I like Marc Bousquet’s How the University Works. That should be obvious to any reader of this blog by now. Every so often I like to pull the book off the shelf and skim for passages I have marked. I’ll be posting these passages from Marc’s book periodically. And yes, I have Marc’s go ahead to do so.

From “Introduction” (20-1):

From a labor perspective, job-market theory disables the practice of solidarity and helps to legitimate the tiering of the workforce. Even to the most idealistic and committed observer, the job-market model offered the seductions of a quick, technocratic fix. For more than three decades, the model has sustained the general conviction that the system of graduate education produces more degree holders than necessary, and that this “overproduction” can be controlled “from the demand side” by encouraging early retirements and “from the supply side” by shrinking graduate programs.

Reality is very different from the model. In the reality of structural casualization, the jobs of professors taking early retirement are often eliminated, not filled with new degree holders. Nor does reducing graduate school admissions magically create tenure-track jobs. Most graduate schools admit students to fill specific labor needs. One of the core functions of graduate programs is to enhance flexibility, always presenting just enough labor, just in time. As a result, management cannot reduce graduate-employee admissions without making other arrangements for the work that graduate employees would otherwise have performed. Universities that have cut their graduate employee rolls have consistently preferred to make other flexible arrangements, hiring part-timers or nontenurable lecturers and not new tenurable faculty. Insofar as these new flex workers are themselves inevitably former graduate employees, there can hardly be said to be any net improvement.

Joe Berry’s Reclaiming the Ivory Tower is not only a great book for adjuncts seeking change individually and collectively, but it is also an excellent model for the kind of writing, research, and activism adjuncts can engage in. More importantly, Berry’s book lets adjuncts know they are not alone, and then shares methods for creating community and collective action.

Since I bought a copy of RIT, I have enjoyed rereading parts for inspiration and motivation. I have selected some quotes and will be posting them over time — Joe has given me permission to do so. I hope you enjoy them as much as I do!

From “Contingent Faculty Today” (10-1):

Yet another aspect of the professional constriction faced by contingent faculty is that the time and energy it takes to maintain a living at contingent academic employment, or at contingent employment outside academia, leaves no time for developing the academic capital that can keep us attractive on the job market. The world of peer-review journals, academic conferences, professional networks, updated personal references, possibilities for co-authorship, or even access to research libraries and facilities, are for the vast majority basically precluded.

However, the costs of the externalization of flexibility by academic employers do not end here. It turns out that the more we work, the greater the percentage of our time at work is hidden, unpaid, and not counted statistically. Here is how it plays out: if you primarily teach full-time at one college, you commute once. You can pick your place of residence in relation to your sole employment and other personal considerations, thereby minimizing your commute and possibly minimizing other trips of a personal nature. You also minimize your professional time outside of class, since you only have one set of administrators, one set of regulations, one place to turn in grades, one system of clerical and technical support to relate to, one parking lot, one office, one computer, one e-mail, voice mail, and mailbox to check, one set of keys, one calendar to relate to, one set of student regulations and grade and transfer requirements to become familiar with in advising students, one set of syllabi to submit, one set of portfolios to create — if that is required to maintain or upgrade your employment status, and a single format of everything that as a faculty member you need to create to do your job. Virtually all contingent faculty face multiples of this, even if their total number of classes is the same or less than that of their FTTT [full-time tenure track] colleagues. Most contingents teach at more than one place, have other paid work outside academia, or have serious unpaid responsibilities equivalent to another job.

Courtesy of Librarian in Black: a collection of 50 open source tools for online writers.

Courtesy of Nick Carbone: Jane Hart has centralized a resource of over 2,300 e-learning links. Even better, she has broken them down by category and which ones are free!

Unions represent one of the best chances for adjuncts to obtain parity in pay, respect, and benefits. Yet the relationship between adjuncts and faculty unions has also been troubled. As I started to look into unions and adjuncts, it became very clear that I was in over my head. There is so much information, so many parties are involved, and there is a long history — both recorded and oral — on adjuncts and unions that I am still attempting to figure out where I stand. An accurate, informed, and intelligent position on this unique relationship requires time, adequate information, and analysis. In spite of my relative ignorance, I firmly believe that unions represent the best and strongest hope for adjuncts to engage in collective action to obtain professional parity. If you have any doubt about the potential and need for unions, I urge you to read Reclaiming the Ivory Tower and How the University Works.

In order to educate myself, share with readers, and facilitate dialogue, I am seeking and conducting interviews with various faculty unions and giving them a chance to represent themselves to adjuncts. The first interview is with Craig Smith of the American Federation of Teachers.

How does the AFT define an adjunct? Does a Non-Tenure Track with a one year contract count as an adjunct? Are there specific skill sets to consider? What about vocational instructors who teach certain trades?

First, let me say thanks for inviting us to join this discussion. We have really appreciated the work you are doing here at Adjunct Advice and are happy to see more dialogue around these critical issues.

AFT is a union of 1.4 million members including nearly 170,000 faculty members (both full- and part-time), professional staff and graduate employees in higher education. About 60,000 of those members are “contingent faculty”—faculty not on the tenure track hired on limited term contracts. That would include part-time faculty, adjunct faculty, full-time nontenure-track faculty, faculty at research universities as well as community and technical colleges.

That is a long way of saying that we don’t define “adjunct faculty” in a particular way. A faculty member’s title is typically established by the employer and differs from state to state and institution to institution. Local bargaining agents may seek to define job titles in a certain way, but at the national level we do not. We do try to use most inclusive terminology that also respects the differences between different job titles and situations. But for us the bottom line is to create better working conditions for all faculty, whether they teach one class, are on a one-year contract, or are on the tenure-track.

What does the AFT see as the most important issue facing contingent academic laborers?

From our standpoint, the biggest issue is fair treatment and stable employment. There is certainly a mix of issues that go into those broad categories and different groups of contingent faculty will have different priorities in that mix depending on their situation. However, we believe there are three key areas where we need to improve contingent faculty working conditions:

1. equal pay for equal work;
2. access to health and retirement benefits; and,
3. job security, stability and obvious paths to full-time positions.

It is tempting to say that one of these rises above the others, but our experience is that they are intertwined and dependent on the local and institutional situation.

In brief, what is the AFT’s plan for addressing this issue?

AFT has been working on contingent faculty issues for some time now. That work has mainly been through local bargaining efforts and state level legislative work. However, our leaders increasingly felt that a more coordinated and systematic effort was needed to address these problems, which is why we launched the Faculty and College Excellence (FACE) campaign at the beginning of 2007.

The FACE campaign is a national campaign aimed at attaining pro-rata compensation for contingent faculty, creating more full-time, tenure track positions, and giving contingent faculty the opportunity to move into full-time positions. The campaign seeks these ends through both legislation and collective bargaining.

FACE has been criticized by some for being all about creating more full-time positions and not about the needs of contingent faculty. The model legislation clearly calls for pro-rata pay for contingent faculty and access to healthcare and pension benefits. It calls on institutions to create a seniority system for contingent faculty and provide a “leg-up” for contingent faculty who are qualified and wish to move into a full-time, tenure position. And it calls for institutions to craft plans that will accomplish the goals of FACE over time without any job loss to existing contingent faculty.

Now obviously, that is the model legislation and it will get altered as it moves into and through a state legislature or through the bargaining process. However, while FACE may take on different forms, we have argued that it must always contain both sides of the equation. It must always seek to improve contingent faculty working conditions and aim to create more full-time tenure-track positions. The goal of the campaign is to improve higher education by improving the working conditions of all faculty members, not some at another’s expense.

Anyone interested in learning more about FACE can check out our website at www.aftface.org.

Why do you think some adjuncts resist joining unions?

We represent thousands of adjunct faculty, in fact, far more contingent faculty than any other organization. And we are actively organizing adjunct faculty as one of AFT’s top organizing priorities. Over the last several years, adjunct and other contingent faculty at University of Michigan, Syracuse University, Rhode Island College, Wayne State University, Henry Ford Community College (MI), Lincoln Land College (IL), Victor Valley College (CA) and many others have formed a union and won elections to be the exclusive representative for adjunct faculty.

All of this to say that we have found contingent faculty to be hungry for an organization to represent their interests. Of course, there are some who resist because they are opposed to unions, while others feel that unions do not and will not represent their interests, but this is to misunderstand AFT local unions. AFT affiliates are autonomous organizations that set their own bargaining and organizational agendas. In short, “the union” is the people who form it, not some outside organization.

What are some of the most common tactics used to scare adjuncts off of unions? How do you address such concerns?

I don’t think that the tactics are much different with adjunct faculty from how they are with other workers. The goal of the employer is still the same—make the employee feel that there will be some negative consequence to the employees having a union. That works best when they can isolate an employee and make her or him feel particularly vulnerable.

The difference is that adjunct faculty are particularly insecure in their jobs from the start. Unlike a full-time employee with some form of job security, employers do not need to technically “fire” adjunct faculty who they see as “troublemakers,” they can just non-renew (fire) them at the end of a semester. So the key is to build an organization with a structure and make sure you have that in place so as to protect individuals from that type of employer behavior.

When you talk to adjuncts, what do they tell you is their greatest concern?

Lack of respect is almost always the first thing we hear from contingent faculty when we talk to them about their working conditions. They want to be treated like professionals and have a voice in the institution. When you push on what gaining respect and voice at an institution would mean, a whole range of issues emerge from the “big three” I noted earlier—pay, benefits, and job security—to professional working conditions like having access to an office and a phone, or professional development opportunities. However, as I said before, I think that needs and concerns vary based on the faculty member and their circumstances.

How do you think adjuncts can best help themselves?

Well, I know that this will come as a great shock to your readers, but I would suggest that adjunct faculty should form a union! Adjunct faculty members have very little institutional power and forming a union is one of the only ways to remedy that imbalance. For those who are in states where the legislative environment doesn’t provide adjunct faculty with a pathway to gain the right to bargain collectively, I would still argue that acting collectively is the answer. Many disempowered and disenfranchised workers changed their circumstances by organizing a union even before state and federal laws “enabled” (some) workers to form unions for the purpose of collective bargaining.

If adjuncts are in a union which does not address their concerns, how can they pressure their union to deal with those issues?

Unions are some of the most democratic organizations in this country, and as such, all union members have multiple avenues to make sure their voices are heard and their concerns addressed. The bottom line is participation. As I said earlier, unions are the people who make them up. It is not a third party organization; its members organize collectively to empower themselves. However, unions also typically have multiple concerns and issues that need addressing to improve the working conditions of the membership and that often means prioritizing. So activism is the key to making sure that concerns are heard and that they are seen as concerns of a substantial percentage of union members.

There is no doubt that contingent faculty activists have worked within unions and have changed the priorities of their unions and made them focus more on contingent faculty issues—and that is all for the better. In fact, our policy statements encourage a frank discussion within unions to make sure that contingent faculty voices are included and their issues being addressed because we believe that the union and all faculty are stronger when they work together.

So, first and foremost, join your local union. Go to meetings. Return bargaining surveys. Volunteer to help the union in whatever way you can, whether that be agreeing to write a column in the newsletter or running for an elected position. In short, become an active member of the union.

What is the AFT’s greatest asset adjuncts should know about?

The people. AFT represents more contingent faculty than any other union, and we are committed to making the lives of those members, and contingent faculty in general, better. Have we always gotten the strategy right and had all the answers? No. But talk to our leaders and our part-time/adjunct faculty activists and I think you will find that this is an organization that is working as hard, if not harder, than any other to address the issues that adjunct and other contingent faculty face at the local, state and national level.

That work includes not only policy statements on how contingent faculty should be treated, but is backed by a deep commitment of organizing contingent faculty, bargaining the strongest contracts we can and working as hard on the legislative front as we can to promote fairness and equity for contingent faculty.

We also have a great staff that serve our higher education locals at the national, state and local level. We believe that unions should be driven by their leaders and members, but we also know that it is critical to have resources to help locals and states achieve their goals. AFT has a variety of skilled staff there to help.

I hope your readers will look at our publications, visit our FACE campaign site and email us with any questions they have. We are always waiting to hear from more contingent faculty who are ready to join us in this collective effort.

Public Knowledge Project is just plain incredible. I visited their site and my jaw dropped: open source software for creating, organizing, and running academic journals and conferences! Of course I have no idea how to organize or run either one of those, but it just feels liberating to know that educators and programmers are working to create tools that make these kinds of activities possible for more and more people.

If I had it in me, I would try the Open Journal System and try to get something going for adjunct-centered research. But, I don’t have that in me just yet. Perhaps someone else does? And I do not see why this kind of software could not be applied to organize an adjunct-themed conference — perhaps it could even be an all digital conference just to see what the results and reception are.

Am I a goofball, or does this seem viable?

Over the past couple of weeks I have been e-mailing notes to myself. At odd times, I come up with ideas about how I want to change my teaching, a reading I want to add to a class, or a question I’d like to put on a quiz. The questions usually show up in the middle of a completely different task — say, researching PhD programs. Rather than write the idea down and lose the sheet of paper or have another loose sheet around, I e-mail myself a brief note.

Once I open my e-mail again, I tag it as Teaching Tip (TchTip) and file it away. That way, in another month or week or hour, the next time I sit down to revise my class design, assignments, or plans, I have a collection of notes to read through. Instead of forgetting great ideas, this process has encouraged me to record them and actually use them.

Now that the term is over, part of me wants to go check out my rankings at Grade My Professor at MySpace and Rate My Professor.com. But I know better than to do that — at least at this point.

Currently, I feel pretty content with the term, my students, what was learned, and how things went. I know of multiple areas where I can improve, and I also have a sense of where I was strong. So, I have a solid and constructive sense of where and how the term went. I want to make use of this information, but I want to wait until next week. Right now, my brain just needs a pause.

In order to make the best use of that self-reflection, I do not need the emotional jacks and dives of reading students’ reviews. Regardless of what I tell myself, the student rankings do have an impact on me. Even when I know they may be biased, baseless, or angry, I still take it personally — at least initially. As such, I know that now is not the time to take a look at the ratings — good or bad. The better time is later — after I have engaged in productive use of my critical self-reflection. With some more space and time, I think I will be in a better place to make the most of student comments.

In the past, I have used student comments to adjust parts of my pedagogy and class. Right now, I just know that looking at comments would be a bit too much for me.

I think I finally deserve a break from school. Even if it is for just a few days.

Yesterday I turned in my grades.
Today I filed for unemployment.

Now that I do not have any teaching to do, all the things I like to do in my spare time — reading, running, training, writing, and research — suddenly seem less important. Since I can now give them my full attention, they somehow feel less meaningful than when I was teaching and trying to get all those things done at once.

Even though I am glad to be finished with this term, I almost miss teaching because of the passion it gave me in my other pursuits. I’ll see how this plays out.

Regardless of how I feel at the moment, I know that reading non-compositional texts and going to the river to sit in the sun can only do me good.

The longer I teach, the more projects I get involved with. My attention wants to shatter like a dropped glass. In order to keep things glued together, I try to stay organized. So far, Google Calendars has done well by me. But, I can tell the edges are starting to warp a bit. In my search for project management software — preferably open-source and web-based — I came across this. It’s an open office document that explains how to set up your own Gantt chart. I’m not sure if I’ll use it, but it appears to be a very useful tool.