The first order of business when arts-and-science professors at New York University gather each year is to decide whether their full-time colleagues who work off the tenure track should be granted voting privileges in faculty meetings. This academic year, for the first time, the professors decided no.
Extending the vote to full-time contingent faculty members was deemed too “dangerous.” As on most campuses, professors at NYU who have tenure or are on the tenure track are a dwindling minority, and some worry that their power would be weakened and their voice muffled if shared governance were shared more broadly.
While tenured professors often express concern about the working conditions of contingent faculty members, they also are moving to draw ever sharper distinctions between those workers and themselves as they seek to retain power and influence. Non-tenure-track instructors have a narrower focus, lack institutional memory, and are subject to pressure from administrators who hire them, say those at NYU who opposed extending voting privileges. Their fear is that the rapidly growing number of those working off the tenure track could overwhelm the shrinking proportion of the tenured.
Eventually, “we may as well not have any say,” says Mary Nolan, a professor of history here who sits on the universitywide governing board called the Faculty Senators Council.
Joe T. Berry, a labor educator who worked for decades in California and Illinois as a contingent faculty member, calls the vote at NYU a bellwether. Non-tenure-track professors, he believes, will eventually win a bigger place at the table. But meanwhile, as they seek inclusion, the likelihood of more bruising confrontations is growing.
“The tenured faculty are now the privileged minority, and they are losing power every day,” says Mr. Berry. “They need to reconfigure their self-image to include the new faculty majority.”
‘Why Do You Even Need Tenure?’
The academic work force nationwide has been transformed over the past several decades. In 1975, nearly half of professors were either tenured or on the tenure track. By 2009, the latest year for which national figures are available, that proportion had dropped to less than a quarter.
Over the same time period, the proportion of faculty working part time increased from 24 percent to more than 40 percent, and the percentage of those working full time but off the tenure track rose from about 10 percent to 15 percent.
No one has good data on how many faculty members working off the tenure track are included in faculty governance. At many institutions, contingent professors, both part-time and full-time, regularly attend department meetings; some are even allowed to vote. But at very few are contingent professors given a full voice on the universitywide faculty senate.
More than half of the adjuncts who have provided information about their working conditions to The Chronicle’s Adjunct Project said they had no role in faculty governance. Adrianna Kezar, a professor of higher education at the University of Southern California who is leading a nationwide project to study changes in the academic work force, estimates that no more than 10 percent of institutions give contingent professors a role in campuswide governance in “a meaningful and full way.”
In January the American Association of University Professors issued a report aimed at increasing that number. The paper, which Mr. Berry helped write, recommends that tenured professors do the opposite of what they did at NYU and open up faculty governance to those off the tenure track.
But would the significance of tenure be tarnished if that happened? “As soon as you let non-tenure-track faculty into shared governance, the question could arise: Why do you even need tenure anymore?” asks Cathy A. Trower, research director of Harvard University’s Collaborative on Academic Careers in Higher Education. “It is part of a slippery slope.”
Tenured professors frequently want it both ways, Ms. Trower says. They bemoan contingent professors’ poor pay, lack of job security, and the meager respect they get on campuses. But at the same time, she says, many tenured professors are “circling the wagons,” refusing to put their non-tenure-track colleagues on equal footing by giving them full seats on the faculty senate. “It’s the whole ‘We are elite and privileged and yet we want to talk about the downtrodden,’” she says.
Josh Boldt, a full-time instructor of English at the University of Georgia who works off the tenure track, agrees: “The great hypocrisy of higher education right now, especially in English departments, is that many professors who teach Marxist theory turn around and just perpetuate this tiered labor structure that theoretically they’d be completely against.”
In January, Mr. Boldt was one of four featured speakers on a “presidential forum” at the Modern Language Association’s annual meeting. It was the first time the forum had comprised only speakers who work off the tenure track. That was not an accident, says Rosemary G. Feal, the association’s executive director. “Many of these faculty appointments are multiyear, and the people who do this teaching are part of the institution,” she says. “But they are not treated as if they were vital members of the governance structures.”
But Marybeth Gasman, a professor of education at the University of Pennsylvania, says asking contingent professors to take on some of the more difficult and sometimes controversial roles of tenured professors ignores inherent limits on their authority and their academic freedom. “For me, for example, I would never want my chair to be anyone but a tenured faculty member,” she says, “because they do not risk being fired for having unpopular opinions and they are more powerful. I believe it’s very important that people in positions of influence who interact with higher-up academic administrators have job security.”
A ‘Dangerous’ Move
At NYU the majority of instructors are part-time adjuncts, who make up about 58 percent of the professoriate here and who have their own union. But, unlike on most campuses, slightly more full-time faculty members at NYU work off the tenure track than on it.
Administrators say that hiring decisions are made by each of the university’s major schools and colleges, and there is no universitywide plan to increase the number of full-time professors off the tenure track. Within the Faculty of Arts and Science, the number of those instructors has increased threefold over the past decade. James M. Devitt, a university spokesman, says graduate students are no longer required to teach as a condition of their financial support, and so instruction for courses in programs like languages has increasingly become the purview of full-time professors off the tenure track. A few years ago the university also wrapped its program in liberal studies—a two-year core curriculum that is staffed entirely by full-time instructors off the tenure track—into the Faculty of Arts & Science.
NYU’s full-time, non-tenure-track faculty members, many of them known as clinical professors, typically enjoy better working conditions than do their counterparts at other institutions. They work on multiyear contracts, with stable salaries and benefits. Some have been here for decades. Clinical professors typically carry a heavy teaching load, but many also create and supervise academic programs, sit on dissertation committees, do research, and publish. On the Faculty of Arts & Science, many clinical professors have doctorates, just like those on the tenure track.
The meeting last October at which tenured professors decided to bar full-time, non-tenure-track faculty members from taking a full role in faculty governance was not well attended, and the vote among those who did attend was close. Just 22 tenure-rank faculty members voted to shut out full-time contingent professors, compared with 20 who voted to allow them in, out of 564 total tenured and tenure-track professors in the Faculty of Arts & Science.
But before this year’s vote, James S. Uleman, a professor of psychology who is chairman of the Faculty Senators Council caucus for the arts and science, sent out an e-mail warning professors that extending voting privileges to non-tenure-track faculty members would be “dangerous.” He pointed out what he believes are vast differences between the two kinds of professors.
“The tenure-track faculty have primary responsibility for developing scholarship in their fields, shaping the curriculum, upholding academic standards, and dealing with a host of other matters that come before us and determine the long-term character” of the faculty of arts and science at NYU, Mr. Uleman wrote. Non-tenure-track faculty, he continued, “have a narrower purview, and are primarily concerned with teaching ... [and] are more subject to pressures from the administration, particularly as they concern continued employment at NYU.”
‘Two Cultures’
The vote put the Faculty of Arts & Science in the minority at NYU. Full-time, non-tenure-track professors are allowed to vote on governance issues, with a few exceptions for certain subjects, within 11 of the major colleges and schools at NYU (not including those of law and of arts and science), according to Mr. Devitt.
But non-tenure-track professors have never had any standing in the universitywide Faculty Senators Council. In the fall of 2011, when Ted Magder, an associate professor of media, culture, and communication, became the council’s chairman, he asked senators to consider allowing clinical professors to vote. Instead, in January 2012, the council urged the university to create a separate governing body for non-tenure-track faculty members.
When the faculty of arts and science voted on the issue last fall, Mr. Uleman says, it was simply following the lead of the council. Arts-and-science professors, he says, endorse the idea of a separate governing group for clinical-faculty members.
“There really are two cultures,” he says. “One is an international culture of tenured scholars where people treat each other as peers, and where these scholars are competing against and judging each other across institutions. That’s really very different from the vertical culture of contract faculty within an institution, where there is a lot more emphasis on your loyalty and the attention you must pay to figuring out what those who can reward you locally are interested in.”
Christine B. Harrington, a professor of politics here who is a faculty senator, puts the differences between tenure-rank faculty members and clinical professors a little more bluntly: “We do not all do the same things.”
Tenured professors, she says, are evaluated “based overwhelmingly on publications,” while clinical-faculty members are evaluated on their teaching. “This mushy liberal stuff that we are all in this together, nicey-nice, just isn’t true.”
‘Second-Class’ Faculty?
To some clinical professors here, the suggestion that they have a governing body separate from the one for tenure-rank faculty members dredges up images of the “separate but equal” doctrine that justified racial segregation.
Frédéric Viguier, a clinical assistant professor at NYU’s Institute of French Studies who has worked full time off the tenure track here for 10 years, says the October vote made him feel second-class. “There is a status thing going on,” he says, “and it’s as if we don’t deserve to have a say.”
Perhaps most insulting, say some clinical professors, was that the e-mail Mr. Uleman sent urging tenure-track professors to keep clinical faculty members from voting was sent via an e-mail list called Faculty Democracy. It had been created to support a decade-long campaign by graduate teaching assistants here to unionize. Mr. Uleman says he used that list because when he tried to send an e-mail to only tenure-rank faculty members, using addresses kept by the dean’s office, his message was blocked, as a result of what he calls a “misunderstanding” with the office. .
Some professors in arts and science believe that NYU is promoting the inclusion of clinical professors. “This is a move by the administration to push this huge nontenured population they have created into the Faculty Council as a way of dividing the faculty and then diluting the power of the tenure-track faculty,” says Ms. Harrington. “That way the deans can do whatever they want.”
Thomas J. Carew, dean of the faculty of arts and science, presided over the meeting in October and, according to faculty members, expressed his disappointment over the vote to exclude clinical professors. Mr. Carew says he was disappointed in the process and believed that faculty members should have taken more time to consider the issue.
Tenured professors in the arts and science say a strong faculty voice is particularly important now because of some crucial issues at NYU that pit administrators against professors. They worry that administrators could influence the votes of professors off the tenure track on issues that may not be important to them but are to tenure-rank faculty members.
For example, John E. Sexton, the university’s president, is pushing to expand the NYU campus through a plan, NYU 2031, that would turn faculty housing into a construction zone for years. Non-tenure-track professors are not allowed to live in faculty housing, but professors like Ms. Harrington say the quality of life for those who do would be significantly impaired. She lives in a two-bedroom apartment in the Silver Towers complex, which stands next to where the administration has proposed constructing a blocklong building.
Some professors within the Faculty of Arts & Science are at such odds with the Sexton administration over the expansion plan—as well as with his Global Network University, which includes branch campuses in Abu Dhabi, Shanghai, and several other foreign cities—that the faculty held a vote of no confidence in the president this month. (Clinical professors were not allowed to vote.)
J. Anthony Movshon, a professor of neural science, opposed the no-confidence vote and also disagrees with keeping clinical professors out of faculty governance. “I’ve learned to take expertise wherever I can find it, and I don’t think the tenure track gives you unique access to expertise,” he says.
Mr. Movshon is one of about nine tenured professors who formed a group last month, the NYU Faculty Alliance, which wants another forum besides the arts-and-science-faculty meetings to discuss campus issues. When the alliance sent out e-mail messages advertising its gatherings, it specifically invited clinical-faculty members to attend.
Correction (3/19/2013, 9:50 a.m.): This article originally misnamed the group that formed last month. It is the NYU Faculty Alliance, not the New Faculty Alliance. The article has been updated to reflect that.
Correction (3/20/2013, 10:22 a.m.): This article mistakenly used the terms “College of Arts & Science” and “Faculty of Arts & Science” interchangeably. Those are different units at New York University, and the article was about the latter. For that reason, all references have been changed to “Faculty of Arts & Science.”
