CANARY IN THE COAL MINE: CONTINGENT FACULTY IN THE PRO-DIVERSITY ERA

The APSA September Chart of the Month, “Field of Study Diversity,” stresses APSA’s commitment “to advancing diversity and inclusion through the profession,” although “more work needs to be done” (APSA 2018). “Diversity” here refers to diverse backgrounds and experiences, organized around categories of gender, race, disability, and sexual identities rather than diversity in economic status. This is in keeping with the American view that the organized pursuit of political representation and political equality is more legitimate and feasible than the pursuit of economic equality (Hochschild 1981).

In 2016, APSA established a status committee on contingent faculty in the profession, with a mixed membership of contingent, tenured-track, and tenured faculty, which joined the long-standing status committees representing women, blacks, Latinos, LGBT, and other underrepresented groups. One long-term goal motivates the new committee’s projects, some of which this spotlight showcases: changing the terms of debate within the profession so that the extreme “diversity” (read “inequity”) in compensation and opportunities for professional advancement in political science loses its legitimacy, as well as when discrimination due to gender, race, ethnicity, and sexual orientation is not involved.

One reason why it is difficult to think through issues linked to contingent faculty is that this term masks much diversity also in the working conditions of those concerned. Some full-timers are in secure and decently paid teaching positions; others cobble together teaching positions at several institutions to survive. Some professionals teach part-time for love of their topic and students; however, most part-timers do so constrained by personal reasons and without making ends meet. Although research has shown for one generation that many non-tenured academics are underpaid and experience minimal professional and infrastructure support such as yearly library privileges (Pratt 1997), little has changed. So what is to be done when state support for public universities also is declining?¹

Individual negotiations can help, up to a point. They may provide a title, which acknowledges publication, service, and awards; an office; and library and email privileges. Negotiations also may inform about administrative mindsets and policies and, in turn, highlight the human cost of bureaucratic decisions. However, improved monetary compensation and job security remain out of reach. In 2008, starting salaries for adjuncts were quietly slashed by almost 15% in the University of Minnesota (U of MN) political science department, and long-standing course-by-course appointments were not renewed—with no apparent reaction from tenured faculty. As for collective action, a two-year effort at the U of MN to organize tenured, tenure-track, and contingent faculty within a single union failed in 2017 when a Minnesota Court of Appeals ruled against it, rewarding a $500 thousand investment in legal fees by university administrators, and faculty opposition.²

Thus, this political theorist wonders: Is there a way to recast the problem so that treating contingent faculty as genuine colleagues becomes not only intellectually legitimate but also ethically imperative and economically feasible? So that offering lower overall compensation because of “some pressure on discretionary funds” to a long-term and highly productive contingent faculty who has just created a new course upon departmental request becomes unthinkable? Budgets are flexible; what is legitimate becomes affordable. Witness the demand for a $15/hour minimum wage, deemed undoable a few years ago; it is now being adopted in many parts of the United States. Why not envisage similar changes of mindset in academia, and eventually, changes of policies?

Thus, this political theorist wonders: Is there a way to recast the problem so that treating contingent faculty as genuine colleagues becomes not only intellectually legitimate but also ethically imperative and economically feasible?

I argue that the concept of “diversity” should be harnessed to legitimize the improvement of working conditions for contingent faculty. Some members of “diverse” categories in tenure-track and tenured positions are skeptical of this concept. It burdens them with representation on countless committees at considerable personal and professional cost (Htun and Tungohan 2018). Yet, “diversity”—a mixed blessing—at least acknowledges that a certain category of people exists. If contingent faculty joins its ranks, it will help to delegitimize treating “contingent” as “disposable” colleagues. This more capacious understanding of diversity could be deployed on campuses where a majority of faculty may not support unionization—or even oppose it—but endorses “equity and diversity.” The U of MN Office for Equity and Diversity (OED) asserts its “special responsibility…to serve, support, and partner with people…facing social, cultural, and economic barriers to education and jobs, to promotion and advancement, and to the highest level of achievement and success” (OED 2012). Undoubtedly, contingent faculty fits this definition.

The issue of inequality of salary and benefits within departments does not concern only contingent faculty, which is like the canary in the coal mine. Tenured faculty—tacitly if not always explicitly—has endorsed a market-based rhetoric, which justifies enormous differences of treatment within its own ranks, with the paradoxical result that it has become “disenchanted” (Kaufman-Osborn 2017, 102).³ Faculty fears rightly for the future of its doctoral students. Rethinking the concept of diversity and its practices to include the interests of under-recognized academics also will serve the privileged, according to OED: “Transformed by diversity, our University will be looked to…around the world for its commitment to social justice; its equitable and transparent recruitment, hiring, and promotion policies and practices” (OED 2012, 2). In 2019, in its eighth symposium, “Keeping our Faculty,” the U of MN Institute on Diversity (which works for OED) is including a break-out session entitled “Contingent Faculty as the Canary in the Coal Mine: Market versus Ethical Aspirations in Academia” (Institute on Diversity, U of MN 2019). This is one step in the right direction.