To the Editor:
I have to admit that I have generally avoided writing too much about my own experience as a contract faculty member because, quite frankly, it does always sound somewhat maudlin. Then I realized that it’s not maudlin if it’s typical; rather, it’s part of a pattern. The pattern is one of blame, denial, obfuscation and, yes, the entitlement Catherine Stukel lists in her jeremiad (“Is That Whining Adjunct Someone We Want Teaching Our Young?” The Chronicle, August 25). However, the entitlement is entirely on the side of those like Ms. Stukel who are quick to point out that things went well for them and therefore if it didn’t go well for the rest of us, it’s our own fault. I do appreciate a good example of transductive reasoning when I see it.
To be sure, it wasn’t my fault when my home province added more than 100,000 students across the board in a period during which they deleted more than 1,100 full-time faculty positions. Indeed, I was hired on a tenure-stream-convertible basis, but nobody wanted me or my predecessor—the position had existed for almost a decade, teaching core courses in the second most popular combined honors program in the faculty—to achieve tenure stream because that would mean a loss of teaching. The chair even joked about it with others during department meetings. While I still had to manage the 40-40-20 load on that contract, I was teaching 3+3 instead of 2+2. The part that was my fault was succeeding. To get that job, I still had to interview and later found that I was definitely the darkest horse in what was expected to be a dog-and-pony show to confirm the hiring of a favorite of certain members of the committee. (As an aside, the dog-and-pony-show interview has become something of a pattern itself and I have come up with some questions to ask hiring committees so that I can tell whether I’m the dog or the pony.) My first year, I earned a merit award in the top third while achieving some of the highest teaching evaluations in the faculty. What made the latter more intriguing was the fact that these were large classes. Eventually, after several years of nominations and being a finalist, I did receive the major teaching award.
In the interim, mind you, my department and faculty decided that I was too expensive, as were 9 of my colleagues. So, during a semi-official moratorium on tenure-stream hiring, my position became six separate contracts for 40 percent less pay (at the time) instead of being converted to tenure-stream. To make things worse, when my students found out via a colleague’s reportage of the same scenario, they banded to protest. This, combined with my excellent evaluations made it clear that I was a Rasputin in the process and was only popular because I was easy on students (with Cultural Studies being an easy ride to begin with). While I continued teaching and became a union activist as a result of the increasingly terrible treatment colleagues and I were receiving, the move to right the wrongs was clearly a further misstep on my part, as three separate grievances (two settlements and one unresolved) will attest.
The last was most interesting and came after a round of provincial negotiations (I had attained the position of vice-chair of the committee for the largest union in the province) in which I was told point-blank by the provincial representative for Ontario and by the human resources chiefs for the Council of Universities that adjuncts “are in the way of graduate students.” I had heard this in the department from my chief rival, in particular. What made this most insulting was the fact that they had developed, cultivated, and perpetuated this myth to obscure their own faculty non-renewal process! Their own policies eliminated more than 1,100 positions, let alone the thousands needed to accommodate current and future growth. Instead, the fastest growing employment segments have been post-docs (who can be disappeared after three years, as if they never happened) and executives. An economist at my own institution did the research for the government(s) regarding the need for faculty renewal and expansion. Yet this data was not only ignored, but the the province and the Council representatives denied its very existence. Then again, they weren’t that happy when some of us obtained the actual budget and revealed that the university was misleading people about its surplus.
So it was little surprise when my own department, while advertising my teaching award on its website, went to the trouble of deleting courses and/or revamping courses under the pretext of further cost-cutting when the economic crisis hit. Despite protests to the contrary, this action had the serendipitous side effect of destroying the entire seniority base of dozens of adjuncts under the guise of economic and/or academic need. Anywhere else, it might be called constructive dismissal. So it was no surprise that my position eventually reappeared under a new guise and that the chair’s new wife’s post-doc somehow managed to get the position. I was not able to grieve this non-hiring, but I was able to grieve my non-hiring for a single course in my discipline. They hired an ABD from a different discipline instead. Admittedly, I probably would have lost the arbitration, had it happened, because the collective-agreement language was written without defining the order or importance of criteria. In fact, this loophole remains unclosed. Thus it was somewhat surprising that the employer offered a pre-arbitration settlement. Equally surprising was the content of their offer. While it very clearly and categorically stipulated that I had done nothing—nothing—but provide excellent teaching and service, the rest of the stipulations read precisely and exactly like a dismissal-with-cause agreement, down to the provision that I resign all privileges and seniority and promise never to apply to the university for any kind of position ever again. It was also noteworthy that the academic signatory was one of the self-proclaimed public academic anti-corporate Marxist-styled activists. More noteworthy, however, was the fact that when I stated clearly that I would actually sign the agreement if it included one line—that the employer would not interfere with my efforts to secure employment elsewhere—I was told that it either stood as written or I could go away unresolved.
How much of that was my fault? How much of that is whining? How much of that is not being able to jump over the hurdles? Every time I have interviewed for a position, I knew—and occasionally was told—that I had a better CV than members of the hiring committee, not when they were hired, but at the moment of my own interview. When I graduated, I had twice the publications and three times the refereed presentations my supervisor had when he graduated, less than a decade earlier. He was hired the year I started grad school. Did I make decisions. Yes, I decided not to be trod upon. I decided to be loyal to my students and to my colleagues, even if they took advantage of me. When my students asked me if they should stop their protests to avoid hurting my career, I told them that the man who taught them countercultures and critical theory would be a hypocrite to do so, and that it was probably too late anyway. I also decided to support students against the bullying they received when fighting monopolistic contracts on campus, when fighting against misogyny, homophobia, xenophobia in the engineering newspaper, and the treatment of a rape victim in that faculty, and when revealing the budget documents and other endeavors. I freely admit those choices and probably dozens of others. At the same time, I can say with good conscience that I never spoke of any of the behind-the-scenes politics—from who was on a “teaching leave” that was actually rehab to who was having an affair with whom, from collective bargaining to the state of my own contract. In the latter regard, the colleagues who made the most noise seemed to fare much better.
In the end, I take umbrage with any charge of whining about anything in my life. I am the grandson of a farmer with all of grade-three education. More than once I watched him go to the “medicine cabinet” (an old toilet-topper) to find the animal sutures to sew himself up when one of the cows kicked. I have shoveled manure in the board room and in the barn. One of those is an honest day’s work. It is little surprise, then, that I have little patience for colleagues’ whining about tenure packets and marking loads, and whining that everyone else whines too much. My doctoral supervisor once observed that there were two kinds of academics, those of us who had scraped, clawed, scratched, and struggled, and those for whom everything fell into place. “Why would you want to be like them, Marc?” he said. “They just turn into fascists anyway.” My experience as adjunct not only confirmed that his playful hyperbole was more correct than either of us imagined at the time, but also reminded me that there must be someone to blame.
Marc Ouellette
Tilbury, Ontario
