An observation (which is really choosing a side, because yes, I think there are sides)

Although I suspect I will piss off a bunch of people by saying this, here's a problem that I see with a lot of very well-meaning and in many ways very valuable advice that tenured/tenure-track faculty give contingent^[1] faculty:

Tenured/tenure-track (TTT) faculty tend to give advice that is intended to help contingent faculty become just like them. It's advice that is based on future prospects, on the assumption that contingent faculty will ultimately join the tenure-track ranks, and that envisions contingent employment as a transitory stage in academic life. You will earn a Ph.D., you will probably (unless you are very very lucky) work in temporary positions for some period, and then you will either get a tenure-track job or you will leave the profession.

After all, this is the model with which many TTT faculty are familiar. In the current job market, I'd be willing to bet that many more TTT faculty have a few (or more) years of temp work under their belts than don't, and they probably all know people who found contingent employment unsustainable and left the profession. So naturally, such TTT faculty think that they understand the way the whole contingent faculty thing works.^[2]

The thing is, there is a whole cohort of people out there for whom contingent employment is their career. It's not a transitory stage. It is what it is. Sometimes this is because those faculty wanted tenure-track jobs and couldn't get them, sometimes (many times) it's not. But in either case, it means that contingent faculty actually occupy a completely different position from TTT people. They're not proto-TTT faculty. They are something else entirely.

For people in that position, much of the advice intended to transition them to a TTT position is not helpful and does not address the realities of their lives. Many contingent faculty are not trying to get a better, permanent job in the future, because they know that isn't going to happen. Instead, they want help configuring their current position to be humane and sustainable. That is not the same thing as advice on how ultimately to land a TTT position.

Hence, quite a bit of both sides talking past each other. 

 

^[1]People use the term "adjunct" to mean all kinds of completely different things, so much so that I think the term has become pretty unhelpful. I'm following the practice of labor activists to use the umbrella term "contingent faculty" to mean anyone who is not tenured or on the tenure-track or on some kind of contract-based equivalent. If I say "adjunct," I mean people who are hired by the course on a temporary basis. Pay is by the course, often not providing benefits. You can be a full-time adjunct, but usually by stacking courses at different institutions. To refer to people who are temporary but who teach full time, who usually are paid a salary and receive benefits, I use the terms lecturer/instructor interchangeably. I also use the term VAP, or visiting assistant professor; I tend to think of these as people who are explicitly filling in for someone who is on sabbatical or to cover a line that is definitely going to be filled with a tenure-track person in the very near future (like someone who fills in during the year a department runs a national search for the line), although this definition may be my own little creation. It's the visiting thing, though, that to me implies the kind of limited term that, for instance, a sabbatical replacement mandates, and distinguishes these people from lecturers/instructors.

^[2] To be fair, I used to think I knew how it all worked based on my own experience as an adjunct/lecturer before getting on the tenure-track, and after getting off the tenure-track. The observation I make here is based on seminar research I did earlier this year, which helped flesh out my perspective a bit beyond my own experience.

Comments

[Anastasia]

The thing about advice that is intended to get me to the tt is that it's largely bullshit anyway. Lightning is going to strike or it isn't. Being all the adjunct I can be isn't going to matter.

[New Kid on the Hallway]

Yeah, I pretty much agree with that. I mean, I think there are things you can do to be a bad adjunct and to hurt your chances of getting on the tt, but there are already too few jobs for the people who are doing everything right (whether in contingent positions or more broadly within the profession). It's necessary to be good but it's not sufficient, and the "how to get onto the TT" advice suggests that if you can just be better, it will be sufficient. But it's not. Structurally, everyone is good. (Yes, individuals have experiences with individual bad teachers/colleagues. But structurally, there is no problem with underachieving faculty.)

I just think it's striking that it's when people call for changes to the contingent market itself - to the nature of contingent employment - and aren't actually aspiring to be TT people, that they get called angry. Well, yeah.

[New Kid on the Hallway]

(And it also just occurred to me about how advice - for instance, etiquette manuals - usually functions only to reify the power structures that already exists, rather than actually to open up access to more people... yeah.)

[Anastasia]

I totally agree with you on that. Don't be angry suggests, again, if you just wait it out, you can get one of the good jobs where some of those who are calling for changes are saying, effectively, if this is the new normal, it's got to change. The status quo will not do and I think it continues because we do collectively think of it as a transitory state. So I agree with you on that.

Also, thank you for clarifying for me that people think being a VAP or a lecturer is adjuncting. I recognize that those are contingent positions but that isn't what I mean when I say adjuncting. And some of the advice makes a good deal more sense if that's the situation one has in mind.

I have to say, though, that if people think the problem with adjuncting is about people who have full-time pay and benefits but aren't tenure track, I don't know what they think we're complaining about. My job at Catholic U is structured such that, were I lucky enough to eke out as many classes as they allow adjuncts to teach, I'd be making 12K/year. Still without benefits or resources.

We've got a bigger problem then VAPs who don't feel quite equally valued.

[Anastasia]

Can I add that it's sort of depressing to realize that the kind of work I do isn't even on the radar, here? It effectively doesn't count for enough to be the subject of this advice column?

[good enough cook]

Amen. You put your finger on it. And more and more of the educating that happens in higher ed happens at the hands of that vast never-going-to-be-TT population. So everyone is talking past each other and NOT having the conversation that needs to be had, about how to adapt the academy's ideals of teaching, scholarship, and collegiality to this new normal.

[Chuck]

I think this is basically right. I don't presume to know the interests or needs of all contingent faculty, many of whom take jobs (for example) because they are geographically tied to a specific area due to marriage or whatever. And I'd agree that the real conversation probably consists of determining how to make contingent jobs a little more sustainable. I'd add that non-humanities field (i.e. nursing, etc) may have other complications that aren't explicitly addressed in a lot of the literature on contingent faculty, which tends to focus on the humanities.

[Historiann]

"The thing is, there is a whole cohort of people out there for whom contingent employment is their career. It's not a transitory stage. It is what it is. Sometimes this is because those faculty wanted tenure-track jobs and couldn't get them, sometimes (many times) it's not. But in either case, it means that contingent faculty actually occupy a completely different position from TTT people. They're not proto-TTT faculty. They are something else entirely."

This is a great point, but I don't understand what this has to do with Tenured Radical's advice, which was very specifically directed. She has given advice to grad students and junior faculty for years with the assumption that most of her readership would prefer to find TT employment somewhere. This makes sense, because this is what she knows best. (In fact, in one post last winter she was attacked by grad students and not-yet-fully employed scholars for suggesting that they explore the possibility of training and working in public hisotry or administration. Didn't she understand that their expectation was that they would be scholars like her? How dare she pull up the ladder just as she finally made it to Full Professor, etc. See: http://tenured-radical.blogspot.com/2010/01/playing-blame-game-how-should-graduate.html)

TR is just one person. She doesn't blog on behalf of the entire historical profession, or on behalf of anyone but herself. (She also blogs under her own name, so you know exactly who she is and where she is coming from.) If you don't like her advice--that's fine! It's a blog, so you get exactly what you pay for, right? But I don't understand the expectation that every time she offers advice that she has to consider absolutely every one of her readers' subjective positions in their fields and all of their future goals.

As you say, New Kid, many contingent faculty are in their lecturerships or adjunct positions because they don't want to do a national job search for family or location reasons. They are not free (or choose not to be free) to move in the ways that many of their peers are. The need for better pay and benefits and better than year-to-year contracts for instructors of proven value is vitally important to people like this--but it's a different issue than the one TR was addressing.

[New Kid on the Hallway]

Respectfully, Historiann, two things:

I'm talking about a general phenomenon. Sure, this post is inspired by the recent conversation around the blogosphere, but you'll notice I didn't link to TR and I didn't do that because this post wasn't intended to call her, just one person, out in any way.

Also, if you want to bring up TR's post specifically, I do think it could be construed as universally-applicable advice, at least for full-time VAP/lecturers, and I don't think it's even that. And while many of the commenters challenging that did so rudely, I think they were legitimately raising issues about the applicability of that advice, and the contradictory elements of it. Frankly, the comment about bumming rides to the train station was snotty and privileged, and while that shouldn't invalidate what was genuinely valuable in the post, it shouldn't get a pass either.

But again, that's really a side point, because my post was about a broader phenomenon and didn't mention TR because, well, it wasn't about her (except as she falls into a much larger group of people).

[good enough cook]

And they're STILL discussing the issue of commuting vs. not commuting over on TR. Although in all fairness, I'm still thinking about that post and why it was so profoundly grating.

I guess it's this: the "New Adjunct Army" (of TR's title) is a symptom of any number of things that have gone terribly wrong with higher education. People working as adjuncts have to organize their lives around those institutional failures, and many are already all too ready to understand them as personal failures.

TR's post made it sound like the problem is the failure of VAP's to precisely calibrate the ratio of their personal involvement with their institutions and to translate that ratio into their interactions with colleagues. (It seems it's okay to ask a colleague to read an article draft, NOT okay to ask for a ride to the train station. All righty then; now we know.)

Sure--VAP's trying to up their chances in the lottery of TT hiring are well advised to be mindful of these issues of professional fine tuning. But that's a pretty small subset of the "New Adjunct Army" (again, TR's title), whose problems by and large are NOT a failure to work hard enough and with appropriate professionalism.

Obviously, those problems aren't the fault of TR and her TT/T peers. But a strange defensiveness emerged on the blog when commenters tried to point out the irrelevance of TR's advice to much of "the New Adjunct Army." It's not just that TR doesn't have much to say about the realities of the academic world that I and many others have to cope with--it's her blog, as Historiann points out--but that her reaction to those who live in that world was so resoundingly dismissive. Either her readers are with the program of upward academic mobility (against increasingly lousy odds and at the sacrifice of all other considerations) or they are lazy, unrealistic, and unprofessional.

I, like many, don't fall into either category. TR is free to alienate as many readers as she wants, but it seems like a missed opportunity for the kind of collegial and progressive dialogue that she champions in other contexts.

[Anastasia]

Dismissive defensiveness looks good on no one. Neither does closing ranks and defending your tenured peers even when, clearly, they could have said something better.

[Chris]

In the comment section to TR's post, I wrote a very similar response to NKotH's post here. (http://www.blogger.com/comment.g?blogID=36212542&postID=4928336406945371966)

It's long. It's in three parts at the end of the comment thread.

Others, including TR, have suggested I should start a blog. Meh ... I'm ambivalent, at best. I don't know if you recognize me, NK, but we go back a long way, back to the days of The Invisible Adjunct. I admit, I tend to come and go as a commenter. There's a reason for that, which is relevant to this thread and your post. IA ended her blog in what, 2003? 2004? And yet, here we are debating the same f'ing sh**. The only difference is that now we seem to be schooling a new crop of slightly more sympathetic, but still pretty-much-in-the-dark-about-how-it-all works TTT folks. (I'm not trying to be insulting here ... I think TR and Historiann and others of that ilk are largely sympathetic. That, and I reserve my ire and insults for Dean Dad (when I can stomach him) and other wolves in sheep's clothing) :P

Anyways. Here's my point, blogblogblogblog, and nothing changes. Raising consciousness is cool n' all, but in the end, what does it accomplish? No one has any power to actually effect any change. Unionizing would get us somewhere, but good luck with that. I doubt I'm going to live long enough to see that come to pass. (I'm 50)

[teachergirl]

i read you all of the time, but this is my first comment. i am an adjunct, full time, by stacking courses at multiple institutions. while the lack of benefits are difficult, sometimes, to deal with, for the most part i find the life quite amenable to what my family and i want. i choose my own schedule, for the most part, and am not saddled with institutional responsibilities for which i have no time or inclination to deal with (perhaps this is unwise to say, but i have always thought of myself as a teacher first, and thus am happy to spend my time teaching rather than administering in any way).

personally, i am discouraged by the way that adjuncting is looked upon by TT faculty--that it is a last resort rather than a viable choice. as institutional needs (and budgets) change, we are becoming more and more important. we ought to consider the lifestyle, as demanding and perhaps inequitable as it might be, as a viable career option rather than an unfortunate result of a ridiculous job market.

[New Kid on the Hallway]

Thank you for the thoughtful comments, everyone - the end of the semester caught up with me and I wasn't able to continue the conversation here, but I appreciate the responses.

Chris - I agree that the problem is, how to actually change any of this, and blogging doesn't do it. I have theoretical positions (get rid of tenure, have really great contracts, unionize like hell), but I don't think any of them would ever actually WORK in the world we live in.

[Z]

They just have to have more TT jobs, which I know they won't, but they do, and more, better instructor/lecturer/VAP positions. Stacking up adjunct positions is OK if you're in an area where this is feasible and it's what you want to do but where I am you're in poverty doing that as a career unless you are on the insurance of a spouse who is also working, and can share expenses etc.

On the TR post, I think she's just po'd at some behavior of some particular VAPs. I've seen some regular APs act amazingly entitled lately, it's a new disease, and it's weird ... behavior that appears to have been OK for beloved advanced grad students where they were in grad school, but that isn't when you're not someone's student or protege any more.

[Z]

Amazingly entitled = stuff like demanding, not asking for / negotiating for, teaching schedules that make the commute easy; moving to town without a car and needing rides everywhere (not just to the train station); asking people to write administrative documents / do paperwork for them (as opposed to ask to read / edit a draft); calling people at home to vituperate about departmental problems rather than visit their office, invite to coffee / lunch / drink.

I think TR means: if you want a nice letter from me, make it possible for me to say you did a good job, were present and collegial and an adult.

[Z]

Finally: I think "Zenith" must get a lot of two types of VAP:

- entitled graduate students who act a little presumptuous
- people with life circumstances TR doesn't get, but who are keeping their New Haven / New York apartments for really good reasons (as in, you'll never get rent like that again, etc.).

[Z]

I agree with NK's post and the footnotes, and I am irritated by TR's post, but I don't think TR is talking to the people for whom adjuncting is a career (which is also NK's point).

I think she's talking at least to people who want to be permanent full time VAPs at one place, in which case you really do have to put almost as much into it as a TTT.

I for my part am worried about some instructors who really still believe that if they get a PhD, any PhD, they'll get auto-promoted to TT, and irritated at some TTs who are pretty rude and also play the victim card a fair amount. I don't remember this sort of behavior existing in the past.