There’s a new piece up at The Atlantic by Elizabeth Segran on the adjunct crisis in U.S. Higher Ed and the growing movement to contest the situation. The piece has a number of helpful aspects, including providing a summary of some of the most recent research on the effects of adjunctification on faculty, students, and the overall shape of the institution of U.S. Higher Education. Especially welcome is the recognition that, aside from its obvious economic consequences and its effects on student outcomes, faculty precarity has significantly eroded academic freedom, scholarly production, and done a great deal to compromise the university as an institution of learning and critical thought. This makes it all the more disappointing that the solutions the author seems most inclined to accept would only improve the economic situation of contingent faculty while doing nothing to make them less precarious or offer more support for research and scholarship.
In what follows, I’ll explain the above in a bit more detail.
As I wrote last year in response to President Obama’s Higher Education Plan, it has historically been somewhat difficult to get usable, easily comparable data about the real working and living conditions of adjunct faculty.* One of the problems is that the people most of us mean when we talk about adjuncts, part-time instructors who are typically very poorly compensated in relation to any sort of full time faculty, are often lumped in with other contingent faculty working under very different conditions or treated as 'staff' rather than part of the faculty. This 'lumping in' move is also evident in the way that last year's Figlio, et. al. study of full-time non tenure track faculty and those on tenure lines (which I wrote about here and at Inside Higher Ed), and much of the reporting about it, tended to obscure the distinction between comparatively well-compensated (though non-tenure track) teaching faculty, who the study showed to be doing quite well by their students, and the part-time, precarious adjuncts the proliferation of whom has been seen to have a negative impact on students in a number of previous studies. Figlio and company pushed the idea that hiring more of these full time, well-compensated but still non-tenurable and so insecure faculty would be a good solution to some of the pressures facing academic administrators. Unfortunately, it seems that Segran and those she interviews are thinking along the same lines.
Nevertheless, before the wholly inadequate 'solutions' section later in her piece, it is worth highlighting what Segran does well—including avoiding at least some of the confusion to which Figlio, et. al. tended to give rise.
Here Segran benefits from one of the most heartening consequences of the growing movement among contingent faculty to advocate on their own behalf for some sort of professional equity, which has been the production of a great deal of new data on the economic issues affecting them and the precise nature of their working conditions. The piece cites two reports, one by the AAUP and another by the Democratic Staff of the U.S. House Committee on Education and the Workforce, which show that “adjuncts now constitute 76.4 percent of U.S. faculty across all institutional types, from liberal-arts colleges to research universities to community colleges,” and "that the majority of these adjuncts live below the poverty line.”
Segran also highlights the work of the Delphi project, which has been able to show "that students who take more classes with adjuncts are more likely to drop out.” This is consistent with the broad body of research on adjuncts, strictly so-called, which even Figlio, et. al. note—and it is important that it be prominently featured.
But even better than simply producing these data points, Segran does very well in terms of explaining the context in which they occur and providing a clear account of the relationship between the economic situation and working conditions of adjunct faculty and the outcomes of their students. Here it is worth quoting her summary of a discussion with Adrianna Kezar of the Delphi Project at length:
Kezar told me that this high attrition rate has nothing to do with the quality of instruction adjuncts provide; it is entirely a function of the compromised working conditions adjuncts face. Tenure-track professors have a wealth of career-development tools at their disposal; in contrast, Kezar says, universities do not give adjuncts the basic resources they need to properly teach their courses, such as sample syllabi or learning objectives. Since most departments hire adjuncts at the last minute, they are often inadequately prepared to enter the classroom. Universities do not provide adjuncts with office space, making it difficult for them to meet with students outside class. To make matters worse, many adjuncts teach at several colleges to make ends meet: Commuting—sometimes between great distances—further reduces the time they can devote to individual students.
All of these are crucial considerations, and even if only some of them apply at any given institution, virtually no one who works as an adjunct is unaffected by some of them.
Moreover, Segran highlights the way in which the very contingency of the adjunct’s situation, and his or her almost abject dependence on student evaluations, makes it almost inevitable that he or she will be forced to perform a great deal of uncompensated labor in order to make up for the inadequacies of her working conditions. "'Students aren’t getting what they pay for or, if they are, it is because adjuncts themselves are subsidizing their education,' Maria Maisto, president of the adjunct activist group New Faculty Majority, told me. 'Adjuncts are donating their time; they are providing it out of pocket.’”
And finally, the article brings to light an issue that has been substantially under-discussed in much of the conversation, namely the consequences of the loss of academic freedom and research production that adjunctification entails.
“We have lost an entire generation of scholarship because of this,” Debra Leigh Scott, an adjunct activist and documentary filmmaker, told me. “Adjunct contracts not only drive professors into poverty, it makes it next to impossible for them to do the kind of scholarship they have trained an average of ten years to do.” Scott suggests that the loss of academic scholarship has ripple effects throughout society, since fewer scholars are contributing to national discussions on issues like the ethics of business and the value of the humanities. “If you lose these expert voices then who is really left speaking?” she asks. “You get the pundits on either side, but there is not a lot of depth to the conversations being held. There has been a dumbing down of discourse across all platforms.”
One might add, drawing a connection that is implicit in this section of the piece, that the effects of mass contingency on academic freedom and the narrowing of the group of active researchers in relation to faculty as a whole also limits the number and type of faculty who are in a secure enough position to play a public role as scholars and intellectuals. And it also limits the number of faculty who are in a position to criticize or context the actions of their own university administrations, in order to advocate either for their own interests or those of their students.
All of this is followed by a similarly good discussion of the causes of the current situation, that accounts for administrative bloat, short-termism in administrative thinking, and a misguided "focus on enhancing the student experience outside—rather than inside—the classroom." And Segran also does well in highlighting the real difficulties facing adjuncts seeking to organize.
All of which makes it particularly disappointing that when turning to the question of how this situation can be ameliorated, Segran is content to follow Kezar of the Delphi Project's profoundly misguided suggestion that adjuncts' "unions suggest alternative hiring models rather than pushing for more tenured positions." Essentially, this amounts to endorsing the creation of the sort of comfortable non-tenure track teaching faculty that the Figlio, et. al. report also endorses. But as a solution to the entire range of problems discussed above, especially given how many of them have to do with the effects of the insecurity of contingent, contract labor on scholarly production, academic freedom, and faculty participation in institutional governance, this should strike us as deeply unsatisfying.
To address this entire range of problems, we need to work toward replacing the masses of adjuncts with an equally large body of secure, tenured faculty who can fully participate in academic life and form a robust bulwark against the short-termism of professional administrators and their tendency to lose focus on the educational mission their institutions.
*especially part-time adjuncts, who often teach at multiple institutions and whose situations are therefore not adequately reflected in data provided by any single institution
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