People Like This Are Why Higher Ed Inequality Persists

Overworked, ravaged part-time higher ed faculty will appreciate that today is National Adjunct Walkout Day, a “grassroots effort…to highlight adjunct faculty labor issues and to insist on fair wages and better working conditions.”

To gain a more complete picture of the labor and wage inequality issues that adjunct faculty face, The Chronicle of Higher Education interviewed Dr. Ellen Schrecker, a tenured professor at Yeshiva University, about her assessment of “adjuncts’ hopes of bringing about change.”

And what better way to understand adjuncts’ hopes than by ignoring those individuals entirely and instead interviewing a tenured professor who has enjoyed full-faculty status at institutions such as Harvard, Princeton, NYU, and Columbia?

Of course, that is not to say that all tenured faculty are unsympathetic to, or ignorant of, the plight of the adjuncter, specifically the newer generation of PhDs who have been there themselves prior to landing their highly coveted position of relative security. But Schrecker’s commentary on the subject is so embarrassingly elitist and condescending that it ironically reveals one of the fundamental reasons adjuncts are in the piteous state they are: the indifference of their tenured colleagues.

When asked how adjuncts can invoke change, Schrecker’s repeated answer is self-advocation. There is no call to action directed at her tenured colleagues. There is no recognition of how many of those very people have inhibited the advancement of adjuncts. Instead, she places the onus solely on the adjuncts to equalize a system of grave inequality. In other words, this self-proclaimed “card-carrying member of the ACLU” reverts to impassivity. Read on:

“What adjuncts need to do is inform the general public, especially their own students, about their situation and the precarity … of their employment, and how it is impacting the education of most students […] in a very negative way.”

Yes, and what better way to inform the general public than to humiliate one’s self by standing in front of one’s classroom and admitting you have no healthcare, no job security, earn poverty-level wages, and are essentially viewed as a lesser human being despite possessing the same degree as your tenured colleagues? This is one step short of declaring that you live in a Camaro and eat squirrels. To be sure, the public needs to be informed, and adjuncts should help facilitate that, to a degree. But influential, tenured faculty who have remained mute and dispassionate on the matter for decades have helped cultivate public unawareness.

“I have always felt that, if I were an adjunct, what I would do is at the top of my syllabus every year or semester would be, ‘This course is taught by Professor Ellen Schrecker, who has a Ph.D. from an Ivy League university and is making $3,000 for teaching this course, and has no benefits and no office.’ I see no reason not to put that at the top of your syllabus.”

No, no reason at all. “Well, if this were me, with absolutely no protection from being fired whatsoever, I would undoubtedly be overtly political, radiate a derisive, oppositional attitude, and risk the small bit of employment I was able to obtain. Because, you know, it’s the principle of the matter.” Additionally, Schrecker’s pompous language about “who has a Ph.D. from an Ivy League university” is alienating. We are to believe, I suppose, that adjuncts who possess a non-Ivy Ph.D. justly suffer.

“The problem that adjuncts face in organizing, in improving their working conditions, is simply the utter unawareness on the part of the general public about their situation. Students don’t know how terrible their working conditions are.”

Actually, this is not “simply” the problem with organizing at all. Tenured faculty have, in fact, for years been a substantial hindrance to adjuncts organizing. As Peter Schmidt, author of the article about Schrecker, pointed out in April 2014, “for the most part . . . [adjuncts’] options have been to form advocacy groups to publicize their problems, to join education unions dominated by tenure-track faculty members with their own agendas, or to simply quit teaching at colleges.” These dismal options have nothing to do with lack of public awareness and everything to do with lack of support from tenured counterparts. This reinforces the assertion that the “unionization (of adjuncts) . . . produces its own set of problems. Most existing campus unions have been set up by and are still controlled by tenure stream faculty [which results in] a potential and sometimes real conflict of interest between part-time and full-time faculty.” Schrecker fails to make any mention of this pertinent and disproportionate condition.

“The one group of workers whose employment structure was similar to adjuncts were longshoremen who had workplaces but didn’t have guaranteed work and every day would go down to the docks and ‘shape up’ to get employment.”

What better way to gain the esteem of your non-tenured colleagues than to compare them to waterfront manual laborers nearly a century ago?

“Years of organizing, years of education, and — as the American public is becoming increasingly aware of economic inequality — plugging in their situation through the broader social and economic problems that we are all facing.”

As the American public “becomes increasingly aware of economic inequality”? Maybe your American public is just catching onto this, Dr. Schrecker, but my and many others’ peers have been tuned into that notion for a while now.

“The most useful thing at the moment is this massive campaign of educating the public and especially the students about the reality of who is teaching them — the reality of people who have to go on food stamps to feed their families … who are teaching them, who probably don’t even have offices where they can be met after class to go over their work. … Even until very recently, full-time tenured faculty members did not know how bad off the adjuncts on their campuses were.”

This claim is simultaneously preposterous and deeply offensive. There is no world that exists in which academics were unaware of the growing dearth of tenure-track positions and the abominable working conditions adjuncts faced. As early as 1979 — the decade in which universities ramped up the practice of exploitative part-time labor — research on the subject appeared ever more frequently in scholarly journals. Articles with titles such as “Lockouts, Layoffs, and the New Academic Proletariat,” “Exploitation of Part-Time Professors,” and “Academic Employment as Day Labor” peppered the pages of academic journals in all disciplines. Moreover, as Schmidt reported in his 2014 article, adjuncts “have long complained about poor pay and working conditions.” To plead ignorance, as Schrecker does, is asinine.

The corporatization of universities may have been originally responsible for the evaporation of tenured jobs and the exploitation of part time lecturers. But elitist faculty such as Schrecker helped perpetuate those conditions. When threatened with a shrinking job market and their own obsolescence, elitists’ “card-carrying” liberal, egalitarian ideals suddenly dissipated. If such faculty remain the ones calling the shots, Schrecker’s got one thing right: adjuncts have only themselves to rely on. Maybe next year The Chronicle will deign to interview one and find out.