Campus Equity Week

The last week in October is Campus Equity Week (also called Fair Employment Week in some places), a coordinated effort to draw attention to the shift away from full-time, tenure-track faculty toward part-time, often spectacularly poorly-paid faculty. Graduate students should be concerned about this shift, not only as a question of justice and equity but because it decimates in advance their career prospects. Faculty already in tenure-track lines, even tenured faculty, need to be concerned about the shift because the existence of a large body of contingent labor both depresses wages and erodes the protections associated with tenure, such as academic freedom. It also erodes the traditional faculty responsibility for shared governance. As Cary Nelson and Stephen Watt wrote in Office Hours (Amazon; WorldCat):

. . . the structural interdependence of the multiple segments of academic labor increases daily. An influx of new students to many administrators is an opportunity to hire more part-timers to teach them. As the ratio of full-time to part-time faculty decreases, all faculty wield less authority over the curriculum, the budget, and every other aspect of campus life. As part-timers and graduate students take over more teaching responsibilities–and do so with less academic freedom–academic freedom diminishes for everyone in the university. As more part-timers with subminimum wages enter the campus workforce, it becomes increasingly easy to lower entering salaries for ladder faculty. New categories of non-tenurable full-timers with higher teaching loads, lower salaries, and diminished control over course content become difficult to resist. Who is to resist? The diminishing tenured faculty? The full-time faculty unions of the present and future can no longer hide from these trends. What we need to do above all else is to recognize the nature of the struggle–a struggle not only over finances but over the nature of the campus workplace and the aims of education, a struggle finally over the meaning of citizenship in a democracy.

Although in its emphasis on getting your stuff done, ProfHacker can seem careerist or as if it endorses a model where faculty are expected to do more and more with less and less support. We’d prefer, I think, to see it as a set of tools and strategies for surviving in academe. It’s still possible to have a good career in higher education, barely, but its terms need to be contested, redefined, and argued for.

Here are some tools for observing Campus Equity Week:

• Job Security for Contingent Faculty
• American Academic: The State of the Higher Education Workforce 1997-2007
• The New Faculty Majority
• The AAUP’s Campus Equity Week resources

Image by flickr user kindlergentler2001 / CC licensed (click the link–the pic is part of a photoset documenting a study of adjunct librarians in California)