The Latent Transformative Power of a Coordinated Contingent Faculty Movement
Contingent faculty at Harvard are trying to unionize. The Harvard Academic Workers – UAW (HAW-UAW) publicly launched their unionization campaign earlier this month.
The lecturers, postdocs, preceptors and other non-tenure-track (NTT) employees of the Ivy League university reportedly want a contract with more job security, parental leave and child care support.
“I’m an award-winning teacher. But I’m not paid like one! With two small kids, it’s a struggle to meet the cost of living,” Ana Isabel Keilson, a lecturer in social studies at Harvard, explained in a testimonial. “Daycare is 85% of my take-home salary and the subsidy Harvard provides covers just over one month of tuition. Harvard says it values education, but it doesn’t value its educators.”
The practice of hiring a tier of academics on short-term contracts bereft of job security and paying them wages incommensurate with the work they do devalues not just educators but also education.
That’s not because NTT faculty on campuses across the US do an inferior job compared to their peers, the tenure-track and tenured professors who enjoy appreciably greater pay, more say over the work they do and far less precarious employment arrangements. (Notably, research shows tenure-track faculty, not surprisingly, are significantly more likely than most people to come from affluent backgrounds; it would be revealing to see research examining to what extent that trend differs for precariously employed professors who in many cases might be off the tenure track precisely because they lack the accumulated social and cultural capital of their tenure-line colleagues who hail from backgrounds characterized by comparatively higher socioeconomic status.)
To be sure, somehow, against all odds, contingent faculty frequently perform miraculous pedagogical feats and, like Keilson, win awards for their educative work. But lecturers and “adjuncts,” as those who cobble together part-time work teaching classes at multiple institutions often on per-semester contracts are called, do so under tremendous pressure.
It takes a toll.
“My relationship with the university has in many ways been debilitating to my mental health; I am sure I am not alone in this regard,” wrote Stephanie Ann-Wilms Simpson, a lecturer in the writing program at the University of California, Riverside, when I corresponded with her back in December.
Simpson previously served as president of the Riverside chapter of UC-AFT, the union representing lecturers — teaching faculty off the tenure track — throughout the University of California system.
Before that, in the spring of 2019, she joined the union’s bargaining team as an alternate.
“I wasn't even sure I was eligible to participate at the time because technically I was on a quarterly contract and had the misfortune of not getting my contract extended to an annual appointment and as a result was scrambling for work during the academic off-period of hiring decisions,” Simpson explained.
She alluded to the panic-inducing “misery” and “self-doubt” that higher education engenders among academics.
“What festers in the halls of many universities is not knowledge, but fear,” she told me. “Fear brought on by those that have been through the cycle before. Those whose acquiescence of unfair working conditions of their students and peers are seen through a tacit [Darwinian] nod. [After all], he who adapts, survives.”
Unbeknownst to many if not most undergraduate students who face their own struggles related to higher education, like paying ever-rising tuition and fees while trying to earn the academic accolades that could make a difference in their future employment prospects, those who teach the majority of their college classes endure treatment and conditions capable of causing seemingly insurmountable anguish.
I wrote previously about Paul Baltimore, Ph.D., who worked tirelessly and passionately as an American history professor in the Los Rios Community College District in California while the pressures mounted. Unable to tolerate academia’s routine attacks on his sense of self-worth stemming from an inability to make ends meet while doing what he loved and while trying to enrich other minds, he ended his life in April 2021.
His mother continues to support the union organizing and advocacy efforts her son hoped could transform the two-tier system. He actively tried to address the systemic problems so life for part-time instructors would feel less cruel.
In the wake of the emergent NTT faculty unionization campaign at Harvard, an astute contributor to the student newspaper at the university offered a few suggestions for improving the well-being of contingent faculty:
First, institutions should index the adjunct pay per course to local living conditions. No adjunct teaching a full course load should struggle to feed a family of four. Second, adjunct pay raises should match full-time faculty pay raises, at least on a percentage basis. Finally, institutions should inform adjunct faculty at least a semester in advance if they cannot be rehired the following term.
Good ideas.
It’s worth adding that adjuncts who are paid only to teach do a lot of uncompensated labor — from writing letters of recommendation, to meeting after class with students, to researching and preparing for courses without that labor being taken into account in their course pay. What’s considered a “full course load” by a school in most all cases also remains highly suspect insofar as the pedagogical labor of fewer courses can still usually result in a full work week and then some.
Unspoken assumptions about self-exploitation tend to be baked into widespread expectations regarding the pedagogical quality instructors aim to uphold against all odds.
And while the early notice the writer for the Crimson suggested would be helpful, de-normalizing the short-term gig employment for those who want to continue teaching at a given school would be even better — and surely better for the stress levels and psycho-emotional health of faculty.
To realize such solutions, though, requires more than piecemeal unionization, as many lecturers represented by unions would attest.
When teaching assistants, student researchers and postdocs in the UC system launched the largest strike in higher education history this past fall, another monumental strike on the opposite coast received a little less attention.
Part-time faculty at The New School in New York City affiliated with ACT-UAW Local 7902 also took to the picket lines and withheld their academic labor until they obtained an agreement from the university 97 percent of members considered acceptable.
“Early on, a video circulated of UC academic workers chanting in support of us,” Jerzy Gwiazdowski, a part-time professor in the school of drama at The New School told me via email in early December 2022. “I watched and shared the video many times. It was a morale boost at a challenging time and a reminder that solidarity isn’t limited to a workplace, a profession, a local, or a contract. Later that week, we responded in kind on our picket line. My friend who is involved in the UC strike was so happy to get that video and share it with their colleagues. The more we support each other, the more powerful we are.”
Indeed.
Gwiazdowski added that organizing and engaging in the labor action brought people together in supportive ways they hadn’t experienced in that academic context before.
“After years of atomization, we are building community within departments—and between the university's various colleges and programs,” he explained. I've been working here for seven years; it finally feels like The New School.”
And when the solidarity extends to coordinated action to compel change not just at one campus, but at campuses across the country, the prospects for meaningful institutional reconfiguration ought to magnify. That is, latent power probably resides in the potential and the shared, desirous yearning for a movement that unites contingent faculty at universities like Harvard, at institutions like The New School with missions to advance progressive inquiry, at once-unparalleled public university systems like the network of University of California campuses, at the many underfunded state schools across the Midwest, and throughout the nations’s oft-neglected community colleges where exploitation of part-time instructors too often exhibits a whole different level of dehumanizing disrespect.
Who better to educate people about the transformative power to be actualized through a higher education movement than those whose work revolves around teaching and involves trying to cultivate capacities for co-learning, for participatory reshaping of individuals as well as their social relations?
Of course, actions can be more instructive than words. And that would-be movement of historic proportions might already be in motion.
“For me, it has very little to do with writing history—it’s about writing my rent check,” Gwiazdowski wrote. “This so-called ‘moment’ is happening now. It’s happening because millions of hardworking people in this country are exploited by our employers and viewed as nothing but an expense on a balance sheet. In a few years, I hope a graduate researcher or adjunct professor of history teaches a course or writes a paper that puts these strikes in an historical context, but who really gives a shit if they aren’t paid a living wage to do so?”