What a difference a decade can make. Little more than 10 years ago, graduate students and contingent faculty had little representation at the MLA. They felt disrespected in countless ways. The prevailing attitude among the tenured faculty was that “the cream rises to the top,” and, if you can’t find a decent job, you have no one to blame but yourself.” There was no sympathy for complainers.
The crisis reached a peak in 1998 when the Graduate Student Caucus -- aided by Cary Nelson and Michael Bérubé, among several other faculty allies -- were able to draw the attention of the MLA membership to such matters as the erosion of tenure and academic freedom, the shift from full-time to part-time positions, and the shameful wages that were paid to adjuncts throughout academe. Suddenly the coverage of the MLA convention shifted from mocking ever-so-trendy paper titles to debates over whether academics are workers who could benefit from collective action that, perhaps, the MLA could encourage and even support.
Who could have guessed the complainers were on the fast-track to the leadership of the profession?
Nelson has been the president of the AAUP for several years and Bérubé is in line to become the president of the MLA in 2012. It seems like almost every time slot at this year’s MLA convention includes sessions on academic labor, and the MLA’s Delegate Assembly overwhelmingly passed a resolution stating that academic employees “should have appropriate forms of job security, due process, a living wage and access to health-care benefits.”
I was particularly struck by a session held on Tuesday morning: “The Academic Workforce in Hard Times.” During the conversation that followed, Rosemary Feal said that her obsession as the executive director of the MLA is addressing the problems faced by contingent labor.
According to the AAUP, between 1975 and 2007, the percentage of full-time tenure and tenure-track faculty declined from 56.8 percent to 31.2 percent, while the number of part-time and non-tenure-track faculty rose from 43.2% to 68.8%. Essentially, there has been no population growth among the tenured; nearly all of the growth in the numbers of students has been met by non-tenured faculty. (For more information, see the most recent issue of Profession, “Education in the Balance: A Report on the Academic Workforce in English,” prepared by the MLA’s Ad Hoc Committee on Staffing.)
At that same session, Paul Lauter, a longtime activist on academic labor issues-observed, “The image of the privileged professor is out of date.” When one speaker mentioned that the MLA recommends that faculty members should be paid $6,000-$9,000 per course, one member of the audience said she was paid $2,000, which, on an hourly basis, is less than the minimum wage.
Given tightening economic constraints, the move towards contingent labor is likely to continue for the foreseeable future -- particularly because the current “crisis” is an obvious opportunity to further reduce tenure under “financial exigency.” Another panel suggested that we should, of course, struggle to retain tenure, but the practical reality is that the best we can do is try to make life better for adjuncts.
The question remains: Even with supportive, reasonably coordinated leadership, will anything change for academic labor? Or will current trends continue? Can anyone correct the course of this oil tanker?
If so, it will probably take more than another decade. And that’s longer than many of us can wait.
