To account for the effects of the pandemic on scholars’ professional and personal lives, hundreds of institutions have extended their tenure clocks, giving junior faculty members extra time to prepare their dossiers. A similar courtesy ought to be afforded to their non-tenure-track and graduate-student colleagues, say a group of prominent academics.
More than 70 scholars are among the initial signatories to an academic-solidarity statement that promises not to accept invitations — for speaking engagements, conferences, and workshops — at institutions that do not “include non-tenure-track faculty and graduate workers in extensions of fixed-term contracts.”
“All academic workers deserve the relief of knowing that they have job security and the opportunity to complete their projects in more favorable conditions,” the statement reads.
Joining the boycott, which will last at least through the 2020-21 academic year, are the novelist and creative-writing professor Zadie Smith, the philosophers Judith Butler and Seyla Benhabib, the race-studies scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw, the cultural theorists Donna Haraway and Naomi Klein, the historians Nell Irvin Painter and Samuel Moyn, and the Nobel Prize-winning scientist Harold E. Varmus.
Premilla Nadasen, a professor of history at Barnard College, is among the signatories. A scholar whose work focuses on labor policy and organizing, Nadasen hopes the statement will raise awareness of the inequities in the academic labor force.
“As with so much of what’s happened around this pandemic, the fallout has impacted different communities to different degrees. And those who are precarious workers, those without economic security, are the ones who have been hardest hit. We have to acknowledge that,” Nadasen said.
Adom Getachew, an assistant professor of political science at the University of Chicago, was among the junior faculty members who drafted the statement. It was spurred, she said, by “the sense that this crisis, like the 2008 crisis, would exacerbate inequalities between faculty on the tenure track and those not on the tenure track.”
Getachew said she and her colleagues sought and incorporated feedback from tenured faculty members into the statement. A majority of scholars the group contacted agreed to be initial signatories, which she found “heartening.” “I think it speaks to the growing awareness of the problem of hierarchy in the academic work force and a growing sense of solidarity across the tenure lines,” Getachew said.
She said she doesn’t expect the statement alone to affect administrators’ decisions, but hopes it will add leverage to actions being taken by advocacy groups or unions on individual campuses. Academics can request that their institutions be added to a public list of those not compliant with the statement.
The website set up for the statement links to a handful of other petitions pledging support to non-tenure-track and graduate workers. But Getachew said her group’s effort marks a “step forward” from those campaigns because it “goes beyond a simple statement of solidarity to express some willingness to take action on the part of signatories.”
Kenneth W. Warren, a professor of English at Chicago who offered feedback to Getachew and others on a draft of the statement, said he was “drawn to the actionable part” of the effort. Even so, he said, the boycott is “maybe more symbolic than we would like.” That’s because, he reasons, invitations to give talks and seminars will dry up as departments’ discretionary funding takes a hit.
Despite that, Warren said, it’s important for senior scholars to express support for their colleagues.
“The more voices that we have, particularly senior voices, drawing attention to this issue, the more likely we are going to be able to place appropriate pressure on institutions,” Warren said. “It just seemed inappropriate for us to be accepting funds from institutions who weren’t making a priority of ensuring that their teaching staff at all levels have the best opportunities to weather this crisis over the next few years.”
Warren said it was telling that junior faculty members, many of whom benefit directly from tenure-clock extensions, were the primary authors of the statement.
“One could have imagined a response where the tenure-track faculty whose situations were at the center of the initial response by many institutions to extend tenure clocks could have said, ‘Well, great. Our needs have been acknowledged by the university,’” Warren said. Instead, tenure-track academics have been “more upfront on these issues” than senior scholars.
Getachew said the statement, which will be circulated widely this week, is “a small part of addressing a much bigger crisis.”
“Higher education as an industry is in severe crisis,” Getachew said. “It was before the Covid-19 pandemic, and that crisis will only exacerbate the condition of higher education in this country.”
