Scholarly Associations Must Face the True Causes of the Academic Job Crisis

Graduate students at the upcoming meeting of the Modern Language Association, to be held in San Francisco at the end of the month, are hoping to move our profession’s discussion of the disastrous state of the job market a large step forward. We will be seeking: the inclusion of graduate students on all major M.L.A. governing committees (so that we can participate in shaping M.L.A. policy and, by extension, that of the profession); the collection and publication of data on the employment of part-time academics (so that we can move toward such changes as converting part-time positions to full-time appointments and establishing a minimum standard of pay and benefits for part-timers); and the preparation of model legislation to be sent to state and local governments to support equitable remuneration at public institutions for part-time academic labor and an increase in full-time positions.

To clarify what we will be advocating -- and why -- we need to review the past year. About a year ago, eight scholarly associations, together with the American Association of University Professors, issued a much-heralded statement on the growing use of part-time and adjunct faculty members in higher education. Their conclusion was that the terms and conditions of those appointments, with their low pay and often heavy teaching demands, harm individuals and weaken colleges and universities. Their recommendation was that equitable salaries be paid to part-timers and adjuncts, based on a standardized policy that would be indexed to the salaries of full-time faculty members.

Now, a year later, little has changed. As graduate students who are directly and negatively affected by a worsening job crisis, we endorse the call for equitable pay for part-time and adjunct instructors. But we suggest that professional associations -- including the Modern Language Association -- need to do much more than they have to bring about needed reform. In particular, we want scholarly groups to stop telling us that we should look for non-academic jobs. We want them to get serious about prodding colleges and universities to end their heavy reliance on part-timers and adjuncts.

As the disciplinary groups made clear last year, that dependence occurs in all areas of academe, but it is greatest in the humanities, particularly in such areas as English. How the M.L.A. has -- and has not -- confronted the job crisis is therefore instructive.

In December 1997, the M.L.A.'s Committee on Professional Employment issued a report, “Employment Patterns in the Modern Languages,” with detailed recommendations designed to reverse the over-reliance on part-timers. They include making sure that the number of qualified Ph.D.'s does not outstrip the number of jobs likely to be available; insuring that all faculty members -- full time and part time -- are recognized and compensated as trained professionals; and improving the quality of postsecondary education at every level, but particularly in the lower-division courses that are increasingly taught by overworked and underpaid adjunct faculty members and graduate students.

Within the M.L.A., the Graduate Student Caucus long has advocated many of those positions. As leaders of the caucus, we recognize that the M.L.A. has accepted its responsibility to confront the job crisis, and we are eager to work with a new committee that the association has set up to insure that the momentum for real change, which the report represents, is not lost. We also are encouraged by the inclusion in the report of hard numbers documenting the near doubling of the proportion of part-time faculty members in the United States between 1970 and 1993, from 22 per cent of all faculty members in all disciplines to 40 per cent.

Shocking as it is, the latter number understates the real proportion of part-time teaching on which universities have come to rely. The A.A.U.P. calculated that in 1993 (the most recent year for which data are available), only 25 per cent of teaching appointments were filled by people with full-time, tenure-track positions. And that doesn’t take into account the many, many credit hours taught by graduate students, who are most often neither appointed nor considered to be faculty members.

We are further encouraged that the M.L.A. has abandoned earlier analyses that looked at problems in the job “market,” and turned instead to the wider problems in the job “system.” The issue is not just too few jobs, but the way in which we assign value to jobs. The prestige accorded to scholarship and to the mythology of “the scholarly life” continues to draw large numbers of applicants to graduate programs. The accompanying devaluation of labor-intensive, lower-level teaching produces a professoriate increasingly willing to turn those duties over to part-time and graduate-student workers.

The result is an ever-larger pool of instructors who are willing to hang on, even years after completing their degrees, teaching part time at any number of institutions. (We know of an adjunct in the Chicago area who taught eight courses at six institutions in one semester.) They scrape together a meager living while desperately hoping that this may be the year when they, too, can enter the prestigious world of full-time, scholarly employment.

The job system reflects (and enables) a corporate mindset in academic administration: a vision of the university as just one more entity to be judged by the bottom line. In such an atmosphere, faculty salaries appear to be one of the least painful places to cut costs. The system is circular: Administrators wish to cut costs, while our academic culture keeps churning out a steady supply of exploitable, part-time laborers.

While we applaud the promising opening in the M.L.A. report, however, we have been dismayed to find that it has slipped back into the familiar argument that the current crisis is an old story -- not the product of recent corporate-style employment practices, but the inevitable consequence of past policies and recent demographic changes. The result is an inordinate emphasis on a perceived oversupply of Ph.D.'s.

We cannot emphasize strongly enough that, were it not for the radical increase in part-time faculty positions, there would be no oversupply of Ph.D.'s.

Indeed, if all college and university teaching were performed by full-time faculty members who held doctoral degrees, we would be facing the undersupply of Ph.D.'s predicted in 1989 by William G. Bowen and Julie Ann Sosa in Prospects for Faculty in the Arts and Sciences: A Study of Factors Affecting Demand and Supply, 1987 to 2012. Ironically, it was their predictions, widely disseminated in the popular media, that led so many current graduate students and new Ph.D.'s to abandon other careers and pursue doctoral study.

That history leads us to respond with skepticism and some anger to the M.L.A.'s blithe recommendations that we pursue alternative careers. Many of us had alternative careers that we gave up for the underpaid, overworked decade of our lives in which we struggled to gain credentials for a profession that has allowed a two-tiered employment structure to develop, offering a living wage, basic benefits, and a modicum of job security to only an elite group of academics.

Hence, while we recognize some utility in the calls for graduate programs to assist new Ph.D.'s in finding non-academic jobs, to cut enrollments, and, especially, to disclose fully to prospective students the levels of financial support available and the departments’ job-placement records, we insist that the primary thrust of efforts to redress the job crisis should be directed toward reducing the use and abuse of part-time faculty members. We strongly support the M.L.A.'s call for fair treatment of part-timers and for conversion of part-time to full-time positions. The great sticking point remains how to give any force to those recommendations.

Unfortunately, the M.L.A.'s Committee on Professional Employment has shockingly little to say on the question of enforcing its laudable recommendations. The M.L.A.'s president, Elaine Showalter, has argued in the association’s summer 1998 newsletter that “academic institutions vary so widely that no fixed formula or quantitative yardstick can apply to every situation” when evaluating how departments use or abuse part-timers. She also has said that sanctions or censures by the M.L.A. would have little impact on departments that violate its norms of fair treatment.

We believe that minimal standards for ratios of part-time faculty members in a department to full-time faculty members can -- and must -- be established. We also believe that the M.L.A. and other disciplinary organizations have a strong obligation to set such ratios and act on behalf of all who teach within their disciplines.

And we believe that a far more effective mechanism than sanctions exists to persuade departments or programs to mend their ways: the simple collection and dissemination of information.

We want to make the ratio of full-time to part-time faculty members at every college or university -- measured in terms of classroom hours taught, and broken down by department -- as much a part of the professional and public discourse about an institution’s quality as are its students’ SAT scores, faculty publications, and library holdings.

The M.L.A. is in an ideal position to lead a campaign to do that, a campaign directed at everyone -- from members of accreditation boards to state legislators, alumni, parents, and students themselves. We suggest that the organization publish annually the results of a survey of departments listing the ratio of part-timers to full-timers and their comparative salary levels. This should be accompanied by a list of departments that fail to respond to the survey (which could be presented as tantamount to admission of poor performance). The publication of such survey results would be a significant step toward bringing the crucial issue of part-time employment into the public discussion of what constitutes academic quality and integrity.

We believe that the crisis in academic employment is inseparable from the lack of confidence the public now places in educators and professional organizations such as the M.L.A. The public face of higher education is no longer the secure, accessible professor devoted to a single institution; rather it is the image of the harried, elusive part-timer who must juggle positions at several institutions. The victims of that job system are not just the marginalized faculty members; the victims also include undergraduates who hardly know what it means to interact with an actual professor. (These undergraduates also are all too ready to adopt the pervasive contempt they see within their institutions for the non-tenured faculty members they meet every day.)

It is imperative that everyone in academe -- the tenured and non-tenured alike -- begin to recognize and admit our complicity in an exploitative job system, so that we can collectively act to change it. To this end, at December’s annual meeting of the Modern Language Association in San Francisco, the Graduate Student Caucus will propose a resolution to create such a system of reporting. Even if the resolution passes, it will no doubt take a few years to improve the quality of undergraduate teaching and change institutions’ reliance on part-time labor. The present crisis did not materialize overnight either.

Throughout academe, graduate students and part-timers, once an excluded and patronized minority, are becoming an organized plurality capable of wielding power. Last year, for the first time in the M.L.A.'s 115-year history, a graduate student was elected to the organization’s executive council. Other graduate students now sit on the M.L.A. elections committee and, perhaps most important, they help define the legislative agenda of the M.L.A.'s delegate assembly. In addition, this year the graduate-student caucus will petition for representation on the executive council and the nominating committee. We also will ask the association to push departments to convert part-time to full-time positions and to treat part-time workers equitably. And we will sponsor a panel at the meeting, “Is Our Labor Academic?”

Thousands of graduate students, who represent the future of the profession, will not quietly resign themselves to careers other than those for which they have been trained, only to make way for another crop of exploited “apprentice” workers.

Mark R. Kelley is president-elect of the Modern Language Association’s Graduate Student Caucus and a doctoral student at the City University of New York Graduate School and University Center. William Pannapacker is a vice-president of the caucus and a graduate fellow at Harvard University. Ed Wiltse is a former vice-president of the caucus and an assistant professor at Nazareth College of Rochester.

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