Very Encouraging

via:

WASHINGTON – Hoping to reach an estimated 1 million adjunct professors nationwide, Service Employees International Union on Monday officially launched its new Adjunct Action Network website. The union marked the occasion with a “national town hall” event for adjuncts at Georgetown University here. ... 

Mary Kay Henry, president of SEIU, called the website a “new way to organize in a changing world,” and to eschew some of the traditional problems adjuncts have had with organizing, such as lack of office space and a kind of commuter status. By connecting with adjuncts on their campuses and in other states through the new online forum, she said, there’s potential for adjuncts to “light up the entire country.” 

Of the Adjunct Action organizing campaign itself, Henry said it reflects at once the brokenness of “America's promise” – that is, that education is one’s path to a better life – and the “inability” of adjuncts to accept that brokenness. 

Fight For Your Long Day

Via.

Duffleman (or "Duffy," as he is called) is the creation of Alex Kudera, a longtime Philadelphia adjunct whose novel, Fight for Your Long Day, is about to be released by Atticus Press. Duffy's narrative on this long day catalogs a list of the kinds of insults that are part of an adjunct's daily existence -- and documents, too, his continuing sense of obligation to his students.

Examined Life

Here is the trailer for Astra Taylor's new film Examined Life featuring Cornel West, Avital Ronell, Peter Singer, Kwame Anthony Appiah, Martha Nussbaum, Michael Hardt, Slavoj Zizek, Judith Butler and Sunaura Taylor.



I hope the dvd for this comes out soon. I have a class this summer I would love to use this film in.

Random Bullets on Academic Labor

There's been an unusually wide assortment of blog posts, discussions, and news items on academic labor issues this week. Due to the conditions of my own academic labor, and the size of the stacks of papers and exams to grade on my desk, I can't do more than briefly list them here:

• Inside Higher Ed is reporting on the recent American Federation of Teachers report on adjunct usage nation wide.

• Dean Dad takes umbrage at the AFT report. It calls for paying adjuncts significantly more for the work they already do. Dean Dad notices this would be bad for budgets. LumpenProf takes umbrage at Dean Dad's umbrage. When workers are paid below the poverty line the way to fix this is to pay them more, not work them harder. This always hurts budgets. And just as unions managed to cut the work week in half and keep their pay the same during the depression, look for academic workers to aim at increasing wages while keeping their hours the same during the coming depression. Never waste a good crisis. Academic labor needs to come out of this crisis stronger and better organized than ever.

• This quote posted by Ortho seems very timely as well: "An ersatz program imposed from above always looks better to an administrator than a proposal growing organically from a constituency below. And power does corrupt." -- Cary Nelson & Stephen Watt, Academic Keywords: A Devil's Dictionary for Higher Education

• Acephalus and Tenured Radical respond to the miseries of Sisyphus' current academic job search.

• And I've been having an intriguing, if somewhat vexed, discussion over on Dead Voles about the status of the lumpenprofessoriat. When you can't even get the Marxist profs on board with the idea of unionizing, it starts to look like a long row to hoe.
  

Worst Pay Ever

From IHE:

The Tennessee Board of Regents has a very simple policy that allows its constituent institutions to decide in which of four categories to place adjuncts. Colleges can devise systems based on educational experience, market differentials and so forth. But the policy is strict on one thing: It sets maximum levels of pay per credit hour. Because the colleges typically avoid classifying people as being in the most “lucrative” pay category ($700 per credit hour), most earn much less, and a college would be correct in saying that $1,800 is the maximum allowable pay for a three credit course of someone in the second level of adjunct classifications. Paying more would violate state rules.

The LumpenProf worked for a semester at a Tennessee school as an adjunct about ten years ago. It was my worst pay ever. Today I read that the rates for adjuncts at Tennessee schools is unchanged after 11 years and that:

After two years of encouraging meetings organized by AAUP leaders in Tennessee, the board — through its presidents council — decided this month that the current policy works just fine, and that there will be no increases in pay maximums.

I am unsurprised. However, I was chagrined to learn that I was paid about a third less than the maximum allowed rate for even the very bottom tier of adjuncts. Fuck.

Global Education: A Modest Proposal

Here is a lovely bit of snark by Paul Youngquist entitled "Thinking Outside the Quad."

i’m writing with a bold new idea i believe can save the college large sums of money that might be better directed toward funding faculty research or alumni reunions. it fits perfectly with the new initiative announced last week by the associate dean for alumni development and undergraduate education to encourage all students to spend a semester studying abroad. while I fully support that proposal, it think it’s far too modest. why not push it to its logical conclusion? why not require every student in the college of the liberal arts to spend his or her entire undergraduate career studying abroad, preferably in the developing world?

i’m sure you can appreciate the appeal of this initiative (I call it the GLOBAL EDUCATION IMPERATIVE), but allow me to describe it in some detail. as i see it, there are several compelling reasons to relocate all aspects of undergraduate education offshore. the first is economic, and even if there were no other reasons (but as you shall see, there are!),this one would justify the whole initiative. we are all familiar with the regrettably uneven distribution of wealth across the globe. as corporations have been quick to realize but universities have not, this unfortunate fact produces a similar unevenness in costs of production. considered as a commodity, higher education requires the same outlays in labor and overhead as a pair of air jordans. it seems reasonable therefore to follow the nimble lead of the nike corporation and implement a business model that redistributes the cost of producing undergraduate education to offshore locations notable for low wages and property values. I would recommend india and malaysia. both are attractive for robust telecommunications networks and deteriorating but serviceable physical infrastructure, minimizing direct costs to home institutions for internet access and student housing. even including overseas transportation, the per capita investment in offshore education falls far short of current tuition levels, accruing to home institutions a handsome increase in revenue with absolutely no adjustment in price. ...

maybe the single most attractive aspect of global education today, however, is the effect it will have on undergraduates. they will be as well-rounded as they are well-traveled. they will be, in the noblest sense, cosmopolitans as they experience first hand the dynamism and energy of life in a developing country, its collective creativity in the face national underinvestment, the everyday struggles of its brave, brown indigenous people. it is impossible to put a price tag on character, of course, but this much is incontestable: four or five years of undergraduate education abroad will enrich the souls of our nation’s youth, preparing them through extensive personal experience to live as global citizens in a world that one day will be as diverse and as highly leveraged as america.

finally, an outcome that is no less a boon for being obvious: students who study abroad do not study here. they do not clutter our classrooms. they do not damage the grass. think of the savings of manhours and womanhours spent preparing lectures, advising students, leading discussions, grading papers, filing grades, managing complaints — all the distracting inanities of undergraduate teaching. let them fall to the parochial ambitions of the offshore workforce. let us reserve the vision and energy of home institution faculty for the higher calling of research. it would be a truism to say that distinction in academic research correlates inversely to time teaching.

I'm almost afraid to circulate this modest proposal for global education. It fits the ruling administrative ideology at my own university all too well.

Student Resistance

This started out as a companion post to Teaching Unwaged Workers below, but has also morphed into a response to a post by Tenured Radical about RateMyProfessors (RMP) -- the infamous site that collects anonymous student ratings and comments about faculty. My starting premise is that the current state of student evaluations is simply another symptom of students' unacknowledged status as unwaged workers and, like so many symptoms, it is unlikely to be cured without addressing the underlying pathology. But to get from here to there, let me start with some of the issues raised by Tenured Radical.

One of Tenured Radical's chief concerns about RMP is the fact that just anyone can write and post a review of a professor, even folks who aren't students.

what this means is that anyone can register as anyone and leave an evaluation -- for anyone -- that says anything. That's right. You could do it from prison if you had internet privileges, or from Afghanistan, if you were just farting around in between avoiding the Taliban.

Now, I have enough worries in my life without the added concern that anti-Taliban refugees might be gaming my student evaluations. For this to rise to the level of an actual concern for me, I would need some evidence that these sorts of abuses are actually having a real impact on the site.

This is from last week's Inside Higher Ed:

Last year, a scholarly study found a high correlation between RateMyProfessors.com and a university’s own system of student evaluations. Now, a new study is finding a high correlation between RateMyProfessors and a student evaluation system used nationally. ... The similarities were such that, the journal article says, they offer “preliminary support for the validity of the evaluations on RateMyProfessors.com.”

This certainly matches my own anecdotal evidence. The comments I get online at RateMyProfessors are very similar to the ones I get in my more traditional student evaluations. And that seems to be true for many of my colleagues as well. If you think that student evaluations have a part to play in teaching assessment, then RMP may be as useful as any other survey instrument we have, even given the absence of any specific sampling controls.

However, further down in the article comes this interesting observation:

For his part, Sonntag [one of the authors of the study] acknowledged that some RateMyProfessors.com reviews are “so mean-spirited” that they aren't worth anyone’s time. But he said that if you cast those aside, there are valuable lessons to be learned.

This, I think, is really the point Tenured Radical objects to. It's that the comments on RMP can be so mean-spirited -- coupled with the fact that they are so very public. But why does this vitriol creep into our student evaluations? Where does it come from?

We like to imagine that we are reviewed by students in much the way we review books in our own fields. What matters is the content and ideas, with perhaps some occasional remarks on the style and presentation. But we would never comment on the way an author dressed, or if we thought they were "hot." We are not literature though. We aren't even pulp fiction. And the reviews we receive from our students are not reviews of our self-worth as human beings in any case even though we often tend to experience them that way.

Instead, we are reviewed more like bosses. And our teaching evaluations read much more like the reviews we write about our own Department Chairs and Deans than the reviews we write about scholarly books in our field. What this should point out to us, is that our relationship with our students is not simply one of teacher to student but that it is also colored by the relationship of boss to worker -- and boss to very poorly paid worker at that. Given this, I think it speaks well for our profession that we aren't more universally loathed by our students. That students resist the conditions of their work is unsurprising. That they find avenues to share their experiences with each other online on sites like RMP is also unsurprising. But if we are truly serious about addressing this particular symptom of student dissatisfaction, then we need to take a serious look at the material conditions of our students' lives in the academy that cause them to react like overworked and underpaid employees.

Grad Student Snark

This is hilarious. Even with the drama it's causing the poor English TA's at Iowa State.

The videos feature real Iowa State TA’s — all in good academic standing — in a pseudo-interview format answering various questions. The answers are frequently silly. Asked if “attendance has been a problem,” one TA answers, “I’ve had a really hard time showing up.” ... Asked about his greatest challenges as a TA, one answers that it is “trying not to headbutt or maim” his students.

It's just as well that YouTube wasn't around when I was serving my time in the grad student office ghetto -- some things are probably best not immortalized on video. I do hope the English Department at Iowa State gets over its very temporary embarrassment soon. If they want to look better, they can always put some time and money into making their TA's working conditions better. Or they can just try to make sure no one makes any jokes. It's a toss up.



There's more about the video and its stir in the campus newspaper.

Starbucks Morality

Here's a nice article from Inside Higher Ed about adjuncts at Marquette University:

... there was something wrong — morally — with tenured professors not speaking out about the conditions facing adjuncts who make their research possible by covering so many classes.

He said that a majority of introductory theology courses are taught by adjuncts — typically Ph.D.’s who have been unable to find a tenure track job. They are paid about $3,200 a course, he said, but receive no health insurance. Because they must scramble to find enough courses to teach — at Marquette and elsewhere — they have no job security and thus no academic freedom, Maguire said.

In addition to citing Biblical teaching on obligations to the less fortunate, Maguire cited the practices of well known corporations. “Even corporations like Starbucks (not the expected moral prophets or beacons of justice in our society) provide health care benefits for their full-time as well as their part-time workers,” he wrote in his memo to his colleagues. “Here is the question for this university with its avowed religious commitments: Can we rise to the moral standards of Starbucks?"

I don't hold out much hope of moral arguments winning the day on this issue. I think it will take an organized faculty taking collective action on many fronts, including, wages, hours, benefits, accreditation, and unionizing.

But at a Jesuit school, a good moral argument shouldn't hurt.

A Cog's Eye View

Academic Cog has a very interesting post on contingent academic labor from the vantage point of a TA working under an adjunct lecturer. Academic Cog writes:

... huge numbers of classes are being taught by people who know they are here only temporarily and who already have an eye on the future and one foot out the door, frantically scrambling to grab a permanent position. Because the adjunct positions are there permanently, only with different individuals cycled in and out of them, what the university ends up with is instructors who are permanently job seeking and distracted. If you put 30 hours a week on an intensive and draining job search, how much time are you going to put in additionally to a job that pays you crap wages? How will that time break down per student given the class sizes?

In short, why invest any more time or effort or collegiality or service into a university that is investing practically nothing in you?

This is yet another face of the current reliance on contingent faculty to teach an ever increasing share of college classes. There are very good reasons to limit the number of years a university can exploit a particular adjunct at starvation wages (and to my mind the fewer years the better -- zero would be ideal). But as Academic Cog notes, the adjunct positions themselves are there permanently. This means that there is revolving door of new faces occupying these underpaid and overworked positions. The result of this is that the institution is buying faculty who cannot afford to invest the time and effort into their teaching that everyone involved -- students, administrators, TA's, other faculty, and not least the adjunct faculty member him or herself -- wishes to be able to devote to teaching.

This is why the question of adjuncts and accreditation begins to loom so large. Adjunct use creates structural limitations on the quality of instruction -- through no fault of the hard working adjunct faculty themselves. Unlike Confessions of a Community College Dean (CCCD), I think linking university accreditation with limits on the use of contingent labor is exactly the right place to apply pressure. Universities cannot be expected to resist the lure of cheap contingent faculty labor without some equally powerful disincentive. Accreditation provides universities with a materially relevant reason to limit their use of adjunct faculty. Moral arguments alone against this exploitation are always doomed to fail when confronted with the realities of a limited budget.

CCCD is rightly concerned, though, that externally imposed limits on the number of adjuncts allowed will simply encourage institutions to game the system and may even force some institutions to increase their use of adjuncts up to the legal limit. This is why I think it will still be necessary to eliminate the existing wage differentials between contingent and tenure-track faculty. As long as adjuncts can be hired on the cheap and without benefits, institutions will continue to exploit them. In fact, the fiduciary responsibilities of an institution's administrators will virtually demand it. Therefore, a twin-pronged strategy focusing on linking accreditation with minimizing adjunct use, coupled with raising adjunct salaries seems necessary.

As to CCCD's other concern about the relevance of limiting adjunct use to the goals of accreditation itself, there is Marc Bousquet's recent article in Inside Higher Ed. CCCD writes:

More to the point, what is the point of accreditation? I've always understood it as a way of assuring prospective students that the institution is what it says it is, rather than some fly-by-night operation. To the extent that it's really about the students, I'm not entirely sure what a magic cutoff number for adjuncts has to do with it.

As Marc Bousquet writes:

First-year students are more likely to persist to their sophomore year when high-stakes “gate-keeper” courses are taught by permanent faculty, and campus unions generate significantly greater undergraduate experience of tenure-stream faculty, observe two studies just released at the annual convention of the American Education Research Association.

This can be coupled with other findings that show that:

A national analysis of graduation and program completion rates at community colleges has found that institutions with higher percentages of full-time faculty members have higher completion rates.

And student retention and persistence to graduation are certainly legitimate and appropriate concerns for accreditation.

Or you can simply look again at the situation faced by Academic Cog who, as the TA for an overworked and underpaid adjunct, sees firsthand the ways students get short-changed by these working conditions:

You know what they call the TA who makes up for this situation by putting in extra time and effort to actually teach the students something about writing and critical thinking and writes lots of insightful, constructive comments on drafts and essays?

Sucker.

Academic Taylorism

There's a very interesting post over on Larval Subjects about the academic assembly line:

These days, one of the more frustrating and tedious aspects of working in an institutional setting such as a secondary school, a college, or a highschool has been the shift to constant mechanisms of “quality control” that are implemented from year to year, semester to semester. What I have in mind are the constant calls to codify things such as student learning outcomes, assessment criteria, and curriculum across the body of educators. These mechanisms, in turn, lead to endless meetings, professional development seminars, and piles of paperwork that often have little or no connection to teaching or what really takes place in the classroom.

This post reminded me off another article on Deconstructing Faculty Work that highlighted the ways in which faculty work has become fragmented and subdivided in some damaging ways. It has now become commonplace for faculty to characterize themselves in their annual reports by how much of their time is spent on the various institutional components of teaching, research, and service.

We constructed the artifact of faculty assignment; a quantity set at 100 percent, and then partitioned that assignment into sections assigned to teaching, research, service, and other duties. Although most institutions do not explicitly quantify these assignments, the work recorded in our faculty annual reports make clear that we parcel out our actual effort into categories defined by what we do for teaching, for research, and for service. Our administrative work became defined by the released teaching effort traded for the administrative effort, further subdividing our faculty work. ... We designed accountability systems to measure the cost of teaching as an item separate from research so that we could calculate the return on the investment in teaching separately from the return on investment in research. ... These became the measurable quantities for effective optimization and management in our increasingly accountable world.

I myself am a 50% teaching, 25% research, and 25% service employee this year. My job is structured such that my full-time teaching load of 4 courses per semester is subject to reassigned time for various other duties, typically including one course a semester reassigned time for research (if I continue to publish well) and sometimes release time for other administrative chores. It has ceased to strike us as strange that we should be subdivided in these ways and to think of our work lives as the assemblage of discrete tasks, rather than as the life's work of a single person.

This subdividing of tenured and tenure-track faculty also tends to facilitate and justify the use of contingent faculty. It is the logical extension of a system organized around the outcomes of specific, and seemingly unrelated tasks.

For the institutions, however, the deconstruction of faculty work offered a great incentive to reduce their commitment to an inflexible work force of tenured faculty and increase their investment in short-term, highly efficient faculty dedicated to specific purposes for specific periods of time and whose productivity and performance could be reliably maintained.

If the teaching me, the research me, and the administrative me cannot actually exist separately and independently of one another, then it makes a certain administrative sense to seek specialized workers whose functions can actually be compartmentalized in exactly this way. Of course, I actually only do any of these jobs well because I do all of these jobs. But that complexity makes faculty assessment and management much more difficult. The pernicious fantasy of the fungibility of faculty work is only perpetuated by the current ways in which we evaluate faculty.

Raising the Bar

And lest we think concern about ever escalating tenure standards is overblown, here is an article from today's Inside Higher Ed:

When assistant professors talk about the ever more stringent standards for winning tenure, one of the favorite metaphors is of colleges “raising the bar.” At Baylor University, assistant professors who came up for tenure this year believe that not only did they face a higher hurdle, but they were forced to jump while blindfolded.

That’s because, several university officials said, senior administrators have come to believe that departmental standards were not rigorous enough and so applied new standards, which have never been shared with faculty leaders, let alone with those who submitted tenure portfolios under the old standards. Largely as a result, tenure denials at Baylor this year — which have been about 10 percent annually in recent years — shot up to 40 percent.

Twelve of the candidates were denied tenure this year, and while some are always denied, two statistics are raising particular concern at the university:

• Nine of the 12 rejected candidates had the support of both their departments and the universitywide faculty committee that reviews candidates after the departmental evaluation. In the past at Baylor, it has been rare for the president to overturn recommendations that had solid backing at all the levels of faculty review.
• The rejection rate was particularly high for women. Of the nine women up for review, six were rejected.

Matt Cordon, chair of the Faculty Senate and a law professor, said that this year’s tenure cases raise significant issues on both fairness and the faculty role in shared governance. “The administration determined that the departments’ standards weren’t enough, but the departments used them, and the tenure candidates used the standards,” he said, adding the no one knew of the new standards until deans reported being told of the change by the president and provost.

My own tenure experience had a similar thrill injected into it when our new administration took up the torch of raising standards and unilaterally created new standards for tenure.

In my case, because I had already spent a dozen years teaching and publishing, I was able to meet these new, surprise, tenure standards imposed from above without much additional worry. Others were not so fortunate. Sadly, those of us who could jump over this higher bar have been used as evidence that the new standards are both possible and fair.

What always gets left out of these discussions is how many years of work it actually took to meet those standards. Very few of us had been brand new Ph.D.'s only six years ago.

Seven Years Is Enough

The recent blog exchange on tenure has now been picked up by Inside Higher Ed and The Chronicle of Higher Education as well as by Professor Zero with her Modest Proposal. I thought perhaps her post might be about hungry adjuncts eating administrators, but no. Instead it's an even more shocking proposal -- tenure at hiring. Although I'm intrigued by such a proposal, I had posted previously an even more modest proposal that I would like to revisit here.

My proposal is simply that institutions adhere to a slightly truncated version of the current AAUP Recommended Institutional Regulations on Academic Freedom and Tenure. The AAUP writes:

The total period of full-time service prior to the acquisition of continuous tenure will not exceed 7 years, including all previous full-time service with the rank of instructor or higher in other institutions of higher learning.

If generally enforced, I believe this one principle would solve many of the current problems with tenure. The constant escalation of tenure requirements and time to tenure is one of the chief complaints of those involved. This makes tenure into a moving target such that no one knows where to aim. It tends to make every tenure case cloudy since one can always imagine that more and better teaching, research and service could have been done, or even point to a case where more and better was actually done thus ratcheting up the standards one more notch. It also produces a tenured faculty whose own records of teaching, research, and service slowly fall behind the current standards such that committees may find themselves turning down junior faculty for tenure whose records are substantially more distinguished than some full professors in the department. This is a situation that can only end in tears -- or law suits.

If institutions restrained themselves and required no more than seven years of full-time work for tenure, these situations would not arise. There is actually a physical limit to how many books and articles can be published, how many courses taught, and how much service can be done in seven years. It may be high, but it is finite. And while some institutions may decide to push closer to this limit while others decide to provide more latitude, and while some might give more weight to teaching and service while others focus more exclusively on research, there is actually an upper limit to the amount of work that will be extracted from junior faculty before being granted tenure.

Thus, if a search committee wishes to hire that very attractive candidate with great teaching evaluations, six articles and a book contract for their position, that would be fine — just notice that the candidate has those very impressive credentials because they have been a Lecturer for five years and a Visiting Assistant Professor for three years already and so should be hired with tenure. If a committee doesn’t want to take that plunge, fine — there are many recent Ph.D.'s they can hire without any teaching experience or publications that can be hired into a tenure track job for the whole seven year probationary time. Or they can find someone in between and let them go up for tenure after two or three years instead. But no one would ever be expected to work for more than seven years, in any combination of jobs, and then be expected to spend yet more probationary time for tenure. Nor is it necessary. It is already abundantly clear what that person can accomplish in seven years. It’s on their vita.

Unfortunately, the AAUP statement then goes on to fatally weaken this otherwise admirable standard by adding that

the probationary period may extend to as much as four years, even if the total full-time service in the profession thereby exceeds seven years

What this exception really means is that faculty are subject to never-ending probationary periods and that there is no upper limit to how high the requirements for tenure can go. For instance, suppose after ten years as a full-time Lecturer, one is then hired into a tenure track position and asked to spend another four years on probation; and then another four years after that if they move on to yet another institution. If after eighteen years of full-time teaching they are then granted tenure, their vita may look substantially more accomplished than any vita of someone who has been working full-time for only seven years. If their vita becomes the new standard for tenure in the department what has really happened is that the probationary period for tenure has been increased from seven years to eighteen, since it is no longer possible for anyone to meet those requirements in only seven years.

Seven years is plenty of time to demonstrate scholarly promise, to show teaching and service excellence, and to document anything else an institution might legitimately want to know about a faculty member. Seven years is enough.

Survivor Issues

“I feel fortunate,” he said, of his position, “and I have survivor issues.” -- Marc Bousquet, author of How the University Works from Inside Higher Ed's Call to Arms for Academic Labor, by Scott Jaschik.

Survivor Issues. That could easily be the title of my entire blog. I resemble too closely the people described by Bousquet and in the various online posts provoked by his recent book (in particular, a headsup from Ortho and posts from Professor Zero and The Little Professor.)



Inside Higher Ed quotes Bousquet:

“Degree holders frequently serve as university teachers for 8 or 10 years before earning their doctorate.... Many degree holders have served as adjunct lecturers at other campuses, sometimes teaching master’s degree students and advising their theses en route to their own degrees. Some will have taught 30 to 40 sections.... During this time, they received frequent mentoring and regular evaluation.... A large fraction will have published essays and book reviews and authored their departmental Web pages. Yet at precisely the junction that this ‘preparation’ should end and regular employment begin — the acquisition of the Ph.D. — the system embarrasses itself and discloses a systematic truth that every recent degree holder knows and few administrators wish to acknowledge: in many disciplines, for the majority of graduates, the Ph.D. indicates the logical conclusion of an academic career.”

This describes me. The one very important difference is that, miraculously, my career didn't end with the Ph.D. and I ended up with tenure after another decade-long soujourn through the adjunct wilderness. And like Bousquet, "I feel fortunate, and I have survivor issues."

You can find more interviews with Marc Bousquet on YouTube.

Why Does Lawrence Summers Keep Getting Work?

Here's a rather somber news item from Inside Higher Ed on recent trends in the political tendencies of the US professoriat.

The results of the study find a professoriate that may be less liberal than is widely assumed ... The authors of the study also found evidence of a significant decline by age group in faculty radicalism, with younger faculty members less likely than their older counterparts to identify as radical or activist.

The article includes this sobering chart:

Percentage of Faculty Members, by Age, Identifying as Left Radicals or Activists

Age	Left Radicals	Left Activists
26-35	3.8%	1.3%
36-49	9.9%	11.5%
50-64	14.3%	17.2%

The authors of the study also note that:

Marxist identity was also low, but with less identifiable shift by age group (the range was 3.9 to 4.7 percent) and with the strongest disciplinary support in the social sciences (17.6 percent) and humanities (5.0 percent), with negligible support elsewhere.

The right's attack on academia has paid off it seems with universities shying away from the hiring and tenuring of overtly leftist faculty members. It appears that the LumpenProf will only get lonelier as the years pass. However, just to add a little extra dose of crap into this mix, the article quotes at length from Lawrence Summers who participated in the discussion at the presentation of these findings. Summers, the former President of Harvard and former Chief Economist for the World Bank commented:

... the extent of the imbalance and some informal research he has conducted “give me pause” and has him wondering about the possibility of bias against right-leaning thinkers. He examined the scholars being asked to give Tanner Lectures (a top lecture series at leading universities) and the political leanings of economists and political figures among honorary degree recipients at a top university (which he declined to name). Liberals receive more such honors by far, he said.

It’s not that there are no conservative professors, he said, but their share is so small as to raise questions that deserve more attention. Summers wondered if the situation isn’t like it was in the early days of baseball’s racial integration, when people trying to say equality had arrived could point to the relatively equal performance of black and white stars. “But it appeared that there were not any African-American .250 hitters,” Summers said. “The only [black] players who played were stars.”

I found this statement to be deeply shocking although, considering the source, I should have expected something of this sort. Summers is famous for making shockingly heinous pronouncements. During his stint at the World Bank, Summers authored a now infamous memo arguing that the World Bank should be "encouraging MORE migration of the dirty industries to the LDCs [Least Developed Countries]." While President of Harvard University, Summers called into question the scholarly chops and academic integrity of Cornel West (thus strengthening Princeton's Center for African-American Studies). This was followed by his remarks on the dearth of women faculty in the sciences as being due to the innate differences in intelligence between women and men. It's not every academic that manages to get his very own "Controversies" section in his Wikipedia article.

Now we learn from Summers that right wing faculty are just like African-American baseball players during the height of the civil rights movement. wtf?! Why does this man keep getting work?

Encouraging News

Here is some encouraging news on rethinking the tenure process from Inside Higher Ed and Western Carolina University:

Western Carolina University — after several years of discussions — has just announced a move in the other direction. The university has adopted Boyer’s definitions for scholarship to replace traditional measures of research. The shift was adopted unanimously by the Faculty Senate, endorsed by the administration and just cleared its final hurdle with approval from the University of North Carolina system. Broader definitions of scholarship will be used in hiring decisions, merit reviews, and tenure consideration.

Boyer, who died in 1995, saw the traditional definition of scholarship — new knowledge through laboratory breakthroughs, journal articles or new books — as too narrow. Scholarship, Boyer argued, also encompassed the application of knowledge, the engagement of scholars with the broader world, and the way scholars teach.

All of those models will now be available to Western Carolina faculty members to have their contributions evaluated. However, to do so, the professors and their departments will need to create an outside peer review panel to evaluate the work, so that scholarship does not become simply an extension of service, and to ensure that rigor is applied to evaluations.

Lee S. Shulman, president of the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching (through which Boyer did much of his work), said Western Carolina’s shift was significant. While colleges have rushed to put Boyer’s ideas into their mission statements, and many individual departments have used the ideas in tenure reviews, putting this philosophy in specific institutional tenure and promotion procedures is rare, he said. “It’s very encouraging to see this beginning to really break through,” he said. What’s been missing is “systematic implementation” of the sort Western Carolina is now enacting, he said.

What could really have an impact, Shulman said, is if a few years from now, Western Carolina can point to a cohort of newly tenured professors who won their promotions using the Boyer model.

John Bardo, chancellor at Western Carolina, said that a good example of the value of this approach comes from a recent tenure candidate who needed a special exemption from the old, more traditional tenure guidelines. The faculty member was in the College of Education and focused much of his work on developing online tools that teachers could use in classrooms. He focused on developing the tools, and fine-tuning them, not on writing reports about them that could be published in journals.

“So when he came up for tenure, he didn’t have normal publications to submit,” Bardo said. Under a trial of the system that has now been codified, the department assembled a peer review team of experts in the field, which came back with a report that the professors’ online tools “were among the best around,” Bardo said.

The professor won tenure, and Bardo said it was important to him and others to codify the kind of system used so that other professors would be encouraged to make similar career choices. Bardo said that codification was also important so that departments could make initial hiring decisions based on the broader definition of scholarship.

Asked why he preferred to see his university use this approach, as opposed to the path being taken by many similar institutions of upping research expectations, Bardo quoted a union slogan used when organizing workers at elite universities: “You can’t eat prestige.”

Where all the children are above average...

There's a very nice article over at Inside Higher Ed on the problems of upping the GPA requirements for admission to certain majors beyond the GPA requirements for graduation:

Progression requirements produce what a colleague calls “academic boat people,” because these students drift from major to major even though they meet, and often exceed, the university’s general 2.0 GPA standard for continued enrollment. What are we to do with these students? What are we to tell parents when they complain that their child has a 2.4 GPA and yet cannot gain admittance into any of three preferred majors? Who should teach these students, and help them graduate? At my university such students become “undeclared majors,” and are transferred automatically into the College of Arts and Sciences. Do deans of the other colleges send flowers and chocolates in thanks of such generosity?

More important, who are these students? Last November I spied one of them late one evening at the local Sam’s Club. She was a decent writer in my upper-division course, but consistently earned C grades, and contributed very little to class discussions. She was at work, of course, and her lapel button held a photograph of her infant daughter. She greeted me kindly, and noted that she worked full time, was a new mother, and that soon she would finish the research paper for my course. At once my assumptions about her ability changed; suddenly her course grade reflected the complexity of life, and was no longer a simple metric of future success. Much the same happened months later when I encountered another student in a restaurant. He too earned a C from me, and as we conversed he noted that he worked more than 40 hours a week while enrolled in my course. He attended my 8 o’clock class, went straight to work, and then returned to campus for a class at night. As a progression requirement pusher I failed to incorporate the reality of these students into our department’s standards.

To be sure there are many students who do not work late, do not face double days with families, and who simply do not apply themselves in courses. This does not justify progression requirements, even though the goal of excluding just such students motivated my own jump into rule making. And herein lies the problem: progression requirements are exclusionary. They keep people from pursuing their particular academic goals. They prevent students from specializing in a field of particular interest to them. Yes, budget constraints mean that universities sometimes cannot meet the demand for programs. But often such issues are absent, and yet progression requirements remain. Take it from a former progression requirement pusher: Such exclusion, as well meaning as it may be, prevents universities from fulfilling the call to educate our citizens. As such they should be eliminated when possible, reduced when feasible, and abandoned as a means of determining in advance who will and will not be successful in life.

This an area of academic discrimination that is increasingly important to resist. Often its source lies in a self-aggrandizing desire to see our own fields has the hardest, best, or most demanding coupled with a, perhaps understandable but still unjustifiable, desire to teach only the best and brightest students with the most time to devote to our subjects. Even where admission to programs needs to be restricted simply because there are not enough classes to meet the student demand, a lottery might be a much better way to apportion those scare seats rather than setting ever higher GPA requirements.

Welcome to my discipline...

I'm glad to see this in Inside Higher Ed. Many of my colleagues think I must be joking when I tell them how under-represented women are in Philosophy departments:

Sally Haslanger’s latest paper won’t appear until next year, in the journal Hypatia, but a version she posted online is attracting considerable attention by pointing out the limits of progress for women in philosophy.

Haslanger studied the gender breakdowns in the top 20 departments (based on The Philosophical Gourmet Report) and found that the percentage of women in tenure track positions was 18.7 percent, with two departments under 10 percent. She also looked at who published in top philosophy journals for the last five years and found that only 12.36 percent of articles were by women. Figures like that might not shock in some disciplines, but they stand out in the humanities. In history, for examples, a 2005 report found women making up 18 percent of full professors and 39 percent of assistant professors. ...

To judge from comments posted about her essay on Crooked Timber and other blogs, many women in graduate school today remain the only women in their programs — and experience variations on what Haslanger described.

Adjunct Freedom

Excellent! Here's an article from Inside Higher Ed on the American Federation of Teachers, academic freedom, and the use and abuse of adjunct faculty.

... the AFT is acknowledging that relying on the tenure system to protect professors’ academic freedom doesn’t work when more and more faculty members don’t have, and may never have, tenure.

“The greatest threat to academic freedom today is the subtle removal of many faculty positions from the tenure track and from engagement with institutional power through shared governance structures like faculty senates,” says a background paper the AFT produced to explain the idea of drafting a new statement of principles on academic freedom. “The mechanisms of tenure (or similar protections against arbitrary treatment), peer review and shared governance are vital to the maintenance of academic freedom.”

I posted recently on another Inside Higher Ed article about the increasing use of adjunct faculty as an attack on tenure and, having spent many years as an adjunct myself, I am in complete agreement with the argument that this constitutes "the greatest threat to academic freedom today." In addition to seeking to curb this alarming trend and increase the number of tenured and tenure-track faculty positions, the AFT is also seeking to increase the faculty governance role of adjunct faculty as well.

As is also the case with untenured Assistant Professors, though, simply including adjunct faculty on university committees does not necessarily translate into institutional power. It is a mistake to think that one can engage robustly in arguing for changes in personnel or curriculum policy when one's own job next semester depends on the continuing good will of the other faculty and administrators also serving on that committee. The problem is not simply the lack of adjunct faculty representation on university committees. The problem is that their status as adjunct faculty makes them too vulnerable for the task. Along with this, adjunct salaries are already so poor that adding yet more time consuming duties on top of their already overworked and underpaid positions is not the most progressive stance to take.

Faculty governance depends on tenure. There is no substitute for it. Adjunct faculty do not, and cannot, have the same academic freedoms and the same roles in shared governance as tenured faculty. This is not because they don't do committee work, but because they are not tenured. The only way to fix this fundamental inequality is to stop using adjunct faculty. I'm convinced that the best way to do this is to raise adjunct salaries dramatically. If there are no cost savings to the institution, there will be much less incentive to hire off the tenure-track.

The End of Tenure

Forget all the debates over whether or not the tenure system ought to be abolished. When tenure actually does come to an end, it won't be because of some faculty senate resolution. It will simply be because the majority of us are part-time workers. This is the real attack on tenure. Inside Higher Ed writes:

A new report from the National Center for Education Statistics shows that of the 1,314,506 faculty members at colleges that award federal financial aid in fall 2005, 624,753, or 47.5 percent, were in part-time positions.

The new report, “Employees in Postsecondary Institutions, Fall 2005, and Salaries of Full-Time Instructional Faculty, 2005-06,” also finds the proportion of all professors who are tenured or on the tenure track to be shrinking. Of the 675,624 full-time faculty members at degree-granting colleges and universities in 2005, 414,574, or 61.4 percent, were either tenured or on the tenure track. That is down from the 411,031 of 630,419 (or 65.2 percent) of professors at degree-granting institutions who were tenured or tenure track in 2003.