I don’t often think about my position as a faculty member at a liberal-arts college. That is, I don’t think about my being a faculty member rather than some other kind of employee -- an administrative staff member or a public-safety officer or a cook. I’m starting to wonder, though, whether not thinking about being a faculty member is a bit like not thinking about being white, an unearned privilege.
It’s not that we full-time faculty members don’t work hard to earn our doctorates. It’s just that once we’re hired, we acquire instant status inside a culture that encourages us to see ourselves as thinkers rather than as workers. That might help us in our capacity as scholars, but it can also prevent us from understanding much of what makes our research, and especially our teaching, possible. We are encouraged to see the workers around us as there to make our jobs easier, rather than as fellow employees of a nonprofit corporation with its own corporate culture. My college, like all others I know, has a class system: If faculty members occupy a position analogous to an upper class, staff members seem to be, if not exactly working class, then let’s say second class.
For about a year now I’ve been on a committee of faculty and staff members reviewing employee benefits at our college. Of course, faculty and staff benefits are not the same. For example, our faculty members can take for granted that some type of parental leave will make it possible for them to stay on full salary when it’s time for their blessed events. Staff members, though, to their chagrin, have to stay healthy and wait until they’ve accumulated enough sick leave to cover the time they’ll need postpartum. If you asked around at a faculty lunch table, very few of us would know that.
The college’s early-retirement policy for faculty members, I learned on the committee, also annoys members of the staff, who have no such incentive. It makes financial sense to encourage faculty members to retire -- we can be replaced by younger professors for half the salary. Staff replacements, on the other hand, will end up earning only slightly less than the retirees. That discrepancy arises not because starting salaries for faculty members are startlingly lower than those for staff members (they’re not), but because our raises are so much better than theirs.
When, six years ago, the faculty members here negotiated a nice package of raises to bring our salaries up to the median of a group of comparable institutions, we measured our pay against the American Association of University Professors’ salary figures. The plan we pursued was for faculty members only. When staff members found out about our deal, they asked for some help from us and were eventually able to negotiate a deal of their own, using ours as a model. That instance of the faculty’s acknowledging its privileged position and using its resources to help the staff stands out because it was so unusual.
But even with faculty help, the staff members were not able to negotiate the kind of percentages we got, at least in part because they had no ready-made comparisons of the kind faculty could make with the AAUP numbers. The variance between the staff and faculty raises continues to be a source of tension. Staff members are not unionized, and they don’t have the clout that we do. Although our faculty is not unionized, either, it does come close to presenting a united front through the AAUP chapter. And many faculty members have job security through tenure.
Colleges are set up, I have observed, to encourage faculty members to think of ourselves as the center of the enterprise, the reason all of the others, including the students, are there. The result can be that we end up viewing other college employees the way upper-class Victorians thought of their servants. We ignore them when they are doing their jobs well. We talk in front of them as if they cannot hear us. We assume that they will work consistently to make our lives easier. And we are sure that they understand that the real point of the institution is what we do.
In my experience, staff members are more than patient with our arrogance and casual neglect. They rarely hold us accountable for the everyday slights we unthinkingly inflict, the menial jobs palmed off on them because, after all, faculty time is too valuable to waste. One thing I’ve learned to be more careful about, through my conversations with staff members, is deadlines. Faculty members are notorious for ignoring deadlines, little thinking that missing one will require some staff member to stay late or come in on a weekend to do what should have been done during normal business hours. I now know that I’ve helped make life miserable for the provost’s office when it is compiling materials for tenure cases, for the registrar’s office when it is putting together final exams, and for who knows what other offices into which I have rushed, past deadline, expecting them to clean up after me. I’m not privy to what staff members say about us behind closed doors, but I do know that most staff members on my campus appear to be endlessly forgiving of faculty foibles. They have to be, though -- the class dynamic demands it.
The usually unremarked-upon divide between faculty and staff here became more noticeable with the war in Iraq. Faculty members passed a resolution against the war, held a teach-in, and proclaimed our support for our antiwar students. Quite a few staff members, on the other hand, set up collecting stations for comforts for the troops (toothpaste, candy bars, deodorant, small treats), sold patriotic bumper stickers to raise money for National Guard units, and gave out flag pins and yellow ribbons.
While faculty members often seemed to speak with one voice against government policy, things were not so straightforward on the staff side. It was clear across the campus that many staff members, even if they were critical of the war, were reluctant to criticize government policies once the fighting began. Many felt it important to “support the troops,” who included, in some cases, their spouses and children. We faculty members felt no need to make a distinction between supporting the war and supporting the troops, except, perhaps, for the occasional faculty member with a child in the military (including, in Wheaton College’s case, the college’s president, Dale Rogers Marshall, whose son is a pilot in the Air Force).
The staff, of course, is not a monolith. Staff members come from all classes, ethnicities, and educational backgrounds. But faculty members generally lump them together as in a separate, and lesser, realm. Financial aid, development, or human-resources officers -- they all could be working somewhere else, doing roughly the jobs they do here. And they don’t get tenure. So most faculty members don’t believe them to be as important to the institution as we are. Even student-life staffers, those employees most likely to be considered the partners in our work with students, are second-class citizens. They are paid less, their benefits are worse, and they are expected to be on campus at least five days a week, year-round. I’m sure the staff has its own hierarchies of which I am unaware, but, indeed, that’s my point. I don’t have to be aware of them. I’m faculty.
I don’t mean that I don’t know people on the staff; I mean that in my position as a faculty member, I have not had to be aware, until now, of many of the issues of employment they face. If working on the benefits review with staff members has led me to start thinking of myself less as a professor and more as an employee, I’m grateful for that. I think the committee’s work may also have helped a couple of staff members see some of us faculty members as employees, too, which would be almost as good. I have found some staff members to be genuinely surprised, for example, that many faculty members need child care all summer because we, too, have to work. They discover that some of us come from working-class backgrounds and really do understand, at a personal as well as a theoretical level, why on-site day care, short-term-disability policies, and the opportunity to take free classes can make a world of difference in job satisfaction.
I can’t say I see worker solidarity in our future -- public-safety officers and literary theorists on the barricades, arms entwined. Despite my working-class background, I find it irresistibly easy to live in the fog of faculty privilege -- maybe it even helps my work sometimes -- and I imagine that’s the case with most of my colleagues. But glimpsing the staff’s world means that it’s harder to ignore, and I will try to remember that the faculty position is the privileged one because other positions are not.
We all work for a corporation, despite the way small colleges genuinely try to construct a sense of community beyond dollars and cents. I’m not prepared to say that my position isn’t central to the mission of this corporation. I think teaching is the reason we’re all here. But I’m more aware too, now, that an underappreciated staff infrastructure makes that focus possible.
Paula M. Krebs is chairwoman of the department of English at Wheaton College in Massachusetts.
http://chronicle.com Section: The Chronicle Review Volume 50, Issue 12, Page B5