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.
Nov 16, 2022·edited Nov 16, 2022Liked by Claire Potter
The "smaller, doing less" seems really important to me, and I think it is an area that faculty governance at all sorts of institutions consistently fails to help with--and that conventional unionization will also likely impede (for good reasons that are core to the value of a union). So it gets left often to upper administrative leaderships, who do a consistently poor job of thinking about how to draw a given institution into a coherent core and instead mimic the logic of corporations, seeking vulnerable or underperforming units to pick off without any vision of a coherent whole.
Why are we bad at this kind of collective action, perhaps especially in faculties where tenure or tenure-eligible faculty are still in a majority? Because we're accustomed to radical deference to the individual autonomy of all faculty members. We understand that autonomy as one of the singular compensations of our professional labor--that we have in many cases given up the higher monetary compensation that professionals in other fields like medicine or law get paid in order to have that kind of deeply liberal autonomy. So while we may have as individuals a coherent vision of how our institutions could move in towards a more coherent 'center' and create more kinds of shared and overlapping forms of inquiry and instruction, we know that doing so requires both that we surrender some measure of our autonomy and trespass on the autonomy of others. (While administrations governed by the logic of corporate austerity circle hungrily around the outside of that collective work.)
But we have just got to do it, and do it in a way that firmly rejects austerity as we go. There's no institution big and wealthy enough to spread out infinitely against the totality of specialized knowledge and curricular offerings.
But the TT faculties and their institutions keep cranking out lots of PhDs, many more than can be hired in the 18%....so while they might at their meetings say and believe that people would have tenured jobs if they were qualified, there's also a little psychic legerdemain about all their own current and former grad students who are in the 82, not the 18...
Hopefully, it one university ends the part-time category others will be forced to follow thus opening up more full-time jobs around the city. Has anyone asked how many PTF want full-time jobs? The original purpose of adjunct teaching should, of course, remain in place for exceptional practitioners who want to offer guest lectures and occasional courses not otherwise offered by the university. Unless we want to go along with the current corporate direction of hiring teachers as independent contractors (like in the failed Open Campus initiative) it's in the interest of FTF to make the vast majority of faculty full-time -- otherwise we become an inconsequentially small and overpaid category of employee/supervisor. When I was hired, my workload was described 33% teaching, 33% service to the university and 33% creative practice. It was understood that some part of our salary went to subsidize our creative practice or research. If you've looked at the school's 990s posted online, you'll see many questionable expenses. There are economists teaching at the school who can over the numbers. A young scholar at the Platform Cooperative proposed a plan for converting the school to a cooperative. That would begin to change the sources of income, allow for collaboration with industrial cooperatives, etc. We've yet to see the new strategic plan for restructuring the school, but I assume its goals include integration of departments and lowering the cost of course delivery.
I agree. In the automotive industry, workers are fighting against the introduction and continuation of tiered employment. Yet in the university, part-time labor is so ingrained that the current negotiations involve 12 points to reach a semblance of equality (in pay, benefits and involvement with curriculum) to full-time faculty rather than a rejection of the part-time category of work. A move to a full-time only model would involve less bureaucracy and give all faculty members the same job security and income. If the budget is currently structured in a way that requires a large number of underpaid teachers, then the budget must be restructured. That would dismantle the current corporate-minded administration, returning those positions to faculty members on a rotating basis and maybe even conversion to a cooperative model for both students and faculty. I'm a tenured faculty member at The New School.
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.
The "smaller, doing less" seems really important to me, and I think it is an area that faculty governance at all sorts of institutions consistently fails to help with--and that conventional unionization will also likely impede (for good reasons that are core to the value of a union). So it gets left often to upper administrative leaderships, who do a consistently poor job of thinking about how to draw a given institution into a coherent core and instead mimic the logic of corporations, seeking vulnerable or underperforming units to pick off without any vision of a coherent whole.
Why are we bad at this kind of collective action, perhaps especially in faculties where tenure or tenure-eligible faculty are still in a majority? Because we're accustomed to radical deference to the individual autonomy of all faculty members. We understand that autonomy as one of the singular compensations of our professional labor--that we have in many cases given up the higher monetary compensation that professionals in other fields like medicine or law get paid in order to have that kind of deeply liberal autonomy. So while we may have as individuals a coherent vision of how our institutions could move in towards a more coherent 'center' and create more kinds of shared and overlapping forms of inquiry and instruction, we know that doing so requires both that we surrender some measure of our autonomy and trespass on the autonomy of others. (While administrations governed by the logic of corporate austerity circle hungrily around the outside of that collective work.)
But we have just got to do it, and do it in a way that firmly rejects austerity as we go. There's no institution big and wealthy enough to spread out infinitely against the totality of specialized knowledge and curricular offerings.
But the TT faculties and their institutions keep cranking out lots of PhDs, many more than can be hired in the 18%....so while they might at their meetings say and believe that people would have tenured jobs if they were qualified, there's also a little psychic legerdemain about all their own current and former grad students who are in the 82, not the 18...
Hopefully, it one university ends the part-time category others will be forced to follow thus opening up more full-time jobs around the city. Has anyone asked how many PTF want full-time jobs? The original purpose of adjunct teaching should, of course, remain in place for exceptional practitioners who want to offer guest lectures and occasional courses not otherwise offered by the university. Unless we want to go along with the current corporate direction of hiring teachers as independent contractors (like in the failed Open Campus initiative) it's in the interest of FTF to make the vast majority of faculty full-time -- otherwise we become an inconsequentially small and overpaid category of employee/supervisor. When I was hired, my workload was described 33% teaching, 33% service to the university and 33% creative practice. It was understood that some part of our salary went to subsidize our creative practice or research. If you've looked at the school's 990s posted online, you'll see many questionable expenses. There are economists teaching at the school who can over the numbers. A young scholar at the Platform Cooperative proposed a plan for converting the school to a cooperative. That would begin to change the sources of income, allow for collaboration with industrial cooperatives, etc. We've yet to see the new strategic plan for restructuring the school, but I assume its goals include integration of departments and lowering the cost of course delivery.
I agree. In the automotive industry, workers are fighting against the introduction and continuation of tiered employment. Yet in the university, part-time labor is so ingrained that the current negotiations involve 12 points to reach a semblance of equality (in pay, benefits and involvement with curriculum) to full-time faculty rather than a rejection of the part-time category of work. A move to a full-time only model would involve less bureaucracy and give all faculty members the same job security and income. If the budget is currently structured in a way that requires a large number of underpaid teachers, then the budget must be restructured. That would dismantle the current corporate-minded administration, returning those positions to faculty members on a rotating basis and maybe even conversion to a cooperative model for both students and faculty. I'm a tenured faculty member at The New School.
Thank you for sticking up for us! ~NYU Adjunct who just won a much better contract :)
Thank you for this!