An Attack from Within

Over the weekend, I had the opportunity to attend a conference on Social Thought here in State College. The event began on Friday evening with a keynote address by noted sociologist Frances Fox Piven, a fitting choice for a conference with a focus on inequality given her work on poverty in the United States. Just as interesting as her address were a number of papers presented by current grad students and faculty the next day, on topics as diverse as the "Sunflower" Movement in Taiwan, the rhetoric of the C.I.A.'s kill list, and Sojourner Truth's conception of equality. It was incredibly heartening to see so much bright young talent, but what was less heartening was Piven's statement the night before that no matter how brilliant a grad student may be, the likely future of most will be the serfdom of permanent adjunct status.

Piven lamented the attack on universities, pointing out the role of states in gutting financial support, in administrators creating ever-more university bureaucracy while decreasing the number of faculty, and in the faculty themselves for not being honest with their graduate students about the diminishing chances of ever getting a tenure-track position after graduation. It was a sobering reminder that not all the attacks on higher education are coming from outside the university. 

Adjunct faculty have a place in higher education, of that there can be no doubt. In my own graduate program, working reference librarians, library directors, and university catalogers from other institutions would teach perhaps a single course in a semester that reflected their area of knowledge. Being an adjunct was a job in addition to their existing full-time, salaried positions that allowed them to make a small amount of extra money while letting the program offer a course on a subject that current faculty may only have been passingly familiar with, and freeing up the tenured faculty at the University to focus on courses within their own areas of specialization. It's a model that works to benefit everyone, but one that has become increasingly abused by institutions to create a permanent underclass of highly-educated, economically insecure individuals. Ostensibly to save money, the number of tenured jobs has decreased to the point where adjunct faculty make up more than half of university teaching positions, and these faculty receive poor wages and few, if any, benefits. Many adjuncts teach the equivalent of a full course load, but are not even given support as basic as an office in the institutions they work for. To reduce well-educated, talented individuals to this state, barely getting by economically and with almost no time for their own research, is little short of a crime against education and should be a source of shame and disgrace for all institutions who so abuse their faculty.

The very individuals tasked with guiding and safeguarding their institutions have done the opposite; by expanding the ranks of administration while simultaneously reducing the number of faculty, and abusing the idea of what an adjunct faculty position is supposed to be, upper level university administration has ensured that the quality of education at their colleges and universities is lessened. What use are burgeoning departments of student life when there aren't enough faculty in a given department to allow students even the chance of graduating in four years? Even in times of state cuts to higher education, which conservatives and libertarians assured us were necessary and would force institutions to become more efficient, administrators chose to continue to feather their own nests while demanding that sacrifices come almost entirely from the faculty side. My own alma mater is a case in point; state aid reductions led to a sharp cut in music and foreign language programs, while perhaps one or two administrative positions only were to be axed. The office of the University President made no sacrifices at all, while demanding others others forfeit their positions for the overall good of the institution. 

This weekend, I felt intellectually alive with the force of new ideas, of new ways of thinking about familiar ideas, and the vigor of academic discourse. This kind of culture cannot continue to exist if the numbers of underpaid, overworked adjuncts continue to climb, if the numbers of faculty decline in favor of more administrators. We have to demand that our universities do better than this.