From Activism to Organizing,From Caring to Care Work

It's no coincidence that in U.S. higher education, the number of faculty who are women, gender-queer-non-binary, and Black or Indigenous People of Color (BIPOC) has increased in response to calls for diversity and inclusion, while simultaneously the number of faculty with robust academic freedom and due process protections is shrinking. An estimated 25% of U.S. professors are tenure-line (Curtis 2021). No matter the justification for any given retrenchment/reduction, anecdotally we’ve seen that faculty in precarious positions are usually not tenured white men; thus, we see academic labor issues as diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) concerns. At the same time, political attacks on higher ed have intensified in the United States as organizations like Turning Point USA have simultaneously “watchlisted” supposedly radical-leftist faculty and fought to find spaces for white Christian nationalism on campuses (Boedy 2021). State legislatures have encroached on both curriculum and academic freedom by banning the teaching of critical race theory—some of the same states that banned requirements for masks and vaccines in the midst of a global pandemic.

This is the context in which we explore both a rhetorical and structural shift from activism to organizing and from caring to care work in order to build solidarity in the face of increasing precarity. We use precarity as an umbrella under which we include the need for anti-racist/ableist/sexist/heteronormative/transphobic work and better compensation and working conditions for faculty. We make this move partly in response to a history of trade unionism in the United States that focused almost entirely on compensation and working conditions, often driven by masculinity, whiteness, heteronormativity, and so on, and partly in acknowledgment of extant work among unions ¹ to center on inclusivity as primary organizing concerns.

More precisely, our argument addresses two recurring problems faculty in U.S. postsecondary institutions face while mobilizing for workplace equity: (1) the tendency to leave the bulk of the work to the faculty who are most vulnerable, while those of us with privilege and security often do little to support their efforts; and (2) the need to restructure workplace policies so that equity efforts are central to everyone's professional responsibilities, which means they need to be both expected and supported. Put another way, we see organizing to address DEI and other labor issues as essential care work that must be integrated and normalized as part of all faculty's professional responsibilities.

Situating Precarity in the U.S. Higher Education Labor Context

We need to make clear from the beginning that we use the terms precarity and organizing more expansively than many labor activists and scholars do, with an eye towards catalyzing solidarity among conventionally disconnected groups. For example, some non-tenure-track faculty activists have made the case for referring to their cadre as precarious faculty instead of “adjunct” or “contingent,” and while we respect and largely agree with those arguments, we also recognize similar claims to the term by academics who face discrimination.

The word organizing is deeply embedded in unionism; we suggest that its goals and ethos should extend beyond union (or proto-union) settings. The U.S. higher ed landscape is comprised of a kaleidoscopic array of institution types ² and connections to both federal and state agencies, legislatures, funding sources, and legal concerns, all against a backdrop of “Administrative union-busting” and “disaster capitalism,” in which “higher education is an industry” in “the increasingly literal business of reproducing class, race, and gender inequalities” (Foster and Vujnovic 2022).

Both public and private institutions answer to donors and corporate interests. Among public institutions, levels of state funding, bureaucratic, executive, and legislative involvement in routine affairs, integration into systems, and other features vary widely; state laws governing faculty unionizing rights also vary, including issues such as the composition of the bargaining unit, whether collective bargaining is allowed and what topics can be bargained, striking rights, and more. Some university administrations negotiate with faculty unions or faculty senates to craft policies, often required by collective bargaining agreements or faculty senate bylaws; other administrations exclude faculty from decision-making altogether. “Shared governance” is sacrosanct in a few places, done combatively and begrudgingly in others, and is disappearing altogether at an alarming rate. Foster and Vujnovic (2022) report on the decline in “the overall involvement of faculty in institutional decision-making,” particularly in regards to budgets.

Our goal for providing this information isn't to offer a complete picture of the U.S. higher education landscape, but in part to explain why our use of the word organizing isn't synonymous with unionizing. Organizing, as we use it, includes any solidarity-building practices among workers, reflective of Joe Berry who, in Reclaiming the Ivory Tower (2005), reminds us that you can act like a union even if you don't have one.

Likewise, we contend that the complexity of the landscape calls on us to recognize precarity intersectionally and expansively. More directly, we see precarity in all its forms as a labor issue—encompassing employment rank/status and the multiple ways in which marginalized faculty are threatened in higher education. We recognize that in different areas of research that comprise Labor Studies, the word precarity invokes differing, perhaps even contrasting, theoretical and political frames. As an example, Guy Standing's landmark study The Precariat: the New Dangerous Class (2013, updated in 2021 with new material about COVID-19's impacts) clearly identifies the class as precarity's defining feature. On the other hand, Robin Zheng asserts that “Precarity is a Feminist Issue” (2018). These frames are neither mutually exclusive (a point both Standing and Zheng make), nor interchangeable, and other valid frames exist. As such, we want to be clear that we see precarity as the intersection of patriarchal, white supremacist, ableist, and neoliberal/late-capitalist hegemonic (a la Gramsci) regimes, that is, regimes that threaten violence tacitly as motivation to “consent” to the will of the powerful. Those threats of violence may be physical, emotional, psychological, financial, or any combination of those. They produce, when successful, unity borne of fear and control, while preserving the power and elite status of groups who are then able to claim that their status is the result of merit—a point made by many people, recently and pointedly in Tauber and Mahmoudi's “How Bullying Becomes a Career Tool” (2022).

The proposal we forward in this piece resonates deeply with Folbre's The Rise and Fall of Patriarchal Systems (2019) [and Folbre's podcast that has continued to develop her thinking] and Kathleen Lynch's Care and Capitalism: Why Affective Equality Matters for Social Justice (2022). In different ways, Folbre and Lynch argue that responses to the current hegemonic conjuncture must push back against the privileging of one analysis of precarity over another. Together, Folbre and Lynch offer clarity on the conceptual failure of any specific lens to capture precarity accurately, and a catalytic way of thinking about solidarity grounded in trust, mutual care, and mutual responsibility as the antidote to hegemonic unity-in-fear.

A Brief Survey of the Current Conversation

We can't do justice to the long history of academic workplace research and organizing in such a short piece, but we see influential books such as the edited collections Presumed Incompetent (Gutiérrez y Muhs et al. 2012) and its follow-up Presumed Incompetent II (Niemann et al. 2020), Equality for Contingent Faculty: Overcoming the Two-Tier System (Hoeller 2014), and the monograph Reclaiming the Ivory Tower: Organizing Adjuncts to Change Higher Ed (Berry 2005) as efforts to move past documenting and decrying inequalities, towards mobilizing to redress them. Organizing work should not ignore the long history of elite U.S. higher education's roots in white supremacy, documented in Wilder's Ebony and Ivy (2013). In just the last two years, journals (including Labor Studies Journal) situated in academic disciplines ranging from physical and social sciences to humanities ³ have published extensively on academic care work, while similar research appears frequently in journals on higher education. All told, there are dozens, if not hundreds, of articles documenting racism, misogyny, heterosexism, and transphobia, as well as studying and advocating a variety of approaches to orchestrating more equitable academic workplaces. ⁴

The COVID-19 pandemic has both amplified labor equity problems and created new ones. University and system-level management had already been sounding alarms about looming enrollment crashes predicted by Nathan Grawe's (2018) Demographics and the Demand for Higher Education. In the early moments of the mass outbreak in the United States in March 2020, they contended that the crash would only come more quickly in the wake of economic struggles caused by pandemic mitigation strategies like lockdowns. Those fears, which turned out to be real in some places, but largely overhyped in others, served the needs of hegemonic neoliberal capitalism (Standing’s 2021 update of The Precariat explicates this at length), white supremacy, and systemic oppression in all forms. Early rounds of research on faculty productivity, for example, show that women have struggled to maintain the pace of research activity as additional family responsibilities pile up, such as supervising children schooling at home, such that even ostensibly supportive moves like extending tenure clocks don't help much (Arnett 2021; Ruomeng, Ding, and Zhu 2020). Anecdotal data show similar patterns for BIPOC faculty and LGBTQ faculty, resulting from analogs forms of stress and emotional labor (in the workplace and otherwise) that takes attention they might otherwise devote to research. The American Federation of Teachers’ report, “An Army of Temps: AFT Adjunct Faculty Quality of Work/Life Report” (Updated February 2022) indicates that contingent faculty across the United States, many of whom are paid by the section and have no security of employment, lost teaching work—and thus income—due to overreactions to the pandemic's economic threat. Many were also forced to spend their own money on equipment and subscriptions to required computer applications, for example, zoom, in order to move online when campuses closed in Spring 2020. (An account based at one university doesn't work well with accounts at another, so contingent faculty teaching at multiple institutions often finds it's easier just to buy a personal Zoom subscription than manage multiple accounts.)

Some positive or at least promising, academic labor equity efforts have emerged from the pandemic. As Kahn and Pason (2021) observe, the sudden transition to online teaching, and in many places, unsafe transition back to in-person work, has generated more sustained attention to traditional academic labor issues in the United States than we’ve seen before. Even the most privileged faculty, who often avoid “pedestrian” conversations about pay and working conditions, have talked openly about compensation for the work of pivoting online in Spring 2020, workplace safety, and evaluation. The student-loan repayment moratorium passed as part of the first COVID relief bill in 2020 has energized a much larger student-debt-cancellation campaign featuring established organizations like the American Association of University Professors (AAUP); academic labor unions like the American Federation of Teachers (AFT), National Education Association (NEA); and grassroots groups that organize across and beyond those established bodies, like Higher Ed Labor United (HELU) and the Debt Collective. Although the major goals of the campaigns are still unmet, public demands to extend the original COVID-relief loan repayment moratorium to September 2022 were successful. In March 2020 as the severity (if not yet the longevity) of the pandemic was starting to become clear, professional organizations issued statements calling for mutual support for precarious and contingent faculty. ⁵

We don't mean to claim that organizing impelled by the pandemic has significantly mitigated its harms, many of which are grounded in hegemonic regimes that predate the pandemic by decades. The COVID-19 pandemic has been difficult for faculty, students, and staff alike; those difficulties have been harder on persons marginalized by race, gender, ability, and academic status. We do hope, however, that both the substantive progress around loan debt and the processes of organizing provide momentum to equity work that has been happening already. Put simply, there's extensive evidence that workplace inequities damage workers and threaten the viability of higher education writ large, but concurrently, there's a growing and welcome body of evidence documenting approaches to fighting back against those inequities; our argument is both an acknowledgment of and a call to expand those efforts.

An Intersectional Approach to Academic Care Work and/as Organizing

Currently, much organizing for academic workplace justice is spearheaded by precarious faculty who must do it as part and parcel of surviving in academia, joined at times (but too often only cheered) by faculty in more secure, privileged positions. As organizers with such security and privilege, we spend a lot of time considering why tenure-line faculty hesitate—when they don't simply refuse—to step up to address labor precarity and inequities on their campuses and across our profession. We are both white, cis-het, tenured, full professors who have long focused on contingent faculty issues, and we recognize our privilege while not overestimating our own importance in labor work. Most colleagues seem to care genuinely, or at least believe they do, about shared governance, academic freedom, and precarity (which, as a reminder, we use to name the intersection of class, professional status, and other forms of oppression). But caring about labor and equity is too often positioned as enough engagement. We are all expected to care. We are not all expected to work for what we care about.

As a result, equity work often becomes something “activists’’ do, cast as malcontents or troublemakers, inevitably posing the work as individual passion or an act of benevolence, descriptions we’ll elaborate below. Seen this way, improving working conditions and campus climate are not a shared responsibility for all academics, but parceled out to activists fascinated with equity, labor, and otherwise, as they might be with any other research problem. In her 2012 study of diversity initiatives in higher education, On Being Included, Sara Ahmed puts this succinctly in the context of racial equality advocacy. Ahmed observes that when one becomes known as “the race person … The very fact of your existence can allow others not to turn up” (5). As a result, while a lot of work is happening, we haven't seen the widespread structural and systemic changes needed to tackle the web of contingency, racism, ableism, sexism, and all forms of bigotry in our workplaces. To make the work more effective and more sustainable, we need to acknowledge precarity as a structural and intersectional labor issue: posing racism, misogyny, ableism, and contingency as intertwined labor problems provides all kinds of opportunities for organizing around them.

We propose reframing working for labor equity in higher education as care work instead of just caring and organizing instead of activism. Organizing evokes the collective power, responsibility, and protection that carefully built solidarity provides, while care work emphasizes the work and the inequitable ways it is distributed. Resisting hegemonic power, too often expressed as systemic inequity, requires both policy changes and cultural changes; organizing must be a normalized, valued part of academic work, or it risks continuing to be a burden largely for the most vulnerable.

Care work is a useful concept both for better understanding the reticence of academics to work for campus equity and for recasting equity work as a labor issue. Here, we build on Cardozo’s (2017) observation that “reframing the majority of college and university educators as care providers is an under-utilized approach that could offer important insights for analysts of care work, higher education, and labor politics” (409), as well as the writer's connections between care work and precarity. The term care work typically describes the un- or under-paid, under-recognized, and undervalued work of caring for self and others, physically, emotionally, or psychologically, in both the home and workplace, primarily situated in professional medical work, elder and child care, and care in the disabled community. Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha describes care work as “the radical ways that we care for each other and that we fight to care for ourselves as disabled people, as disabled intersectional people. And that is work, you know. That is labor. That is work. That is real shit” (qtd in Wong 2019). Academics need to pay more attention to how we care or are cared for, and recognize that as worthy work and real shit, particularly up against white supremacist, neoliberal hegemonic regimes that work so hard to make sure we don't care for each other.

Care work is vital to communities, yet frequently performed by those in vulnerable positions and without institutional support, much like in higher education, women, BIPOC, and multiply-marginalized workers take on the lion's share of what we’ll call academic care work. In addition to the examples we surveyed above, academic care work also includes “student recruitment, departmental social events” (Swanson and Johnston 2003, 65), and, especially where Black working-class academics are concerned, advisement and retention of students who experience “marginalization and alienation in the academy” (Magoqwana, Maqabuka, and Tshoaedi 2019, 8). Academic care work also invokes worker–management relationships in the forms of administrative positions, committee work, and other service obligations (Inayatulla and Robinson 2020), that is, it's work for which people are evaluated and disciplined for underperforming, but not credited for performing well. Much academic care work straddles caring for faculty and caring for students, for example, efforts to ensure suitable accommodations for disabled persons on campuses. Even so, “higher education remains under-represented in the care work literature” (Cardozo 2017, 409), perhaps precisely because it is primarily performed by women, BIPOC, and multiply-marginalized academics.

Care work and organizing are both sometimes professionally identified as service and sometimes not professionally recognized at all. While academics may romanticize the more conventionally scholarly parts of our jobs, service and organizing often affect the very make-up of faculty and student communities, the policies that carry material consequences for both, and the futures of institutions. Moreover, much organizing concerns the growing precarity, loss of shared governance, and inequity that disproportionately affect women and marginalized faculty. It is no surprise that many labor scholars and organizers in higher education are from these groups.

Cardozo emphasizes the links among care work, gender, race, teaching, and precarious employment, asserting that “the neoliberal university and state have colluded to create a marginalized care work sector within the professoriate, devaluing the teaching labor necessary to sustain the life of higher education” (2017, 406). Teaching, Cardozo argues, is associated with care work “not only because it develops human capabilities or because faculty may develop emotional attachments to their students, but also because the creation of a devalued teaching class is consistent with the social construction of caring labor historically” (407). In turn, teaching-as-care-giving has been both feminized and undervalued: women are “concentrated in ‘softer’ disciplines with lower salaries; these same disciplines often deploy the greatest number of contingent faculty (e.g., humanities). … Meanwhile, the teaching-only contingent sector is predominantly female, with a growing percentage of women therein hovering at the poverty line” and a growing sector of non-tenure-track faculty “only teach” (408). The result, Cardozo argues, is a “divide within the professoriate between those who care less, and those who ‘only’ care” (409).

In contrast, academic cis-het white men are institutionally positioned, and expected, to care less. Yes, some men have precarious positions, but according to Ivancheva, Lynch, and Keating, that is not the prevailing male academic narrative (2019, 457). Less likely to be affected by workplace inequities, they can focus less on service concerned with diversity, equity, and inclusion. While some men perform academic care work, its feminization means that they are simply not asked or required to do it as often, and are rewarded for more “masculine” work. Inayatulla and Robinson explain that “what gets dismissed as feminized labor is regarded as quotidian, and what gets praised as masculinized labor is regarded as prestigious. These patterns are observable when examining breakdowns of whose writing, voices, and administrative achievements are most rewarded in our field” (Inayatulla and Robinson 2020, 213). Meanwhile, women, BIPOC, LGBTQ + , and disabled faculty ignore academic care work to their own detriment.

Yet the choice of these faculties to work for labor justice is not clear cut. Women, for instance, regularly experience “both contractual and affective precarity” as “significant limitations to a sense of Security” (Ivancheva, Lynch, and Keating 2019, 457). Working for labor equity is of course complicated by such limitations; without the protections of tenure or a union, challenging campus, system, or state policies may put one's livelihood at risk. Because individual faculties are doing the work often invisibly, even when successful, it's unsustainable. G Patterson explains in a tweet:

[I]nvisibilized service is labor that is I N T E N D E D to be invisible, because the moment a multimarg faculty makes that labor visible … they would be read as hostile … [I]t's abt labor no one wants to know about, because the minute you point out that you’re doing it, you expose the institution's lie that they care about [DEI] in the first place. And you can't simply “opt out” … because it's often foisted on you as you navigate violent institutional practices … or it's brought upon you by individuals … in positions … even more precarious than your own. (@drgpat, 20 September 2021)

Women academics’ ability to take on academic care work and, indeed, to maintain academic positions at all, is further complicated by the persistence of inequitable distribution of care work outside of the workplace. As caregivers in their family networks, they often have to choose between doing less “visible measurable work, especially research and publications” to maintain their positions, or to remain childless or put off motherhood: “those who get permanent academic positions are disproportionately care-free individuals” (Ivancheva, Lynch, and Keating 2019, 452).

Further, racially marginalized faculties are statistically under-represented in all academic ranks, “mak[ing] up only 12.9 percent of full-time faculty members across the country, despite making up 32.6 percent of the US population” (AAUP 2020). Racism has a profound negative effect on the persistence of these faculties. In their study of faculty of color, Settles, Jones, Buchanan, and Dotson describe “epistemic exclusion” which is “an experience in which faculty of color are deemed illegitimate members of the academy” (1) and “a form of gatekeeping because bias regarding certain scholars and specific types of research prevents faculty of color from being valued as legitimate and credible knowers/scholars” (3). Their findings suggest that “epistemic exclusion, whether enacted through formal hierarchies or informal processes, can undermine the advancement and retention of faculty of color” (Settles et al. 2020, 12). At the same time, UCLA's Higher Education Research Institute found in 2019 that “faculty of color and female faculty disproportionately experience stress due to discrimination and feel they have to work harder than their colleagues to be perceived as a legitimate scholar” (“Discrimination”).

Calls to work for workplace justice, then, are legitimately unappealing, daunting, or even impossible for some faculty. Faculty may choose not to tackle labor inequity in their workplaces because they are already doing too much intense and necessary unpaid work. In some cases, marginalized faculty do choose positions that remove them, to some extent at least, from the systems that demand care work. Writing about her decision to decline tenure at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, Nikole Hannah-Jones explains, “For too long, powerful people have expected the people they have mistreated and marginalized to sacrifice themselves to make things whole. The burden of working for racial justice is laid on the very people bearing the brunt of the injustice, and not the powerful people who maintain it. I say to you: I refuse.” The racism exhibited in the school's initial denial of tenure signaled that a career there would require a great deal of care work. Instead, Hannah-Jones chose “to work in the legacy of a university not built by the enslaved but for those who once were,” joining the faculty at Howard University, an HBU (“Nikole Hannah-Jones Issues Statement” 2021).

Not long after, an open letter to Hannah-Jones from Howard non-tenure-track professor Imani Light (a pseudonym) reminded tenure-line faculty everywhere that intersectional work should include contingent faculty. Light explains that “Howard relies significantly upon a faculty of full-time, non-tenure-track professors” doing the same work as TT profs, while the administration tries to break the contingent faculty union and refuses to bargain. Light further describes how the academic care work of Howard contingent faculty is taken for granted and exploited: “We teach at Howard by choice. But the Howard Administration's awareness of our love for the university's ethos and mission has resulted in the abuse of faculty,” threats which the writer details. Light invites Hannah-Jones to join contingent faculty “in solidarity…until fairness and equity become part of the Administration's agenda” (Light 2021). In March 2022, Howard University NTT and adjunct faculty announced a possible strike, growing out of these complaints, and culminating in a tentative three-year agreement that addresses some of their working conditions.

Our call to frame academic care work as a form of organizing is not an elixir for all labor ills. Rather, it requires that faculty recognize the work that sustains the university, as well as the dynamics of power and privilege that delegates it. We agree with Lynch, Ivancheva, O’Flynn, Keating, and O’Connor that “Without a governing ethic of care in higher education, the ambition and self-interest of the few will override the educational and research interests of the many. And … the undermining of care has serious negative implications not only for women, but also for students, staff and for the culture of the organisation itself” (2020, 170).

From Activism to Organizing

Putting that ethic of care into practice is simple in the sense that pretty much everyone agrees we need to care about each other; and complex in the sense that institutional structures and political forces make it difficult, sometimes dangerous, to withdraw our consent from hegemonic regimes of power. Sara Ahmed saw this difficulty frequently described by participants in her qualitative study as “banging your head against a brick wall” (2012, 26), the wall being academia's structural racism. Our position is that reframing care work as organizing rather than activism, a distinction most clearly drawn by Smucker (2017) and Taylor (2016) (a founder of the Debt Collective, whose work we pointed to as being energized by the COVID-19 pandemic), offers a way to build solidarity, which provides both collective power and protection from hegemony's sometimes more/sometimes less tacit threats. The move away from the activism frame responds to two different but overlapping exigencies: activist as an identity fraught with both negative stereotypes and assertions of danger that's better left to people who are either more desperate or safer than we are; and activism as benevolence, that is, something creditworthy as long as it isn't dangerous to hegemonic power, and thus pushed out into communities other than our workplaces. These exigencies both hinge on one or another version of hegemony's tacit threat—the threat of being labeled a loudmouth malcontent (or more often, in bureaucratic language, “uncollegial”) and hence facing repercussions—especially for faculty without due process protections—and the threat of not getting credit for the work because it's in the wrong site or written off as “service” that doesn't count much for most U.S. faculty. In short, some faculty may feel that being an activist is more dangerous than experiencing workplace injustices. As a result, the work may be left undone, and that all too often gets taken as consent to those unjust systems.

Even those who choose to work for campus equity may not want to be identified as an activist. Amy Pason, writing about research she conducted as an undergraduate in the early 2000s, found that students at her institution were doing all kinds of socially engaged work but thought that “activism” was too radical and confrontational a term to describe it (Pason 2019). Pason focuses on undergraduate students’ resistance to the “radicalism” of the activist identity, a trope Chuck Rybak takes up in an oft-circulated 2014 Inside Higher Ed essay, “Do the Job You Were Hired to Do,” which contends that junior faculty who get too involved in working for institutional changes are spending time and attention they don't have on problems that they likely don't have power to solve, while making themselves visible as trouble-makers. Rybak's advice is well-intentioned, and much of it is accurate, particularly his analysis of the limits of individual faculty power vis a vis higher administrations, system-level governing bodies, and legislatures. He's right that it takes time to learn institutional systems/structures, and that failing at your primary responsibilities because you’re focused away from them isn't going to position you well to do anything at all. Our concerns with the broader argument are two-fold. First, the most experienced and secure faculty often benefit from unjust workplace practices and are less likely to use their power in service of sharing it. Second, one of the reasons academic care work isn't “your job” to “just do” is that faculty don't get job credit for doing it, which is circular if not tautological: it's not your job because it's not your job.

What's more, faculties who successfully engage in workplace activism or academic care work often see their efforts diminished as acts of benevolence (Riedner and Mahoney 2008). Riedner and Mahoney argue in Democracies to Come that the current regime of neoliberalism deflects energy from the work of systemic change by directing it towards actions that reinscribe colonial relations of gift-giving and debt, and thus do not address anti-democratic hegemonic regimes of domination. Benevolence further undercuts the likelihood of radical change by training actors to see ourselves as having done our part, so we feel satisfied with our contributions to the cause. It's not uncommon for faculty involved in workplace justice efforts to enter such relationships, if not as pointedly as we’ve put it here, by expecting recognition as “leaders.” Activists in the contingent faculty equality movement often view tenured allies as tourists or colonizers. Indeed, we’ve both been accused of capitalizing on the contingent labor crisis for our professional gain.

Perhaps such a fraught landscape is one reason why faculty who regularly do social justice work may locate it in off-campus communities rather than our workplaces, as McCann (2019) explains in “Borders of Engagement.” McCann notes that this can feed into the stereotype of “the energetic graduate student who fulfills their academic responsibilities while … pursuing activist interests in the ‘community’” and into calls for faculty to focus only on external public organizations (2019, 12). The problem with this reduction is that “Privileging the community as a vulnerable space outside the academy creates an alibi for the structures of higher education themselves” (12-13). Neither McCann nor we mean to critique scholars whose work takes them off campus, but a professional apparatus that naturalizes this decision as the only legitimate one, at the expense of our own colleagues (and students and other campus workers). Further, we recognize that sometimes faculty have to construe activism as “service” or claim it on CV lines via publication, and part of the case we’ll make is that doing so with the goal of keeping faculty engaged in the work is crucial to justice.

Our contention, following Smucker and Taylor, is that recasting workplace justice and academic care work as organizing evokes the long, slow processes of solidarity-building and trust-building that lead to genuine justice. Taylor (2016), crediting earlier work from Smucker, emphasizes the goal of organizing to “build and exercise shared power” [emphasis added], as distinct from activism, which “anyone” can do, “even someone who operates alone.” She acknowledges that “Raising awareness … can be … valuable,” but organizing is the “often tedious work” of “aggregating people … so they can strategically wield their combined strength.”

Our call follows this logic. Moving from activism to organizing, building networks of solidarity, protects participants who are most threatened by retaliation; helps participants who start from positions of privilege avoid colonizing; and builds the collective power necessary to produce just workplaces. Because so many of us care about workplace justice and are increasingly finding spaces to engage in the labor of academic care work, we should be able to normalize the practices of workplace justice such that people who resist justice become the outliers.

Your Job, Not Benevolence

In order to do that, academic care work must become intrinsic to our job descriptions, articulated as responsibilities, and rewarded professionally. Policy changes that recognize and reward this work may contribute to the retention, health, and welfare of our most vulnerable faculty, who often find themselves organizing simply to exist in academia. Moreover, policy-making and enforcement often encourage the most privileged professionals to move from caring to organizing, from feelings of benevolence to active commitment. In a job that demands so much of our time, time taken from family, friends, and self-care, when the stakes of hiring, tenure/renewal, and promotion are so very high, dedicating effort to uncredited tasks may seem like a fool's errand. Let's change that.

Officially, our job descriptions and our sense of what we get credit for stem from the hiring, tenure, and promotion guidelines which get us the gig, rank, raises, and job security—for those of us who get those, that is. Care work (e.g., creating, implementing, and enforcing DEI policies) is not usually an integrated part of the scholarship, service, and teaching in which these policies are grounded, at least not explicitly or widely. While U.S. institutions do weigh service in reviews, it is usually given the least value in rubrics, disincentivizing organizing even where it's ostensibly creditable. When care work is devalued by hiring, tenure/renewal, and promotion systems that serve white cis-het male tenure-line faculty, it is perhaps not surprising that many tenure-line faculty, regardless of gender and identification, don't see working for workplace equity as part of their jobs, even when they do it as an act of survival. An important step, then, is within our grasp: challenging and revising these guidelines. We agree with Cardozo, who argues for “institutional interventions” that “involve reforming both tenure values to better support caring activities and hiring, retention and promotion structures to adequately reward those engaged in care work off the tenure track” (2017, 414).

Examples of Organizing for DEI

As we noted at the beginning, in the face of systemic labor precarity, inequity, and bigotry, as well as threats of expulsion from the academy for refusing to consent to those systems, faculty still take courage and do important work. Two examples highlight principles we’re arguing for—not fully, but clearly in their strengths. What's most important about both is: (1) the extent to which they credit work towards justice as professional activity, thus supporting faculty's ability to commit to it; and (2) the extent to which the processes themselves are inclusive in ways that enact solidarity-building.

Our first example is an institution that has established DEI work as worthy of its own path to tenure and promotion, Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI):

Starting in 2022 …, scholars will have another option for tenure and promotion: the “balanced-integrative case” for excellence in DEI. To be promoted based on this standard, candidates must demonstrate excellence “across an array of integrated scholarly activities aligned with diversity, equity and inclusion.” Professors must articulate a DEI philosophy and show how their teaching, research and service advance DEI. They must also demonstrate independence, innovation and initiative, along with scholarly impact, local impact and development over time. (Flaherty 2021, np)

A collaboration between the Faculty Council and college/university-level administrators including the Associate Vice Chancellor for Faculty Diversity and Inclusion, the policy enshrines DEI work as a rewardable category, and just as important, credits faculty who integrate DEI work across their teaching, scholarship, and service. That is, it recognizes the labor in care work, and it helps faculty connect scholarly/national/international conversations with local efforts. Obviously, it's too soon to evaluate the policy's efficacy, but we applaud everyone involved in creating it. As organizers whose workplace justice efforts focus on contingent faculty equality and equity, we also want to recognize the creators of this policy for remembering that contingent faculty also does DEI work and need analog rewards.

The IUPUI DEI pathway is strong in that it formalizes academic care work as a central part of some people's jobs; it establishes protocols for declaring, documenting, and evaluating the work, thus situating workplace justice within the purview of academic labor; and it results from an exercise in collective trust-building and mutual support/responsibility. As they move forward and other institutions follow their lead, we hope to see institutions build from the recognition of individual effort and success towards recognizing and supporting more explicitly collective labor, following Inayatulla and Robinson's “femme” approach to academic administrative work, which challenges the “feminized discourses of nurturance and of (re)productivity” that “resists and provides recourse to historically masculine expectations of feminized labor” (2020, 214). Masculinized individual effort should not be valued more highly than feminized cooperative effort.

As a reward system, the IUPUI policy understandably depends on measurable outcomes and accomplishments; those are how the work gets evaluated. Anyone who engages in organizing understands how difficult it is to measure; as Smucker and Taylor point out, organizing is often a long, slow process that happens in informal, subtle, and even tacit ways. We acknowledge the difficulties of rewarding such processes, and we call on institutions and individuals at least not to disrupt or undercut them if you support their goals. More substantively, and more difficult, is to support faculty who face retaliation for their workplace justice efforts. IUPUI's establishment of DEI work as creditable rather than dangerous helps to push back against that sense of danger; furthermore, well-organized networks of solidarity (Reich and Bierman) protect people who join them, while making the participation of people with privilege less likely to be colonial. In short, the DEI Pathway at IUPUI is significant both for its collaborative process and for its willingness to counter the threat of DEI work by enshrining a mutual support system in tenure and promotion policy.

Finally, and likely most controversially, if solidarity is as much an expression of collective responsibility as an expression of collective power and mutual support, we hope to build on IUPUI's policy so that workplace justice becomes more of an expectation than simply one among many options for professional success. A new (announced April 2022) policy at the University of Illinois requiring DEI statements of all faculty applying for tenure and promotion (Flaherty 2022) is one way of addressing this concern; as a management imperative, we don't applaud the model for its development and implementation, but establishing the expectation of a commitment to DEI work as a professional obligation is important. All too often, those of us involved in academic care work from privileged positions hear it packaged in ways that minimize it without addressing the substance of it. Sometimes, the work gets packaged as a “passion,” that is, the professional equivalent of any other scholarly pursuit: “Oh, your research is about contingent faculty organizing? Mine's about [insert almost any more conventionally scholarly research area here].” We’re not arguing that one research area is more important than any other; the problem is that treating an inherently collective effort as an individual “passion” makes it easy for people to opt-out in favor of something they’re more “passionate” about.

Our second example narrates a more grassroots-collectivist project of building anti-racist/patriarchal/heteronormative and decolonial spaces across the scholarly apparatus of a discipline. The changes occurred largely within the National Communication Association (NCA) and two journals; the organizing happened in venues ranging from conference business meetings to professional listservs to social media (plus phone calls and emails and hallway conversations) over the span of several years. These initiatives responded to a recognition that the field of Communication Studies, and the subfield of rhetoric, are “so white” (hence the hashtags #CommunicationSoWhite and #RhetoricSoWhite). Efforts have led to changing the way NCA recruits nominees and selects recipients for its most prestigious award, the Distinguished Scholar; removing the founding editor of a prestigious journal (Martin Medhurst at Rhetoric and Public Affairs) and replacing him with a committed anti-racist editor and editorial board, while revamping the journal's mission; and founding a whole new journal, Rhetoric, Politics & Culture dedicated to supporting and publishing socially just activist research historically dismissed as not rigorous or too political (which are all too often the same claim).

The breadth of participation in these initiatives is one of its marquis features; hundreds of faculty and graduate students have been involved to various degrees. As we’re distinguishing organizing from activism, this story thus exemplifies broad participation orchestrated in concert, enacting a grassroots-driven agenda. At the same time, the efforts benefited from the involvement of influential members of the field, including one Distinguished Scholar who took on the role of co-editing the first issue of the rebooted R&PA; a leader in the effort who was selected as a Distinguished Scholar in the first cohort after the process overhaul; and dozens of well-known mid-career faculty who joined editorial boards and have written extensively about the issues, thus putting their scholarly ethos directly to work towards workplace justice. Taken together, that is, participants recognized both the need for mutual responsibility and mutual support, engaging as wide a constituency as possible while minimizing individual risk for being involved. The actual labor undertaken in this project has been massive: recruiting/network-building; researching, writing, and editing materials—both for internal organizing and for public consumption; running candidates for positions in professional associations; etc. We also need to emphasize the intersections of workplace justice and labor, and of economic and other forms of precarity, at the heart of our argument: participants in these efforts care, and they’re working hard to achieve justice, and they’re acutely aware of the worker/management (i.e., labor) context in which they’re doing it.

In 2015, NCA members began asking leadership to diversify the organization, leading to a petition to the NCA Executive Committee for increased diversity among NCA journal editors and among Distinguished Scholars in 2018. Distinguished Scholar nominations had long originated within the Distinguished Scholar cadre; by 2018, the group had already recognized a problem and had opened the nominations process so that anyone could nominate. In their thinking, more inclusive access to the process should have diversified the nominees and recipients. It didn't. Recipients continued (and continue) to be mostly white and predominantly male (Parry-Giles 2019).

Simply opening “opportunities” for more inclusivity by prioritizing diverse and equitable recipients wasn't working, but some Distinguished Scholars fiercely opposed changes, generally on two grounds. First, because they had opened the nominations process, the lack of diversity among recipients wasn't their problem to fix; they had done their part (see the discussion of benevolence above). Second, mandating increased diversity would mean sacrificing rigor by forcing them to accept more diverse scholars who weren't meeting standards (obviously, in their logic, or they would have been approved).

Debates reached peak volume in June 2019. Exchanges mostly on the CRTNET (Communication Research and Theory Network) listserv, on Twitter (#RhetoricSoWhite and #CommunicationSoWhite), and in a Facebook group called Communication Scholars for Transformation, were at times personal, even bullying and threatening. They also clarified how resistant the Distinguished Scholars were to the idea that their notions of rigor and standards were steeped in systemic bigotry, and they provided organizing spaces to build towards the takeover of R&PA and the founding of Rhetoric, Politics & Culture. Notably, NCA didn't reverse changes to the Distinguished Scholars process, and the last three years’ of recipients feature BIPOC scholars.

White supremacy and patriarchy still operate in the discipline, but leaders and members can commit to justice and follow through. Along with the policy changes, scholars have published extensively about the problem itself, for example, the forum on #RhetoricSoWhite in the October 2019 Quarterly Journal of Speech, featuring Darrell Wanzer-Serrano, Stacy K. Sowards, Godfried Agyeman Asante, Vincent N. Pham, and Tiara R. Na’puti; and Bryan McCann's “Borders of Engagement.” Our hope is that the work can become more committed, meaningful, and safer as that published scholarship circulates and perhaps instigates structural changes on campuses. We hope that as institutions like IUPUI credit DEI work as professionals, faculty will earn renewals, tenure, promotion, or merit raises for work grounded in such research.

Conclusion: Care Work is Organizing Work

Finally, we recognize that the sheer enormity of the work that needs doing, and the problems that need addressing, can make the beginning daunting. We suggest that for faculty trying to find a starting point, campus policy can be a good site for organizing, especially as we may already be engaged in its creation and revision. Moreover, producing, deliberating, enacting, and enforcing policies that do care work require the kind of organizing for which we’re advocating; policy on its own is necessary but not sufficient for justice.