Resisting the Exploitation of Contingent Faculty Labor in the Neoliberal University: The Challenge of Building Solidarity between Tenured and Non-Tenured Faculty

Abstract

This article explores why tenured faculty, particularly at major public and private research universities, often have failed to engage in collective resistance to the rise of the neoliberal university and the exploitation of “casualized” academic labor. Thirty years of steady federal and state cuts in the funding of higher education have led to the quasi-privatization of public higher education, with both public and private universities viewing themselves as corporate entities that must maximize student tuition and corporate and philanthropic revenues while minimizing costs. This has led to a massive increase in the number of exploited contingent faculty whose precarious working conditions are akin to those of low-wage, temporary workers in the rest of the economy. This article explores various reasons behind the failure of most tenured faculty—particularly the eighty percent not in faculty unions—to engage in overt, sustained protest at the radical expansion in casualized faculty labor. The article also examines the rise of professional administrators as the new governing class of neoliberal universities which compete for “student customers” on the basis of amenities and “student life” rather than on the basis of educational quality. These administrators' drive for “measurable metrics” has contributed to an increase in self-interested behavior on the part of a tenured faculty who are increasingly rewarded on the basis of “research productivity.” While in the short run such a retreat from public life by tenured faculty may be rational, in the long run such behavior threatens the future existence of tenure, except in the most prestigious and well-endowed of private and public institutions. Thus those remaining tenured faculty committed to higher education providing a quality intellectual experience for all students must work politically to ensure that all faculty have humane and secure working conditions and manageable teaching loads. In short, tenured faculty committed to a future for democratic public education must take up the challenge of building solidarity across faculty rank and status.

Notes

¹ On the nature of the neoliberal university, see Henry A. Giroux, Neoliberalism's War On Higher Education (New York: Haymarket, 2014); Nancy Folbre, Saving State U: Fixing Public Higher Education (New York: New Press, 2010); and Dan Clawson and Max Page, The Future of Higher Education (New York: Routledge, 2011).

² For tenured faculty concerns that adjunct unionization might erode tenured faculty control over faculty appointments and university governance, see “Union Efforts for Adjuncts Meet Resistance in Faculty Ranks,” The Chronicle of Higher Education, April 18, 2014, pp. A23.

³ See  < http://pankisseskafka.com/2014/06/22/adjuncts-what-should-we-talk about>.

⁴ See Keith Hoeller, “The Wal-Mart-ization of Higher Education: How Young Professors Are Getting Screwed,” Salon, February 16, 2014,  < http://www.salon.com/2014/02/16/the_wal_mart_ization_of_higher_education_how_young_professors_are_getting_screwed>, as excerpted from the introduction to Keither Holler (ed.), Equality for Contingent Faculty: Overcoming the Two-Tier System (Nashville, TN: Vanderbilt University Press, 2014).

⁵ See Max Weber, “Science as a Vocation,” in Hans Gerth and C. Wright Mills (eds), From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology (New York: Oxford University Press, 1958), pp. 129–132.

⁶ For a detailed account of some administrators' attitudes toward adjuncts see Rachael Riederer, “The Teaching Class,” Guernica: A Magazine of Art and Politics, July 16, 2014,  < http://www.guernicamag.com/features/the-teaching-class>.

⁷ On the reproduction of class and of parental social and educational capital within the higher education system (and K-12), see Ann L. Mullen, Degrees of Inequality: Culture, Class and Gender in American Higher Education (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2011).

Even left wing tenured social scientists rarely admit that their class pedigree may often have as much or more to do with their academic success than their alleged innate intelligence or work ethic. Social science studies such as the one cited above show that where one goes to graduate school strongly affects one's job market prospects. And where one goes to graduate school is heavily determined by where one went as an undergraduate. And one's undergraduate pedigree is heavily determined by one's parental class background, as eighty percent of students at highly select institutions come from the top quintile of the family income distribution. That is, the class and racial patterns of recruitment into top graduate programs are partly set (not totally, of course!) before a child is born.

⁸ Occupy Wall Street and other “flash protests” against neoliberalism in Greece, Turkey, Spain, the Middle East, and elsewhere have drawn their participants disproportionately from under-and-unemployed recent university graduates. These protests often have not been sustainable because there does not yet exist a majoritarian Left that can govern and reverse neoliberal policies. A revived governing Left would have to build cooperation among states on at least a regional, if not international, scale. For example, unless the Left and working class of northern Europe reject the bi-partisan social democratic and conservative embrace of austerity policies, there can be little hope for reversing neoliberal austerity in southern Europe. For the nature of “flash protest” movements against neo-liberalism, see David Plotke, “Occupy Wall Street, Flash Movements and American Politics,” Dissent (online), August 12, 2012,  < http://www.dissentmagazine.org/online_articles/occupy-wall-street-flash-movements-and-american-politics>.

⁹ See Terry Eagleton, After Theory (New York: Basic Books, 2004).

¹⁰ For a more extensive treatment of why social class has receded as a category central to discussion among “progressives,” including students, see Joseph M. Schwartz, “A Peculiar Blind Spot: Why Did Radical Political Theory Ignore the Rampant Rise in Inequality Over the Past Thirty Years,” New Political Science: A Journal of Politics and Culture 35:3 (2013), pp. 389–402.

¹¹ See Suzanne Mettler, “Equalizers No More: Politics Thwart the College's Role in Upward Mobility,” TheChronicleReview, March 7, 2014, pp. B7–B10.

¹² On the role of the GI Bill in providing opportunities for upward mobility for the white working class (and of the role of the civil rights and women's movement in expanding those opportunities more broadly), see Ira Katznelson, When Affirmative Action was White: An Untold History of Racial Inequality in the United States (New York: W.W. Norton, 2006).

¹³ For the effects of Reagan and George W. Bush's 2001–2006 tax cuts in reducing federal tax revenue by close to 2.1 percent of GDP each, see The Tax Policy Center, “The Tax Policy Briefing Book,” 2012, especially pp. 13–17. Also see, “The Bush Tax Cuts: How Do They Compare to the Reagan Tax Cuts?,”  < http://www.taxpolicycenter.org/upload/Background/I-11thru1-14TheBushTaxCuts.final.pdf>.

¹⁴ See Robert Hiltonsmith and Tamara Draut, Demos, “The Great Cost Shift Continues: State Higher Education Funding After the Great Recession,” March, 2014,  < http://www.demos.org/publication/great-cost-shift-continues-state-higher-education-funding-after-recession>. For the most comprehensive treatment of the decline over the past thirty years of public university education as a means for social mobility, see Suzanne Mettler, Degrees of Inequality: How the Politics of Higher Education Sabotaged the American Dream (New York: Basic Books, 2014). On the decline in the real value of per capita state funding for higher education students, see especially Mettler, pp. 118–131.

¹⁵ For the increase in tuition as a percentage of funding of total public higher education costs, see State Higher Education Officials, “State Higher Education Finance, FY 2012,” especially p. 29,  < http://www.sheeo.org/sites/default/files/publications/SHEF-FY12.pdf>.

¹⁶ On the precipitous decline in the real value of Pell Grants compared to tuition and room and board fees see Tyler Kingkade, “Pell Grants Cover Smallest Proportion of College Costs in History,” Huffington Post, August 29, 2012,  <  http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/08/27/pell-grants-college-costs_n_1835081.html>.

¹⁷ See “Average Rates of Growth in College Education,” Trends in Higher Education, The College Board,  < http://trends.collegeboard.org/college-pricing/figures-tables/average-rates-growth-tuition-and-fees-over-time>.

¹⁸ See Phil Oliff, Vincent Palacios, Ingrid Johnson, and Michael Leachman, “Recent Deep State Higher Education Cuts May Harm Students and the Economy for Years to Come,” Center for Budget and Policy Priorities, July 2013,  < http://www.cbpp.org/cms/?fa = view&id = 3927>.

¹⁹ On the student debt crisis, see Rohit Chopra, “Student Debt Swells, Federal Loans Now Top a Trillion,” Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, July 17, 2013, < http://www.consumerfinance.gov/newsroom/student-debt-swells-federal-loans-now-top-a-trillion/>.

²⁰ For a study of the decline in middle-class jobs as a percentage of a labor force increasingly polarized between a growing, but small number of “good jobs” and a proliferation of “low wage” jobs, see John Schmitt and Janelle Jones, “Where Have All the Good Jobs Gone?” Center for Economic and Policy Research, June 2012, < http://www.cepr.net/documents/publications/good-jobs-2012-07.pdf>. For evidence that the decline in the growth of “good jobs” is more due to neoliberal political policies (changes in tax policy, deregulation, and anti-union government policies) rather than inexorable technological changes (known as the “Skills Based Technological Change” theory of wage polarization), see Lawrence Mishel, Heidi Shierholz, and John Schmitt, “Don't Blame the Robots,” Working Paper, Economic Policy Institute and Center for Economic and Policy Research, November 19, 2013, < http://s1.epi.org/files/2013/technology-inequality-dont-blame-the-robots.pdf>. For a comprehensive summary of the research on the stagnation of incomes of recent college graduates and on the scarce nature of high-wage STEM jobs, see Colin Gordon, “The Computer Did It: Technology and Inequality,” Dissent (Spring 2014), pp. 73–76.

²¹ For historic trends in the number of students enrolled in post-secondary institutions, see National Center for Education Statistics, “Fast Facts” (2013), < http://nces.ed.gov/FastFacts/display.asp?id = 372>.

²² See again, National Center for Education Statistics, “Employees in Post-Secondary Institutions, Fall 2011,” p. 9.

²³ For an analysis of the change in the composition of university faculty and administrators from 1976 to 2011 that draws upon Institute for Post-Secondary Education Statistics from 1976 and 2011, see the work of John W. Curtis and Saranna Thorton, “Losing Focus: The Annual Report of the Economic Status of the Profession, 2013–14,” Academe (March–April 2014), < http://www.aaup.org/file/zreport.pdf>. The chart based on this study commissioned by the American Association of University Professors (the AAUP) can be found in the “In Brief” section of The Chronicle of Higher Education, April 18, 2014, p. A 23.

²⁴ Marc Bosquet's How the University Works: Higher Education and the Low-Wage Nation (New York: New York University Press, 2008) offers considerable insight into the rise of contingent academic labor as part of the growing proliferation of “precarious” and low-wage employment even among college graduates. He also provides considerable evidence that there is no shortage of teaching jobs for recent PhDs. Rather, too few of these jobs provide humane and just working conditions. See especially Chapter 6, “The Rhetoric of the Job Market and Reality of the Academic Labor System,” pp. 186–209.

²⁵ For a good primer on the rise of “contract” and “temporary” workers in the neoliberal labor force, see Sarah Jaffe, “Temporary Insanity,” In These Times (January 2014), pp. 18–21; and Barbara Ehrenreich and John Ehrenreich, “Death of the Middle Class Dream: The Professional-Managerial Class in Crisis,” In These Times (January 2014), pp. 22–23.

²⁶ Benjamin Ginsberg examines how the shift in incentives toward research facilitates a new class of non-academic professional administrators becoming the dominant voice not just in university services and finance, but also in determining curricular matters and faculty hiring and promotion-decisions traditionally controlled by the faculty. See Benjamin Ginsberg, The Fall of the Faculty: The Rise of the All-Administrative University and Why It Matters (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011).

²⁷ For an ironic, perhaps tragic, look at how these trends play themselves out at a mid-tier public research university that aspires to move into the “Top 50” in the US News and World Report, see Gaye Tuchman, Wannabe U: Inside the Corporate University (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2009).

²⁸ For two excellent summaries of the Delta Cost Project report on the precipitous growth in university administrative personnel, see Scott Carlson, “Administrator Hiring Drives 28% Boom in Higher-Ed Work Force Report Says,” The Chronicle of Higher Education, February 5, 2014, < http://chronicle.com/article/Administrator-Hiring-Drove-28-/144519/>; and Jon Marcus, “New Analysis Shows Problematic Boom in Higher Ed Administrators,” New England Center for Investigative Reporting, February 6, 2014, < http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/02/06/higher-ed-administrators-growth_n_4738584.html>.

²⁹ See Benjamin Ginsberg, “Administrators Ate My Tuition,” The Washington Monthly, September 2011, < http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/magazine/septemberoctober_2011/features/administrators_ate_my_tuition031641.php?page = all>.

³⁰ For Clifford Geertz's musings on whether he would have received tenure in today's hyper-professional environment, see Chapter 1 of Clifford Geertz, Available Light: Anthropological Reflections on Philosophical Topics (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001).

³¹ On the status of adjunct faculty within the CUNY system see The CUNY Adjunct Project, < http://cunyadjunctproject.org/>.

³² For the classic exposition of the concept of “equality of standing” see R.H. Tawney, Equality (London, UK: G. Allen and Unwin, 1931).

³³ The concept of equality of standing or democratic equality advanced here is, in some ways, a more political and policy-oriented version of Amartya Sen's and Martha Nussbaum's human capabilities approach to theorizing about justice. See Amartya Sen, DevelopmentasFreedom (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999); and Martha Nussbaum, Creating Capabilities: The Human Development Approach (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011).

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Notes on contributors

Joseph M. Schwartz

Joseph M. Schwartz is Professor of Political Science at Temple University where he teaches political theory and American political development and chairs its Intellectual Heritage program (a non-Eurocentric Great Books required sequence). He is the author of The Future of Democratic Equality and also The Permanence of the Political. The Future of Democratic Equality won APSA's political theory section prize in 2011 for the best book published in the past five years in political philosophy. Schwartz serves on the executive committee of his faculty union (AFT), which includes tenured, tenure-track and non-tenured faculty. He also serves as a national vice-chair of Democratic Socialists of America.