Reflections on casualization and pathways to reprofessionalize the professoriate: a conversation between communication studies colleagues

ABSTRACT

This essay considers academic labor in communication studies through the lens of Michael Bérubé and Jennifer Ruth’s The Humanities, Higher Education, and Academic Freedom. Bérubé and Ruth argue that, by and large, knowledge production in the humanities is in “fine shape,” but that the decades-long trend away from tenure-track towards contingent faculty employment has “hollowed out” the profession of college teaching—a de-professionalization that departments, disciplines, and institutions have yet to fully reckon with. We find Bérubé’s and Ruth’s policy prescription for this exigent moment—the creation of a teaching-intensive tenure-track for contingent faculty—to be a provocative frame through which to begin addressing casualization in communication studies. Our hope is to spark conversation in response to a rather large question: At a time when every profession, from law to medicine to journalism, faces varying degrees and consequences of casualization, what would it mean to reprofessionalize ourselves, as communication studies faculty?

KEYWORDS:

• academic labor
• professionalism
• higher education

Notes

1 Christina R. Foust and Daniel J. Lair, “The Political, Cultural, and Economic Assault on Higher Education,” Review of Communication 12, no. 2 (2012): 159–74.

2 Michael Bérubé and Jennifer Ruth, The Humanities, Higher Education, and Academic Freedom: Three Necessary Arguments (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), 2.

3 Ibid., 7.

4 Jonathan Sterne, “The Politics of Academic Labor in Communication Studies: A Re-introduction,” International Journal of Communication 5 (2011): 1853.

5 American Association of University Professors [AAUP], Visualizing Change: Annual Report on the Economic Status of the Profession, 2016–2017 (Washington, DC: March–April 2017), https://www.aaup.org/file/FCS_2016-17.pdf.

6 Student satisfaction surveys are often the only form of feedback many contingent lecturers receive, and we hardly consider this “professional”—particularly when re-employment is conditional upon achieving quantitative rankings.

7 The American Association of University Professors (AAUP) also endorses a teaching-intensive tenure-track as part of a portfolio of options to deal with the casualization crisis. Subcommittee of Committee on Contingency and the Profession, “Tenure and Teaching-Intensive Appointments,” American Association of University Professors, 2011, https://www.aaup.org/report/tenure-and-teaching-intensive-appointments.

8 Sterne introduces his special issue noting that communication studies is at once a laboratory for casualization with larger class sizes and more part-time instructors; and fortunate in comparison to disciplines such as English, owing to our stronger job market and integration into applied fields (“The Politics of Academic Labor in Communication Studies”). As Thomas A. Discenna asserts, “the field has transformed the material concerns of the job crisis into largely symbolic ones,” framing disillusion with our professional work throughout the 1990s in neoliberal terms (e.g., individual scholars experience a “spiritual” crisis). “Academic Labor and the Literature of Discontent in Communication,” International Journal of Communication 5 (2011): 1844.

9 The 2015 National Communication Association (NCA) jobs report revealed a bleak reality for Ph.D.s seeking jobs in communication studies: 2014 saw nearly twice as many new graduates as there were assistant professor job listings, and those graduates were competing with 2013 doctorates still on the market. 2015 Academic Job Listings in Communication Report (Washington, DC: National Communication Association, March 2016), https://www.natcom.org/sites/default/files/publications/Reports_on_the_Discipline_2015_NCA_Job_Listings.pdf. The AAUP's most recent statistics (2015) demonstrate that graduate student teaching lines remained relatively stable from 1975 through 2011 at 16–20% of instructional employment, while part-time instructor lines skyrocketed from 25.1% to 41.5% of the total academic work force. Tenured professor lines fell by 13% as assistant professor lines dropped 9%. American Association of University Professors Research Office, “Trends in the Academic Labor Force, 1975–2015,” American Association of University Professors, March 2017, https://www.aaup.org/sites/default/files/Academic%20Labor%20Force%20Trends%201975-2015.pdf. As Marc Bousquet argues, we do not have an over-production of Ph.D.s; rather, we have an underavailability of full-time employment in the academy. How the University Works: Higher Education and the Low-Wage Nation (New York: New York University Press, 2008).

10 Juliana Breines, “Graduate School and Mental Illness: Is There a Link?” Psychology Today, November 26, 2015, https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/in-love-and-war/201511/graduate-school-and-mental-illness-is-there-link.

11 Toby Miller, “The Contingency of (Some) Academic Labor: Communication Studies and the Cognitariat,” International Journal of Communication 5 (2011): 1839.

12 Ibid.

13 For more information about flexibility in faculty-led teaching–research–service ratios, see American Council on Education, An Agenda for Excellence: Creating Flexibility in Tenure-Track Careers (Washington, DC: American Council on Education, 2005), http://www.acenet.edu/leadership/programs/Documents/Agenda-for-Excellence.pdf.

14 Jack H. Schuster and Martin J. Finkelstein, The American Faculty: The Restructuring of Academic Work and Careers (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006), cited in Subcommittee of the Committee on Contingency and the Profession, “Tenure and Teaching-Intensive Appointments.”

15 Bérubé and Ruth, The Humanities, Higher Education, and Academic Freedom, 70.

16 Sterne, “The Politics of Academic Labor.”

17 Russell A. Berman et al., “The Future of the Humanities Ph.D. at Stanford,” Humanists@Work, 2012, https://humwork.uchri.org/features/reports-and-white-papers/, 1.

18 Sterne, “The Politics of Academic Labor,” 1859; 1860.

19 Amy M. Pason, “Four Myths About Academic Labor,” International Journal of Communication 5 (2011): 1790.

20 Bérubé and Ruth, The Humanities, Higher Education, and Academic Freedom, 11.

21 David Brooks, “The Humanist Vocation,” The New York Times, June 20, 2013, http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/21/opinion/brooks-the-humanist-vocation.html, para 6.

22 Mark Chelgren, qtd. in Sarah Larimer, “This Lawmaker's Bio Touted a Business Degree. It Was Actually a Sizzler Training Certificate,” The Washington Post, March 2, 2017, https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/grade-point/wp/2017/03/02/this-lawmakers-bio-touted-a-business-degree-it-was-actually-a-sizzler-training-certificate/?utm_term=.5b2b0285c09e.

23 “Twitter Account Mocking ‘Questionable’ Left-Wing Papers Is Shrouded in Secrecy Amid Threats of Hacking,” Fox News, February 14, 2017, http://www.foxnews.com/us/2017/02/14/twitter-account-mocking-questionable-left-wing-papers-is-shrouded-in-secrecy-amid-threats-hacking.html.

24 George Will, “An Excess of Intellectual Emptiness,” National Review, January 28, 2017, http://www.nationalreview.com/article/444354/alternative-facts-safe-spaces-come-similar-intellectual-problems.

25 George Cheney and Karen Lee Ashcraft, “Considering ‘the Professional’ in Communication Studies: Implications for Theory and Research Within and Beyond the Boundaries of Organizational Communication,” Communication Theory 17, no. 2 (2007): 150.

26 Colleen Flaherty, “Killing Tenure,” Inside Higher Ed, January 13, 2017, https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2017/01/13/legislation-two-states-seeks-eliminate-tenure-public-higher-education.

27 Bérubé and Ruth, The Humanities, Higher Education, and Academic Freedom, 29.

28 Ibid., 76.

29 Ibid., 137.

30 Dhawal Shah, “How Does Coursera Make Money?” EdSurge News, October 15, 2014, https://www.edsurge.com/news/2014-10-15-how-does-coursera-make-money.

31 Jill J. McMillan and George Cheney, “The Student as Consumer: The Implications and Limitations of a Metaphor,” Communication Education 45, no. 1 (1996): 1–15.

32 Pew Research Center, “Sharp Partisan Divisions in Views of National Institutions,” July 10, 2017, http://www.people-press.org/2017/07/10/sharp-partisan-divisions-in-views-of-national-institutions/.

33 Valerie Strauss, “DeVos: Colleges Tell Students “What to Do, What to Say and, More Ominously, What to Think,” The Washington Post, February 23, 2017, https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/answer-sheet/wp/2017/02/23/devos-colleges-tell-students-what-to-do-what-to-say-and-more-ominously-what-to-think/?utm_term=.69b4a8440a02.

34 Ibid.

35 David Jesse, “Conservative U-M Students Allege University Is Anti-Donald Trump,” Detroit Free Press, November 14, 2016, https://www.freep.com/story/news/local/michigan/2016/11/14/conservative-u-m-students-allege-university-anti-donald-trump/93790128/, para 2.

36 Bérubé and Ruth, The Humanities, Higher Education, and Academic Freedom, 8.

37 Frank Donoghue, The Last Professors: The Twilight of the Humanities in the Corporate University (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008).

38 Kenneth Burke, Attitudes Toward History, 3rd ed. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), 308.

39 Cary Nelson, No University Is an Island: Saving Academic Freedom (New York: New York University Press, 2010).

40 Cheney and Ashcraft, “Considering ‘the Professional’ in Communication Studies.”

41 Bérubé and Ruth, The Humanities, Higher Education, and Academic Freedom, 21.

42 See Burton J. Bledstein, The Culture of Professionalism: The Middle Class and The Development of Higher Education in America (New York: Norton, 1976); Magali Sarfatti Larson, The Rise of Professionalism: A Sociological Analysis (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1977); Keith M. Macdonald, The Sociology of the Professions (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 1995); William M. Sullivan, Work and Integrity: The Crisis and Promise of Professionalism in America, 2nd ed. (San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass, 2005).

43 Cheney and Ashcraft, “Considering ‘the Professional’ in Communication Studies.”

44 Ibid., 151.