Abstract
Keith Hoeller’s wonderful book, Equality for Contingent Faculty, examines the two-tier system of faculty employment in higher education. The first tier is traditional tenure and tenure-track jobs. The second tier, which currently includes over 70% of all faculty, is know as “contingent.” Contingent faculty lack virtually all the working conditions that have produced our renowned system of teaching and research institutions: no job security, no academic freedom, no role in governance, no institutional support, and wages that are often beneath living wage standards.
Equality for Contingent Faculty was many years in the making and in fact had difficulties finding a publisher. It was worth the wait, however, since it is very likely the only book by “new majority” faculty activists to address the current working conditions and consequences of contingency and the strategies needed to change them.
The book is provocative and provides a real discussion of the relevant issues, as compared to a single perspective packaged to look like a diversity of views. It represents a discourse in a real living movement, with people who are trying to change this one corner of the working world—academia. There are three main sections: first, case studies of progressive change; then insightful and critical descriptions of the current situation, including what is happening with union representation for second-tier faculty; and finally a section about strategic ideas.
The quotes used in the book are almost too good for nonfiction. In the opening article, by Elizabeth Hoffman and John Hess, a full-time tenure-track faculty leader shouts in a union meeting, “Throw the lecturers out of the union!” The authors note the axiom that no contingent faculty member is “ever more than fifteen seconds away from total [professional] humiliation” (p. 9). Later, Mario Savio, Free Speech Movement hero and himself a lecturer at Sonoma State University, asks the California Faculty Association Lecturers’ Council how many lecturers sit at the table during bargaining. “One,” someone answers. Savio responds, “There always have to be at least two of you if anything is going to change” (p. 15).
Other chapters clarify issues about contingency in higher education that are often misunderstood. The chapter by Don Eron lays out the case for tenure, or job security for all teachers, as clearly as I have ever seen. Two Canadian contributions make clear that both the problems and the solutions are not just “made in the USA.” The article by Natalie Sharpe and Dougal MacDonald describes the deskilling of academic labor through online teaching. The second is Frank Cosco’s spellbinding chapter on how full equality has been very nearly achieved through principled unionism at Vancouver Community College.
Two additional notable chapters are by editor Hoeller and by Jack Longmate, who make the case for separate unions and bargaining units for contingent faculty and, in so doing, lay out some practices that are all too common in institutions and in academic unionism. One does not have to agree with their conclusion to see deep problems in a situation where the person who hires and fires you is also your union representative. In the piece by Rich Moser, longtime AAUP staff rep and one of the few noncontingent authors, he makes the case for joint combined bargaining units without denying any of the contradictions. He also gives the most complete treatment of the corporatization of higher education and the crucial role of contingent faculty in resisting it. The volume is rounded out by Lantz Simpson’s call for a “new abolition” movement to abolish contingency and Frank Donohue’s question, “Do college teachers have to be scholars?”
The book would have profited from more judicious editing of some exaggerations, especially in Hoeller’s own chapter, and from a discussion of a recent increase of organizing in the private sector, including the for-profit institutions.
Overall the book is a reminder for labor educators planted in higher education that we need to put down our bucket where we are.