and sincere in their resolve to address it. They, and many of the activists before and since who have taken on this cause, have in common a highly developed, inspirational sense of justice and fairness. As a parent, I would be eager to have my children taught by professionals like them.

However, as a parent, I also understand that the appeal to justice and fairness does not always translate well into action. Not to say that justice and fairness should be abandoned, either as goals for which to strive or as principles by which to live. But if we are to achieve those goals and live by those principles, then sometimes we have to find different ways of thinking about and articulating them.

This is precisely what we have done at the NFM. The statement we lead with is not that contingent faculty working conditions are exploitative but that “faculty working conditions are student learning conditions” (see Osborn). We were not the originators of this slogan, but it is our operating principle. We use it not because we believe that faculty members are not exploited. Rather, we use it because one of the most important lessons we have learned in our short existence is that all the arguments we make about the need for reform of non-tenure-track faculty working conditions must be linked to the fundamental principle that students and faculty members both deserve access to quality higher education.

We learned this lesson through an interesting interaction with, of all entities, the IRS, which I’ve written about elsewhere (“Taking Heart”). The IRS was not convinced that advocating on behalf of contingent faculty members could possibly fit the definition of a public charity charged with advancing education. The agency didn’t get our unstated assumption (because it was unstated!) that education is a public good and that students are harmed when their teachers are not respected or supported.

Michael Bérubé reflected on this problem of assuming that an audience shares your understanding and your value system at our January 2012 NFM summit and in his MLA “From the President” column reflecting on the summit. He suggested that in communicating with those outside higher education, we have to be aware that

tell[ing] people that non-tenure-track faculty members need a measure of job security and academic freedom if they are going to be able to do their jobs . . . amounts . . . to telling parents, students, administrators, and legislators that they have to fight for the right of professors to challenge their students intellectually. . . . This argument will resonate with people who understand what higher education is all about. They are a subset of the American electorate, but they know why academic freedom is essential to an open society, and they believe in the promise of higher education. The question is whether they can be persuaded that the promise of higher education is undermined when three-quarters of the professoriat is made up of los precarios.

If we are going to make the case that the promise of higher education is undermined when seventy-five percent of the professoriat is exploited, then we need to lead with a conversation about that promise. To whom is it made? Who has access to it? Is it for faculty members too? How is the promise of higher education fulfilled? What are the conditions necessary for it to be fulfilled?

We soon found that others working on this issue were also coming to the realization that the argument needed to be revised. Adrianna Kezar, an associate professor at the University of Southern California and an NFM member, has refocused the conversation in her groundbreaking Delphi Project, whose participants include representatives from the MLA, NFM, all the faculty unions, and almost every sector of higher education, from administrators to accreditors to the Association of Governing Boards. By foregrounding research and practice that tie support for faculty members to support for students, the Delphi Project on the Changing Faculty and Student Success debunks the notion, still in vogue, that making all faculty positions contingent is somehow good for higher education.

I know that when contingent faculty members hear that educational quality is being invoked as an argument against contingency, their immediate and understandable fear is that the argument will be construed as an attack on their credentials, professionalism, and even character. (For that reason Bérubé requested that we consider solutions that do not devalue the work of non-tenure-track faculty members.)

In encouraging that we revise our argument to emphasize educational quality, I am saying not that statements about the exploitation of faculty members should be eliminated or downplayed but that, as a matter of rhetorical strategy, the idea of exploitation should be reframed. Exploitation as a violation of justice and fairness should not be separated from the concept of educational quality; the two should be fully integrated.

A practical program to reverse exploitative practices is not only consistent with but is in fact rooted in the fundamental purpose of education in and for a democratic society. Richard Moser, a historian, an NFM member, and a trusted adviser, articulated this idea well. At a meeting of the Coalition on Contingent Academic Labor in Chicago in 2004, he observed:

[T]he campus is a distinctive but integral part of the broader society serving the public good. If we take a step further and define the public interest as the defense of core values, then the campus should become an exemplar of freedom, democracy, equality, and justice. The constitution of the campus could be considered its most important pedagogy and the efforts to shape that constitution our best classroom.

(5)

As Steve Street and I wrote, “[T]here are few more compelling definitions of the purpose and process of education. As every parent and every educator knows, there is no better—or more unforgiving—pedagogical tool than the power of example” (Maisto and Street 12).

Tell the Stories

My second suggestion for making our argument more accessible is based on what we so often tell our students when their papers have a great thesis but not enough evidence—or poorly organized and presented evidence—to support it. There are a number of stories out there and ways to tell them, yet too often the stories are not accessible. Sometimes we cannot make them accessible to one another, not because we are being proprietary about them but rather because we adjuncts, like our stories, are not organized enough. And by not organizing, we end up telling troubling stories. Consider, for example, that according to the American Federation of Teachers, “of the 10.4% of faculty positions held by members of underrepresented racial and ethnic groups, 7.6% are contingent—which means that 73% of underrepresented faculty hold positions that do not give them adequate wages or benefits, job security, or meaningful academic freedom” (Promoting 13).

We at the NFM have been working on telling stories effectively to legislators and policy makers about how contingency lowers the quality of education. We are tapping into demands for more information, like the Student Right to Know before You Go Act and the White House College Score Card.

Part of the NFM’s goal, then, is to be a national clearinghouse, a library, a hub, a center that provides activists with access to the stories they need and assists our fellow storytellers in making their arguments effective. Our summit aimed, in part, to make the point that organization is a fundamental principle of both social activism and effective communication. We wanted not only to present the stories but also to connect the storytellers. Connecting Joshua Boldt to Bérubé, for example, led to the launch of The Adjunct Project, which has been part of an unprecedented convergence of data collection efforts around adjunct faculty working conditions, along with the MLA’s Academic Workforce Data Center and the published findings of a survey by the Coalition on the Academic Workforce (CAW) of part-time faculty members (Portrait). The narrative power of the numbers that these projects reveal is awe-inspiring.

For example, at the college where I teach (at least, this semester), Cuyahoga Community College, the number of non-tenure-track faculty members went from 14.1% in 1995 to 77.7% in 2009 (10% part-time in 1995 to 76.3% part-time in 2009), according to the MLA’s Academic Workforce Data Center. Meanwhile, according to the CAW survey, annualizing contingent faculty compensation reveals that the difference, in terms of dollars and as a percentage, between what faculty members make and what people with the same level of education make working outside higher education ranges from $21,950 (65%) to $69,500 (310%) (Portrait, table 20).

The Delphi Project (which recently administered a survey to two national deans’ organizations that yielded revealing responses [see June]) has also been compiling research and stories of best practices to share. And the NFM Foundation in conjunction with the Center for the Future of Higher Education published a report based on our back-to-school survey of contingent faculty hiring practices (Street, Maisto, Merves, and Rhoades); it harnesses the narrative power of quantitative and qualitative analysis—numbers and stories—to explain how faculty working conditions affect student learning conditions. We framed the issue of quality around the student’s experience of being faced with a professor made invisible, powerless, and anonymous as well as around faculty experiences of either donating or being denied the tools and support that colleges should be providing.

Our survey, like the departmental checklist released in 2011 by the MLA Committee on Contingent Labor in the Profession (Professional Employment Practices), is a story-creating tool that all institutions and faculty groups should use in the pursuit of quality. Our finding is that from 30 to 60 percent of contingent faculty members get their teaching assignments with three weeks or fewer to prepare and are given scanty access to professional tools, from offices to parking passes, even though a significant number have taught at their institutions for years, even decades. This report is a powerful counternarrative to institutional claims of the need for flexibility and more managerial control.

We invoke the voices also of students and administrators. In 2008, the then vice president for human resources at the University of Akron, A. G. Monaco, declared, “Wal-Mart is a more honest employer of part-time employees than are most colleges and universities” (Jaschik, “Call”). More recently, community college students reported on a survey funded in part by the Gates Foundation that they are very much aware of what is going on and do not appreciate being shortchanged with ever-dwindling access to the teaching, advising, and mentoring that they want and need. In that survey, students said that introductory courses—the ones most likely to be taught by adjuncts and subject to the “just in time” hiring (“Just in Time”) we highlighted in our report (Street, Maisto, Merves, and Rhoades)—“are not offered in a way to help them succeed.” Faculty members “who offer support and guidance” are “in high demand” but “hard to come by” (Student Voices 2, 6). Research like this exposes the stark difference between institutional policies, which are self-serving, and activist arguments, which are student-serving.

Telling the story of how adjunct working conditions lower the quality of education, we focus on another important theme of the 2013 MLA convention: access for people with disabilities. The NFM’s acting research director, Marisa Allison, wrote a brief for the most recent newsletter of the GWU Heath Resource Center, an online clearinghouse on postsecondary education for people with disabilities. It explains how poor working conditions make it difficult for contingent faculty members to serve students with disabilities. As the mother of a child with Asperger’s and an instructor who has worked to help students with disabilities, I am committed to the story of how avenues of access—for contingent faculty members and for people with disabilities (and their families)—converge.

From testimonials on electronic discussion lists to documentaries to novels and artwork, the stories are out there in abundance. There is subversive fiction and humor: Alex Kudera’s Fight for Your Long Day, the Web site True Adjunct Tales, Doonesbury. There are true stories about adjuncts, like Doug Wright, a longtime instructor whose reduction to adjunct status caused him to lose health insurance just as he discovered he had cancer (Jaschik, “Uninsured Adjunct”), and Sissy Bradford, who was not offered classes to teach at the University of Texas, San Antonio, after she complained that crosses were being erected at the public university’s entrance (Schmidt). Others include Michael Dubson’s book Ghosts in the Classroom, L. D. Janakos’s YouTube series Teachers on Wheels, Debra Leigh Scott and Chris LaBree’s film ’Junct, and the online video Con Job: Stories of Adjunct and Contingent Labor. Our colleague Vanessa Vaile has been at the forefront of our social media efforts, singlehandedly curating the most comprehensive collection of stories about the contingent faculty experience that currently exists. She has connected so many storytelling activists to one another that she should have the title “national adjunct faculty organizer.” Appropriately, one of the sites she manages is called A Is for Adjunct.

Regarding the constant fear that focusing on educational quality will devalue or blame adjuncts, I suggest that unearthing, curating, and disseminating the stories of the adjunct experience is the natural antidote to the perception that the problem lies with the adjuncts and not with the system. Unlike the replacement referees used by team owners during the 2012 National Football League referee lockout (Heller), adjuncts are not incompetent. They are not fake professors; they are real ones. If they were really incompetent, the system would have collapsed ages ago.

Some people believe that the dedication and success of adjunct faculty members despite their working conditions should not be the theme of the stories of adjunct experience. Such heroic narratives, they contend, undermine the thesis that the quality of education is being negatively affected. As one administrator put it, if adjuncts are always surmounting the obstacles placed in front of them, then what incentive do institutions have to change their ways? My response to that question is that adjuncts should strive for professionalism and should tell the stories of what it takes to provide it—sometimes successfully, sometimes not—in the face of great obstacles. Our argument, supported by considerable research (see, e.g., “Resources”), concerns the structural inequality of the contingent system, not the individual quality of the instructors. The onus is on institutions, not instructors, to level the playing field so that a fair comparison among instructors can be made.

Be Attentive to Language

No matter how much we stress working conditions, some audiences will hear what one listener heard during a recent NPR show on adjunct faculty organizing on which I was a guest (“Adjunct Professors”). The listener asked, “So you mean that I’m paying for steak and getting hamburger? I’m not getting a real professor?” The response to that should be, “No, you are getting steak, but you need to call the health department, known as accreditors in higher education, to expose colleges’ lack of safe food-handling practices.”

Our job is to be attentive to language, both in conversations outside our communities and within them.

Here is another, perennial example. Many people focus on the problematic language of titles: adjunct, lecturer, and so on. We can take a lesson from Hester Prynne and make a badge intended to humiliate us into one that honors us. Instead of continuing to use words like adjunct and contingent, we might use the expression “extraordinary faculty” (Maisto, “Professor”). This idea came to me through a tenured friend at Georgetown University who refers to tenure-stream faculty members as “ordinary.” The term suggests that faculty work should be so essential to the institutional mission as to be unmarked linguistically. I like “extraordinary” for non-tenure-track faculty members because it communicates both the heroism necessary to teach well in the current system and the appalling nature of that system.

We should be attentive to language by getting involved in debates that involve language, especially definition. Many of these debates emerge around labor and employment issues and human resources, which Beth Landers addressed at the 2013 MLA convention. These issues are already on the radar screen of legislators and policy makers, under the umbrella of “misclassification of employees” (“Employee Misclassification”).

Three manifestations of this problem in higher education have been prominent recently, and we can use the expression “trying to have your cake and eat it too” to describe how colleges have manipulated definitions to derive the benefits of using their employees without having to incur the costs associated with using them. One cost is unemployment insurance. Colleges remind adjuncts in many ways that they have no expectancy of continued employment, yet these same institutions affirm to state unemployment agencies that their adjuncts have reasonable assurance of continued employment, legal language that denies adjuncts unemployment insurance. Exposing and correcting this abuse is the focus of the Steve Street National Unemployment Compensation Initiative. There has been attention to how the definition of part-time will affect what rights part-time faculty members will have under the Affordable Care Act. Colleges are beginning to cut adjunct hours to avoid providing adjunct faculty members with health insurance. In some instances, they are also redefining adjunct faculty work according to a formula that asserts that faculty members work only one hour outside class for every hour they teach.

Finally, looking at contingency from the human resources perspective brings up the ubiquitous but little understood definition of exempt versus nonexempt employees under the Fair Labor Standards Act. Exemption, like unemployment, is under the jurisdiction of the Department of Labor. The government provides exemption from rules for hourly wages and overtime but also recognizes the responsibility of the employee to exercise professional judgment that takes specialized training into account. Colleges exploit this definition, which at heart is a technical and cultural classification of faculty work as professional, to classify extraordinary faculty members one way for one purpose and a different way for another purpose—to the benefit of the institution, not the faculty member or the student. The MLA, as the leading association devoted to language and letters in higher education, ought to take a leading role in these language- and definition-dependent policy issues.

I don’t pretend to be a Hawthorne scholar, but I believe that The Scarlet Letter provides us with some powerful strategies for confronting contingency. How does Hester Prynne co-opt a symbol meant to shame her and reshape the argument over what her future should be? As my colleague Anne Wiegard has put it, Hester performs an act of resignification, finding a way to tell her story as she wants it told. She makes a beautiful A, altering the form of the letter artistically with vivid embroidery, interpreting red as the color of sacrifice and passion, and displaying the A prominently. Instead of rendering the letter on a small scale and trying to hide it, she embraces it and owns it.

Adjuncts and full-time contingent faculty members—extraordinary faculty members—are now the majority in the academic teaching workforce. It’s time for us, and for those with whom and for whom we work, to change the conversation from a legalistic and mean-spirited debate over who deserves to have access to education of the highest possible quality, either as a student or a faculty member, to consideration of how to ensure that the social contract at the heart of education is nourished and strengthened for the good of all, so that one day the scarlet “A for Adjunct” will, to paraphrase Hawthorne, “cease to be a stigma which attracts [higher education’s] scorn and bitterness, and becomes a type of something to be sorrowed over, and looked upon with awe, and yet with reverence, too” (305–06).

Works Cited

Academic Workforce Data Center. Modern Language Association. MLA, 8 Mar. 2013. Web. 19 July 2013.

“Adjunct Professors Unite: Labor Rights on College Campuses.” The Kojo Nnamdi Show. NPR. WAMU, Washington, DC, 1 Oct. 2012. Radio.

Allison, Marisa. “Thinking about Different Student Populations.” Heath Resource Center at the National Youth Transitions Center Newsletter (2012): 5–7. Web. 31 Dec. 2012. <http://www.heath.gwu.edu/assets/133/heath_nytc_2012_december_newsletter.pdf>.

Bérubé, Michael. “From the President: Among the Majority.” Modern Language Association. MLA, 30 Mar. 2011. Web. 30 Dec. 2012. <http://www.mla.org/blog?topic=146>.

Doe, Sue. “Testimony regarding Fisher Legislation As Provided to the House Committee on State, Veterans, and Military Affairs, Colorado General Assembly, on February 15, 2012.” American Association of University Professors Colorado Conference. N.p, 15 Feb. 2012. Web. 31 Dec. 2012. <http://aaupcolorado.org/2012/02/15/testimony-regarding-fisher-legislation-as-provided-to-the-house-committee-on-state-veterans-and-military-affairs-colorado-general-assembly-on-february-15-2012/>.

“Employee Misclassification as Independent Contractors.” Wage and Hour Division. United States Dept. of Labor, n.d. Web. 9 Aug. 2013. <http://www.dol.gov/whd/workers/misclassification/>.

Hawthorne, Nathaniel. The Scarlet Letter. New York: Dover, 1994. Print.

Heller, Jake. “The NFL Replacement Referees’ Six Worst Blown Calls.” Daily Beast. Newsweek / Daily Beast, 26 Sept. 2012. Web. 21 July 2013.

Jaschik, Scott. “Call to Arms for Adjuncts . . . from an Administrator.” Inside Higher Ed. Inside Higher Ed, 14 Oct. 2008. Web. 31 Dec. 2012. <http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2008/10/14/adjunct>.

———. “The Uninsured Adjunct.” Inside Higher Ed. Inside Higher Ed, 30 Nov. 2009. Web. 16 Sept. 2013. <http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2009/11/30/adjunct>.

June, Audrey Williams. “Deans’ Ideas about Hiring Adjuncts Differ from Reality, Survey Finds.” Chronicle of Higher Education. Chronicle of Higher Educ., 13 Nov. 2012. Web. 19 July 2013.

“Just in Time.” Investopedia. Investopedia US, 2013. Web. 9 Aug. 2013. <http://www.investopedia.com/terms/j/jit.asp>.

Landers, Elizabeth. “Human Resources: Employment Practices and the Future University.” The Presidential Forum: Avenues of Access: Non-Tenure-Track Faculty Members and American Higher Education. MLA Annual Convention. Sheraton Chicago, Chicago. 3 Jan. 2013. Address.

Maisto, Maria. “A Professor by Any Other Name.” Twenty-First Century Scholar. Twenty-First Century Scholar, 17 Feb. 2012. Web. 31 Dec. 2012. <http://21stcenturyscholar.org/2012/02/17/a-professor-by-any-other-name/>.

———. “Taking Heart, Taking Part: New Faculty Majority and the Praxis of Contingent Faculty Activism.” Embracing Non-Tenure Track Faculty: Changing Campuses for the New Faculty Majority. New York: Routledge, 2012. 190–204. Print.

Maisto, Maria, and Steve Street. “Confronting Contingency: Faculty Equity and the Goals of Academic Democracy.” Liberal Education 97.1 (2011): 6–13. Association of American Colleges and Universities. Web. 16 Sept. 2013. <http://www.aacu.org/liberaleducation/le-wi11/LEWI11_FacultyEquity.cfm>.

Moser, Richard. Campus Democracy, Community, and Academic Citizenship. Chicago Coalition of Contingent Academic Labor, 22 July 2004. Web. 31 Dec. 2012. <http://www.chicagococal.org/downloads/conference-papers/Richard-Moser.pdf>.

Osborn, Eliana. “Faculty Working Conditions Are Student Learning Conditions.” Chronicle of Higher Education. Chronicle of Higher Educ., 30 Jan. 2012. Web. 18 July 2013. <http://chronicle.com/blogs/onhiring/faculty-working-conditions-are-student-learning-conditions/30256>.

A Portrait of Part-Time Faculty Members. Coalition on the Academic Workforce. CAW, June 2012. Web. 19 July 2013. <http://www.academicworkforce.org/CAW_portrait_2012.pdf>.

Professional Employment Practices for Non-Tenure-Track Faculty Members: Recommendations and Evaluative Questions. Modern Language Association. MLA, June 2011. Web. 19 July 2013.

Promoting Racial and Ethnic Diversity in the Faculty: What Higher Education Unions Can Do. Amer. Federation of Teachers, n.d. Web. 16 Sept. 2013. <http://www.aft.org/pdfs/highered/facultydiversity0310.pdf>.

“Resources and Tool Kits.” The Delphi Project on the Changing Faculty and Student Success. Pullias Center for Higher Educ., U of Southern California, 2012. Web. 27 Sept. 2013.

Schmidt, Peter. “Faculty Groups Accuse Texas A&M of Retaliating against Adjunct.” Chronicle of Higher Education. Chronicle of Higher Educ., 1 June 2012. Web. 16 Sept. 2013. <http://chronicle.com/article/Faculty-Groups-Accuse-Texas/132103/>.

Street, Steve, Maria Maisto, Esther Merves, and Gary Rhoades. Who Is Professor “Staff” and How Can This Person Teach So Many Classes? Center for the Future of Higher Educ., 2 Aug. 2012. Web. 31 Dec. 2012. <http://futureofhighered.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/08/ProfStaffFinal1.pdf>.

Student Voices on the Higher Education Pathway: Preliminary Insights and Stakeholder Engagement Considerations. Public Agenda–WestEd, n.d. Web. 16 Sept. 2013. <http://www.publicagenda.org/files/student_voices.pdf>.

Wiegard, Anne. Message to the author. 3 Jan. 2012. E-mail.

The Wyoming Conference Resolution. Kairos, n.d. Web. 17 July 2013. <http://www.technorhetoric.net/1.1/news/cwta/wyores.html>.

Maria Maisto is instructor of English at Cuyahoga Community College, Western Campus, OH, and president of the New Faculty Majority. A version of this paper was presented at the 2013 MLA convention in Boston.

Posted October 2013

The problems facing higher education cannot be resolved in a piecemeal or institution-by-institution process. We need a comprehensive plan to deal with tuition increases, student debt, decreased degree attainment, questionable educational practices, and the casualization of the academic labor force. This essay argues that we can resolve all these issues if we start off with the notion that all public higher education should be free. One reason why we need to begin with this strong claim is that if education is seen as a private good accessed by private individuals for private means, there will be no way to make higher education a universal public good.

The Cost of Free Public Higher Ed

The first question to deal with here is how much it would currently cost to make all public higher education free. In 2008–09, there were 6.4 million full-time-equivalent undergraduate students enrolled in public universities and 4.2 million enrolled in community colleges. In 2009–10, the average cost of tuition, room, and board for undergraduates at public four-year institutions was $15,014; at two-year public colleges, it was $7,703. If we multiply the number of students in each segment of public higher education by the average total cost, we discover that the cost of making all public universities free would have been $96 billion in 2009–10, with an annual cost of $32 billion for all community colleges—or a total of $128 billion (Digest, table 227).

Although $128 billion seems a large figure, we need to remember that in 2010 the federal government spent $35 billion on Pell grants and $104 billion on student loans, while the states spent at least $10 billion on financial aid for universities and colleges and another $76 billion for direct support of higher education.1 Furthermore, if one looks at various state and federal tax breaks and deductions for tuition, it might be possible to make all public higher education free by just using current resources in a more effective manner. Moreover, the cost for free public higher education could be greatly reduced by lowering the spending on administration, athletics, housing, dining, amenities, research, and graduate education.2

It is important to stress that the current tuition rates are inflated because schools increase their sticker price to subsidize institutional financial aid for low-income students and to provide merit aid for wealthy, high-scoring students. If we eliminated the current aid system and each school instead received a set amount of money for each student from the state and federal governments, we could significantly reduce the cost of making public higher education free in America. Also, by eliminating the need for student loans, the government would save billions of dollars by avoiding the current costs of nonpayment of loans, servicing and subsidizing them, and borrowers’ defaults.

Instead of directly funding public higher education institutions, state and federal governments have often relied on tax deductions and credits to support individual students. The tax code has been used to fund higher education because it is easier for Congress to pass a tax break than it is to get funding for a particular program, but what this system has achieved is a tremendous subsidy for upper-middle-class and wealthy families, while lower-income students are forced to take out huge loans to pay for their education. According to a recent study,

[f]rom 1999 to 2009, the government spent $70 billion on tax breaks aimed at subsidizing higher educa­tion for families . . . about 13 percent, or $9.4 billion, of that total went to families making more than $100,000 a year. At the same time, only 11 percent went to the neediest families, those making less than $25,000. Families in the middle—those making between $25,000 and $99,999—received the lion’s share of the aid, taking in slightly more than three-quarters of the benefits.

Later the report indicates that more of the funding now goes to the wealthiest Americans:

Nearly 83 percent of the higher education tax benefits distributed from 1999 to 2001 went to families earning less than $75,000 per year. No benefits went to those earning more than $100,000. By contrast, in the last three tax years alone, families making between $100,000 and $180,000 received nearly a quarter of the benefits. The share going to middle-income families sharply declined.

(Burd)

This tax system for higher education is a great example of how so many of our governmental policies end up subsidizing the wealthy while poor and middle-class citizens pay more and get less.

In 2010–11, the federal government provided the following tax subsidies, breaks, and credits for higher education: student loan interest rate exemption ($1.4 billion), exclusion from taxation of employer-provided educational assistance ($1.1 billion), exclusion of interest on student loan bonds ($0.6 billion), exclusion of scholarship and fellowship income ($3.0 billion), exclusion of earnings of qualified tuition programs—savings account programs ($0.6 billion), the Hope tax credit ($5.4 billion), Lifetime Learning tax credit ($5.5 billion), parental personal exemption for students age nineteen or over ($3.4 billion), and state prepaid tuition plans ($1.8 billion).3 There’s also the stimulus package’s American Opportunity Tax Credit ($14.4 billion) and the part of the deductibility of charitable contributions for gifts to educational institutions ($4.9 billion). In total, the federal government lost over $40 billion in tax revenue because of higher education in 2010.

If we made all public higher education free, we could not only do away with this unjust tax system but also stop the movement of public funds to expensive private and for-profit universities and colleges. What most people do not realize is that the use of financial aid and tax subsidies for individual students has resulted in a system where much of the governmental support for higher education ends up going to private institutions that cater to the superrich or to low-achieving for-profit schools. In fact, during a 2012 congressional investigation of for-profit colleges, it was discovered that up to a quarter of all federal Pell grant money is now going to these corporate schools, which charge a high tuition and graduate very few students.4 What this investigation did not uncover was the total amount of state and federal tax breaks that go to support for-profit institutions.

Educational Welfare for the Wealthy

Recent research calculates how much the federal government has spent on tax deductions and credits for higher education, but as far as I can tell, no one has examined how much states are spending on tax breaks for colleges and universities. It is likely that the total subsidy by the states is at least the same as the total federal level of support, because many of the states have tax deductions that exceed the national tax breaks for tuition, and most states have tax-advantaged 529 college savings plans.5 For example, in New York State, the tuition tax credit goes up to $5,000 per year per student, and the tuition tax deduction is $10,000 for each eligible student.6 It is important to note that tax deductions favor the wealthy because many low-income families pay little if any federal income taxes.

One of the great secrets in higher education funding is the role played by 529 college savings plans: “In 2000 a total of $2.6 billion was invested in 529 plans. This grew to $14 billion in 2001 and more than $92 billion in mid-2006. The student aid resource Finaid.org projects that total investment in 529 plans will reach $175 billion to $250 billion by 2010, with a total of 10 million to 15 million accounts opened” (“529 Plan”; see also “Section 529 Plans”). Not only do state governments lose billions of dollars in tax revenue each year because of these 529 plans but also the wealthy have figured out how to use these plans as all-purpose tax shelters. For example, if a couple puts $26,000 a year for each child into an account and decides later to use the money to buy a yacht instead, only the investment gains will be assessed a ten percent penalty and taxed as income. Also, contributions made to a 529 are removed from a family’s estate, and 529 plan owners can name a successor to the account when they die, which enables the plans to shelter money for many generations.

One way that wealthy people use these accounts to avoid paying taxes is by giving each other gifts. Gift taxes can be avoided if contributions into the plans over a five-year period do not exceed $65,000 for single taxpayers and $130,000 for married couples. Clearly, only the wealthiest Americans are able to profit from this type of plan. In fact, according to a Department of the Treasury report, “Currently there are effectively no limits on Section 529 account balances. Because 43 states offer plans open to residents in other states, a beneficiary can have accounts in as many as 44 states, each state with a limit exceeding $224,465.” It is obvious that only wealthy people can afford to save and invest this type of money. More­over, the same study of 529 plans details how the richest families are using these plans for tax shelters:

Data from the 2007 Survey of Consumer Finance found that among households in the top five percent of income—average income, $548,000 per year—those with education savings plans held an average balance of $106,250. That’s more than triple the average for households in the 90th–95th percentile, more than ten times the balance for the 50th–75th percentile, etc. Second, among households in Kansas who took a state income tax deduction for 529 contributions, the average deduction for households making over $250,000 per year was $10,323. For those in the $100K–$250K range it was less than $5,000, for everyone else, less than $3,000.

(Analysis)

As this federal government report indicates, 529 plans have now become an effective way to subsidize wealthy people; meanwhile, states are being forced to cut their higher education budgets because of their lack of tax revenue.

If we took all the state and federal money that is lost each year because of these tax credits, deductions, and shelters, we could make public higher education free for millions of Americans. However, the tax code is rigged to provide aid to wealthy people, and one side effect of this system is that private universities are able to charge higher tuition because they know that the parents of many of the incoming students will pay only a fraction of the full price thanks to merit aid, institutional aid, and tax breaks. In fact, replacing the current mix of financial aid, institutional aid, tax subsidies, and grants with direct funding for public institutions would give the government a way to control costs at both public and private universities and colleges. The federal government could also require states to maintain their funding for public institutions in return for increased federal support. Once we stabilize funding and make higher education free, there will be no need for so many students and institutions to go into debt.

Making public higher education free would allow more students to attain degrees, because the biggest reason why students drop out of colleges and universities is that they cannot afford the high cost of continuing. Moreover, many students who do not drop out nonetheless fail to graduate in a timely fashion because they spend so much time working in order to afford the increasing costs of tuition and room and board (see Bousquet).

Fixing the Academic Labor System

Free public higher education could also lead to improvements in the working conditions of most faculty members who now teach undergraduate courses. If it greatly reduces the number of graduate students teaching undergraduate classes, the demand for new teachers would increase. If the federal government required that most undergraduate courses be taught by full-time faculty members, we could stabilize the academic job market and concentrate on rewarding undergraduate faculty members who focused on providing quality instruction.

To both control costs and increase instructional quality, the government could make sure that every student is taught in a small class by an expert teacher who has academic freedom and job security. We could teach every undergraduate student at American public universities and colleges in classes of no more than twenty-five students for a direct instructional cost of under $5,000 per student per year. I arrived at these figures by extrapolating salary and course-load data from the University of California in the following way. Currently 75% of all courses in United States higher education are taught by non-tenure-track faculty members, and in the University of California system these teachers receive on average $62,000 to teach six courses a year. If we add benefits (15% of salary) to this total and if each course has twenty-five students, the cost per student for each class is $475. With tenure-track and tenured faculty members, if the average salary with benefits is $100,000 and the average annual course load is four courses for professors who teach undergraduate courses, the total cost per course per student is $1,000. So if the average student takes eight courses in a year, and six of the courses are taught by non-tenure-track faculty members, the total cost would be $4,850.

I am using the University of California as the basis for my calculations because this system is known to have the best contract and compensation structure for non-tenure-track faculty members in the United States. Thus, while many adjunct and part-time teachers in America are paid only about $3,000 a course and have no benefits, my proposed model would increase the pay and job security for most teachers in United States higher education—yet it would be less expensive than the current haphaz­ard use of graduate students, part-time teachers, and research professors.7

If the direct instructional cost per student were $4,850, we would be able to reduce the total cost to educate each student while simultaneously improving instruction, through the use of small, interactive learning environments. As the experience in countries like Finland shows, a key to improving the quality of education is to increase the respect and compensation for teachers. It might seem that increasing compensation would drive up the cost of higher education, but we could actually save money by regularizing the use of non-tenure-track teachers and reducing noneducational expenses. Because most people teaching undergraduates today lack tenure and are not on the tenure track, we need to stabilize their jobs by moving people into full-time, tenure-track positions. This change would cut down on faculty turnover and the need to hire and manage a stream of part-time teachers constantly moving through the revolving door. Furthermore, by allowing these newly full-time faculty members to participate in faculty senates and serve on departmental committees, the current high amount of service required from professors could be reduced. All faculty members would then have time to take on tasks, like student advising, that are now done by an army of staff members, which would result in significant savings.

The key to improving the accessibility, affordability, and quality of public higher education is to make it free and spend public funds on faculty, instruction, and research.

Notes

1. For statistics on Pell grants, see Baum and McPherson. For state spending on higher education, see Lederman. For financial aid for universities and colleges, see “State Support.” For federal support for student loans, see Student Loans Overview. ↩

2. With regard to the funding of graduate students, I propose that we stop the current model of forcing them to teach undergraduate courses and sec­tions and that each graduate student be fully supported by a mixture of state and federal funds. This support would require reducing the number of graduate stu­dents, but it would increase the number who graduate in a timely fashion. Because of their need to teach while they are pursuing their degrees, many graduate stu­dents in the humanities and the social sciences never get their degrees, and many of the ones who do take ten years to earn their doctorates. Moreover, after receiving their PhDs, most students in the humanities and social sciences end up either unemployed or underemployed. If we used current federal research funds and state support and limited enrollments, we could make all public graduate education free. ↩

3. The federal tax breaks for higher education are itemized at Subsidy Scope (Direct Expenditures). ↩

4. For statistics on how many Pell grants for-profit colleges are using, see Fuller. ↩

5. For a list of many of the tax breaks for higher education in individual states, see “State Tax Deductions.” ↩

6. For the New York tuition tax deduction information, see “NYS College Tuition Tax Credit.” ↩

7. In the University of California system, after six years of service, non-tenure-track lecturers are eligi­ble for continuing appointments. This practice offers strong protection against arbi­trary dismissal. ↩

Works Cited

An Analysis of Section 529 College Savings and Prepaid Tuition Plans: A Report Prepared by the Department of Treasury for the White House Task Force on Middle Class Working Families. US Dept. of the Treasury, 9 Sept. 2009. Web. 22 July 2013. <http://www.treasury.gov/resource-center/economic-policy/Documents/09092009TreasuryReportSection529.pdf>.

Baum, Sandy, and Michael McPherson. “Pell Grants vs. Tuition Tax Credits.” Chronicle of Higher Education. Chronicle of Higher Educ., 28 Oct. 2011. Web. 22 July 2013. <http://chronicle.com/blogs/innovations/pell-grants-vs-tuition-tax-credits/30663>.

Bousquet, Marc. How the University Works: Higher Education and the Low-Wage Nation. New York: New York UP, 2008. Print.

Burd, Stephen. Moving On Up: How Tuition Tax Breaks Increasingly Favor the Upper-Middle Class. Education Sector. Educ. Sector, 19 Apr. 2012. Web. 22 July 2013. <http://www.educationsector.org/publications/moving-how-tuition-tax-breaks-increasingly-favor-upper-middle-class>.

Digest of Education Statistics 2011. Natl. Center for Educ. Statistics, June 2012. Web. 22 Aug. 2013. <http://nces.ed.gov/pubs2012/2012001.pdf>.

Direct Expenditures in the Education Sector. Subsidy Scope. Pew Charitable Trusts, 20 Mar. 2012. Web. 22 July 2103. <http://www.pewstates.org/uploadedFiles/PCS_Assets/2013/Subsidyscope.org%20—%20Education%20Sector.pdf>.

“529 Plan.” Wikinvest. Wikinvest, n.d. Web. 22 July 2013. <http://www.wikinvest.com/wiki/529_Plan>.

Fuller, Andrea. “For-Profits Hit Hardest by End of Year-Round Pell Grant Program.” Chronicle of Higher Education. Chronicle of Higher Educ., 29 June 2011. Web. 22 July 2013. <http://chronicle.com/article/For-Profits-Hit-Hardest-by-End/128089/>.

Lederman, Doug. “State Sup­port Slumps Again.” Inside Higher Ed. Inside Higher Ed, 23 Jan. 2012. Web. 22 July 2013. <http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2012/01/23/state-funds-higher-education-fell-76-2011-12>.

“NYS College Tuition Tax Credit/Deduction.” New York State Higher Education Services Corporation. New York State Higher Educ. Services Corp., n.d. Web. 22 July 2013. <http://www.hesc.ny.gov/content.nsf/SFC/NYS_College_Tuition_Tax_CreditDeduction>.

“Section 529 Plans.” FinAid! FinAid Page, n.d. Web. 22 July 2013. <http://www.finaid.org/savings/529plans.phtml>.

“State Support for Student Aid, 2009–10.” Chronicle of Higher Education. Chronicle of Higher Educ., 11 July 2011. Web. 22 July 2013. <http://chronicle.com/article/Sortable-Table-State-Support/128153/>.

“State Tax Deductions for 529 Contributions.” FinAid! FinAid Page, n.d. Web. 22 July 2013. <http://www.finaid.org/savings/state529deductions.phtml>.

Student Loans Overview: Fiscal Year 2014 Budget Proposal. US Dept. of Educ., n.d. Web. 22 July 2013.<http://www2.ed.gov/about/overview/budget/budget14/justifications/s-loansoverview.pdf>.

Robert Samuels is a lecturer in the Writing Program at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and president of the University Council of the American Federation of Teachers. A version of this paper was presented at the 2013 MLA convention in Boston.

Posted October 2013