Labored speech: reconsidering how communication studies works

ABSTRACT

This essay introduces a special issue concerned with the state of academic labor in the field of communication studies. Academics first voiced concerns about casualization and the deteriorating state of academic labor over 40 years ago. Predictions made then about the decline of tenure have become reality. A 2018 National Communication Association report found that the field of communication studies has the smallest percentage of total faculty who are either tenured or tenure-track. As academic jobs continue to casualize, the field risks its legitimacy, status, and educational and scholarly commitments by not attending to labor practices. While the problems with academic labor are well documented, alternatives remain elusive, a situation that constitutes a moment of possibility.

KEYWORDS:

• academic labor
• casualization
• contingent faculty
• job market
• tenure-ineligible

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Erratum

Acknowledgements

Thank you to everyone who participated in the 2016 Western States Communication Association Pre-Conference on academic labor, all of the reviewers, and to Ramsey Eric Ramsey and Sohinee Roy for their guidance and support.

Notes

1 Martin J. Levine, “Higher Education and Collective Action: Will Professors Unionize?” The Journal of Higher Education 38, no. 5 (1967): 263.

2 Ibid., 265.

3 Amy M. Pason, “Four Myths About Academic Labor,” International Journal of Communication 5 (2011): 1786.

4 For an etymology of “labor,” see Marc Bousquet, “Labor,” in Keywords for American Cultural Studies, 2nd ed., ed. Bruce Burgett and Glenn Hendler (New York: New York University Press, 2014), 142–45. For an analogy between lecturers and nineteenth-century journeymen, see Kevin Mattson, “How I Became a Worker,” in Steal This University: The Rise of the Corporate University and the Academic Labor Movement, ed. Benjamin Johnson, Patrick Kavanagh, and Kevin Mattson (London: Psychology Press, 2003), 87–96.

5 In 2012, the median national pay per three-credit course was $2,700. Coalition on the Academic Workforce, “A Portrait of Part-time Faculty Members,” June 2012, 10, http://www.academicworkforce.org/CAW_portrait_2012.pdf.

6 See Raymond Williams, “Labour,” in Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society, rev. ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983), 176–79.

7 See Sue Ellen Holbrook, “Women’s Work: The Feminizing of Composition,” Rhetoric Review 9, no. 2 (1991): 201–29; Eileen E. Schell, Gypsy Academics and Mother–Teachers: Gender, Contingent Labor, and Writing Instruction (Portsmouth, NH: Boynton/Cook, 1998); Desi Bradley, “Gender, Contingent Labor, and Our Virtual Bodies,” Workplace: A Journal for Academic Labor 15 (2008): 93–102.

8 Rachel Riederer, “The Teaching Class: Teaching College Is No Longer a Middle-Class Job, and Everyone Paying Tuition Should Care,” Guernica Magazine, June 16, 2014, https://www.guernicamag.com/the-teaching-class/.

9 John Markoff, “Essay-Grading Software Offers Professors a Break,” The New York Times, April 4, 2013, http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/05/science/new-test-for-computers-grading-essays-at-college-level.html; David Streitfeld, “Teacher Knows if You’ve Done the E-Reading,” The New York Times, April 8, 2013, http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/09/technology/coursesmart-e-textbooks-track-students-progress-for-teachers.html.

10 Carole Blair cautions us not to assume that current employment practices are inevitable. “The Political Economy of Higher Education,” Spectra 51, no. 1 (2015): 3.

11 In 2016, unions representing a total of 50,000 faculty at the two largest public university systems in the U.S.A.—City University of New York (CUNY) and California State University (CSU)—came within months (in the case of CUNY) and days (in the case of CSU) of faculty walkouts. CUNY and CSU administrations agreed to salary increases and other benefits adjustments. See David W. Chen, “Tentative Contract Deal at CUNY Ends Stalemate and Strike Threat,” The New York Times, June 16, 2016, https://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/17/nyregion/tentative-contract-deal-at-cuny-ends-stalemate-and-strike-threat.html; Rosanna Xia, “Deal to End Cal State Strike Gives Faculty a 10.5% Raise Over Three Years,” Los Angeles Times, April 8, 2016, http://www.latimes.com/local/education/la-me-0409-csu-strike-deal-20160409-story.html.

12 For a nuanced account of the crisis talk surrounding higher education, see Mark Garrett Cooper and John Marx, “Crisis, Crisis, Crisis: Big Media and the Humanities Workforce,” Differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies 24, no. 3 (2014): 127–59.

13 Alastair Gee, “Outside in America: Facing Poverty, Academics Turn to Sex Work and Sleeping in Cars,” The Guardian, September 28, 2017, https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/sep/28/adjunct-professors-homeless-sex-work-academia-poverty.

14 National Communication Association [NCA], A Report on the Contingent Faculty Workforce in Communication (Washington, DC: National Communication Association, January 2018), 4, https://www.natcom.org/sites/default/files/publications/Reports_on_the_Discipline_2018_NCA_Report_Faculty_Workforce.pdf.

15 Rebecca Schuman recounts her experience publishing her first book while lecturing. She paid all publishing expenses out of pocket. “The Academic Book as Expensive, Nihilistic Hobby,” ChronicleVitae, October 23, 2015, https://chroniclevitae.com/news/1169-the-academic-book-as-expensive-nihilistic-hobby.

16 Marc Bousquet, “Foreword: The Institution as False Horizon,” Workplace: A Journal for Academic Labor 1 (1998): 5.

17 Sandra M. Gilbert et al., “Final Report of the MLA Committee on Professional Employment,” PMLA 113, no. 5 (1998): 1154–87.

18 Bousquet, “Foreword,” 5; “The Waste Product of Graduate Education: Toward a Dictatorship of the Flexible,” Social Text 20, no. 1 (2002): 81–104; How the University Works: Higher Education and the Low-Wage Nation (New York: New York University Press, 2008); Louis Menand, The Marketplace of Ideas: Reform and Resistance in the American University (New York: Norton, 2010). Bousquet argues that the system underproduces stable jobs and Menand argues that it mainly produces ABDs (All But Dissertation).

19 Bousquet, “Foreword,” 5.

20 Cara Chell, “Memoirs and Confessions of a Part-Time Lecturer,” College English 44, no. 1 (1982): 35–40.

21 Ibid., 37.

22 Carol Simpson Stern et al., “The Status of Part-Time Faculty,” Academe 67, no. 1 (1981): 30.

23 Ibid.

24 Ibid., 32.

25 Hirschel Kasper et al., “1986 Report on Full-Time Non-Tenure-Track Appointments,” Academe 72, no. 4 (1986): 14a.

26 Ibid.

27 Ibid., 17a.

28 American Association of University Professors, “The Status of Non-Tenure-Track Faculty,” Academe 79, no. 4 (1993): 39.

29 Ibid., 42.

30 Lydia Belatèche, “Temp Prof: Practicing the Profession off the Tenure Track,” Profession (1994): 64–66.

31 Jack H. Schuster and Martin J. Finkelstein, On the Brink: Assessing the Status of the American Faculty (Berkeley: University of California, Berkeley Center for Studies in Higher Education, 2007), 4.

32 Ibid.

33 Steven Schulman et al., “Higher Education at a Crossroads: The Economic Value of Tenure and the Security of the Profession,” Academe 102, no. 2 (2016): 13.

34 Ibid. A 2012 study of part-time faculty by the Coalition on the Academic Workforce suggests that as much as 75% of all postsecondary faculty work off the tenure-track (“A Portrait of Part-Time Faculty Members”). For a graph showing labor trends in higher education since 1975, see 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.

35 Sterne, “The Politics of Academic Labor in Communication Studies,” 1854.

36 Jonathan Sterne, “The Pedagogy of the Job Market,” Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 6, no. 4 (2009): 423.

37 Ibid.

38 National Communication Association [NCA], 2014 Academic Job Listings in Communication Report (Washington, DC: National Communication Association, 2015), 1, https://www.natcom.org/sites/default/files/publications/Reports_on_the_Discipline_2014_Jobs_Report.pdf.

39 National Communication Association [NCA], 2013 Academic Job Listings in Communication Report (Washington, DC: National Communication Association, 2014), https://www.natcom.org/sites/default/files/publications/Reports_on_the_Discipline_2013_NCA_Jobs_Listings.pdf.

40 National Science Foundation [NSF], “Doctorate Recipients from U.S. Universities: 2013,” NSF 15–304 (December 3, 2014); National Science Foundation, “Doctorate Recipients from U.S. Universities: 2012 Data Tables,” NSF 14–305 (December 5, 2013); National Science Foundation, Doctorate Recipients from U.S. Universities: 2011,” NSF 13–301 (December 5, 2012); National Science Foundation, “Doctorate Recipients from United States Universities: 2010 Data Tables,” NSF 12–305 (December 6, 2011): https://www.nsf.gov/statistics/srvydoctorates/. The 2010 report includes the 2009 numbers.

41 NCA, 2013 Academic Job Listings in Communication Report, 1; 3–4.

42 The NCA could track lateral hires as well as failed or canceled searches by requiring departments to report the outcome of all job listings they submit including the name of the hire and their previous position held. Dan Fogerty, Analysis of Faculty Teaching Positions Advertised 2005–2010 (Washington, DC: National Communication Association, July 2011), 5.

43 National Science Foundation, “Doctorate Recipients from U.S. Universities: 2014,” NSF 16–300 (December 3, 2015), https://www.nsf.gov/statistics/2016/nsf16300/.

44 NCA, 2014 Academic Job Listings in Communication Report, 4.

45 It is possible that with more data we could account for those graduates. It is also possible that more data would paint a less dire picture, which seems a good reason to bother collecting it. For instance, the NCA primarily advertises jobs in the U.S.A. and some of those graduates may have found jobs at universities in other countries. The field’s definitional complexities are also a factor. What NSF counts as “communication” graduates may encompass a broader range of doctorate programs than the NCA represents. If that were the case, then the job pool for those 1,100 graduates would be bigger than just NCA-associated jobs.

46 Sterne, “Politics of Academic Labor,” 1855.

47 Roger W. Hite, “A Career Alternative for Communication Professionals: Education and Training in the Health Care Field,” Communication Administration Bulletin 18 (October 1976): 10–13.

48 William Work, “ERIC Report: Education at the Bargaining Table,” Communication Education 28, no. 2 (1979): 154.

49 Robert M. Smith, “The University and Part-Time Faculty: An Interdependent Relationship,” Communication Administration Bulletin 34 (October 1980): 32.

50 Craig Monroe and Sarah Denman, “Assimilating Adjunct Faculty: Problems and Opportunities,” Communication Administration Bulletin 78 (August 1991): 56–62.

51 James Benjamin, “Unionization and Speech Communication Faculty,” Communication Administration Bulletin 26 (October 1978): 45–47; Patti P. Gillespie, “Part-Time and Temporary Faculty in Theatre,” Communication Administration Bulletin 59 (January 1987): 82–85; Anita Taylor, “Part-Time Faculty: Problems and Prospects,” Communication Administration Bulletin 29 (August 1979): 54–57.

52 William S. Howell, “Collective Bargaining and the Crisis in Higher Education,” Spectra 7, no. 5 (1971): 1.

53 Thomas A. Discenna, “Academic Labor and the Literature of Discontent in Communication,” International Journal of Communication 5 (2011): 1844.

54 While communication faculty have published relatively little on labor issues per se, the field has hosted a rich debate on professionalism. Notable examples include Robert Hariman, “The Liberal Matrix: Pluralism and Professionalism in the American University,” The Journal of Higher Education 62, no. 4 (1991): 451–66; William L. Nothstine, Carole Blair, and Gary A. Copeland, eds., Critical Questions: Invention Creativity, and the Criticism of Discourse and Media (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1994); Janice Hocker Rushing and Thomas S. Frentz, “The Gods Must Be Crazy: The Denial of Descent in Academic Scholarship,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 85, no. 3 (1999): 229–46; Carol Blair, Julie R. Brown, and Leslie A. Baxter, “Disciplining the Feminine,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 80, no. 4 (1994): 383–409; George Cheney and Karen L. 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): 146–75; Rob Drew, “The Lethargy Begins at Home: The Academic Rate-Buster and the Academic Sloth,” Text and Performance Quarterly 26, no. 1 (2006): 65–78; Elizabeth Whitney, “Coming (Back) to Performance Studies: A Slightly Fictionalized Ethnographic Narrative (in Three Parts),” Text and Performance Quarterly 34, no. 4 (2014): 382–85.

55 Robert Hariman, “The Rhetoric of Inquiry and the Professional Scholar,” in Rhetoric in the Human Sciences, ed. Herbert W. Simons (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 1989), 215.

56 Burton J. Bledstein, The Culture of Professionalism: The Middle Class and the Development of Higher Education in America (New York: Norton, 1978), 21.

57 Ibid., x.

58 Thomas P. Miller, “Lest We Go the Way of the Classics: Toward a Rhetorical Future for English Departments,” in Rhetorical Education in America, ed. Cheryl Glenn, Margaret M. Lyday, and Wendy B. Sharer (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2004), 24, 25.

59 The Research Committee, “Research in Public Speaking,” Quarterly Journal of Public Speaking 1, no. 1 (1915): 24.

60 Gerry Philipsen, “Paying Lip Service to ‘Speech’ in Disciplinary Naming, 1914–1954,” in A Century of Communication Studies: The Unfinished Conversation, ed. Pat J. Gehrke and William M. Keith (London: Routledge, 2015), 46–63.

61 Fred McMahon, “Part-Time Faculty from the Perspective of a Western Undergraduate Program,” Communication Administration Bulletin 34 (October 1980): 66.

62 American Association of University Professors, “Statement from the Conference on the Growing Use of Part-Time and Adjunct Faculty,” Academe 84, no. 1 (1998): 54–60.

63 Randy Martin, “Academic Labor: An Introduction,” Social Text 51 (1997): 6.

64 Sheila Slaughter and Gary Rhoades, “The Neo-liberal University,” New Labor Forum 6 (2000): 73.

65 John S. Levin, “Neoliberal Policies and Community College Faculty Work,” in Higher Education: Handbook of Theory and Research, Vol. XXII, ed. John C. Smart (Dordrecht, The Netherlands: Springer, 2007), 451–96.

66 Bousquet, “The Waste Product of Graduate Education,” 92.

67 Thomas A. Discenna, Discourses of Denial: The Rhetoric of American Academic Labor (London: Routledge, 2017).

68 James Manyika et al., Independent Work: Choice, Necessity, and the Gig Economy (n.p.: McKinsey Global Institute, October 2016), https://www.mckinsey.com/global-themes/employment-and-growth/independent-work-choice-necessity-and-the-gig-economy.

69 Rosalind Gill and Andy Pratt, “In the Social Factory? Immaterial Labour, Precariousness and Cultural Work,” Theory, Culture & Society 25, no. 7–8 (2008): 14.

70 Alvin Cheng-Hin Lim, “Lines of Flight: The New Ph.D. as Migrant,” Workplace: A Journal for Academic Labor 22 (2013): 104.

71 Vinicius Kauê Ferreira, “Moving Futures: Anthropological Reflections on Academic Mobility and Precarious Life Amongst South Asian Social Scientists in Europe,” Indian Anthropologist 47, no. 1 (2017): 60.

72 Wendy Brown, “Neo-Liberalism and the End of Liberal Democracy,” Theory & Event 7, no. 1 (2003). doi:10.1353/tae.2003.0020.

73 Gill and Pratt, “In the Social Factory?” 16.

74 Audrey Williams June, “The Invisible Labor of Minority Professors,” The Chronicle of Higher Education, November 8, 2015, https://www.chronicle.com/article/The-Invisible-Labor-of/234098.

75 Gabriella Gutiérrez y Muhs et al., Presumed Incompetent: The Intersections of Race and Class for Women in Academia (Logan: Utah State University Press, 2012).

76 For more about the relationship between intuitional technologies and communication ethics, see Ronald W. Green and Darrin Hicks, “Lost Convictions: Debating Both Sides and the Ethical Self-Fashioning of Liberal Citizens,” Cultural Studies 19, no. 1 (2005): 100–126; Ronald W. Green, “Rhetorical Materialism: The Rhetorical Subject and the General Intellect,” in Rhetoric, Materiality, and Politics, ed. Barbara A. Biesecker and John L. Lucaites (New York: Peter Lang, 2009), 43–65.