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October 28, 2009
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Putting the genie back in the bottle
Tenure has been disappearing for decades--just about as fast as adjuncts can be hired. Much ink and many pixels have been devoted to analyzing, deploring, and even, at times, celebrating the fact that today, by some counts, upwards of 70 percent of college courses are taught by non-tenure track faculty. Now the AAUP wants to put the genie back in the bottle.
The AAUP is arguing that in order to preserve academic freedom, adjunct faculty positions ought to be converted into tenured ones. It has issued a draft statement laying out the hows and the whys, and inviting comment. Debate is already raging, within the AAUP and beyond, about how such conversion should be handled, and how it might grapple with certain realities--such as the fact that adjuncts at research universities don't tend to have the publishing records required for tenure at such places.
The realities in turn raise messy ethical issues. As KC Johnson observes at Inside Higher Ed,
The AAUP statement is deeply troubling ... Adjuncts are not hired through competitive, national searches, nor (with very, very rare exceptions) does an adjunct position contain any expectation of scholarly production. Converting them en masse to tenure-track faculty status would send a message to graduate students entering the field -- much less to state legislators, donors, and alumni -- that institutions no longer have any interest in ensuring that tenure-track positions result in the hire of the best candidate, drawn from a national pool to include consideration of the candidate's scholarly publications.
It's a sad irony. The argument against adjunct labor is often a quality control argument--adjuncts, the logic goes, tend not to have the time or resources to teach with as much dedication as they should; they don't have academic freedom, so can neither teach nor research fearlessly; they don't have time to publish. But the argument against converting adjunct positions into tenured ones is also shaping up to be an argument of quality control, for the very same reasons. You can't have it both ways, though the folks who really just want to dial back the clock and return to the halcyon days of tenure want to believe you can.
I'm getting tired and I haven't even mentioned the financial obstacles. Or the fact that the AAUP, once again, is behaving more like a union than a principled professional organization. The draft statement argues that "Tenure was conceived as a right rather than a privilege." But academic freedom, as the AAUP itself used to emphasize, is not just a "right." It is a system of major responsibilities and contingent rights that add up to an ideal of ethical, peer-reviewed professionalism. You don't get the rights if you don't fulfill the responsibilities. Those responsibilities include self-policing, meaningful peer review at hiring and promotion, serious post-tenure review, and so on. It's no secret that in the aggregate, academics aren't holding up their end of the bargain.
I'm thinking this is a genie that won't go back into the bottle.
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Comments:
Shouldn't the lack of research responsibilities lead to better teaching by the adjuncts? Certainly when I was in school the biggest problem in getting quality instruction in the class room was getting research professors to put in an effort, rather than focusing on research.
"...that institutions no longer have any interest in ensuring that tenure-track positions result in the hire of the best candidate, drawn from a national pool to include consideration of the candidate's scholarly publications."
If 70% of college classes are taught by adjuncts, then it seems to me that tenure and whatever the track is to getting it are fairly irrelevant to the process of teaching at universities. So what is tenure relevant to?
AOG - definitely. But that's not how the argument tends to go. I've long thought that in the humanities in particular, research should be something that is voluntary, and done on one's own time -- evenings, weekends, summer. That would make it MUCH more honest than it is now, when people write not because they have something to say, or because they want to, but because they must in order to get tenure-track job, get tenure, get promoted.
Laura -- There is the argument, and there is the reality. The argument is that you need tenure for academic freedom. The reality is that very few academics, once tenured, do much of anything that would test their colleagues' willingness to keep them on. Meanwhile, the AFT, AAUP, etc., are devising ways to ensure academic freedom for non-tenure-track faculty.
You need tenure to assure a reasonable teaching load so that you can provide quality instruction, advising, etc. Adjuncts have to cut corners, because they have to teach 6-7 classes a term in order to make ends meet.
And research is important. You need to stay on the cutting edge of your field, or you are teaching things sometimes decades old.
Adjuncts are not hired through competitive, national searches, nor (with very, very rare exceptions) does an adjunct position contain any expectation of scholarly production. Converting them en masse to tenure-track faculty status would send a message to graduate students entering the field . . . that institutions no longer have any interest in ensuring that tenure-track positions result in the hire of the best candidate
And the current hiring process (in the humanities--English, in my case) is ensuring that the best candidates are hired? This is news to me.
But John, if 70% of courses are taught by adjuncts, then tenure only provides that reasonable teaching load, quality instruction, and cutting edge to 30% of the courses being taught. Tenure is relevant to the tenured professors, I suppose, but I don't see how it could be relevant to college teaching as a whole.
And I do get, Erin, that tenure is important for academic freedom, although after having read your blog for a while I'm not sure that there is a nationwide consensus as to what academic freedom is and what all it should cover. It's good that non-tenure-track faculty look like getting academic freedom, because until then 70% of courses will be taught by unfree academics.
Perhaps, Laura, this is part of the reason why universities are doing such a crap job?
I'm not arguing that some of the currently tenured shouldn't be shown the door. But there are also a lot of us who are trying our best to provide quality instruction and advising, keep on top of recent developments in our field, and provide service to both our universities and our fields of study.
You want experts in the class? Or do you want migrant workers?
John, I'd like experts in more than 30% of the classes.
Why are there so many adjuncts who don't have tenure? Are they terrific teachers who just don't have the publications and so forth? If so, are they so burdened with the coursework that the tenured professors aren't doing that they can't teach effectively? How is that helping anybody?
You talk about how crucial tenure is - then how come it's OK for 70% of courses to be taught by non-tenured teachers?
