Contingent Faculty Publishing in Community: Case Studies for Successful Collaborations

Case Studies for Successful Collaborations

L. Guglielmo, L. Gaillet, L. Guglielmo, L. Gaillet

• Publisher: Palgrave Pivot
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781137491619
• eBook ISBN: 9781137491626
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education Administration

Contributors argue that the key to innovative teaching and scholarship lies in institutional support for the contingent labor force, and they encourage contingent faculty to organize self-mentoring groups, create venues for learning/disseminating their experiences and findings, and connect scholarship to service and teaching in novel ways.

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The New Faculty Majority: Changing Conditions and a Changing Scholarly Publication Environment

Eileen E. Schell

Abstract: Eileen E. Schell offers an overview of the changing conditions of employment for faculty working off the tenure track and discusses teaching and scholarly work viewed against the backdrop of larger social and economic shifts occurring in US higher education. This introduction considers how works such as the present volume—focused on opportunities for contingent faculty members to publish—can help make the work of contingent teachers and scholars more visible in ways that lead to transparency of working conditions within higher education.

Keywords: Boyer Commission Report; contingent faculty; heuristics; mentoring; professional development; scholarship of teaching

Guglielmo, Letizia, and Lynée Lewis Gaillet, eds. Contingent Faculty Publishing in Community: Case Studies for Successful Collaborations. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015. DOI: 10.1057/9781137491626.0005.

Many of you will remember the story of the swindling tailors who fool the emperor by creating an invisible garment in the Hans Christian Anderson version of the fairy tale “The Emperor’s New Clothes,” originally entitled “The Emperor’s New Suit.” The swindlers, in their infinite wisdom, convince the emperor that they “have invented an extraordinary method to weave a cloth so light and fine that it looks invisible . . . to anyone who is too stupid and incompetent to appreciate its quality.” The emperor is intrigued and agrees to have the garment made. After painstaking “fake” work by the tailors, the emperor parades through the streets in his carriage while his subjects proclaim how beautiful his new “garments” are. The emperor’s minions walk in front of him to see who is too stupid to see his beautiful new outfit and his attendants walk behind, holding his imaginary mantle. Meanwhile, the tailors make off like bandits with their bags of gold.

A child in the crowd, who is unafraid of public opinion and censure, points to the spectacle and announces that “The Emperor is naked.” While the child’s father tries to reprimand him, the boy’s remark travels like wildfire and is repeated again and again.

“The boy is right! The Emperor is naked! It’s true!”

Although the emperor realizes that people are right, he cannot admit that he has been swindled. He continues “the procession under the illusion that anyone who couldn’t see his clothes was either stupid or incompetent. And he stood stiffly on his carriage, while behind him a page held his imaginary mantle” (Anderson).

I reference this memorable fairy tale to remind us that we are having our very own moment of the “Emperor’s New Clothes” in higher education. Paraded through the brochures and documents advertising educational institutions are the traditional tenured and tenure-track (TT) faculty in their doctoral robes marching in graduating ceremonies, sitting in their book-lined offices with enrapt students, writing scholarly books and articles, or teaching small groups of students. But if the TT faculty is marching in the parade of higher education to admiring crowds, they are a very thin line of the overall faculty, at 30 percent or less nationally. What we really have is a large population of contingent faculty marching behind, holding up the mantle by performing the bulk of instructional duties: teaching classes (both traditional and online), grading papers and exams, and often mentoring and advising students. The American Association of University Professors (AAUP) subcommittee of the Committee on Contingency in the Profession notes in a recent report that

By 2007, however, almost 70 percent of faculty members were employed off the tenure track. Many institutions use contingent faculty appointments throughout their programs; some retain a tenurable faculty in their traditional or flagship programs while staffing others—such as branch campuses, online offerings, and overseas campuses—almost entirely with contingent faculty. Faculty serving contingently generally work at significantly lower wages, often without health coverage and other benefits, and in positions that do not incorporate all aspects of university life or the full range of faculty rights and responsibilities. The tenure track has not vanished, but it has ceased to be the norm for faculty.

Given these patterns of faculty employment, we need to be like the whistle-blower child in the fairytale. We need to be the ones to get past the denial in higher education about the growth of contingent faculty and the changing conditions of higher education and point out that faculty working off the tenure track are the new faculty majority. We also need to take action to shore up the crumbling infrastructure of higher education through stabilizing and improving all faculty positions. We also need to ensure that one of the primary functions of academe—producing new knowledge for the future as well as new thinkers and an educated workforce for the future—is not obstructed by conditions that will make it impossible for the new faculty majority to be included in scholarly or professional activity.

This edited collection considers how all faculty and instructors—whether tenure track, tenured, contingent, or graduate students—might be included in the work of scholarly publication. This stance toward strategic inclusion works against the exclusive tendency that is practiced in many “how-to” scholarly publication manuals or guides, which automatically assume an audience of TT faculty members. Such guides, while useful, do not often deal with the changing nature of academic positions in higher education, the rise of lectureships, instructorships, online teaching positions (whether part-time or full-time, non-tenure-track [NTT]), as noted above. Often such resource guides or how-to books do not adequately deal with the changing nature of scholarly publication or the changing nature of support for scholarly work. Given this absence, we need realistic resource guides and analyses that engage questions such as these:

What are strategies for maintaining a record of active scholarly publication or creative activity when one is in a teaching-intensive or administrative-heavy position and working off the tenure track?

What does it mean to maintain an active scholarly or creative record when there may be little or no money or time available to support that work?

What counts as scholarly or professional activity in an increasingly digital realm?

And what of the fact that there may not be a comprehensive reward system that recognizes the value of publication—whether traditional or digital publication—for teaching-intensive, NTT positions?

From various vantage points, the writers in this edited collection, representing TT, tenured, administrative, contingent, and graduate student positions, consider strategies for engaging in scholarship that account for the material conditions and constraints of busy teaching lives and less than adequate pay and working conditions. Contributors advise readers how to pursue opportunities for scholarly work and publication while offering realistic advice about the tough realities of higher education employment practices. Before addressing the contributions this collection makes, though, I wish to consider how we got here—to this moment—of changing academic positions and the transformation of academic knowledge production. What accounts for the rise of these conditions? And how can we understand our own contingency as professionals, scholars, teachers, and literacy workers? I begin with my own engagement with contingency, which has substantially shaped my understanding of these issues.

Considering contingency: how did we get here?

My initial interest in this topic of contingent workers in higher education came from my own experiences in 1988–1989 working part-time at a community college in Seattle, Washington. During that year and a half of working part-time, I met and worked with a half dozen freeway flyers in the bullpen offices we shared on our concrete block campus that squatted along the I-5 freeway. Fresh out of graduate school with a master’s degree in British literature, idealistic, naïve, hopeful, and 24 years old, I hoped that teaching writing as an adjunct at a community college might land me a stable teaching position for a few years until I was able to save up enough money to go back to graduate school. Well, I could dream, and my teaching job that year became one of three jobs I had at the time as I waited tables and served drinks at a local bar and grill in the evenings; edited the writing of education, science, and engineering graduate students in the afternoons; and then spent my mornings teaching writing courses at the local community college. Over the course of that year and a half, I learned about the seemingly hidden world of adjunct labor from my women colleagues who were veterans—freeway flyers—of multiple campuses strung up and down the I-5 corridor. These women were an interesting lot—many had raised children, pursued their art and writing, weathered various forms of cancer or other illnesses, and along the way, they had shaken out into contingent positions, some by choice and many more by necessity, geographically bound by spouses, family, elder care, and geographically limited employment options. They taught me about how they survived as contingent faculty members—how they timed their classes across the city and surrounding environs so they had enough time to go from campus to campus, how they juggled lesson plans across the campuses, and how they dealt with a slew of differing campus regulations and administrative demands. They talked about how they “stole” time for writing projects or cobbled together money from different sources to attend and present at academic conferences or creative workshops.

I also learned about being contingent from some of my students who were sleeping in their cars because they did not have enough money to rent apartments or rooms. I learned about what it meant to be expendable to the US government as some of our student veterans who had served in Vietnam were living with conditions associated with Agent Orange exposure and striving to have their disability claims recognized. I met homeless people who sometimes dropped in on classes at the college or who hung out in the library or student lounges because it was warmer and drier there than under the rainy and windy I-5 freeway overpass.

Teaching as a community college adjunct opened my eyes to contingency in higher education—contingency in the higher education workforce, contingency among the student populations trying to get a leg up through higher education, and contingency in society in general through homelessness, unemployment, and poverty. And this kind of contingency has only increased over the years with the defunding of the public sector, including decreased federal and state-funding for public higher education.

This picture of contingency was not something I forgot when I went off to graduate school to pursue a doctorate; it became the subject of my research, writing, and activism in graduate school and faculty life after that (see Schell, Schell and Stock). In particular, I was interested in exploring the gendered nature of contingent work, especially in the humanities where many women are teaching off the tenure track and have been teaching there for decades. Gary Rhoades, general secretary of the AAUP, has argued that “we are all contingent” in higher education right now, but, of course, that claim must be nuanced. Some of us are way more contingent than others and have longer histories with being contingent workers. Indeed, this principle was brought home to me a few years ago when I was asked to judge a contest for an “unsung hero” in a department in the humanities. As I was reading the various nomination letters, I encountered a particularly memorable account of a part-time faculty member who had been teaching on that campus for 37 years on a semester-to-semester contract. This part-time faculty member shared a computer and a small two-desk office with three other people. She also taught at three different campuses, yet still made it to every single meeting and event on the main campus. The letter went on to narrate this teacher’s successes with students and her encouragement of many of them to become majors and minors through her lower-division teaching. At the end of the letter, the nominator noted that, finally, in her 37th year of employment, this contingent faculty member has been granted a year-long contract, but still without health benefits after almost four decades of service. The recent addition of a union to the campus had made this year-long contract possible, yet the teacher was still struggling to be recognized for her contributions.

My decision to vote for this part-time faculty member as the top choice for “unsung” hero was a no-brainer; however, reading her file caused me to reflect upon the ways in which a story such as this is an all-too common narrative. This instructor is an everywoman, representative of a whole generation of women who have worked diligently off the tenure track for decades. I have met hundreds of these women and a growing number of men over the years at my speaking engagements and travels to various campuses. Colleges and universities both rely on and exploit their labor, which begs the question, how did we get here?

The changes in the composition and working conditions of the faculty in American higher education are part and parcel of larger changes in higher education. As higher education expanded its reach and opened its doors to many students in late 19...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• 1  The New Faculty Majority: Changing Conditions and a Changing Scholarly Publication Environment
• 2  Casting NTT Faculty as Practitioner-Researchers: Using Research Opportunities to Enhance Teaching, Service, and Administrative Assignments
• 3  Knotworking with the National Writing Project: A Method for Professionalizing Contingent Faculty
• 4  Legal Tender or Counterfeit Currency: Organizing a Conference off the Tenure Track
• 5  Opportunities in Assessment: Making Your Service Your Scholarship
• 6  Born-Digital Work: Opportunities for Collaboration and Career Growth
• 7  Into Active Voice: Seeking Agency through Collaborative Scholarship
• 8  Applications: A Practical Guide for Employing Habits of Mind to Foster Effective Writing Practices
• Afterword
• Index