So many of the debates about higher ed reform are so incredibly stale, and so profoundly stuck. The debate about the rise of non-tenure-track faculty is one of the stalest and stuckest. But there's a new book out that offers an intriguing new way to think about the issue--and that has the potential to un-stick the debate. Maurice Black and I have co-authored a review of John Cross and Edie Goldenberg's Off-Track Profs; here are the opening paragraphs:

According to the AAUP, 48 percent of faculty are part-timers, and 68 percent of all faculty appointments take place off the tenure track. The American Federation of Teachers (AFT) cites comparable numbers, reporting that a mere 27 percent of postsecondary instructors hold fulltime, tenure-track positions. Such figures are the familiar touchstones of debates about the nature and future of academic work, undergraduate education, and academic freedom. They anchor official statements and form the basis of movements. Adjunct faculty are unionizing, and the AFT has launched a campaign to increase the proportion of undergraduate courses taught by fulltime and tenure-track professors to 75 percent.

Surrounded by statistics, activism, and commentary, the adjunct faculty member is never far from discussions about higher ed reform. "There is no subject so painful and so ubiquitous as the role of adjuncts in higher ed," writes Louisiana State University English professor Emily Toth, the Chronicle of Higher Education's "Ms Mentor." Nor, perhaps, is there an academic subject so thoroughly stylized. The underpaid, uninsured, and underappreciated "freeway flyer" has become a tragic figure, a poster prof for the moral, economic, and ethical failings of modern-day academia. Hardly a month goes by without another scandal in which someone fires---or fails to renew---an "invisible adjunct" who has expressed controversial views. Such cases---and the anger they evoke---have become the standardized set pieces of an academia that has yet to reckon with the fact that its modes of employment have undergone a seismic shift.

The supporting casts in these set pieces are as stylized as their non-tenure-track stars. There is the bean-counting administrator, an anti-intellectual corporate drone who sees adjunct faculty as a handy way to reduce overhead. And there is the smug tenured professor who sits idly by while a corps of shamelessly exploited workers enables his light teaching load, his leisurely sabbaticals, and his inflated salary. Together, these characters facilitate two structures of blame. The first focuses on putatively deliberate actions, assuming that the rise of adjuncts is an intended consequence of a specific, crass economic plan; the second focuses on passive inaction, assuming that tenured professors have made a Faustian bargain to secure their own comfort at the expense of tenure and academic freedom for future generations.

Blame of this sort is righteous indeed, and can feel awfully fine. But it's important to recognize its origins in oversimplification and caricature. The cost-conscious administrator is not so ruthlessly calculating as the blame game makes her out to be, nor is the tenured professor so consciously entitled. The fact is that neither administrators nor faculty can be exactly blamed for the rise of adjunct faculty. As John C. Cross and Edie Goldenberg demonstrate in their meticulously documented, devastatingly dispassionate Off-Track Profs: Nontenured Teachers in Higher Education, this is a situation that no one set out to create and that no one actively maintains. They find that the growing numbers of non-tenure-track college teachers are, instead, the cumulative, unanticipated result of decades of disconnected, dispersed decision-making by administrators, deans, department chairs, and staff members working within a decentralized system where planning, assessment, communication, accountability, and adjustment are all exceptionally challenging endeavors.

A devastating correlative fact is that no one actually knows what the facts about adjunct labor in academe actually are. Take the statistics propagated by the AAUP, the AFT, and others---the ones that underwrite the academic labor movement and that fuel debate about what the rise in adjunct faculty means for the quality of undergraduate education, for academic freedom, for tenure, and for a host of related issues. These, Cross and Goldenberg note, are often drawn from statistics published by the U.S. Department of Education, which collects them from colleges and universities. But---and this is the appalling discovery at the heart of the book---colleges and universities do not themselves track this information. When called upon to report figures, they throw something together. But they don't actually know what's happening on their campuses. The "data" they report is largely guesswork done to produce what the authors call "fictitious precision."

UPDATE: Here's David French on the implications of Off-Track Profs' argument:

As I read the somewhat surprising news that no one really seems to know how many adjuncts there are and no one really understands how they are (systematically) hired and fired, I couldn't help but think that we're seeing the beginnings of a functioning free market in labor in higher education. While the market is still dramatically distorted by tenure, the very desirability of academic jobs creates the virtual equivalent of a black market in lecturers, instructors, adjuncts, and aides. Budget pressures are eased by the crush of willing applicants, and thorny tenure decisions can be postponed, perhaps indefinitely, by hiring a series of part-time professors eager for even an outside shot at a true, enduring academic career.

While there are no doubt many bad adjuncts, and there are no doubt many instances of unfairness toward and even exploitation of part-time academics, this merely places the university workplace on a more equal footing with virtually any other career. Are these disadvantages worse, on balance, that the disadvantages of the present, tenure-bound system? After all, we know what tenure has given us: a semi-permanent class of academic elites who think alike, cost a lot, and educate poorly.

At the end of the day, lasting academic reform may not come from top-down legislative or legal initiatives, but from the relentless logic and creative energy of thousands of hopeful academics who are willing to do more for less. After a while (and especially during a recession), the costly ideological monoculture spawned by tenure and other hidebound academic traditions simply stops making sense.

The Stoning of Soraya M. opens tomorrow in select theaters. Based on the 1994 bestseller about the stoning-to-death of an Iranian woman, this film is beyond timely, beyond important. See it if you can.

Check out the trailer for TEN9EIGHT, a new film about the power of entrepreneurship to lift kids out of poverty and hopelessness--and into purposeful life. I got the trailer this morning in an email from the Templeton Foundation, which blurbs it thus:

A child drops out of high school in the U.S. every nine seconds, but it doesn’t have to be that way, according to a new film called TEN9EIGHT: Shoot for the Moon. The film tells the inspirational stories of several inner-city teens as they compete in an annual business-plan competition run by the Network for Teaching Entrepreneurship (NFTE). Both the film and the NFTE have received major grant support from the John Templeton Foundation.

Produced by the award-winning filmmaker Mary Mazzio, TEN9EIGHT shows that when young people are given the opportunity to start their own businesses and take control of their futures, they can improve their academic performance and lift themselves out of even the most difficult circumstances. One of the students featured in the film is Rodney Walker, who was put into the foster care system at the age of 5 and ended up homeless on the streets of Chicago. During high school, he founded Forever Life Music and Video Productions, and he is now studying business as a freshman at Morehouse College. Another student in the film is Amanda Loyola, whose father escaped from the slums of Rio de Janeiro and brought his family to Brooklyn, where he worked at Burger King. Inspired by his example, Amanda started her own business, a vegetarian dog-treat company.

The final NFTE competition in New York City brings together 35 young entrepreneurs, chosen from over 24,000 participating students from across the country. The winner receives $10,000 to launch his or her own business. The finalists have the opportunity to interact with high-profile entrepreneurs like Arthur Blank, the founder of Home Depot; Tom Scott, the co-founder of Nantucket Nectars; and Kay Koplovitz, the founder of USA Network.

Wanted to draw attention to a column that ran last week in the Chronicle of Higher Ed. The subject is the fraudulent manner in which many schools handle the teaching of freshman composition:

When I was a graduate student, I participated in academic fraud. I didn't plagiarize to get an article published or inflate my CV to get a job. I did something worse. I accepted a teaching assistantship as a doctoral student at Elite National University.

By becoming a TA there, I took on a responsibility for which I had no qualifications: teaching first-year composition courses. Even though I had a bachelor's degree in English, I hadn't taken an introductory writing course while I was an undergraduate. I'd never taught before or had any course work in education. I didn't even have a master's degree. My hometown community college wouldn't have hired me as an adjunct, but Elite National U. put me in charge of two sections of a required class.

Students attend ENU to be taught by experts, not amateurs. In my defense I can only plead ignorance.

In those days, graduate programs at many universities sent teaching assistants into the classroom with no training, but ENU took pride in its support program. Before the first day of classes, new TA's had an entire afternoon of training in grading essays, and "Dr. Dreedle," the director of the first-year composition program, told us, "Look confident."

Straining to appear stern, I began the first day of class by giving a rehearsed speech about the wonders of writing essays. I hadn't gotten very far when one young man, "Nate," declared in a stage whisper, "Bullshit!"

I hadn't prepared a response for obscenity, but the other students ignored Nate, so I went on. In a few moments Nate repeated his sotto voce declaration. The young women around him snickered. I praised rhetoric more loudly. Then he said it again.

I resorted to what I'd seen teachers do in high school. I glared at Nate and asked coldly, "Do you have a question?"

He looked down. "No."

Nate spent the rest of the semester challenging me, and I responded like a desperate novice. I tried telling Nate outside of class to behave, shaming Nate in front of his fellow students, and finally forcing him to sit in a desk in the front where I could keep an eye on him. We endured one another until the semester ended.

I expect that the author wrote this piece because he knew his experience was far more typical than not. His story certainly meshes with my own, which also involved being thrown into teaching freshman comp without ever having taught before, and essentially without preparation or guidance. Yes, there were some nominal "training" sessions the week before classes started, and yes, there were some "mentoring" sessions throughout the first semester, but I can't say they did much.

I was tickled by the anecdote about Nate. My Nate didn't curse at me, so far as I can remember--but he did make faces at me, and once he stood up in the middle of class, calmly walked out, and twenty minutes later returned with a Big Mac, fries, and a Coke, which he then ate, noisily and with great relish, throughout the remainder of the hour. Once you've taught for a few years, such events become totally unimaginable--you just acquire an easy authority and things like that just do not happen. You don't have to think about Imposing Order or Commanding Respect or any of those things. It just happens. You know your job and you know what you are doing, and the students instinctively know that you know, and problems are very rare indeed. But when you are just beginning, anything can happen.

The fact is that of all the courses English departments offer, composition is probably the hardest one to teach (and also the hardest one to take). The workload is much greater and in many ways more demanding, for both teacher and student, than a traditional literature course, and the stakes are much higher -- it really matters whether students learn in freshman comp. It matters no matter what they go on to major in, and no matter what they go on to do in life. It matters much less whether they learn something in an elective seminar on Victorian novels--and I say that as someone whose bread and butter used to be teaching Victorian novels. And yet, for the most part the folks who teach composition in university English departments are grad students who have no particular interest in composition, who may not be very good writers themselves, who may or may not know the rules of grammar and syntax, and who have been planted in composition classrooms because a) they need teaching experience; b) the faculty doesn't want to teach composition. It's win-win for everyone except the freshmen who don't get the kind of course they need--and have a right to expect.

So what tends to happen in freshman comp? The standard model is that students spend most of their class time discussing readings--rather like a standard lit course. This suits the grad student teachers just fine, because it lets them practice teaching literature, which is what they really want to teach anyhow, while also allowing them to mask the fact that they aren't generally doing very much at all in the way of teaching actual writing. Students will then write lots of essays, and there will often be lots of class time devoted to "workshopping" the essays, an enormously time-consuming activity of questionable value. In a "workshop" every student has supposedly read and commented on one student's essay. Then they all talk about it, and deliver their considered opinions about what's good about the essay and about how it could be improved. Good teachers can make this format work--but inexperienced ones tend to allow it to become a shapeless free for all in which bad ideas get just as much play as good ones, and in which the outcome tends more to confusion than clarity. That's an acceptable tradeoff for the beginning teacher, though, as workshopping is a great way to fill up class time while getting the students to talk. It also makes everyone feel that writing is being taught--even when it isn't.

Stanley Fish is fascinating on the subject of what composition courses should be. Here he is in Save the World on Your Own Time:

All composition courses should teach grammar and rhetoric and nothing else. No composition course should have a theme, especially not one the instructor is interested in. Ideas should be introduced not for their own sake, but for the sake of the syntactical and rhetorical points they help illustrate, and once they serve this purpose, they should be sent away. Content should be avoided like the plague it is, except for the deep and inexhaustible content that will reveal itself once the dynamics of language are regarded not as secondary, mechanical aids to thought, but as thought itself. If content takes over, what won't get done is the teaching of writing, something the world really needs and something an academic with the appropriate training can actually do.

Yesterday I wrote a bit about the stalemated quality of many "debates" (they aren't really debates, since they are stalemated and increasingly scripted) about higher ed. The occasion was ACTA's new booklet on intellectual diversity on campus--which, far from being a "manufactured controversy" (a phrase coined by defenders of the academic status quo and defended vigorously with a nice brew of ad hominem attack, false accusation, and ostrich-like disinterest in facts)--poses some very reasonable, constructive ideas for what campuses can do to ensure that free inquiry and open exchange are alive and well among students and faculty. ACTA's ideas are all drawn from examples of what some forward-looking schools are already doing--and they exemplify ACTA's collaborative outlook.

So did the panel discussion ACTA recently ran at the AAUP national meeting, and so do a bunch of other recent ACTA endeavors. Here's ACTA president Anne Neal, describing the organization's outlook over at ACTA Online:

"Reaching Across the Aisle: Bridging the Gap Between Governing Boards and Academics." That was the name of ACTA's panel discussion at the recent American Association of University Professors annual meeting. Dedicated to fostering a greater exchange between faculty and trustees, this panel was part of ACTA's larger, long-term effort to educate trustees about what constitutes appropriate governance, to educate faculty about the same thing, to spark productive discussions between these two groups, and to enlist the AAUP as a partner in those efforts.

In recent months, ACTA has been pleased to reach out to faculty and the AAUP in a number of ways. In December, we participated in a colloquy with AAUP board member and Penn State English professor Michael Berube at the National Communication Association's annual convention. In January, at the annual meeting of the National Association of Scholars, we asked AAUP president and University of Illinois English professor Cary Nelson to join us in stomping out speech codes (he accepted our invitation). Most recently, we included an article by AAUP general secretary Gary Rhoades about intellectual diversity in our forthcoming newsletter. These events are complemented by our participation in academic conferences hosted by the Association of American Colleges and Universities, the State University of New York, and others. At every point, we seek to build an ongoing, positive engagement with the higher ed community -- to discuss issues, to hear differing perspectives, to brainstorm solutions, and to build the kinds of dialogues and relationships that can facilitate beneficial reform for everyone in higher ed, from the faculty to the students.

We may not have completely "bridged the gap" just yet, but we have only just begun. And I do believe we have laid a strong foundation. As I noted during the AAUP session, ACTA shares faculty members' interest in demanding excellent governance -- including resisting rogue administrators and trustees who micromanage. That is one of the goals of our state report cards, which grade boards on numerous fronts: presidential selection and review, committee structures, transparency and accessibility, as well as substantive actions. ACTA also shares many faculty members' legitimate concern about administrative bloat and about trustees who lack a sensitive understanding of the special protocols and values that underwrite the unique enterprise of higher education.

That said, we also believe that it is the professoriate's job to reach out to trustees. Faculty should understand that presidents and trustees are engaged in enormously complex, vital, and often urgent fiduciary endeavors. They should also understand that, going forward, trustees must be included among academia's primary stakeholders, alongside faculty and administrators. The bottom line: Shared governance should indeed be "shared." ACTA has made a start towards a broader dialogue and we look forward to continuing on this path.