Feeling downsized, disrespected, and exploited, disgruntled members of the Modern Language Association—seeking to capitalize on the Occupy Wall Street movement’s messages about income disparity—have called for action in advance of the group’s annual meeting next month.
Those members, mostly faculty who are off the tenure track, have turned to blogs and a Twitter feed called OccupyMLA to air grievances about deteriorating labor conditions on their campuses for part-time instructors. Among their list of complaints: low wages; no health insurance; lack of access to office space, phones, and computers; abrupt decisions by administrators to cut programs and courses; criticisms of unions; little or no openness about spending; job insecurity; and fear of retribution if they speak out.
Propelled by the national conversation about income disparity, the OccupyMLA organizers, who have remained anonymous, and the 315 followers who have joined the feed since it began in November are still debating whether to occupy the MLA’s annual meeting in Seattle. They perceive the organization as being feckless at advocating for better protections for its non-tenure-track faculty members, at a time when those faculty are a majority of instructional faculty nationwide. Tenured and tenure-track faculty make up 36 percent of instructional employees at four-year colleges, while the rest are adjuncts and graduate students, according to the latest figures from the U.S. Department of Education.
“These are turbulent times in the academy, and part-timers are being left out in the cold,” said Nancy Traver, an adjunct professor of journalism at Columbia College Chicago and spokesperson for the college’s Part-Time Faculty Association. “Colleges and universities are moving away from tenure. The MLA has got to modernize. It should become more of an advocate for part-time faculty. We are very experienced with great credentials, and we essentially do the same things in the classroom as tenured faculty.”
Ms. Traver, who said she has no ties to the OccupyMLA group, and many of the anonymous OccupyMLA tweeters say that part-time faculty are being sidelined and segregated within the MLA.
Rosemary G. Feal, the MLA’s executive director, disagrees. Under Ms. Feal’s leadership, the MLA leadership has called for substantive changes in attitudes toward and treatment of part-time faculty, and has urged colleges to provide phones, office space, access to libraries, funds for research, and travel to conferences. Scholarly organizations, Ms. Feal has said, are limited in what they can do to force change at institutions.
The MLA played a major role by composing guidelines for ethical practices and policies in 2003. In June, the MLA’s Committee on Contingent Labor in the Profession released a set of recommendations to help departments and institutions “ensure that those colleagues employed outside the tenure track have the appropriate salaries, working conditions, status rights and responsibilities, and security of employment.” The association recently announced that in the next few years it will organize further conference sessions and propose publications dealing with the concerns of non-tenure-track faculty members and the departments that employ them.
Russell Berman, president of the MLA, said, in written remarks, that this year’s meeting, too, will mount “a robust defense of our values and our profession.” The group will discuss, he said, how the organization will continue to “fight against the degradation of working conditions in higher education.”
Call for Leadership
But John A. Casey Jr., an adjunct professor of English at the University of Illinois at Chicago as well as Columbia College Chicago, said he was fed up with reports, discussions, committees, and proclamations. At both institutions, Mr. Casey has access to a phone and computer, but they are shared among multiple instructors. In addition to his college teaching, Mr. Casey offers private tutoring in his home and earns $33,000 annually for all three jobs. He said he carries all of his academic materials on his back because he has no storage space on campus. That there is no space allocated solely to him, he said, is an example of the overall disrespect for part-time faculty.
Mr. Casey, who said he was not tied to the OccupyMLA group, said “there is disdain for part-time faculty. There is this attitude that if you are working in one of these positions, then you must be substandard.”
Mr. Casey said he recently saw a job listing at his university for a janitorial position with health benefits that requires only a high-school diploma and pays more than his total teaching salary.
Ms. Traver said that the instabilities of being a part-time employee hurt students, too. “When they need guidance, how will they reach you when you don’t have an office or a phone?” she asked. “If you are working at three or four campuses, you are worn out and spread thin. The stress level, the worry, none of that can be good for students.”
“The MLA has quite a lot of power,” Ms. Traver said. “When it speaks, institutions listen. They need to put pressure on institutions and tell them to take better care of their adjuncts. Give them respect, health benefits, and job security.”
Mr. Casey wrote a letter to Ms. Feal in November,,, which seems to have galvanized the OccupyMLA movement after he posted it online. It has been reposted on numerous blogs. “What we need now more than anything is action,” he wrote. “The MLA must lead or be left behind.”
Ms. Feal was unavailable for an interview but referred to the comments she made in response to Mr. Casey’s letter, which appear on the same Web page. “You say that this is a time for action, and I agree with you completely,” she said. “Where we diverge, I think, is in our understanding of how action can be initiated and implemented.” She said that the MLA cannot directly control the institutions where its members study and teach.
“You may not feel supported by the MLA; you may even feel betrayed,” she continued. “We’ve all been betrayed by a system that has roots much deeper than the ground on which the MLA is planted. We didn’t get here in a year, and we aren’t going to change all that needs changing in a year, either. But if you look at the MLA of recent times, I think you will see an Executive Council with a very different composition than a decade ago. You’ll see that we’ve taken positions no other comparable association has (and positions are a form of action: words may be cheap, but that doesn’t mean they are without value for the actions they can inspire).”
Meanwhile, it remains unclear what OccupyMLA might do at the meeting, if it does anything at all. There has been talk among tweeters about wearing paper clips on their collars and drawing O’s on their conference badges so they can identify one other. The mix of tweets on the feed appear unwieldly and lacking in a specific call to action. While some are serious and thoughtful commentary, others are more like small talk.
Mr. Casey and Ms. Traver, who won’t be attending the conference because they say they can’t afford to and their departments do not fund conference trips for adjuncts, said that if protesters decided to take any action, it might take the form of shouting down a keynote speaker, occupying a book table in the exhibit hall, or demanding that the MLA engage in dialogue with members.
“It would be good for there to be an OccupyMLA,” Ms. Traver said. “The leadership need not fear open discussion. We should move forward with dialogue and discussion. Why shy away from it?”
Mr. Casey said that ignoring the voices of part-time faculty will only harm the MLA’s relevance. He said, “Failure to take action will simply precipitate the decline of the MLA, which has become for many of its members no more than an acronym for a citation style and a place to interview for jobs.”
