The New Tenured Radicals

Seth Kahn remembers saying some pretty inflammatory things about higher ed’s reliance on contingent labor into a microphone.

Years ago, at a conference, composition instructors were filming what would become Con Job, a 2014 documentary about the institutional marginalization of non-tenure-track faculty members. They needed talking heads. Kahn, then an associate professor of English at West Chester University of Pennsylvania, was game.

He played the hits. He talked about neoliberalism, the fear of being fired or nonrenewed for speaking up, the sheer obviousness of the problem: “Everybody knows.” He did a good job. Kahn’s specialty is the rhetoric of activism.

Then, he walked out of the interview room and smacked himself on the forehead. No, really. In that moment, Kahn said, he realized that if he actually meant anything he’d said, he needed to get to work.

Kahn is one of several tenured faculty members who’ve had such moments of clarity, albeit most without the head-smack. Together, they formed Tenure for the Common Good, an attempt to organize tenured professors nationwide to fight for decent pay and working conditions for their less-privileged colleagues. What began as a loose conglomeration has taken formal shape in recent months. Its message is one of urgency and moral responsibility: “We just don’t have time to waste feeling powerless,” a statement on the website says, “when we haven’t exercised the power we have.”

Right now feels like the right time for a reason. While tenured professors have typically stood by silently as their nontenured colleagues advocated for themselves on the national stage, they have watched their own kind dwindle. Positions are remaining unfilled. Tenure lines are getting pruned. There’s still the same service work to do, but fewer people to do it, and those who remain shoulder the burden. They’ve also mentored their own graduate students as those scholars have braved an anemic academic job market and felt the sting of not being able to land good positions.

And today, as a global pandemic has devastated budgets and led college leaders to freeze hiring and furlough even tenured professors, the cause seems especially urgent.

The structural changes that preceded the pandemic helped set the stage for those austerity measures, and manufactured a growing — if uneven, slow, some would say glacial — recognition among the tenured that relying on contingent labor hurts everyone, activists and higher-education researchers say. “We’re all on a raft,” said Talia Schaffer, an English professor at Queens College and the CUNY Graduate Center of the City University of New York, who serves on Tenure for the Common Good’s executive committee. Pieces are falling off, she said, and “we’re sort of clinging to the last, the central bit, of wood.” It’s not sustainable.

Either everyone works together to save each other, the thinking goes, or everyone sinks.

Over the past four decades, the academic profession’s traditional model has eroded. As the higher-education scholars Adrianna Kezar, Tom DePaola, and Daniel T. Scott put it in their 2019 book, The Gig Academy, for years universities have simultaneously “expanded the number of doctoral degrees granted while constricting the number of stable academic jobs,” creating a system in which low wages and precarity “are standard terms of employment for the least and most educated workers alike.”

Contingent faculty now dominate the profession. More than half of faculty members at four-year public institutions are off the tenure track, and that rises to about 66 percent at four-year private nonprofit institutions, according to data from the fall of 2017 compiled by The Chronicle. At two-year public colleges, it’s about 80 percent. Of all faculty, more than 40 percent at four-year and two-year colleges don’t have full-time positions.

There’s a gulf between those on and off the tenure track. Non-tenure-track faculty members, especially part-timers, are typically restricted from designing curriculum and have little access to shared governance. They’re paid less and subject to the ever-shifting winds of departmental priorities and student demand.

Kezar and her co-authors draw strong parallels between those jobs and more commonly thought of gig work. “Whether one needs a car ride to the airport in two minutes or an instructor to teach one semester of English in two weeks,” they write, “it can be delivered cost-effectively only if the labor required exists in sufficient oversupply that someone can always be mobilized on demand.”

Those bifurcated working conditions were apparent to Maria Maisto, who was working as an adjunct professor in Ohio in 2008, as the economy was cratering. In early 2009, Maisto co-founded New Faculty Majority, a national advocacy group. The Great Recession helped to catalyze her activism. But not everyone’s.

Maisto, who is on the advisory board of Tenure for the Common Good, said that when she started her activism, she accepted that most tenured faculty members would be indifferent at best and hostile at worst to her cause. She’d hear from tenured professors who believed in the cause and thus felt like loners in their departments or on their campuses. Empathy wasn’t the norm.

How much tenured professors have cared, historically, about their contingent colleagues, is difficult to measure. Everyone knows the caricature: the older, typically white, typically male full professor whose non-tenure-track colleagues escape his vision, who still believes merit rises to the top and those who fail to land tenure-track jobs lack work ethic, intelligence, or both.

“In general, we’ve seen the adjuncts as nobody,” said Aaron Barlow, an English professor at CUNY’s New York City College of Technology who is on Tenure for the Common Good’s executive council. “And that needs to change.”

Others think the stereotype has been overblown. Jennifer Ruth, a professor of film studies at Portland State University and another member of the group’s advisory board, said she can’t think of anyone she knows who is indifferent to the plight of their contingent colleagues. Many tenured colleagues are quiet, she said, because they don’t know how to help, or how to enter the discussion without becoming targets on social media.

Regardless, there’s consensus among activists that tenured faculty, as a class, haven’t waded far enough into the fight, considering they have labor protections that the average worker does not. Stand-out exceptions exist — names that everyone knows — but they are still exceptions.

Meanwhile, over the past decade, groups like the New Faculty Majority have established themselves. They lobbied Congress and publicized the stories of “freeway fliers” who commute from one job to another. Social media brought lots of those narratives to the fore and made it harder for tenured professors to wear blinders, Maisto said. News stories, like that of a homeless adjunct who lives out of her Volvo sedan, exploded. In recent years, the movement has changed to focus less on victim narratives, said Joe Berry, author of Reclaiming the Ivory Tower: Organizing Adjuncts to Change Higher Education. Now, he said, the message is, “We deserve not charity, but solidarity.”

Tenured faculty also couldn’t ignore the groundswell of contingent-faculty organizing, including that of graduate-student workers. The Service Employees International Union started what became the Faculty Forward movement several years ago and has unionized at least 57,000 faculty members and graduate-student workers on 60 campuses, according to its website.

Anecdotally, Kahn, a Tenure for the Common Good leader, and others have seen evidence of an attitude shift among the tenured. Five years ago, if an exploitative job ad for an adjunct got posted on a listserv, it would be Kahn and maybe a couple other people who’d respond to say, “This looks like a dangerous trap.” But over time, he said, he’s seen 20, 30, sometimes 40 people publicly challenge such ads.

It’s still a very small cadre, he said, but it’s growing.

Not every tenure-tracker has made common cause with adjuncts. Some see the two groups’ aims as fundamentally incongruent. “This mushy liberal stuff that we are all in this together, nicey-nice, just isn’t true,” a New York University professor told The Chronicle in 2013. That academic year, arts-and-science professors there decided to deny their full-time colleagues who worked off the tenure track the ability to vote in faculty meetings.

Some professors at New York University thought extending the vote to full-time contingent faculty members was a risk, because the tenured and tenure-track ranks were already shrinking. They worried about their voice weakening. For a long time, a common attitude was that resources for the two groups came from the same pie, Berry said. A bigger piece to one meant a smaller piece to the other.

But now, the sense is growing that their fates are tied. Tenured faculty members have begun to understand that contingency threatens the integrity of the profession, said Maisto.

Even if tenured professors might not pay attention to the adjuncts who walked their hallways, they couldn’t help but notice the fates of their graduate students, who were being sent into a bottlenecked academic-jobs market to compete for slimmer pickings. They started to connect the dots.

The reliance on contingent faculty also started to affect the everyday life of the tenure-track faculty member, said Paula M. Krebs, executive director of the Modern Language Association, and an advisory board member to Tenure for the Common Good.

She gave an example. Say you’re in a department that’s dropped from 50 full-time, tenure-track faculty to, say, 30, over time. It’s not like that was the plan. At first, the department used a contingent faculty member to replace someone on maternity leave. And then it was a way to do more composition teaching. And then it was a way to teach a language that didn’t have enough enrollment. And then. And then. And then.

After a while, the department has far fewer tenured or tenure-track professors, but curricula must still be developed. Students must be advised. Committees must be filled. Those who are left have felt their own service workload grow heavier, Krebs said.

Suddenly, you start to look around and say, “how did this happen?”

Carolyn Betensky was one of those professors who had other things on her mind.

An English professor at the University of Rhode Island, Betensky had completed her doctorate in 1997. She became so busy trying to find a job that she didn’t pay much attention to the bigger picture, she wrote in an essay for Inside Higher Ed. She thought about her own odds, and they weren’t good. She landed a three-year position that turned into a six-year position and then finally got an assistant professorship at Rhode Island, where she then channeled her energy into getting tenure.

“It’s embarrassing to admit this,” she wrote, “but even though I disapproved of the treatment of contingent faculty, I just wasn’t paying attention to the way the naturalization of their exploitation was taking place concurrently with my own professionalization.”

She also never thought of herself as having a say in the matter, because no one asked her. Like many, she felt helpless to stop a train that seemed to have left the station long ago.

Over the years, Betensky watched adjunct faculty members and graduate students organize and find creative ways to tell their stories. She noted the conspicuous absence of a tenured faculty group that was dedicated to resolving the problem. “Why is it,” she wrote, “that those of us who occupy relatively privileged positions are the readiest to accept that this is just the way things are?”

“Have we really given this battle our all?”

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No, Betensky decided. She knew other people were embarrassed that tenured faculty hadn’t entered this struggle. They hadn’t seen any groups trying to denaturalize what has come to seem natural, she said in an interview.

She started talking about creating such a group, and Kahn and Schaffer were soon on board, with Barlow and Rachel Sagner Buurma, an associate professor of English at Swarthmore College, later rounding out the executive committee. The committee is all English professors, but the advisory board includes scholars in other disciplines, and the group wants to affect change across academe.

Betensky is a project person. Kahn is a super-extrovert whose department photo shows him at a protest. And Schaffer wanted to feel less helpless. She’d seen her graduate students — who, she says, are far more qualified than she or her cohort were — get “destroyed” by the collapse of the academic job market.

“I don’t want to be lying awake crying about this,” she said. “I want to be doing something.”

In 2017, Betensky established a Tenure for the Common Good Facebook group to post ideas. It began as just a loose assortment of people who wanted to stop looking away, Betensky said. And it was people who wanted to work alongside the contingent faculty who’d already been in the fray, sticking their necks out, Betensky said. “This isn’t a savior thing.”

Striking the balance can be tricky. The activism of tenured professors should not overshadow what contingent faculty members are doing, said Roopika Risam, an associate professor of secondary and higher education and English at Salem State University, who serves on the advisory board.

But even as their influence may have waned, tenured professors have resources and can wield power that non-tenure-track faculty members don’t and can’t. In the beginning, Tenure for the Common Good lurched from idea to idea, serendipitously, Kahn said. One of the first was to try to persuade U.S. News & World Report to change how it conducts its best- college rankings. Its “faculty resources” category weights faculty salaries much more heavily than it does the ratio of part-time to full-time faculty.

They petitioned to switch that balance. Those faculty-salary numbers don’t reflect the majority of college instructors, the group wrote. Contingent instructors are “underpaid, exploited, and exhausted.” A university that mistreats its employees this way is not giving its students a good education, no matter how much it might pay the few remaining tenure-track faculty members, the petition says.

They sent the petition to U.S. News and got a meeting, but no changes. In an email, Robert Morse, chief data strategist at U.S. News, said the organization tried to collect comparable information on part-time faculty salaries a few years ago, but “a very large number” of institutions either didn’t have the information or weren’t able to collect it uniformly. “Our methodology has been evolving for more than three decades,” he added, “and we make updates based on careful, thoughtful analysis and consultations with experts in the field.”

Still, the petition got over 1,000 signatures, which was encouraging. Members of the group offered a roundtable and workshop at the 2018 and 2020 MLA conventions. They wrote an article in Profession, describing their goals. They met with Krebs to discuss ways the MLA could help, and together, developed a plan to train external reviewers to assess institutions’ treatment of contingent faculty members.

The group is also trying to create a Fair Labor Seal for academe. It’d be a kind of prize for which colleges would compete, or a designation for which they could apply. It’d signal that the institution adheres to good labor practices in hiring and employment, the group’s website says. The idea came from a Guardian article, in which the writer Alissa Quart juxtaposed the $1.8 billion donation to the Johns Hopkins University from Michael Bloomberg, the former New York mayor, with the lived reality of some adjuncts: getting meals from their university’s foodbank, occasionally donating plasma for money. “A fair-labor label would affect colleges where they live,” she wrote, “their public image.”

And when it became clear that the global coronavirus pandemic would capsize higher education, at least for the foreseeable future, Tenure for the Common Good saw a place to intervene. The group made a list of what institutions could and should do to give the contingent faculty the same resources and protections that tenure-track faculty members have. “Do not require contingent faculty teaching at multiple institutions to use multiple videoconferencing apps or technology platforms,” reads one. “Suspend student evaluation of teaching for this semester” is another.

That’s one use of Tenure for the Common Good: sharing practical strategies, said Robin Sowards, an organizer with United Steelworkers who sits on the advisory board. Lots of tenured faculty don’t know what they can do, or they’re fatalistic, he said. But there are concrete steps achievable by everyone: Plan out sabbaticals so that contingent faculty have a consistent level of work. Give them the maximum amount of warning time, if there’s going to be a decline in enrollment.

And the group is a way to signal to non-tenure-track people that tenured people care, said Schaffer, of Queens College. “This shouldn’t be a war for scarce resources,” she said. “This should be all of us fighting to expand the pool of resources.”

Of course, it’s one thing to raise the consciousness of tenured professors that their adjunct colleagues need their support. It’s another to show them that the system may ultimately undermine everyone. And it’s a step further to get them to make sacrifices necessary to change it.

Even when the will is there, pleasing everyone is not a given. Ruth, the Portland State professor, ran for English-department chair on the platform that she’d fight for tenure lines and create only more good jobs. It meant doing things like saying no when someone wanted to hire an adjunct so he could finish his book. It meant saying no to giving out adjunct sections to a faculty member’s spouse or girlfriend. It meant trying to reassure the existing contingent faculty members who, understandably, feared for their jobs, even though Ruth did not eliminate them.

Within two years of work — work that included cajoling a few faculty members to relinquish sweetheart deals and up their course loads — she and her allies in the department created three new tenure lines. Her strategy worked.

But she could also claim “a whole army of new enemies,” and none were administrators, she wrote in a post for the blog Remaking the University. They were some of the people who’d been her closest friends.

In the beginning, it all felt righteous. Toward the end, it got ugly. Ruth ended up moving to the film-studies department. She’d make the effort again. But it came at quite a steep personal cost.

“Some of my friends in the fight will say, First, do no harm,” Ruth said. “And I feel like there’s no way not to.”

There are other giants to fell, outside office walls. Even if every tenured professor got on board tomorrow, they would face a steep, maybe insurmountable, uphill battle. The tenured rank’s stature has been chipped away for more than 40 years. Professors were generally slow to take up arms, and now there are proportionately fewer of them. Tenure itself has been weakened, many argue. Its swan song has been sung time and time again.

The long-term effects of Covid-19 are still a mystery, but as colleges freeze hiring and budgets bottom out, it doesn’t seem to spell good news for either precarious workers or tenure trackers.

And there’s also a left-wing argument that tenure itself promotes unjust labor practices.

“As long as some of us have something to defend that others never had in the first place, it will be difficult to build the kind of solidarity that leads to lasting and substantive change,” writes Greg Afinogenov, an assistant professor of history at Georgetown University, in an essay for The Chronicle Review. In the broad push for economic justice, both “the need and the justification for academic hierarchy will fall away.”

Afinogenov’s essay, predictably, raised some hackles from tenured professors. Kahn had a milder take.

It seems like Afinogenov wants tenured faculty to stop claiming special protections for themselves only, Kahn wrote on his blog. And Kahn agrees. When the tenured claim these privileges and don’t fight for them for other workers, they sound like they’re declaring themselves exceptional, he wrote.

Tenure for the Common Good wants to retool what tenure has come to signify. Instead of being merely a mark of individual achievement, it would represent a sense of responsibility to the profession.

That won’t be easy to achieve, especially now. Nothing is guaranteed. They feel they have to try.

Emma Pettit is a staff reporter at The Chronicle. Follow her on Twitter @EmmaJanePettit, or email her at emma.pettit@chronicle.com.