Tenured Faculty, We Are the 18%
Why solidarity in a labor crisis is not enough
Just a note before we begin: if you are walking a picket line somewhere, in between chants you might enjoy listening to my new podcast, “Why Now?” You can download it from the archives of this newsletter or subscribe for free on Apple iTunes, Spotify, Google Podcasts, or Soundcloud.
And if you know someone interested in the politics of academic labor, please:
This morning, around 48,000 academic workers at nine University of California campuses went on strike. As Stella Chan and Taylor Romine of CNN report, the two sides reached an impasse after more than a year of negotiation despite tentative agreements on some issues.
As is customary in such situations, charges of bad faith are lobbed back and forth like a pickleball: it’s probably not wise to fully believe what you hear from management or the unions. But Chan and Romine’s report points us in another direction. They ask us to think about the striking workers, an adjunct army of talented, well-educated people, many working at or slightly above the poverty level, who make up the majority of workers at a modern research institution.
As Chan and Romine write, at the UC campuses,
Striking workers include researchers, graduate student researchers and instructors, trainees, fellows, and others who provide academic support across the University of California’s 10 campuses. The United Auto Workers union represents these academic employee groups who want transportation subsidies and pay that matches housing costs.
Among the salary demands, the union wants a $70,000/year minimum salary for post-doctoral employees; their current salary range starts at $55,632/year.
The part-time faculty union at my institution, The New School, in New York City, has also called a strike this evening:
These two universities seem to have little in common. The UC system is vast, fueled by California tax dollars and a river of public, foundation, and corporate money. In 2022, the University of California received 26% of its core funds from the California state budget and tuition revenue ($13,752 for each undergraduate), 12% from the federal government, and a whopping 36% from its medical centers—its largest income stream. Its $44 billion budget is $16 billion more than the GDP of El Salvador.
The New School is a very different financial animal, with a small endowment and a campus to maintain in one of the most expensive cities in the world. Needless to say, revenues barely meet expenses. Heavily tuition-dependent, the New School is without the professional schools that bring in students whose enormous loans will be offset by large, post-graduation salaries. It has no hospitals or scientific research centers that can woo corporate dollars and federal grants. In fact, a terrifying 77% of The New School’s $424 million annual budget comes from tuition, which is almost double the amount that UC students pay, $26,854 per year. This meant that when the pandemic hit in March 2020, The New School, like other tuition-dependent schools, was much more vulnerable than large research institutions, public or private.
These differences are no small thing: while a long strike at UC would be damaging, closing down the economically vulnerable New School for the same amount of time could be several orders of magnitude more damaging.
Yet these two strikes, happening almost simultaneously, tell a bigger story about how fragile the project of higher education has become. Surprisingly, the differences in wealth and size I have just described have produced demographically similar faculties. At both schools, the best-compensated faculty—those who are tenured and tenure-eligible—represent less than 18% of the academic workforce. The University of California employs 43,000 academic workers in various roles, yet only 15,900 are full-time faculty, and only half of those, or around 17%, are tenured or tenure-eligible. At The New School, founded in 1919 as a school without a full-time faculty, only 13% of today’s teaching force are tenured or tenure-eligible and most of those are clustered in appointments at the university’s social science graduate school.
It’s hard not to think that this unwillingness to invest in people, either faculty or students, points to an accelerating structural crisis in higher education. It is one that, yes, requires better labor contracts in the short term but demands a major reorganization and re-envisioning in the long term. Those changes will look different at different schools: for example, the University of California could change very little but rebuild its faculty on the strength of taxes. The New School, which cannot raise tuition to meet the challenge of a larger full-time faculty, may have to consider becoming smaller, doing less, and slashing administrative costs.
But regardless of size and wealth, it is hard to see any university surviving the challenges of the 21st century without rebuilding its faculty around full-time workers who are willing to commit to the institution in return for being treated fairly. Armies of contingent laborers will never align their interests with an institution built to serve the 18%, nor should they.
Conversely, solidarity is nice during the current crisis. And unions help defend the dignity of all workers. But neither one addresses the problem: precarious labor was sold to higher education as an economically and intellectually flexible vision for the future. Instead, it has made all universities more vulnerable, not just to labor actions, but to the illusion that contingent labor pools are a kind of piggy bank that can be raided when universities want to build new institutes, recruit star faculty, and expand their campuses.
The 18% of tenured and tenure-eligible elite have not allowed this to pass entirely unnoticed. And yet, we have also become ever-more divorced in our everyday interests from the intellectuals, artists, and practitioners who teach the vast majority of students. Go to any faculty meeting, and you will hear what the 18% really believes: that if contract and contingent faculty deserved tenure-stream positions, they would have them. The hard truth that we fail to grapple with when the 82% is not striking is that contingent academic workers, even if their labor actions are completely successful, will still work for salaries and benefits that underwrite the salaries and benefits of the top 18%.
Until we, the 18%, understand that quality education, and a just workplace, require opening the door of full citizenship and privilege to the other 82%, we can’t begin to solve the problem that has put our part-time colleagues and graduate students on the picket lines.
Short takes:
According to Tobias Burns at The Hill, Republicans may want to put a pause on calling themselves the party of the working class. “Low-income workers who saw a substantial spike in wages amid the pandemic may have helped bolster Democrats in the 2022 midterm elections after they were predicted to endure large losses in Congress,” Burns argues. “For the bottom fifth percentile of earners over that period, nominal wages grew nearly 11 percent, smashing the 6-percent annualized inflation rate by nearly 5 percentage points.
The nominal gains for the bottom 10th percentile were 9.5 percent for a 3.5-percent growth in real wages.” (November 14, 2022)
When the dust clears from the 2022 midterms, the only institution of the American government that will have unobstructed power is the Supreme Court, says Paul Starr at The American Prospect. Even a slim majority in the House could create deadlock between the legislative and executive branches, leaving a “path open for the controlling majority in the third branch of government to pursue its agenda,” Starr writes. “This is the big effect of the midterms that hasn’t yet registered widely. Despite the backlash against the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade, the Court’s right-wing majority came out of the election as the least-obstructed branch.” (November 14, 2022)
It’s a “spinster bashfest” on the right, Cathy Young informs us at The Bulwark. Who knew that with all that meanness, racism, transphobia, and threats to turn us into captive breeders, women would turn on the GOP in startling numbers? But it isn’t just women that the right seeks vengeance on: it is single, childless women. Of course, “obvious reason the right would do well to knock it off with the single-woman-bashing: Trashing a group of voters for not voting your way is not a great way to bring them over to your side,” Young writes. “Come for the misogyny, stay for the demonization of political opponents. Or vice versa.” (November 14, 2022)
I love the idea of the New School as a cooperative.
You know who the original adjuncts were? faculty wives, often with PhD's, who couldn't get hired in tenure stream jobs because they were all reserved for men. A history of contingent faculty status is sorely needed.
Thanks for this important piece! About 5 years I visited SUNY Stonybrook, where the History Department had committed to having no adjuncts, and had both enough TT folks to cover all classes and a commitment from TT folks to cover the crucial but often adjuncted introductory and “service” classes. Not sure if that is still the case, but we need to champion places doing it right and providing full-time, with-benefits, work to all their instructors, whether tenured or not.