Academic Labor: Who Cares?

Introduction

Neoliberalism has fueled the increased privatization of higher education and unprecedented levels of student debt without corresponding completion rates, yet a disruptive mass mobilization to ensure accessible, high quality, college education has not occurred (Clawson, 2013). As stewards of higher education, it is incumbent on the professoriate and faculty unions to offer an alternative vision. Unfortunately, the faculty has also been impacted in ways that inhibit our capacity to both analyze and organize. Three decades ago, most US faculty members were tenure stream; today that percentage is less than a third and by some estimates even lower. The contingent majority struggle to keep their precarious jobs (often while working on multiple campuses), while the remainder juggle a high-stakes tenure system and a range of professional responsibilities once shared by a far greater number of fulltime faculty.

It is clear that a sea change has occurred in the faculty. However, we need a corresponding ‘see change’ to better understand its implications and formulate an effective response. We are witnessing the Taylorization of the faculty, in which institutions have strategically unbundled a complex professional role that historically integrated scholarly, teaching, and service activities (Berry, 2005), isolating teaching as a casual activity off the tenure-track. But as an online American Association of University Professors (AAUP) report reminds us, ‘Tenure was not designed as a merit badge for research-intensive faculty or as a fence to exclude those with teaching-intensive commitments’ (AAUP, 2010). In fact, most faculty appointments were, and still are, teaching-intensive. Thus, what has occurred is a ‘seismic shift from “teaching-intensive” faculty within the big tent of tenure to “teaching-only” faculty outside of it’ (AAUP, 2010). ¹

The core function of teaching – so central to the democratic mission of higher education – is now conducted primarily outside the protections of ‘the big tent’ by faculty members who ‘only’ teach (as far as the institution is concerned – of course, some contingent faculty continue to engage in research and service, often without formal support or recognition). In addition, while many local and disciplinary variations obtain, the non-tenure-track (NTT) sector is also more often assigned lower level or ‘service’ courses while tenure stream faculty teach in their preferred areas of specialization. Contingent faculty have been ‘shunted outside the tenure system [into] positions that do not incorporate all aspects of university life or the full range of faculty rights and responsibilities’ (AAUP, 2010).

How and why did this restructuring come about? Interdisciplinary, intersectional and feminist studies of care work provide an important explanatory framework. In Caring for America, a sweeping history of ‘home health workers in the shadow of the welfare state’ from the Great Depression to the 21st-century recession, Eileen Boris and Jennifer Klein reveal the state’s role in (re)producing a class of (predominantly) female workers of color whose health care work would come to be privatized and excluded from federal labor oversight and regulation. Such work ‘is devalued [not] just because of its ascribed racial or gendered meanings but because of the way the state chooses to structure it’ (Boris and Klein, 2012: 8). As Boris and Klein explain, ‘Home care as a distinct occupation emerged in the crisis of the Great Depression to meet both welfare and health imperatives’ and took on ‘a hybrid structure: part domestic service, part health care’ (Boris and Klein, 2012: 11). Crucially, home care became ‘a sweated industry’ (Boris and Klein, 2012: 14) whose ‘ever expanding use of independent contractor designations and casualized employment’ spread within a generation to a range of other fields including university teaching (Boris and Klein, 2012: 15). In short, ‘home care’s past prefigured the future’ (Boris and Klein, 2012: 15); Boris and Klein trace how ‘the labor necessary to sustain life became invisible, under-compensated and defined as not really work’ (Boris and Klein, 2012: xiv). Likewise, 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.

The literature typically includes higher education within five major sectors of care work (Folbre, 2012: 222):

This list highlights the institutional diversity of care work, a framework in which most people ‘rely on both unpaid and paid caregivers, funded in a number of different ways and provided in a number of settings’, including homes, hospitals and schools (Folbre, 2012: 2). Care work must be coordinated through the institutions of family, community, market and state – no single domain can meet this need (Folbre, 2012: 183). Yet the cost of caring ‘remains complex, contested, and often unclear’ and typically results in reduced earnings for care workers (Folbre, 2012: xi).

By various definitions, care work is ‘the relationships and activities involved in maintaining people on a daily basis and intergenerationally’ (Glenn, 2010: 5) as well as occupations in which workers develop the human capabilities of others (Folbre, 2012: 221). As a broad category, care work spans both paid and unpaid forms of interactive care (focused on the well-being of the recipient of care), support care (work that enables interactive care) and supervisory care (on-call availability to provide interactive care) for the full age spectrum from infants to the elderly (Folbre and Wright, 2012: 1). According to Rachel Dwyer:

care is different from other services in that it involves labor that was once provided mainly within families and kin networks rather than in market exchange. Care often requires more relational and interactive skills than do other service jobs, skills that are highly associated with women’s work. These features of care work set it apart from other jobs, including other services. Perhaps most important, the historical development of care work jobs has been bound up with changes in gender relations. (Dwyer, 2013: 394)

As such, the distinctive features of care work are not well-served by the logic of capitalism:

Unlike the idealized consumers [of] economics textbooks, care recipients often lack the competence, information or time required to make good choices. Unlike standard products, care services are heterogeneous, emotionally intense, and often person-specific [services whose quality is difficult to measure]. ‘Outputs’ are often coproduced by paid employees, family members and care recipients themselves: teachers collaborate with parents and children [as] home care providers collaborate with medical experts, family members, and the individuals they assist. (Folbre and Wright, 2012: 2–3)

Whether paid or unpaid, care work is perhaps most distinctive because ‘intrinsic motivation and emotional attachment’ inform the quality of the work, which is ‘affected by the caregiver’s concern for the well-being of the care recipient’ (Folbre, 2012: 183). As such, college teaching can readily be identified as interactive 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.

In How the University Works, Marc Bousquet drew an analogy between managed health care and higher education in the neoliberal era, observing similar efforts across sectors to ‘deny access to the best procedures in favor of cheap procedures’ (Bousquet, 2008: 2). Indeed, the devaluation of care work is a constituent feature of capitalism, which requires the ‘appropriation of immense areas of labor and resources that must appear as externalities to the market’ (Federici, 2012: 140). As a result, paid care work has long been treated as though it were an extension of women’s unpaid domestic labor rather than as a legitimate form of wage labor with its own standards, training requirements, and pay scales’ (Glenn, 2010: 9). Unfortunately, the nature of academic socialization ² and the higher status traditionally attributed to faculty work prevents many from recognizing that the professoriate is not exempt from the larger global transformation in which, as labor historian Dorothy Sue Cobble observes in The Sex of Class:

The sex of work is changing along with the sex of the worker. Work is feminizing in the sense that more women are doing it [but also] that women’s often substandard working conditions are becoming the norm. … The casualization of work and the growth of low-wage, dead-end, contingent jobs are manifestations of this phenomenon. The proliferation of low-level white-collar and service occupations is another. Women have always held these jobs. What is different today is that men are now often in work arrangements and in occupations once reserved primarily for women. (Cobble, 2007: 3) ³

Cobble observes that those without a college degree – around three-quarters of the US work force – bear the brunt of these changes. For present purposes, what is significant is how this feminization and casualization of work has also spread to the professions, yielding the extremes we now see in higher education, where an advanced degree yields upward mobility for some, but for others instantiates a downward spiral into ‘the lowest-paid, least-prestigious jobs’ (Cobble, 2007: 4). In short, paying ‘more attention to women and to women’s jobs is essential if we are to understand the experience of the majority of workers’ (Cobble, 2007: 3).

Who Cares?

Indeed, women make up 90 percent of the paid care workforce (Glenn, 2010: 4), with ‘low-income African American and immigrant women [heavily] overrepresented in the most poorly paid care jobs [and facing] particularly serious problems balancing the demands of paid employment and family care’ (Folbre, 2012: xi). Higher education is no exception to the finding that ‘employment in care industries is distinctively female’ (Howes et al., 2012: 66). For example, in 2010 ‘women represented 47 percent of all employees, but 75 percent of all those in education and health services – a far higher percentage than in any other major sector’ (Howes et al., 2012: 66). In the professoriate, women tend to be concentrated in ‘softer’ disciplines with lower salaries; these same disciplines often deploy the greatest number of contingent faculty (e.g. humanities). Women also remain a minority in the tenure system, where they cluster at the lower ranks (Bauder, 2006; Gutierrez y Muhs et al., 2012). Meanwhile, the teaching-only contingent sector is predominantly female, with a growing percentage of women therein hovering at the poverty line. ⁴

In higher education, as in other sectors, there is an inverse relationship between who cares and who advances. Not only are women overrepresented in lower status, care sector jobs, they are often in such roles because personal care-giving demands inhibit their capacity to pursue advancement (McCall, 2007). A terrible closed circuit emerges in which many workers are trapped in socially devalued and low-paying care sectors because they are also juggling significant personal care-giving demands. In addition, having significant caretaking responsibilities often results in the depleted health of the caregivers themselves (Glenn, 2010), further limiting their employment options. Whereas childcare has always been a primary site of work-family conflict, the ‘new frontier [involves] care for elderly and disabled kin’ (Glenn, 2010: 3). Not only are women who provide elder care more likely to be older than those who care for children (mid-40s to mid-60s), they are increasingly part of a ‘sandwich generation’ that must care for both the young and elderly at the same time. Indeed, care-giving demands (for recipients on either end of the age spectrum) are one reason that academic advancement is inhibited for many women – both those who ‘stall’ within the tenure system and those treading water in the NTT sector. Here, there is a burgeoning literature on the inequities between academic mothers and others: a rigid tenure clock and narrow scholarly values determining what kinds of academic work are valued make it unlikely that ‘off-ramps’ for care exigencies will lead to ‘on-ramps’ back to a viable academic career. ⁵

The construction of contingent faculty who ‘only teach’ is but another manifestation of a political economy in which caring labor has long been extracted for little or no pay. In this context, the emergence of a two-tier faculty system can be reframed as one between faculty positions that retain the cultural, economic and social capital of ‘productive’ activities and those devoted primarily to caring labor. Indeed, specialized research became a privileged criterion for tenure in the same decades that the percentages of tenure system and contingent faculty were reversing themselves. Historically, as David Damrosch details in We Scholars, the research emphasis was confined to a few (mostly private) major American universities (Damrosch, 1995). But, like Adam Smith’s invisible hand, these scholarly values have trickled down through the system as a whole ‘to a remarkable degree’, such that many smaller colleges now model themselves upon research-intensive institutions (Damrosch, 1995: 39). That the division of research/teaching labor generates a hierarchy of institutions has always been apparent; now it also highlights a parallel divide within the professoriate between those who care less, and those who ‘only’ care.

As long as faculty work included higher status non-care activities such as research, it was buffered from the devaluation that has long accompanied care work. Reconstructed as a caring class, NTT faculty became vulnerable to the struggles typically endured by other care workers. But, by the same token, we can now be alert to the possible organizing and policy solutions with which academics may be unfamiliar but from which other care sectors have benefited (I will say more about these in my conclusion).

To be sure, the Marxist feminist distinction between production and reproduction does not apply neatly in the academic context: many tenure system faculty as well as those in research roles also engage in aspects of caring labor, just as some NTT faculty may not actually care about students. Moreover, college teaching is also ‘productive’ work in increasing the value of human resources, just as research can be socially reproductive (witness the care literature itself). Nonetheless, the creation of a new teaching segment reveals a familiar hierarchical division of labor (even if the kinds of work faculty members do across sectors is mixed in practice). The framework of care remains instructive when we consider a feminized work sector charged exclusively with developing human capabilities and placed outside the spheres of knowledge generation and governance, with little control over the relations of re/production.

Given the severe public disinvestment that leaves higher education only nominally a ‘non-profit’ sector, capitalism’s historic divisions between private and public, home and market, reproduction and production, now operate within academe [and other sectors] to facilitate new ways to appropriate caring labor. Although the casualization of academic labor plays out with disciplinary and local institutional differences, in general it reconstructs teaching as ‘poorly paid housework in the marketplace’, where some tend to the (college) kids and maintain the (departmental or campus) home, while others engage in more ‘productive’ work that circulates on the market. Viewing teaching and service as care work thus clarifies the invidious gendered and racialized logic by which the complex work of ‘professing’ has been unbundled into a two-tiered system of academic labor that also devalues caring activities within the tenure system.

And yet, higher education remains under-represented in the care work literature: case studies usually focus on childcare or adult care. Most researchers ‘tend to specialize in analysis of either unpaid care provided within families or paid care provided through employment’ and tend to focus on children, people with disabilities or the elderly in such sites of care as households, healthcare institutions or for-profit firms (Folbre and Wright, 2012: x). Folbre’s edited collection For Love and Money (2012) argues for a unified approach to care policy and makes a groundbreaking contribution to that end, but it too does not really address higher education faculty. Thus, 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. Consider, for example, these framing remarks in an article on paid care work, which represented an estimated 15 percent of all paid workers in 2010: ‘Care occupations are heterogeneous, ranging from one of the highest-paid major occupational groupings (professional and related occupations, which includes doctors, nurses, teachers, and college professors) to one of the lowest-paid (service occupations, in which child and adult care workers are classified’ (Howes et al., 2012: 67). This discussion places college professors in the ‘high-end’ position. But what we see now in academic labor is a split within the occupational category: college teaching as both highly compensated and ‘low-wage’ work.

As Dwyer notes (2013), economic theories of job polarization have been divided between those who believe that unequal job growth resulted from technologies that deskilled middle-wage jobs and institutionalist scholars who emphasize the importance of social factors, but there is a third way. Viewing ‘care work as a distinctive form of labor [highlights] different dimensions of economic restructuring’ than either of these theoretical camps (Dwyer, 2013: 390) and better explains some of the puzzles concerning patterns of job polarization:

Why are jobs growing at the bottom of the wage structure? [W]omen’s increasing labor force participation and changes in the organization of care [produced] a direct source of demand for low-wage jobs.

Why are upper-middle-wage jobs growing along with low- and high-wage jobs? Care work is polarized between jobs with more or less labor market power.

Why is job growth different for men and women, and for different racial groups? [C]are work has been a crucial element of economic restructuring and is disproportionately performed by women and racial minorities.

Did non-routine manual jobs grow in the middle of the wage structure as well as at the bottom? [J]obs providing the most direct care are culturally devalued because they are considered women’s natural and unskilled work, undercompensated because they provide a public good, and have little labor market power to achieve higher wages. Other similarly low education jobs in manufacturing and construction have higher pay [in part] because they are male-dominated occupations that were historically unionized … [However,] care work may provide [future] opportunities for growth in the middle. (Dwyer, 2013: 396)

The rise of contingent academic labor complicates Dwyer’s otherwise exemplary analysis, which places college teachers in the top quintile without addressing the stark division within the professoriate. Dwyer observes that care work highlights ‘inequality among women and the ways economic restructuring has benefited college-educated women far more than low-skilled women’ (Dwyer, 2013: 411). When we ask who cares in academe, we see not only that the construction of a new teaching/caring class increases inequality among (academic) women, but also that the larger benefit gap closes when college-educated women are contingent faculty; the New Faculty Majority’s Women and Contingency (2015) project documents increasing encounters of adjuncts with poverty.

As Harald Bauder (2006) has argued, the rise of contingent academic labor is more fodder for theories of labor segmentation (in contrast to the idea of a meritocratic ‘free’ market):

Workers in the primary segment capture the ‘good jobs’ with stability, high wages and benefits, while workers in the secondary segment obtain either the ‘bad jobs’ with little job security, low wages and few benefits, or they are unemployed [a.k.a. Marx’s reserve army of labor]. From this perspective, [the] stability of tenured faculty positions is functionally dependent on the existence of a sufficient number of flexible sessional and adjunct faculty. (Bauder, 2006: 231)

Now, however, ‘the secondary segment threatens to replace the primary segment. Segmentation becomes a strategy of reducing wages and labor standards in the entire academic labor market’ (Bauder, 2006: 231). In short, our fates across faculty sectors are wholly interdependent. Moreover, as one of my reviewers aptly noted, future research would benefit from considering these issues in the context of globalization, under which fragmentation will only intensify without a robust anti-capitalist movement. ⁶

In any case, care work is a provocative framework through which academic labor might be understood, with implications for a different kind of worker subjectivity and labor politics. For example, Mignon Duffy (2010) has described a significant convergence of interests among care providers, recipients of care, and union activity. At a local gathering of Service Employees International Union (SEIU) members, Duffy witnessed ‘a mosaic of gender, racial and ethnic identities, language, age, and ability that [defied] stereotypes about unions. Personal care attendants, many of whom are women of color and immigrants, stood side by side with the “consumers” of their care, many of whom arrived in wheelchairs’ (Duffy, 2010: 126). Duffy was ‘struck by how different this union is from previous organizing efforts and by the many ways in which they are engaged in a similar and ongoing struggle’ (Duffy, 2010: 126).

By training I am a scholar neither of care nor labor, having engaged primarily in interdisciplinary cultural studies, with additional background in higher education studies. As a feminist, however, I have been struck by how the treatment of the ‘teaching-only’ sector in academe converges with the historic devaluation of care work. Although an established body of care scholarship exists and much has been written about academic labor, it is surprising that these strands have not yet been brought together in robust ways. Thus, in this article I integrate analyses of care work, academic contingency and union activity with diversity discourses to argue that academic labor issues are diversity issues. Indeed, it is impossible to view the current crisis in academic labor without intersectional analysis: as one journalist put it, echoing much postmodern critique that has described the same phenomenon within certain academic disciplines: ‘the entry in larger numbers of women and people of color into the ranks of academic workers accompanied the denigration of academic employment’ (Kahle, 2015: 26). Academic labor issues are ultimately gendered and racialized in ways that we must confront if we are to build an effective social movement that not only fosters alliances between faculty sectors, but also between the faculty and other care workers across industries.

The Color of Caring

In Forced to Care, Evelyn Nakano Glenn observes the ‘diverse forms of coercion’ that have induced women disproportionately into caring for family members and have ‘tracked poor, racial minority, and immigrant women [into] caring for others’ (Glenn, 2010: 5) through both status obligations (duties assigned based on a given role) and contractual obligations (services for compensation). Glenn explains:

As Western societies modernized, they shifted from reliance on status relations to contractual relations. In this view, market relations have been more or less completely contractualized, but family and kin relations have remained ‘premodern’ in that status obligations remain in force. [Today] status categories such as race and gender continue to shape both market and kin relations. Consequently, women are charged with a triple status duty to care, on the basis of 1) kinship (wife, daughter, mother), 2) gender (as women), and 3) sometimes race/class (as members of a subordinate group). (Glenn, 2010: 7)

Thus, intersectional analysis inheres in the very concept and history of care work, which cannot be discussed generically as ‘women’s work’ but raises questions about which women (and men) do which kinds of work.

However, it is difficult to engage in a robust intersectional analysis of academic labor: the relevant literature rarely integrates statistics of race, gender, and faculty rank – one or the other variable is often missing. We do not have as comprehensive or precise an understanding of the demographics of academic labor as of care work in other sectors (especially since many universities do not divulge the extent to which they rely on contingent labor). Nonetheless, as affirmed by Presumed Incompetent, a recent collection of essays about race and gender in academe, women of color are most likely to be ‘represented at the bottom’ (Gutierrez y Muhs et al., 2012: 6) – at the lower rungs of the tenure system or in the contingent ranks (Gutierrez y Muhs et al., 2012: 421). Yet too often, contingent academic labor is discussed with little or no mention of gender and race. Alternatively, attempts to address racial and gender diversity in the faculty often do not address contingency. For example, Sara Ahmed’s (2012) study on racism and diversity in institutional life is insightful but does not address the precarious nature of academic employment. Similarly, while Presumed Incompetent helps to fill an important gap by focusing on the experiences of women of color, it discusses contingent faculty only marginally: most contributions are by or about those who are or were in the tenure system. Perhaps this explains the editors’ puzzling use of the future tense in observing that the professoriate ‘may become a winner-take-all market, with a handful of academic superstars at the top and an enormous underclass for whom academe is a classic “bad job,” featuring low pay, few or no benefits, and low job security or input into shaping the rules that govern one’s working life’ (Gutierrez y Muhs et al., 2012: 6, my emphasis). Clearly, we are already there.

The creation of a class of academics who ‘only teach’ should alert us to the longstanding history in which women, and women of color in particular, have been ‘forced to care’. Of course, higher education demographics do not line up precisely with other care sectors: we cannot say that the contingent faculty sector consists predominantly of women of color. Indeed, since institutional diversity initiatives focus primarily on tenure-track (TT) recruiting efforts, on some campuses more women of color may be found in the tenure system than the contingent sector. ⁷ Nonetheless, the history of care work suggests why it has been possible to devalue the contingent teaching sector so readily, while also illuminating inequities within the tenure system, where white women and women of color are often coerced into caring only to find such activity reframed as a ‘lack of productivity’ that is held against them come tenure or promotion time (Gutierrez y Muhs et al., 2012). For example, the Modern Language Association’s (2009) ‘Standing Still’ report on the advancement of women in the profession documents that women stall at Associate Professor because they tend to be mired in service responsibilities. Likewise, a growing literature provides evidence that the historical alignment of women of color with caring or social reproduction thwarts their recognition and advancement in academe. ⁸

The racialized operation of university business as usual has deep roots indeed. As Craig Wilder documents in Ebony and Ivy, the early American academy was rooted in the slave economies of the colonial world, which ‘required the acquiescence of scholars and the cooperation of academic institutions’ (Wilder, 2013: 10). In keeping with patterns of labor history, people of color are still most often found in caring or service roles on campuses (working in buildings and grounds, food services, student services, diversity programs and, yes, teaching) ⁹ or – as Davarian Baldwin points out in his study of ‘UniverCities’ – living nearby in neighborhoods that are increasingly being gentrified by universities, with predictably negative consequences for the current inhabitants (Baldwin, 2015). In short, both housework and fieldwork are required to maintain the Master’s house, which, as Audre Lorde famously said, will never be destroyed by the Master’s tools. On these grounds, we should think very seriously about what academic ‘mastery’ entails and about the cultural politics of ‘excellence’.

In addition to the enduring bias that views people of color as ‘not scholarly’, the underrepresentation of faculty of color in the tenure system or at the highest levels of administration persists for other structural reasons. First, those who embody racial difference in the academy do a disproportionate share of the ‘diversity work’ that is also a form of care work, e.g. in identity-based mentoring of junior faculty and students (Ahmed, 2012). ¹⁰ Second, faculty of color in general and women of color in particular are more likely to be found in newer fields and more likely to have temporary appointments rather than established tenure lines – for example, ethnic studies, women’s studies, and other interdisciplinary fields. Ironically, it is the progressive intellectual agenda of these nontraditional fields that attracted many historically underrepresented groups into the academy, yet those same fields are the most precarious (Cottom, 2014). Indeed, as I drafted this article, an email petition circulated from the National Women’s Studies Association (NWSA) Contingent Faculty Interest Group, arguing that the pressure on women’s studies programs to employ adjuncts is ‘even greater given the discipline’s already precarious institutional status’ (Beetham and Allison, 2015). And yet, the authors argued, ‘complying with such institutional imperatives undermines our ethics as feminists and contributes to a system of inequality that is in direct opposition to [women’s studies’] principles’ (Beetham and Allison, 2015). Thus, fields intellectually well-positioned to enact the kind of intersectional and interdisciplinary analysis that the current situation demands are often most poorly positioned institutionally.

Third, as a combination of the factors above, women of color are likely to have unorthodox trajectories that inhibit their academic advancement. There is scant research addressing the interrelation of these factors, but I refer to the following kinds of considerations: the coercion into or proclivity for diversity/service work often puts women of color in hybrid roles and positions, including administrative appointments before, during, or after the PhD; our concentration in newer fields may also include methodologies such as community-based research or service-learning that are undervalued as ‘scholarship’, and, finally, as the care literature documents unequivocally, we are likely to have substantial personal caring demands. Such factors lengthen the odds of being housed in tenure-track faculty positions or achieving tenure.

The care literature further suggests that certain ‘dispositions or personality characteristics [lead people] into or away from certain types of occupations’, with the result that ‘people who say that they have a desire to work with and help people have lower earnings’, while those who ‘don’t care’ are more likely to advance:

‘Masculinity,’ defined by interest in typically masculine activities, inhibition of tender emotional expressiveness, and lack of fearfulness, has a positive effect on earnings. … ‘Machiavellianism’ or a willingness to engage in behaviors that involve manipulating others in one’s own interest – a personality characteristic that is seemingly the opposite of caring – has a positive effect on earnings for people in high-ranking occupations. … The effects of such socioemotional personality traits on earnings are large, comparable to the effects of education and experience. (Folbre, 2012: 32)

In contrast, ‘a preference for caring developed as a result of caring activities, which might be called endogenous altruism’, tends to be costly:

An emotional attachment to their students, patients, or charges may discourage workers from [demanding changes] that would benefit them but that might adversely affect care recipients. By contrast, [managers] are less likely than care workers to come into direct contact with care recipients and may be more likely to engage in cost-cutting strategies without experiencing negative emotional consequences themselves. (Folbre, 2012: 32–3)

While we could have a field day analyzing how masculinist and Machiavellian values play out in academe, such data invite us to focus on the opposite: appreciating faculty who do the caring labor necessary to sustain the life of our institutions. Unfortunately, the pervasive feminization and devaluation of care work along with the masculinist aspects of academic socialization have fostered the dis-identification of many TT faculty (of whatever gender) from the NTT majority, with the result that many have failed to grasp how the devaluation of teaching threatens the entire enterprise (Casey, 2011).

The care rubric may also illuminate the debate on whether teaching quality suffers when delivered by contingent faculty. In a tenure system increasingly focused on research, why would we assume that teaching within the tenure system is better than the majority happening outside of it – especially if the latter segment is primarily focused on teaching? Wouldn’t that make contingent faculty expert teachers? As Ian Robinson’s essay in this issue details, for all the rhetoric about the degradations of contingency, there is little hard evidence that teaching outside the tenure system is of lesser quality – only that it is devalued and de-professionalized. If anything, the care work literature suggests that care providers tend to privatize the burden of closing the gap when institutions fail to adequately support care work: as a result, the quality of adjunct college teaching may not actually diminish (Segran, 2014).

My point is that discourses on care work, faculty contingency and diversity are rarely linked, even though the stabilization of ‘teaching-only’ positions would not only improve the quality of education but also clearly support both gender and racial diversity in the professoriate (Cottom, 2014). As Glenn argues: ‘Because care-giving is disproportionately carried out by women and by people of color, the devaluing of caring contributes to the marginalization, exploitation, and dependency of these groups. Conversely, valuing caring and caring relationships would expand the boundaries of equality to many currently excluded from social equality’ (Glenn, 2010: 189), a point reinforced by Duffy (2010) and Dwyer (2013). Many faculty from underrepresented ethnic groups enact teaching and other forms of caring labor as ethical and political commitments. At the same time, these are the very groups who may most need a release from caring obligations, having rarely been granted the opportunity to do otherwise. At the very least, then, institutional interventions must 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. We must continue to mount this argument within the academy as we come to understand how the logics of production and reproduction continue to divide and conquer in alignment with norms of masculinity and femininity, along with racialized logics of mastery and servitude.

What’s Love Got to Do with It? Teaching as Care Work

Duffy (2010) identifies ‘two distinct but overlapping’ frames for care work scholarship. For some, ‘care work’ is almost synonymous with the socialist-feminist concept of ‘reproductive labor’ while others ‘focus on the content of the labor process as the defining characteristic of care work’ – that is, those who enable the well-being of others in a provider-recipient relationship (Duffy, 2010: 127). Duffy terms the latter ‘nurturant’ care workers, as distinct from those engaged in the cooking and cleaning activities also broadly included as reproductive labor. In prior sections I drew from the socialist-feminist genealogy to suggest how the turn to casualized labor in academe has reanimated a public/private distinction between research as ‘productive’ (circulated on the market) and teaching as largely ‘reproductive’ (confined to the institutional home); here I explore the ways in which nurturant ‘care work is a distinct form of labor due to its motivational complexity’:

Motivations for care provision reach far beyond the extrinsic rewards traditionally emphasized by economists (wages, benefits) or sociologists (social approval) to include prosocial motivations that offer intrinsic rewards, such as the gratification of helping others. … Prolonged personal interaction with those who need care often leads to emotional attachment to them. Care preferences are also shaped by cultural traditions and institutional structures. … Moral obligation seems stronger – and exchange motivation weaker – than for other kinds of work. (Folbre and Wright, 2012: 2–3)

Yet, as Boris and Klein observe (quoting policy analyst Deborah Stone), ‘the rules and regulations of caring in the public or commercial sphere “promote disengagement, distance, and impartiality,” discounting the love, partiality, and attachment that many develop toward those cared for’ (Boris and Klein, 2012: 9). Nonetheless, many care workers view their work as ‘a calling infused with spirituality’, as much a form of public service as employment (Boris and Klein, 2012: 9). Likewise, Glenn notes that ‘dedication to clients induces many care workers to remain on the job despite the financial sacrifices they may incur’ and ‘may even do extra tasks or errands for their clients on their own time’ (Glenn, 2010: 4).

Similarly, the AAUP confirms analogous personal subsidization of caring on the part of contingent faculty:

Mindful that their working conditions are their students’ learning conditions, many faculty holding contingent appointments struggle to shield students from the consequences of an increasingly unprofessional workplace. Faculty on contingent appointments frequently pay for their own computers, phones, and office supplies, and dip into their own wallets for journal subscriptions and travel to conferences to stay current in their fields. (AAUP, 2010)

We should not ‘shield’ students or the public from the costs and consequences of devaluing care work in higher education, but expose them. At least two political responses follow from this: we can urge people to care less, or we can organize so that care work is valued more. More likely, both approaches are required: people must necessarily limit the amount of work they will do for free while at the same time they should be able to honor a deeply felt and socially beneficial ethic of caring. We must reclaim the value of caring while recognizing that working ‘for love’ renders us vulnerable to exploitation. ¹¹

The framework of care enables my response to special issue co-editor Ian Robinson’s cogent questions about the way neoliberalism has ‘turned the professoriate into an irrational economic choice’ (AAUP, 2010):

How has it been possible to [maintain] the current two tiered system of tenure-track (TT) and non-tenure-track (NTT) faculty with relatively little loss in the supply of academic labor, despite the major differences in pay and status between the two types of faculty?

Why haven’t highly educated people whose only option in the academic labor market is teaching as NTT faculty left the field in numbers great enough to drive up the price of NTT faculty labor for those that remain?

And, related, why did and do most TT faculty allow their NTT colleagues to be treated this way? (Robinson, 2015)

My answer is that the administrative restructuring of the faculty has mobilized both the cultural norms which devalue social reproduction and the persistence of those who provide care nonetheless, whether they are ‘forced to care’ and/or because the call to care is a deeply held personal ethic. The ‘irrational’ persistence of NTT teaching faculty or ‘illogical’ commitment to service on the part of TT faculty becomes easier to understand when we view them as care workers who maintain strong intrinsic motivations despite insufficient extrinsic rewards. ¹² While adjuncts are often advised to ‘just leave’ under exploitative circumstances, the care literature suggests deeper and socially beneficial incentives at work that we would do better to reward than dismiss.

In short, while some faculty members do not care for care work, others identify strongly with the caring aspects of the profession. As Robinson suggests, they/we:

self-select into that kind of work [due] to two additional kinds of motives: (a) care work has intrinsic value for us, meaning that we derive real satisfaction from doing it, in a way that we would not from many kinds of better remunerated work; and (b) because we care about our students and feel some mixture of feelings ranging among concern / affection / loyalty / duty, we are willing to do more and/or higher quality work than we would otherwise, despite the low pay. So it’s partly self-interested (but not just about economic self-interest) and partly ethical (i.e. rooted in virtues like duty).

Because enough people are motivated by these non-monetary concerns, enough people stay in the NTT faculty ranks to prevent the academic labor market from driving up the salaries and benefits of the people performing this work to the point it would [reflect] the real value of its contribution to university finances or social and economic development. There is a kind of market failure here, caused by non-economic motivation, which induces large numbers of people to produce a lot of positive social externalities that are not recognized or compensated by the labor market mechanism. (Robinson, 2015)

Socialist feminists have long argued that the concept of a free market is always already a failure given capital’s refusal to acknowledge the centrality of social reproduction to economic productivity. ¹³ This has also been a problem for Marxism and related critiques, as Sylvia Federici observes: ‘Marx failed to recognize the importance of reproductive work because he accepted the capitalist criteria for what constitutes work’ and many socialist feminists followed suit, ‘imagining the social reconstruction of women’s reproductive work in the form of a rationalization process, raising its productivity level’ (Federici, 2012: 95). Thus the revaluing of care work has been made more difficult by a dis-inclination on the part of some feminists and others to reclaim what seem to be essentializing ‘feminine’ functions. Yet, as Federici argues:

focusing on the collectivization of reproductive work [is] not to naturalize housework as a female vocation. It is refusing to obliterate [the] experiences, knowledge, and struggles that women have accumulated concerning reproductive work, whose history has been an essential part of our resistance to capitalism. Reconnecting with this history [is] a crucial step, both for undoing the gendered architecture of our lives and reconstructing our homes [or, in the context of this article, our home departments] as commons. (Federici, 2012: 148)

Such strains of feminist thought have sought alternative and non-market solutions, as well as market-based adjustments for the problem that does have a name: the devaluation of caring. Whereas the paternalistic advice of both individuals and institutions has been to ‘protect’ aspiring academics from ‘too much service or teaching’, a contemporary feminist perspective might argue instead for the increased valuation of care work in academe: making it count for hiring, retention and promotion and rewarding it accordingly.

Consider, for example, how the Wages for Housework movement of the 1970s centered directly on the question of reproduction, emphasizing that raising children and taking care of people is a social responsibility: ‘In this society where money governs all our relations, [we must] ask that those who benefit from housework pay for it’ (Federici, 2012: 57). Clearly, the ‘domestic help’ of the NTT sector underwrites the ‘productivity’ of the tenure system and its visibility in the public sphere (Bauder, 2006). Academic activists must insist on the recognition of this fact by the tenured sector, university and public at large while mobilizing across sectors and industries for meaningful structural change. This begins with understanding why we care. Folbre and Wright challenge the prevalent assumption ‘that care is motivated either by love or by money [and that] paying money for care undermines love, so care provided for love should not be paid’ (Folbre and Wright, 2012: 2). The authors emphasize instead the ways in which love and money often combine and intersect. This perspective is crucial to the analysis of academic labor, where love and (not enough) money often intersect.

As Miya Tokumitsu argues, the ‘Do What You Love’ (DYWL) mantra of the neoliberal era has made academics especially vulnerable, since ‘Few other professions fuse the personal identity of their workers so intimately with the work output’ (Tokumitsu, 2014: 2). In this context, professing becomes self-expression and the fulfillment of a ‘higher’ purpose rather than a form of labor as vulnerable to exploitation as any other. This, she argues, is how DWYL extracts ‘female labor for little or no compensation’, ensuring that ‘women comprise the majority of the low-wage or unpaid workforce – as care workers, adjunct faculty and unpaid interns’ (Tokumitsu, 2014: 2). Tokumitsu observes that ‘what unites all this work, whether performed by GEDs or PhDs, is the belief that wages shouldn’t be the primary motivation for doing it’ (Tokumitsu, 2014: 2). Melissa Gregg, citing Luc Boltanski’s and Eve Chiapello’s ‘new spirit of capitalism’, further argues that organizations have revolutionized past models of employment by generating ‘feelings of enterprise and esteem central to work’s psychological appeal’, enforcing commitment without compulsion by making work ‘meaningful’ (Gregg, 2011: 13).

More insidiously, as Gregg notes in Work’s Intimacy, new media technologies have generated a presence bleed ‘where firm boundaries between personal and professional identities no longer apply [and] the location and time of work’ exceed any clear parameters (Gregg, 2011: 2). In Alan Liu’s terms, there is now ‘no recreational outside’ to knowledge work (Gregg, 2011: 13). Gregg documents the distress of employees who struggle to ‘develop the emotional and psychological capacity to withstand positions and workloads with no definitive beginning or end’ (Gregg, 2011: 14). For most faculty, there are no clear metrics of what a workday actually entails, no foundation to clearly determine what ‘fair wages’ would be. Indeed, college teaching has always been susceptible to presence bleed: technology merely exacerbates it:

Labor politics has always rested on the notion that limits must be placed on the workday … [But if] the office exists in your phone, how is it possible to claim the right to be away from it for any length of time? Indeed how do employees assert the right to avoid work-related contact if the bulk of their colleagues are friends? Labor activism is powerless to meet these challenges with its current vocabulary. Like never before, communications technologies grant access to the workplace beyond physical constraints, just as workplace intimacies trouble the sense of what is coerced or freely chosen labor. (Gregg, 2011: 14–15)

While all faculty members deal with these blurred boundaries, contingent faculty members face the toughest negotiations between love, money and time.

In a chapter on ‘part-time precarity’, Gregg observes that salaried staff ‘answering email at all times of day and night [confuse] the notion of formally paid hours of work’, leaving casual workers to struggle to rein in communication practices that exceed any recognizable boundaries of a part-time workday (Gregg, 2011: 59). These concerns are mirrored in our students as greater ‘crossover between scholarship and industry’ means that ‘the changing identity of student workers affects their condition in two directions – their access to study facilities and a workplace’, yielding competing subjectivities as students and workers (Gregg, 2011: 64). Obviously the implications of presence bleed for teaching, learning, and degree completion are immense (and, unfortunately, not addressable within the limited confines of this article). ¹⁴ Viewing these circumstances as a ‘widespread policy failure’, Gregg reminds us that organizations (including labor unions) must respond at the policy level.

Today, academic care work is not unlike much of the piece-work organized on a ‘cottage-industry basis’ that characterizes women’s labor around the world (Federici, 2012: 59). ¹⁵ Like home health care, teaching is decentralized and delivered in cellular fashion in private spaces. The fact that many contingent faculty lack dedicated campus office space and that technology now enables us to engage in teaching-related activities off-site further obscures the amount of hours actually worked. Per-course payments clearly do not compensate for adjunct time, particularly in time-intensive pedagogies of such fields as composition, where the use of contingent faculty is most prevalent.

In short, higher education teaching is simultaneously both paid and unpaid work, conducted for both love and money. As Bousquet has noted, in few other industries do ‘sixty-year-old persons who have distinguished themselves at their work get paid less than college faculty’, who in ‘the most casualized disciplines [earn] about as much as either a good accountant with two or three years of experience or a twenty-five-year-old district attorney’ (Bousquet, 2008: 41). Indeed, ‘cheap teaching is not a victimless crime’ (Bousquet, 2008: 41). Understood as care work, all teaching is cheap teaching, particularly when auxiliary functions are considered. Advising, mentoring, writing letters of recommendation, and all other forms of ‘life support’ that the educational relationship entails continue to be uncompensated or valued cheaply because they are unquantified under crude ‘productivity’ metrics, as well as unrestricted to the confines of a ‘regular’ workday. Grants and publications can be readily counted, and the attendant forms of prestige are understood to increase the university’s ‘brand’ in the marketplace. In contrast, as is true of care studies generally, it is hard to develop an adequate metric for valuing caring (Folbre and Wright, 2012). In addition to quantitative analysis, substantial qualitative and longitudinal studies would be required, but it is precisely the longer-term that is belied in ‘just in time’ employment structures.

Fortunately, as Glenn observes, the ‘care crisis’ is finally receiving public attention because it extends beyond the poor families who have long struggled with these issues: ‘Today, even relatively affluent middle-class families are experiencing a “time bind” and “stretch out” in their efforts to meet competing demands for income and caring’ (Glenn, 2010: 2). Glenn’s study analyzes the ideological and material foundations of the current care crisis in which ‘the number of people needing care has risen much more steeply than the number of those available to provide that care’ (Glenn, 2010: 1). ¹⁶ Thus, as Federici argues, we must redefine the reproductive sphere ‘as a sphere of relations of production and a terrain of anticapitalist struggle’ (Federici, 2012: 5) – this includes both the caring labor done as paid employment, and the burdens of social reproduction that women still carry, disproportionately, in our private lives.

Tokumitsu and others are right that caring leaves workers ripe for exploitation. Still, there is no getting around the fact that motivation extends beyond the wage incentive: many of us do care about those we teach or otherwise serve. Yet, as my second epigraph suggests (uttered by an African-American researcher who left Yale to develop public youth science education programs), to feel called to teach or to express so strong a sentiment as love for one’s academic labor is ‘the kiss of death in academe’, an effective career killer. Tantamount to exhibiting a mental disorder in the current institutional context, it is to convey that one’s priorities are woefully out of alignment with various strivings for ‘excellence’ that promise to put our academic institutions on the map. But, as Harney and Moten (2013) have argued, from the ‘undercommons’ that differs from the ‘university in ruins’ (Readings, 1997), excellence is not all it is cracked up to be. Quite often, it is not even excellent in any objective sense, but merely that which is most intelligible within prevailing ‘technologies of recognition’ (Shih 2004). Excellence and its cousin ‘progress’ are capitalist discourses whose vocabulary is the language of production and profit; it will take a strong counter-discourse (as well as a counter-memory of all that has been lost to capitalistic ‘advancement’) to reclaim the values of social reproduction upon which our mutual futures depend. Ultimately, love is not enough, since even ‘care that is motivated by concern for the care recipient can be crushed by work organizations that obstruct the caregiver’s ability to care’ (Howes et al., 2012: 87). In the next section, I look at how attachment (whether to ideals fueling care work or to recipients of care) renders care workers more vulnerable to exploitation and more difficult to organize.

Queering Academic Labor: Toward a Posttenure Politics

The care research suggests that a ‘high-road’ strategy of a positive work environment and opportunities for employee advancement offer ‘a particularly high payoff in the care sector of the economy’ (Glenn, 2010). Of course, no such road was ever paved without mass mobilization. Yet, as noted, the motivational complexity of care work poses particular challenges for labor organizing. Thus, care scholars emphasize the need for organized labor strategies that take seriously their members’ identities as women and/or as caring workers (for example, see Berry, 2005; Cobble, 2007; Crain, 2007; Milkman, 2007). Concern that organized resistance may risk the well-being of care recipients is one major reason why care work complicates traditional labor politics, demanding newly effective ways of organizing. For example, although union membership is now common in their sectors,

many nurses and teachers remain wary of traditional unionism, finding it at odds with certain long-standing values within the profession. In response, some professional unions are moving toward a new unionism that melds the best traditions of professionalism and collective bargaining into a new amalgam [concerned] with preserving the ‘ethic of care’ [to] provide quality care without abandoning the union emphasis on ‘equity, collective rights, and improving the conditions of work and pay’. (Cobble, 2007: 8)

Since most ‘labor movements of the past arose in response to the needs and aspirations of a male-dominated blue-collar workforce’, the present moment requires ‘reinventing worker movements and the class politics they embrace’ (Cobble, 2007: 3–4). As Marion Crain notes, labor movements have been weakened by an ‘artificial divide between workers’ rights to economic justice and women’s rights to workplace equality’ – this ‘two-track’ system of rights management has limited labor organizers from understanding how sex discrimination limits worker movements, just as feminism has not sufficiently embraced that the decline of unionism is, in fact, a feminist issue (Crain, 2007: 99). As long as gender differences persist, the mass organization of women will remain central to the labor movement’s future:

Men and women continue to work in different sectors of the economy doing different kinds of work. They are still held to different cultural and social expectations. … Fewer men than women, for example must choose between keeping their job and bearing a child. Labor movements must be sensitive [to] how the sex of class matters in determining goals, choosing tactics, and devising institutional structures and policies. (Cobble, 2007: 4) ¹⁷

Obviously the same could be said of racial differences, as well as of the relationships between LGBT rights and labor organizing (Frank, 2014; Hunt and Boris, 2007).

A focus on care work integrates diversity, labor and social justice issues and thus requires us to go beyond conventional organizing principles. In her article on unionization in the care sector, Duffy asks:

Do low-wage care workers represent the new face of the ‘working class’? Or does ‘care work’ represent a broad occupational category that unites workers on the basis of that shared experience across traditional class boundaries? Perhaps the concept of care offers the possibility of uniting workers even more broadly on the basis of their shared family and community needs? (Duffy, 2010: 125)

Duffy argues that integrating all three frameworks provides the most robust framework for academic research and labor organizing. Care workers increasingly represent the working class, but (as shown in the health care industry, for example), the concept of care also has the capacity to unify workers across class boundaries around their shared identification as care providers as well as across traditional battle lines of employer versus employee. Duffy (2010: 135) cites Deborah Stone’s observation that ‘We have the Bill of Rights and we have civil rights. Now we need a Right to Care, and it’s going to take a movement to get it’:

The right to care is twofold. First, it includes the right to receive quality care when we need it – when we are young, old, ill, or disabled. Second, the right to care includes the right to provide care to family members and friends without endangering our jobs or our livelihoods and to have meaningful choices about how to best provide that care. Framing care, one of the most fundamental tasks of a society, as an individual right and as a social responsibility, opens up many theoretical and strategic possibilities for a broad movement for transformative social change. (Duffy, 2010: 179)

Academic labor fits readily in to Duffy’s tripartite approach: many contingent faculty now inhabit the low-wage working class; at the same time, identifying with care has the potential to unify not only faculty across the tenure and contingent sectors but also faculty and care workers in other industries. Finally, faculty could form bold alliances with our own beneficiaries of care: students, families and the general public. Here Duffy cites an example of one health care organizing campaign for ‘quality care through quality jobs’, which claimed:

[Paraprofessional Healthcare Institute] works to improve the lives of people who need home or residential care – by improving the lives of the workers who provide that care. Our goal is to ensure caring, stable relationships between consumers and workers, so that both may live with dignity, respect, and independence. (Duffy, 2010: 136)

New Faculty Majority employs a similar tactic with their slogan: ‘faculty working conditions are student learning conditions’. Those working conditions are also faculty learning conditions. As contingent workers, most faculty are denied opportunities for knowledge generation and participation in shared governance.

The current exigencies are giving rise to innovative organizing. As Duffy argues:

while maintaining an emphasis on traditional class divisions on the one hand, unions have also embraced the notion of strategic coalition building within occupational and industrial clusters, including those defined by care, on the other. [For example] the SEIU claims to be ‘the nation’s largest union of health care workers, representing 870,000 in the field, including 110,000 nurses and 40,000 doctors’. (Duffy, 2010: 133)

In contrast, it is difficult to summarize the history and current state of efforts to organize contingent faculty – not only due to the range of parent unions involved, from the education-focused AAUP, American Federation of Teachers (AFT), or National Education Association (NEA) to industrial unions like the United Auto Workers (UAW), but also the structural diversity in terms of whether adjuncts combine with tenure system faculty or form their own unions. In addition, graduate student organizing has involved its own set of issues regarding the legal battle with the National Labor Relations Board to acknowledge students as employees (with an equally contentious parallel in relation to student athletes). Nonetheless, graduate students have been instrumental in bringing contingent labor to the forefront of institutional and public consciousness (Bousquet, 2008); the Coalition of Graduate Employee Unions (CGEU) represents a range of such efforts in the US and Canada. Joe Berry’s Reclaiming the Ivory Tower (2005) remains a seminal history of these and other efforts to organize adjunct faculty. These include both direct organizing by unions and the work of intermediate organizations to raise awareness and build the movement, e.g. the Coalition for Contingent Academic Labor (COCAL), Coalition on the Academic Workforce (CAW), and New Faculty Majority, which highlights the gender issues involved through their ‘Women and Contingency’ project (New Faculty Majority, 2015). In addition, myriad professional associations have issued their own statements and task forces on contingency, as the American Sociological Association did at its most recent gathering in August 2015. A representative sampling of how academic associations address contingent labor is offered at the following association sites in my Reference list: AAUP, American Historians’ Association, American Sociological Association, and Modern Language Association. Contingent academic labor issues also recently received federal attention with testimony by New Faculty Majority president Maria Maisto and others before the US House of Representatives Education and Workforce Committee in 2013, which culminated in a sympathetic report, ‘The Just in Time Professor’ (New Faculty Majority, 2014).

If we take our cues from Duffy and the various contributors to The Sex of Class, the labor movement will need to reinvent itself on several fronts. As Cobble summarizes, the ‘future of unionism lies in embracing diversity in union strategy, tactics, structure and message’ (Cobble, 2007: 11) by considering the following:

Academic activism needs to think beyond worker organization on the basis of a labor contract to broader rationales and constituencies for labor organization and alliances. Here, one of the defining features of the successful organization of care work is the cultivation of alliances between those who provide care and those who receive it (Glenn, 2010: 199–200). Rather than being locked into an oppositional employer/employee relation, they have come to understand that their shared concerns and constraints involve third, fourth and fifth parties – the recipients of care, the families who hire care workers, and the state (Boris and Klein, 2012: 10). The recent passage of the Domestic Workers’ Bill of Rights in Massachusetts (2015) is one example of how the concept of caring labor ‘recognizes the possibility of crucial alliances and forms of cooperation between producers and the reproduced: mothers and children, teachers and students, nurses and patients’ (Federici, 2012: 100).

To reclaim the importance of care work is to reject the elitism, sexism and racism that continuously reproduce prevailing academic values. However, it is not my intention to merely reverse the hierarchy such that teaching is lauded over research, with the latter characterized as non-reproductive or merely self-serving: that would be a heteronormative and reductively binary way of thinking about academic labor. Rather, as Halberstam has argued with regard to the ‘non-reproductive futurity’ sometimes privileged in queer theory:

We need to craft a queer agenda that [opposes] global capitalism, and to define queerness as a mode of crafting alternatives [which] are not naively oriented to a liberal notion of progressive entitlement but [also] not tied to a nihilism which always lines up against women, domesticity and reproduction. (Halberstam, 2008: 154)

We must queer academe so that teaching is no longer the kiss of death, so that the profession does not inherently line up against the diverse faculty who maintain our institutional homes and engage in other forms of social reproduction. This requires ‘the production of “commoning” practices [and] new collective forms of reproduction, confronting the divisions that have been planted among us along the lines of race, gender, age, [and] location’ (Federici, 2012: 12). We must refuse to be members of the clubs that will have us, and write new rules of incorporation.

Academic activists must also reclaim a more holistic understanding of what it means to profess – restoring organic links between scholarship, teaching and governance. As seen in other countries, tenure-track positions are not the only way to achieve this goal. Following J.K. Gibson-Graham’s (2006) concept of a postcapitalist politics that enacts alternative configurations eclipsed by ‘capitalocentric’ discourse, I have advocated elsewhere for a posttenure politics that adequately values diverse faculty contributions in different position structures (Cardozo, 2012). In reality, many ‘tenure-centric’ strategies to restore the profession revolve around attempts to (re)generate tenure-track positions that fail to benefit actual people in the NTT sector. Tenure system hiring norms typically preclude the transfer of adjunct faculty into TT roles, preferring PhDs fresh from the pipeline for a variety of complex reasons, few having to do with merit alone: indeed, the system continuously replaces its most experienced professionals with those least experienced (Bousquet, 2008). Although rebuilding the tenure system and creating a more dignified class of NTT faculty appointments are not mutually exclusive aims, a posttenure politics takes the latter more seriously for the simple reason that it better serves the faculty majority. In so doing, a posttenure politics does not subscribe to the notion that the tenure system is the sole domain of analysis and problem-solving: it seeks to democratize knowledge production in order to benefit from the most diverse collection of perspectives, recognizing a basic fact of standpoint epistemology: contingent faculty members have insights and experiences that tenure system faculty do not.

Under current circumstances, we cannot seriously believe that the tenure system is a meritocracy housing ‘the best and brightest’ that the professoriate has to offer or that our governance systems are ‘naturally’ populated by those with the requisite vision to lead us out of the current morass. More likely, academic gate-keeping systems reward those who conform to institutional norms, which increasingly place career advancement and institutional branding above all else. This is not to vilify tenure system faculty; rather, it is to emphasize that within the contingent ranks are equally talented and committed professionals: the difference between sectors is not in the people; it is in the circumstances that make it nigh impossible for contingent faculty to compete on tenure system criteria, or for those within to understand how different is the activity and weather outside the big tent. ¹⁸ Over time, this leads to fundamentally different forms of expertise among higher education faculty. We will need to reincorporate this diversity of perspectives into knowledge production, governance and union activity. There can be no credible idea of democracy, shared governance, or organized labor that does not put those who care front and center.

Conclusion

Gibson-Graham’s efforts to track manifestations of a postcapitalist politics and my efforts to think through a posttenure politics resonate with a growing Detroit-centered movement whose rallying call is ‘New Work, New Culture’ (2016). This views the crisis of global capitalism not as a mere cyclical recession but as the dying breaths of an employment system in a transformation as significant as the prior ones from agricultural to industrial to knowledge economies. That is: even as jobs disappear, there is plenty of work to be done. ‘New Work, New Culture’ is about moving beyond restrictive job formations to inventive modes of communal and local production that make use of ‘small scale and small space’ technologies while freeing up worker time to engage in other humanizing and community-building activities. Like adaptive weeds pushing through the concrete of vacant Detroit lots and inventive ‘New Work, New Culture’ organizers who seek to revitalize such urban landscapes, academic activists must work through the cracks of consciousness to provide a new vision for higher education. We must engage a posttenure politics that does not merely seek admission to, or advancement within, but the radical transformation of, our institutions. We must generate new academic work, new academic culture.

Care work, of course, is hardly new, but rather an ancient mode of human labor that became formally segmented and devalued under capitalism. What is new, however, is the global movement to resist the denigration of caring labor and revalue essential care-giving activities. On the jacket of Revolution at Point Zero: Housework, Reproduction, and Feminist Struggle, Ousseine Alidou praises Federici’s career-long commitment to illuminating how:

capitalism naturalizes the exploitation [of] women’s productive and reproductive life … whether in the domestic or public sphere, capital normalizes women’s labor as ‘housework’ worth [little to] no economic compensation or social recognition. [This] underlies the gender-based violence produced by the neoliberal wars that are ravaging communities around the world [in order to] keep women off the communal lands they care for, while transforming them into refugees in national-states weakened by the negative effects of neoliberalism. Sylvia Federici’s call for ecofeminists’ return to the Commons against Capital is compelling.

In higher education, our communal lands are the academic commons – the rightful province of those who care for and cultivate them. We must resist dehumanizing calls for greater ‘productivity’ while promoting a vivifying ethic of care that (re)turns institutional resources toward the providers of the nurturant labor that our society so desperately needs.