My last post (the final of my reflections on mobility and access over the holiday period) talked about the issue of feeling “trapped” in a faculty job, and wondered if there were ways university labourers could work together to ease what is an all-too-common, but often invisible, experience. As often happens to me – I think I may be a serendipity magnet of some kind – the virtual ink was barely dry on that post when I got a notification from the awesome Tomorrow’s Professor listserv about a new book that considers this very issue, as it asks questions about what the future of the academic work force might look like.

The book is called Envisioning the Faculty for the 21st Century: Moving to a Mission-Oriented and Learner-Centered Model (Rutgers UP, 2016 – get it here), by Adrianna Kezar and Daniel Maxey.  It extends work that Kezar has been doing for some time, as the founder of the Delphi Project on the Changing Faculty and Student Success at the University of Southern California (though she now works at Santa Clara University). Based in part on a comprehensive survey of more than 1500 participants, ranging from non-tenured and tenured faculty to deans, administrators, and members of professional societies, the book explores ways to make faculty jobs more broadly equitable by reimagining the standard research-teaching-service, tenure-stream model.

I’ve not read the book yet, and thus cannot make any comments or judgements about its content here; I did, however, want to draw our collective attention to it because it presses on an urgent need.

Chances are we’re never going to be able to go back to the 20th century university model of extensive, full-time, tenured jobs supported by just a very small number of part-timers, and many of us lament this witheringly whenever we get the chance. Indeed, in my previous post I did too, noting that the disappearance of tenure-track jobs in my field is one of the reasons why the feeling of entrapment folds around me and my colleagues, as we desperately search for that ever-more elusive gig and, when we find it, cling to it with all our might.

Kezar and Maxey eschew the lament and take a different tack: they use the vanishing-tenure-stream problem as an opportunity to ask if that model is, in fact, one we want to return to. They don’t suggest moving away from tenure altogether, but they do put pressure on our knee-jerk assumption that tenure is the salve for every academic sore.

In the terrific online resource Inside Higher Ed, Colleen Flaherty writes a helpful, comprehensive review of Kezar and Maxey’s book. Here’s a chunk of that review, to give you a sense of the book’s investments and conclusions:

They begin Envisioning the Faculty by undressing the myth, held by some, that the “traditional” faculty model – in which the vast majority of faculty members are all considered for tenure, based on their teaching, research and service records – isn’t that traditional at all. It’s largely a 20th-century phenomenon, they say, and should be seen as one chapter of professorial history.

They don’t condone what they call the recent “devolution” of the faculty role, to a predominantly part-time workforce, however, and spend a significant time reviewing the literature suggesting it’s bad for students, instructors and institutions alike. Some examples: poor working conditions for adjunct faculty members (no job security, relatively low pay and lots of instructor turnover) have been shown to have a negative impact on student retention, transfer from two-year to four-year institutions and graduation or completion rates. That’s regardless of how skilled or committed adjuncts are.

Yet there’s room for improvement in the tenure-track model, as well, Kezar and Maxey argue, or at least what’s become of it. A disproportionate emphasis on conducting research undervalues teaching – including innovations in teaching – especially in the pretenure period, along with service, the book says. There’s also little room for flexibility in hiring to teach in new fields or account for “market fluctuations” – a common argument among administrators against more restrictive tenure-track hiring. Plus, tenure-track professors, now a minority across academe, feel the burden of service and shared governance previously spread across a great proportion of the faculty.

Flaherty also notes that Kezar and Maxey’s survey research indicates the importance of building common ground – what I called in my last post ally-ship – among university labourers of all kinds, which ultimately means thinking less autonomously and more collaboratively as scholars:

“There was almost uniform agreement among all stakeholders in our survey on all the items related to ensuring that faculty members have academic freedom, equitable compensation and access to benefits, involvement in shared governance, access to resources needed to perform their role, opportunities for promotion, clearly defined expectations and evaluation criteria, clear notification of contract renewal as well as grievance processes, and continuous professional development,” the book says.

Yet “this level of support is at odds with hiring practices over the past 20 years that have moved away from the professionalization of faculty.”

The book recommends meaningful discussions as to why beliefs about faculty professionalism don’t meet employment practices, but flags faculty “autonomy” as something that merits rethinking. “Faculty as professionals in today’s environment may need to emphasize working collectively toward community, institutional or departmental goals, since it is unclear how well autonomy has served the academic enterprise as a whole.”

(My emphasis)

Questions about autonomy vs community in the academy are close to my heart. My commitment to collaborative academic labour is the main reason I went up for my recent promotion on the back of my substantial editorial work, rather than waiting until I’d written another solo-authored book.

The 20th century professorial model has encouraged us to fetishise the Oxbridgian stereotype of the dotty, genius prof in gowns in his/her (mostly his) plush office, beavering away alone while occasionally admitting students for sage wisdom and port. Obviously most of us don’t live the stereotype – it’s barely possible even for the Oxbridge sort now! – but we all know it, and it’s a compelling fantasy.

Anthony Hopkins as CS Lewis in Shadowlands. OF COURSE I wanted to be a prof because of him!

The hall where my office is located is a series of mostly shut office doors; I’m used to seeing a bare handful of my colleagues when I’m at work. When we get together at faculty meetings and retreats we’re usually crabby about it and think it’s a waste of time. That, I suspect, is because we don’t really see ourselves as a community; we imagine we work alone, and our employment structure (40% research, which usually means stuff we read and write about alone; 40% teaching, which involves students but not other colleagues, typically; 20% service, which we all grouse about and try to get out of) reinforces this belief inherently.

The problem – as Kezar and Maxey note – is that this very structure, not just of university employment, but of our beliefs about that employment, contribute to the inequity that surrounds contemporary university faculty as the tenure-stream slips away. When the most privileged tenured faculty hunker down, look after ourselves and our students behind closed doors, and minimise service duties as much as possible to maximise research time, we pass the buck to others. And those others are usually rather less fortunate than we are: mid-career faculty (often women, or minority-identified men) who have been earmarked as “reliable” and are now stuck in work-horse mode; junior faculty looking for promotion to tenure; part time faculty looking for a tenure-stream job; graduate students already underpaid and scared for the future.

Instead of buck-passing, could we team up, maybe even re-imagine academic privilege together? I’m looking forward to reading this book and thinking more about how systemic, faculty-led change at our universities might allow us to work better, together, and live more freely and happily, too. I’ll do a full review of it in due course.

Kim