I have waited a long time to write this post, part 5 in a series that started on my blog. I have waited for a variety of reasons. Some of those reasons are life-related and some of them are professional (like a 3rd year contract review). One of those reasons, however, is that I have spent a really long time thinking about what I wanted to write in this post and how I wanted to approach my fellow full-time, tenure-track, and tenured faculty. I do not necessarily want to admonish anyone, though I think some of us could stand to be admonished, and I do not want to ask faculty to take on burdens that are too heavy or too risky. I wanted to be able to challenge us in a way that is productive, in a way that asks us to see and acknowledge our privilege and how much power we have. I wanted us to take a look at the ways that refusal can be an act of resistance to the regular, everyday practices of the academy that exploit the most vulnerable among us. I wanted us to see that all of us can be doing something, even if it is just one thing, to “negate that which negates us.”

Then National Adjunct Walkout Day happened yesterday, and I saw the most vulnerable among us make themselves even more vulnerable to retribution in order to enact the politics of refusal and stand up for what is right and ethical. I hope that to my fellow full-time and tenure-track faculty members this is a clear call to action. If contingent faculty, the most at-risk for retribution and negative consequences, can refuse, we are under an ethical obligation to use our privilege and our power to change those practices that hurt us and hurt others.

Tenured, tenure-track, and full time faculty need to get radical. We have to start refusing. Getting radical, and getting radical together, is in my view the only way to reform a deeply entrenched system of which we are a part and from which we receive a great deal of benefits. On Twitter, I originally (polemically) suggested that tenured faculty at PhD-granting institutions should publicly resign in protest of the unethical working conditions of adjuncts and graduate students, and the continued recruitment of large numbers of PhD students who have very little reasonable expectation of employment. While this polemic suggestion certainly inspired conversation, some productive, some not so productive, I fully acknowledge then and now that resignation is not feasible for many, nor is it the only way to resist business-as-usual in the academy. However, I still stand by public resignation and refusal as one possible option for how we can get radical.

We should learn from radical, decolonial, feminist, and queer political theory and activism that refusal and negativity can be powerful tools, strategies that insist on care of the self and active, collaborative resistance rather than participation in unjust systems. So many of us are inspired by that activism in our work already, and we can and should turn towards it in the departments where we work. If it is feasible and if you can make an impact, resigning in protest from a PhD-granting department can be an important show of solidarity — especially if you continue to be an educator and an agitator — but it can also be a strategy of survival for those who are burned out, tired of seeing their students remain dejected and underemployed year after year, and don’t know what to do about it. Of course, for resignation to work as a strategy of refusal and resistance, financial and social capital is necessary, and many faculty, even on the tenure-track, do not have that sort of capital. Many, if not most, have families, debt, and other obligations that make giving up a full-time salary, which is often not a lot to begin with, an impossibility. Thus we come to slightly less polemical ways to refuse and get radical.

Despite the abysmal job numbers over the course of the last decade, PhD programs in the humanities and social sciences have continued to grow and expand. This means that a new crop of students is being admitted every year (in some research institutions, as many as 15–20 students are admitted and make up the incoming class), when their counterparts who are graduating have little or no hope of finding a full-time or tenure-track job. This leads to what we already know is a flooded market of PhDs, as well as to the very unhelpful slogan “There are always good jobs for good people”, that makes graduate students and new PhDs feel a sense of utter and abject failure because this statement is not accompanied by the truth: “most of them are contingent”.

While obscuring or outright lying about placement data, programs admit new students who will spend five to ten years working towards a degree, often at considerable personal and financial cost. These programs prepare them for faculty research jobs with very little pedagogical training or idea of how to find other employment outside the academy, and then essentially drop them off the books when they fail to find tenure-track employment. Continuing this practice is unconscionable. I know many tenured and tenure-track faculty members at PhD-granting institutions also think it is unconscionable, but do not feel like they can change the policies of their department or institution. They are probably right about their individual effect on larger systems.

But we can all together change ourselves and hold ourselves accountable. We can actively refuse to be part of that unconscionable system. This refusal can be managed by engaging in different kinds of work that is not privileged by the strucutre of the academy, but that is necessary to engage in active refusal within the system. Instead of taking on graduate students, volunteer to teach general education courses like composition or surveys, teach courses in the major so you have an opportunity to talk to students about the realities of this profession. Insist on bringing in speakers and career counselors who can help graduate students find work outside the academy. Offer coursework, assistantships, or employment opportunities that can help current graduate and undergraduats students cultivate skills that are marketable in many job fields. Encourage your undergraduates to pursue other opportunities outside of humanities graduate school programs, such as minoring in public administration, business, or computer science.

Advise and teach more undergraduates in your major, and make sure to talk about how they might use their degrees outside the academy in each and every course and in each and every advising session. Don’t write your undergrads recommendation letters to PhD non-elite departments or departments with a placement record of less than 50%, and actually explain to them why you will not do so. Accept, or even seek out, a higher teaching load. Refuse to chair any more dissertations or teach graduate seminars until your department or institution changes their admissions and labor policies. This isn’t about telling undergraduate or graduate students to “give up their dream” because of a bad market, but rather about refusing to participate in a system that we know for an undisputed fact hurts and exploits people.

Institutional prestige and rankings for PhD-granting institutions are partially determined by low faculty teaching loads and churning out PhD after PhD, even when they have nowhere to go. Individually and collectively as faculty, we can refuse to continue being part of that problem. Further, we can hope that actively refusing to participate in this unethical system will force our administrators, our departments, and our institutions to take a hard look at what they are doing. Maybe if we don’t participate in the prestige economy, the prestige economy will have to change the way it does business. Maybe not. We cannot know until we try, and if we try, we can also ensure that in our small corner of the world, where we are responsible for guiding our students, that we are doing our best to do no harm.

Finally, those of us (like myself and like most of us) who are tenured, tenure-track, or full-time at teaching institutions still have a significant role to play in being part of the solution. Many of the “get radical” recommendations for active refusal above for faculty at PhD granting institutions that pertain to undergraduates still pertain to us. We should be encouraging our students who want to major in the humanities or social sciences to think about what kinds of career options are available to them and actively help them pursue opportunities outside of the four-year university-to-graduate school pipeline. We should still be volunteering, if we aren’t already, to teach composition, general education, or the first-year experience courses at our institution in order to make contact with, and make an impact on, students who are not going to be humanities or social science majors. As I argued in a post on my blog, general education courses are a good opportunity to become advocates for the importance of higher education in general, as well as advocates for the importance of the humanities and social sciences in particular. We should join organizations that give real, material support to adjuncts and graduate students. If we are lucky enough to have a faculty union, we should insist that the union also represent and negotiate for the interests of adjuncts. We can stop thinking, even secretly to ourselves, that we are “better” than adjuncts because we have full-time or tenure-track employment. We are not better, we are lucky. We should treat our adjunct faculty as equals and as partners in our mission to advocate for better labor practices and for the importance of providing a world-class education, no matter where we are.

Getting radical is not easy. It will require all of us to give up things we like. It will require all of us to learn new things. It will require all of us to acknowledge that we benefit from the exploitation of others and to turn that acknowledgment into action. Those actions will frustrate, depress, and inconvenience us. But they will help us be better educators, as well as more empathic to contingent faculty and graduate students who are so often inconvenienced, frustrated, and depressed. Most importantly, the actions we take will shift the burden of responsibility, resistance, and refusal from students and adjuncts onto us. If as tenured, tenure-track, and full-time faculty we hold ourselves accountable and participate as a collective, we are bound to see changes in the way we do business. This is not a panacea, but it’s a start.