After the Deluge

The deluge in question is a long thread that has been running on the Council of Writing Program Administrators' list serve. It started with a simple, practical question and has morphed and morphed again into a discussion of tenure track and non-tenured teaching positions. This is positively a boon for me, as I am speaking at that very group's conference on that very subject on Saturday.

Ironically, if not absurdly, I submitted my proposal in the category of "conversation starter" - not a full paper, but a brief overview of a given topic which is then thrown open to the participants to discuss. It's obvious that this conversation has been started, and is not going to end any time soon.

And it's possible to squeeze out a tiny bit of hope for the future of labor conditions in American higher education. On June 26, adjunct faculty at Point Park University in Pittsburgh voted to join the Adjunct Faculty Association of the USW. Previously, part-time faculty members at Tufts, Leslie, and Northeastern Universities also voted to unionize. There are many more cases of organizing in process, including awaiting the results of Duquesne University's appeal of the union vote to the National Labor Relations Board.

There is currently a petition circulating to urge David Weil, the director of the Wage and Hour Division of the US Department of Labor to investigate working conditions and wages of adjunct faculty. (Read and sign the petition here.)

It may not seem like much, but the movement has gained steam quickly since the September 18 article in The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette about the life and death of spurned adjunct Mary Margaret Vojtko. I've seen more concern from people outside of academia, and more concern from tenured faculty, many of whom had sat above the fray.

All of those are positive things. Something that strikes me as less positive is a growing support for converting adjunct jobs into non-tenured, full-time teaching lines with benefits. On the surface, and certainly for the poor adjunct traveling to three or more schools, teaching an outrageously heavy load, and still walking the tightrope of the poverty line, it seems like a wonderful idea.

Here are my reservations. First, the online division of Southern New Hampshire University (a huge operation that has been called "the Amazon of education") has tested converting adjunct jobs to full-time. The workload, already heavy, increased. The pressure to follow the rules (respond to every assignment within 72 hours, for example) increased. And when the full-time jobs are created, the university has said that "some" of the current adjuncts will be hired in them.

Granted, there may be good reasons not to hire every single adjunct in a full-time position. Some may, for their own reasons, prefer to remain part-time. But every qualified and capable adjunct who has served the university well should be offered a full-time job, until those jobs are all filled. I was warned by a faculty member at one university where I applied to be an adjunct not to do it, as adjuncts were never considered for tenure-track jobs. Thank you for your service; please apply elsewhere.

The second concern is more urgent. Full-time, non-tenured teachers often have no support, no protection, and no job security. I worked one year in such a position,where I was assured that renewal was almost automatic. Sadly, someone with a strong vote and a weak grasp of my field didn't like the way I taught. I was a campus leader in service, scholarship, and teaching - at least to everyone else, but it didn't matter. In a tenure track job, I would have been protected from such pettiness.

So the conversation, once started, will not hush. Here are the questions I intend to raise on Saturday:

How can writing program administrators:

• create an atmosphere inclusive of contingent faculty
• advocate for better conditions, including increased pay, benefits, and working conditions such as office space, parking, and access to university services
• address gender inequality in contingent issues
• participate in activism on behalf of contingent labor beyond our own campuses
• build alliances among administration, tenured and tenure-track faculty, full-time nontenured faculty, and adjunct faculty, staff, students and parents for the improvement of the working conditions of contingent faculty as well as a longer-term goal of increasing the number of full-time, tenure-track positions?

If you have any answers, feel free to post a comment. And if you're going to Normal, Illinois this weekend, you'll be one step ahead of the rest of the participants at my panel.

Long Time No Blog

It's that magical time of year - finals! So my blog has been strangely silent, in spite of the many interesting developments in the faculty labor world.

Probably the most interesting is the delivery of a petition to Duquesne University supporting unionization of adjuncts there. As you may remember, it was the death of an adjunct at Duquesne that set off the national discussion - I'd like to call it national outrage, but as a nation, we reserve that for sleazy awards show performances and bad NFL calls.

Pittsburgh CityPaper posted this on its blog (blogh - the h is silent - clever!) Check this out.

Meanwhile, here is their picture, featuring front and center a friend and colleague with whom I served as an adjunct at a Pittsburgh university:

Love the language (after all, we do teach writing): Tenuous Track. 

Frankly, adjunct, contingent, tenure track or tenured - at this point all faculty jobs are tenuous. It is time for national outrage. Students, parents, faculty, staff, strangers on the street - we all need to step up and address the importance of higher education (ok, all education). If we don't, more great teachers will give up and move on. And then who will teach my grandsons when it's their turn for college?

Activism to Apathy to . . .

In 1970, Duquesne University was in the midst of a financial disaster and felt forced to decide between closing the doors and raising tuition significantly. Then president Father McAnulty* met with student leaders and another solution was found: The Third Alternative to Save Duquesne.

Students put together an amazing fund raising program, including door-to-door solicitation, which raised almost $600,000.

When I was a high school junior searching for a college in 1971, I knew the story well and put Duquesne on my list. I was accepted and offered a generous financial aid package.

By the time I arrived on campus in August of 1972, there were no lingering signs of student involvement, or even concern. Although the program was still in progress to some degree, I never heard a word of it on campus, and the students I met knew nothing of it - and cared even less. Duquesne had become a party school - at least one mixer on campus every weekend: all the beer you could drink for a dollar. No carding.

Saturday nights, students crawled up the hill from the bar of choice, Frank and Wally's (famous for gravy-covered fries), to go to 2 a.m. mass at the university chapel.

So I was interested to read this article about student support for adjuncts from USA Today. So far, no word from the Duquesne students, but I will say this.

In my seven years as an adjunct, I always told my students exactly what that meant. It was the reason I had to meet them for conferences in the cafeteria; it was the reason I was only on that campus one day a week; it was the reason I sometimes returned papers late. Seven courses, three schools, five locations. I'm running as fast as I can.

I had a student at one college who had five courses - and five adjuncts. And this a private university with a hefty tuition rate.

So, yes, students: get involved. Save the professoriate the way you saved Duquesne.

And now - who will save Duquesne?

*I want to point out that Father McAnulty was a great leader. He knew my name and the names of most of my classmates. He regularly visited all the offices on campus and knew his staff. I was not happy at Duquesne, and that is partly because it was too big for me - I graduated in a class of 241, still the largest class to ever graduate from my high school. Even so, it was not the school that The Third Alternative had led me to expect.

Brian O'Neill Nails It - As Usual . . .

Pittsburgh Post-Gazette columnist Brian O'Neill has weighed in on the case of Duquesne University adjunct, Professor Margaret Mary Vojtko. And, yes, I am calling her Professor (not adjunct, not visiting, not instructor) on purpose, because that is the title she deserved.

In it, O'Neill does some disturbing math. Read his column (brilliant as always) here.

In case you don't want to go to the link, O'Neill writes this: "Money charged to students covers 108 percent of instructional costs. The overflow goes to university research, public service and overhead. That would be where dwindling state budget money devoted to universities goes, too -- not to instruction. Thus college costs have soared even as more instruction comes from part-time professors who squeeze in classes with their real jobs. Public universities have done this largely because state appropriations have shrunk. In Pennsylvania, state appropriations cover only 18 percent of university core revenue. Only Colorado and Vermont offer a lower percentage."

So thank you, Brian. This is exactly where I was planning to go next. Duquesne University, a private school where undergraduate tuition ranges from $29,000 to $34,000 a year, chooses to exploit its workers, it's wrong. It's evil. But it's the free market economy - they do because they can. (I'm not excusing them from the Catholic commitment to labor issues. Apparently they have done that themselves.)

But when public education does the same, it's unspeakable. I was blessed to get my PhD from Indiana University of Pennsylvania paying in-state tuition - a fraction of what my out-of-state classmates paid. But I spent my whole life paying Pennsylvania state taxes. I finally got something for it (other than the occasionally paved pot hole). I pay my state taxes, in part, hoping to allow others get the education they need to succeed in the world.

When O'Neill says "overhead," a lot of that money is administrative salaries. The teachers in the trenches are suffering while presidents and football coaches are getting rich. This is what the defunding of public colleges and universities is truly defunding: teaching. The heart and soul of the university. There is no move to cut administrative salaries. And, strangely, no move to cut governors' salaries.

One of O'Neill's sources refers to "educational consumers." As problematic as that term is, if you are, in fact, an "educational consumer" - a student or parent of a student - step up. Demand teachers who are treated with respect, health insurance, and a living wage.

And the Bigger Problem

The use and abuse of contingent labor in academia didn't just happen; it is, perhaps, a symptom rather than the disease itself. Higher education is under attack from all sides, including from within. While Duquesne University is a private school, the labor conditions in public education are often worse. Steven Ward writes that this is no accident. While to an outsider, his words may sound paranoid, as someone who has worked in the field for 14 years, I have seen all of these things in play.

And don't get me started on the idea of free markets and college-as-business. Anyone who knows me knows how I suffered working in the for-profit education world. I watched from within as Goldman Sachs destroyed a formerly prestigious 90-year-old institution. The day its parent company took the stock public and Goldman Sachs bought the controlling interest, it was as if the lights had been suddenly turned off. Layoffs started and eventually included the librarians, the advisors, department chairs, faculty . . .  Even worse, we were constantly pressured to dumb down the curriculum and to pass failing students, while support services for our most needy students were being cut. After all, offering counseling services doesn't bring in profits, does it?

None of this is happening in a vacuum. There is an atmosphere of anti-intellectualism, a fear of elitism, and a glorification of the average in our culture today. George W. Bush is proud of his C+ average at Yale. Highly educated and highly intelligent people have been stereotyped as helpless geeks who can't manage their own lives. In television, think about Ross from "Friends," the Crane brothers of "Frazier," and everyone but Penny in "The Big Bang Theory."

The next group to be glorified? Wildly successful dropouts, including Steve Jobs and Bill Gates (who suddenly knows how to fix education - but that's a story for another day). Early in President Obama's first term, he visited a school and gave a fairly routine "stay in school" speech, and leaders in the Republican party demanded rebuttal time. To say what? Drop out? And that is exactly the message the conservative media landed on: no need to go to school! Certainly Glenn Beck is doing just fine with just a high school degree!

What this ignores, of course, is that in order to succeed without education beyond high school, you need to be incredibly driven or a genius. It helps to be both.

My students who are receiving that message are neither. They are first generation college students in a state that has slashed funding to higher education. Their fathers and grandfathers were farmers or coal miners. Now they believe that there is a future in oil and gas that doesn't require education. And the governor is just fine with that.

In the formerly great state of Pennsylvania, the governor has made no secret of his agenda to destroy public education, starting with preschool and not stopping until the PhD programs are gone.

Combine these state efforts with the high interest on student loans and dwindling resources such as Pell Grants. Tuition goes up, financial aid sources dry up, and students fear (and rightly so) living the rest of their lives under crushing student loan debt. What happens then? Higher education, once considered a great equalizer, the gateway to opportunity for all Americans, will revert to its roots: a place for rich white guys to revel in their privilege.

Sad.

It's All About the Union - Or Is It?

Today's entry includes a great cartoon from Rob Rogers in today's Pittsburgh Post-Gazette:

Unfortunately, I think too many people are making this an issue of unionization, and the anti-union climate today is perhaps obscuring the bigger issue. Union or no, contingent faculty should not be abused. If a union is the only way to get fair treatment, a union it must be. 

Ken Gormley claims that Duquesne University pays its adjuncts more than many other Pittsburgh area colleges and universities, and from my experience, that is true. But the argument that some colleges treat their adjuncts well sounds vaguely like the claim that some slave owners didn't beat their slaves. Nice to know, but it doesn't make owning slaves all right. Paying more than other universities is nice, but it still resulted in abject poverty for Professor Vojtko.

A Great Day for the Great Race

Don't say I didn't warn you - there will be occasional blogs about running. And, since it's Sunday, I decided to lighten up a bit . . .

Today was the thirty-sixth running of the Richard S. Caliguiri City of Pittsburgh Great Race. I have run the 10K event almost every year since I started running in 1999. I couldn't be there this year - I'm living about three hours south in Glenville, West Virginia, and I couldn't get a dog sitter (long story for another time, perhaps).

The Great Race is known for its long uphill climb from mile four to mile five - it goes up the Boulevard of the Allies out of Oakland to Mercy Hospital (Pittsburghers will get this immediately). The elevation chart doesn't do it justice. There is no shade and the road is concrete. Although the second, third, and fourth miles are rolling hills and the overall elevation of the course is downhill, it's a tough mile. Often, it's hot.

I'm a slow runner, so it's almost always hot by the time i get there. My favorite part of the course is where the hill crests right behind Duquesne University. There are always cheerleaders and band members and other students cheering the runners on, and there's a water stop. From that point, it truly is downhill all the way to the finish line at Point State Park.

Interesting that the expression "downhill all the way" can be used to describe a happy circumstance, at least for runners, or an unhappy circumstance, something like "down the tubes."

I ran over four miles in my tee shirt from last year's Great Race today. Don't know how I would have felt about running past my alma mater.

In other news, as the world's worst transition puts it, "Death of an Adjunct" letters earned The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette's "Issue One" position today.

And the Beat Goes On

Yesterday I mentioned that the furor over Professor Margaret Mary Vojtko's life and death seemed to have died down. Not so: there were several more letters to the editor of The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. You can find them here.

Tobias Wolff wrote, "A true piece of writing is a dangerous thing. It can change your life." I believe that all of the writing on this subject, starting with Daniel Kovalik's original essay, can change lives. Please keep sharing the articles that you find, and spread them as far as you can - to students and their parents, to administration, to politicians (not that you expect anything to come of that). The wonderful thing about Mr. Kovalik's story is that it brought an issue that has long been festering within academia out of the ivory tower and into the world. Let's keep it there.

In the Interest of Full Disclosure

I should have mentioned this earlier: I am a graduate of Duquesne University. I earned a bachelor's degree in English in 1976 (ok, I can here you all doing the math in your heads). Back in those dark ages when we chiseled our research papers on stone tablets, guess what? All my professors were full-time, tenure-track or tenured teacher/scholars. Graduate students led discussion groups for the large introductory lecture courses, but that was the only experience I had with contingent faculty.

The system seemed so secure that my professors encouraged me to go to graduate school and become a college teacher. Perhaps if I had taken their advice at the time, I would have entered the profession before the glut of English post-graduates hit the market. Perhaps I would have avoided the seven years of insecurity. Perhaps I would be able to anticipate retirement.

But my field - English composition - was in its infancy. I would have been directed into some subfield within literature. And it turns out I really don't like teaching literature. I love helping students - especially underprepared students - discover that they can write.

So instead of going directly to graduate school, I worked in journalism, public relations, fund development, and retail. I got an MFA in fiction writing from the University of Pittsburgh 20 years after my graduation from Duquesne. I had not intended to teach - I was going to write the best-selling, critically-acclaimed Great American Novel.

Back to retail.

I started teaching through a series of fortuitous connections. It was love at first sight. I was a part-time make-up artist in a downtown department store and taught two classes a semester.

It took a while before I felt used, abused, and exploited.

Back to school - I began doctoral studies almost 10 years after my master's program.

And everyone warned me: you still might not get a job. It took two years on the market and well over 100 applications before I landed my current tenure-track job.

Many of my friends and classmates have not been as fortunate. While Professor Vojtko's story makes the rounds of social media, some very good friends and very good teachers have posted their intent to leave teaching because they need health care, or steady income, or some sense of job security.

We will continue to lose good teachers. We will lose good teachers who never became teachers.

And, eventually, we will lose higher education.

Adjunctivitis: The Heartbreak Continues

Although it's hard to imagine anything worse than the sad story of Margaret Mary Vojtko, the Duquesne University adjunct professor who died in abject poverty, there is something worse: the official responses of the university to that story.

The first came in a letter to the editor of The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette from the Reverend Daniel Walsh, the university chaplain. He is appalled - not by the treatment of Professor Vojtko, but by the idea that the story was told at all. After all, when she was living in squalor and dying of cancer, they offered her charity! They visited her! That should make it all better, right? Read his letter here.

Then we have this gem from Ken Gormley, dean of the law school, who could not be more clueless. He claims that part-time faculty bring real-world experience into the classroom. This is true in many fields - a working lawyer teaching a course in law school would be an asset to the classroom. But Professor Vojtko's field was French - there is no "real world" job to bring to the classroom. My own field, English composition, is one in which there are no "real world" jobs - the field is the classroom. And yet it is probably the biggest user and abuser of contingent faculty in the academy.

Gormley also points a finger at "individuals who seek to build full-time careers by combining multiple part-time contracts, often at several institutions." In his rosy world view, where all adjuncts are merely supplementing their income and sharing their real world experience, it is the adjuncts themselves who want full-time careers who are the problem.

Let me say this right now: I know many many contingent faculty members. Not one of them seeks the life of a freeway flyer. They have been seeking full-time employment. And yet the academy continues to churn out qualified teachers with master's degrees and doctorates, creating a labor pool so large it is easily exploited.

Next, we have a letter from a staff member. This is probably not an official university response, but it does lead me to believe that the school is serving Kool-aid. The article, she claims, is "unfair to the university." Her letter contains at least one factual error (Professor Vojtko never slept in a classroom. She did sleep in her office sometimes.). She blames Professor Vojtko's family for not rescuing her from the poverty that a combination of university policy and cancer created. I wonder if she has any idea of what "family" that might be. She also claims that Professor Vojtko was receiving Social Security and Medicare. I wonder how she knows this. If Professor Vojtko's wages were as low as reported - and the university has not disputed that - her payment into Social Security would not have been very much - therefore her payments from Social Security wouldn't have been very much either.

But none of this matters. Neither charity nor defensiveness nor mansplaining justifies the exploitation of a woman who, from all reports, was both a good teacher and a good Catholic, by an institution that prides itself on instilling Catholic values in its students.

Adjunctivitis: The Search for the Cure

That's the title of a paper I wrote in my doctoral program about six years ago. It told the stories of my woes as a "freeway flyer" - a part-time faculty member working for several institutions of higher education at the same time to fool myself into believing I had a full-time job.

My worst semester (out of seven years) I taught six courses for three colleges in five different locations. I had a Monday/Wednesday/Friday book bag, a Tuesday/Thursday book bag, and a Wednesday night book bag. God help me if I ever grabbed the wrong bag or pointed the car the wrong direction.

I also edited newsletters for two local government bodies.

My best year I earned almost $30,000. I had no health insurance most of the time - I finally caved in and bought an individual plan that cost about $200 a month.

But I was living in the lap of luxury compared to Margaret Mary Vojtko, whose sad story, written by Daniel Kovalik, appeared in The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette on September 18 - read the story here if you haven't already.

The story has, as they say, gone viral. But its fifteen minutes of fame seem to be fading, after just a week. Groups that were already focused on the exploitation of part-time faculty are still spreading the story and the many and varied reactions to it, but the general public seems to have moved on. No more letters to the editor in the P-G. No more outrage from Catholic publications. Hey! There's a new iPhone! and did you read about the 40-foot rubber ducky coming to Pittsburgh?

I talked to my students about the story. They were shocked. We are fortunate to be in a remote, rural area of West Virginia where there is no labor pool to exploit. Pittsburgh is very different - with such a rich collection of colleges and universities, there are many many people with masters' degrees and even doctorates who are eager to teach. So - supply and demand, right? Why even pretend to pay them a living wage?

Of course, there are many good reasons to, apart from the obvious ethical issues. Or are they obvious?

This blog will continue to share the writing on this subject as well as my own experience. Professor Vojtko's nephew's wish is that the story is so powerful that there will be no more Margaret Marys. From his lips to God's ear . . .