All quiet in the classroom
Just when it's most important for academics to be social critics, universities are cutting back on tenure – and squelching free speech on campus.

By Camille T. Taiara

KATHLEEN HULL HAS a Ph.D. in theological and religious studies from Drew University. She wrote an award-winning dissertation on Charles Sanders Pierce, the founder of American pragmatism and semiotics, and has won national recognition for her articles and her teaching. She's presented her work in the United States and abroad. Yet Hull, who's been teaching as an adjunct professor at New York University since 1996, earns a mere $14,400 a year carrying two classes a term. She receives no benefits and may be fired at any time.

"I wouldn't be able to do this work if I wasn't married and my husband didn't have benefits," she says. Hull earned her master's degree in philosophy from Johns Hopkins University and then took a break from academia to start a family. The decision cost her what could have been a tenured position, with its commensurate lifetime job security, generous benefits and research support, and a salary more than three times higher than what she currently earns. "People I was in graduate school with in the '70s all have tenure," she says.

Now her husband has lost his job, and Hull may have to leave her profession if he doesn't find employment soon.

Nonetheless, Hull considers herself lucky. She estimates that more than half of the other adjuncts in her NYU general studies program, in which 80 percent of the faculty are part-time instructors hired on a term-by-term basis, must work at several universities to eke out a living.

Hull and her colleagues represent just a few of the growing number of part-time, underpaid lecturers with no job security who have been steadily replacing tenured faculty at colleges across the nation. The shift, some say, is the result of the corporatization of higher education. Analysts warn that the surge in the use of adjuncts is shortchanging America's students and chipping away at academic freedom. And teachers are starting to say they're not going to take it anymore.

Less than one-third of all faculty at postsecondary institutions were tenured in 1999, according to the latest data from the U.S. Department of Education's National Center for Education Statistics. By comparison, 78 percent had tenure in 1970. Meanwhile, the number of part-time faculty doubled over the previous 30 years to 45 percent. All but 5 percent of part-timers hold posts outside of the tenure-track system.

The figures are even more alarming at community colleges, where almost two-thirds were employed on a part-time basis as of 1995, according to a Harvard University report. Indeed, there are community colleges in the United States with no tenured teachers at all.

As a result, decision making is concentrated in the hands of a shrinking, privileged few and disciplines that don't lead directly into private sector jobs are effectively being devalued.

"The trend comes from a resurgence of corporate culture that says higher education should produce workers to fill job slots as opposed to critical citizens," says Cary Nelson, Jubilee Professor of Liberal Arts and Sciences at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where about 70 percent of the courses in his department are now taught by part-timers. As author of Manifesto of a Tenured Radical: Higher Education under Fire and national vice president of the Association of American University Professors, Nelson has become one of the nation's foremost critics of the abuse of contingent instructors.

The exploitation of temporary lecturers has gotten so bad that a documentary produced five years ago by Barbara Wolf called "Degrees of Shame" actually compared their circumstances to those of migrant farm workers.

Academic freedom and the role of the public intellectual

Analysts worry that contracting out higher education not only produces less-critical, well-rounded graduates, but also narrows the spectrum of political discourse in society as a whole.

Tenure was established in response to a case at Stanford University in 1900, when sociology professor Edward A. Ross called for the nationalization of America's railroad system. Leland Stanford had made a fortune building railroads, and his widow, who headed the university's trustees, had Ross fired. Ross then took a position in Nebraska and later at the University of Wisconsin. His experience led to the drafting of the AAUP's "1940 Statement of Principles on Academic Freedom and Tenure," which provided the blueprint for faculty tenure.

Tenure has protected academics' freedom to express unpopular views from the time when the system became universal practice 60 years ago. Public intellectuals have played a crucial role in putting mainstream assumptions to the test and questioning the powers that be ever since.

After all, "the final guarantee of free speech is not being able to be fired for political reasons," Nelson says.

Left-leaning faculty came under fire during the McCarthy era of the 1950s. Professors in support of the antiwar and civil rights movements found themselves under attack in the late '60s and early '70s.

Now, as a consequence of the political paranoia following Sept. 11, tenured professors' right to express unpopular perspectives has been placed at risk once more.

In a case that has garnered national attention, the University of South Florida tried to fire computer science professor Samuel (Sami) Al-Arian following his appearance on the O'Reilly Factor Sept. 26. Show host Bill O'Reilly questioned the Kuwaiti-born Palestinian imam about statements he'd made against the Israeli occupation of Palestine, including a call for "death to Israel" in 1988, during the first Intifada. He also dug up allegations that a think tank Al-Arian cofounded, World and Islam Studies Enterprise, helped funnel funds to the Palestinian Islamic Jihad and Hamas. The Federal Bureau of Investigation had conducted an investigation of Al-Arian and WISE four years before and found there to be no basis for any charges of links to terrorist groups. In the fall of 2000, federal Judge R. Kevin McHugh characterized WISE as a "reputable scholarly research center." But the university was flooded with phoned-in threats and nasty e-mails. Al-Arian was placed on indefinite leave the next day. In December he received notice of the university's decision to terminate his employment – after 16 years teaching at the school and without ever being granted the opportunity to defend himself.

The AAUP issued a stern warning to the USF administration, threatening to censure the university should it fire Al-Arian, and was able to ensure Al-Arian wasn't taken off the payroll. USF president Judy Genshaft is expected to issue a final decision on Al-Arian this month.

There is no question Al-Arian would have lost his job if he hadn't had tenure. "There are powerful groups who don't care much for academic freedom, who will try to undermine tenure and the idea that professors, even once they've proven themselves, cannot speak their minds without fear," Al-Arian says. He reports knowing of at least four other instances in which professors have lost their jobs since Sept. 11 because of their nationality or political beliefs. "I'm told this is the most important case since that of Angela Davis." Davis was fired from her tenure-track post at UCLA in 1969, under then-governor Ronald Reagan's administration, shortly after becoming a member of the Communist Party and visiting Cuba.

"Tenure has been under threat due to erosion," Al-Arian says. "Now it faces a possible McCarthy-like challenge when members of the public simply don't believe in free speech anymore. Freedom of expression is guaranteed in the Constitution, but you have to struggle to sustain those principles."

Shortchanging students

In the end, it's the students who stand to get hurt in the battle over tenure.

"Statistics show that the switch from tenured faculty to part-time instructors has literally cut in half the amount of time teachers can spend preparing for class and counseling students," Nelson reports. The lack of time can lead to lecturers replacing traditional course work such as term papers with multiple-choice tests and other less time-consuming assignments. The lack of support for research means adjuncts are less able to stay atop their fields.

"Also, if you don't have tenure, you're more vulnerable to student complaints," Nelson says, pointing to increasing pressures to keep students happy by giving them good grades and avoiding politically loaded issues. "It undermines teachers' ability to evaluate student work accurately. There's less intellectual risk taken in class. If someone complains about a part-timer, that part-timer simply doesn't get rehired the next term. It diminishes the intellectual integrity of our educational system."

Ernst Benjamin's 1997 report "Some Implications of Tenure for the Profession and Society" supports Nelson's concerns. "Currently, any class discussion of race, gender, religion, evolution, or sexuality may erupt in a career-threatening controversy," he writes. As evidence, he cites recent altercations involving the issues of crime, DNA, Freud, and an Ashcan school display of ethnic stereotypes.

Finally, students taught by part-timers whom they may never see again simply don't get the kind of long-term mentoring experiences a university should provide. And because adjuncts are excluded from departmental planning and work on academic committees, there is no medium in place for their in-class experiences with students and the curriculum to get recycled back into the programs.

In the end, Hull says, "students are getting a degree that has a cultural caché but is not connected with a deep learning experience."

Universities enter the temp business

While rates vary, a 1999 survey conducted by the Coalition on the Academic Workforce found that most adjuncts in the humanities and social sciences receive less than $3,000 a course. "Nearly one-third of them earn $2,000 or less," the report states.

The low pay and lack of guaranteed work has led to the emergence of "freeway flyers": teachers who must piece together gigs at several colleges to make ends meet and who sometimes spend more of their day driving from one campus to another than they spend in the classroom.

Even if an adjunct teaches four courses a semester, that person is still likely to earn less than $20,000 a year. Most receive no health coverage or any other benefits. About a quarter of adjuncts in the humanities and social sciences are offered travel or research support, according to CAW's findings. Less than a third are provided private office space to meet with students.

"There's literally no place to hang your hat or coat," reports NYU's Hull, who shares a room fitted with eight cubicles with 150 colleagues. "There are phones in some of the cubicles, some of which work. And there are computers in some of the cubicles, some of which work."

Analysts agree there are valid reasons for using contingent, part-time faculty: to respond to unforeseen jumps in overall enrollment, for example, or to meet demand within a specific discipline. Often, adjuncts are brought in to supply cutting-edge knowledge in their specialties. This is particularly common in business and technology-related fields, where more adjuncts are likely to hold down full-time industry jobs with generous salaries and are not committed to a career in academia.

"The standard claim is that many disciplines produce too many Ph.D.'s," Nelson says.

The overproduction of doctorates in disciplines like English or history that do not offer many career options, so the market-based argument goes, translates into low salaries with no benefits. In fact, almost three-fourths of Ph.D. holders in the humanities and social sciences were in higher-education positions in 1997.

"It's probably not the most insightful explanation," according to Nelson, who notes that the drop in tenured faculty is not commensurate with any drop in enrollment. With an increasing number of high school students about to graduate and looking to go to college, he says, the demand for permanent professors is likely to grow.

Budget cuts aggravate the problem. But academics say that's only part of the story. While adjuncts survive on meager wages, many have seen their schools spend more money on high-paid administrators, research, and new facilities. The Bureau of State Audits found the University of California system increased its number of managers, administrators, and employees dedicated to fiscal, staff, and student services by between 26 and 67 percent from 1997 through 2001. Tenure-track faculty, meanwhile, increased by less than 10 percent.

Dinosaurs at the helm

There's no question the current tenure system is riddled with problems.

For starters, the decrease in tenured positions has raised the bar on the requirements academics must meet to attain tenure. The pressure to "publish or perish" is so great that, in an article published in Academe in January 2002, attorney Donna R. Euben asks whether Galileo himself would have been granted tenure in today's scholastic environment. After all, Euben writes, "Galileo took six years to write his treatise, The Dialogue on the Two Chief World Systems: Ptolemaic and Copernican. Church censorship, peer review, and the plague caused further delays, and three more years passed before the book was published – and not by a university press. And how original was The Dialogue anyway? Was Galileo simply proving Copernicus's ideas?"

The rigorous prerequisites to attaining tenure mean teaching takes a backseat to research and publishing. And a lack of clear expectations adds to the problem. Around the nation, faculty who were denied tenure following years on the track have been suing administrations for their failure to delineate their criteria for granting tenure.

Women and people of color make up a disproportionate number of the academics excluded from the tenure system. According to the AAUP, women made up only 28.8 percent of all tenured faculty last academic year. "Only 5 percent of full-time faculty in the U.S. are African American, and half of them are at black colleges," reports Cathy Trower, senior researcher for the Project on Faculty Appointments at Harvard University's Graduate School of Education. Latinos comprise a mere 3 percent.

"Tenure needs to be brought into the 21st century," Trower says. The system, she explains, is still based on policies established in 1940, when tenure was first instituted by the AAUP.

Those policies include a six-year probationary period during which tenure-track faculty are judged on their scholarship, teaching, and committee work within their departments. But the inflexible timeline was created when the vast majority of academics were men with stay-at-home wives. A study out of UC Berkeley found that the probationary period tends to coincide with female instructors' biological time clock. (The average age for women to obtain a Ph.D. is 32.)

What's more, most veteran tenured faculty and administrators involved in the hiring process continue to be older, white males who prioritize scholarship centered on conventional themes within narrowly defined disciplines. This cultural bias works against the newer breed of scholars of color, whose focus is more likely to be interdisciplinary.

"Most [decision makers] don't want you to be doing anything other than writing a book on T.S. Eliot," says Jamie Owens Daniel, a tenure-track assistant English professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago and national president of the Marxist Literary Group. "They don't understand that intellectual work can be grounded in community work or a public context."

Alfred Arteaga, an associate professor at UC Berkeley, agrees. "Those in power were hired 30 years ago," he says.

Arteaga went through his own tenure battle. A Ph.D. holder specializing in minority literary criticism, Arteaga accepted a tenure-track position at UC Berkeley's English department in 1990 and had published a book on Chicano poetics through Cambridge University Press by the time he came up for tenure in 1997. While others who had published fewer books and articles were hired on, Arteaga says, he was fired in July 1998. Arteaga got a lawyer, sued the school, and was rehired a month later – but at a different department. "I was ghettoized into Ethnic Studies," he says – at a time when the university was working on an unofficial plan to get rid of the department. (Student protests eventually saved the program.)

Arteaga has seen plenty instructors of color come and go since then. "They have a tendency to spread themselves too thin," he says. According to Arteaga, because such professors are so underrepresented, they have to do more counseling with students of color. They're also called on to fill gaps on more academic committees. Add those factors to the institutional bias about what is and isn't considered bona fide scholarship and "it makes it hard for them to meet the requirements," he says.

Both Trower and Arteaga count themselves among the growing ranks of academics calling for a revision of tenure. Trower and her colleagues at the Harvard project are advocating for colleges to (1) create a more transparent process for attaining tenure, including clearer criteria and a broader definition of acceptable scholarship, (2) add more flexibility to the tenure clock, and (3) allow for multiple pathways to tenure.

Regardless of its flaws, advocates agree that tenure is something to be reformed, not abolished. They still say the greatest problem with tenure is that there just isn't enough of it.

Unionization drive: organizers on the ground

Increasingly, adjuncts facing dead-end jobs at unlivable wages with no job security are demanding a better deal – for themselves and their students.

"The more we talked about it, we thought, what do we have to lose?" Hull says. She and hundreds of other adjuncts at NYU followed the lead of graduate teaching assistants who had begun organizing in the late '90s. The T.A.'s joined the United Auto Workers and negotiated their first contract this January.

According to union estimates, NYU employs more than 3,500 adjuncts to teach up to 70 percent of its classes. Teaching assistants account for another 10 percent of classes taught.

On July 9 the adjuncts also voted to join the UAW, which has a reputation for procuring strong contracts and was one of the only unions willing to take on the difficult task of organizing part-timers in higher education.

The move created the first substantially sized bargaining unit of adjunct faculty in the nation and the first at a private college.

"We still don't know how many people will get the bullet," Hull says. Contract negotiations won't begin until the fall, and the university has been bringing in "a tremendous amount of new hires."

Still, "it's a serious indictment of what's happening in higher education," Hull says. "A lot of us are hoping it will begin national consciousness-raising on the issue."

Indeed, it might. The UAW already reports being contacted by adjuncts at other colleges across the United States. And lecturers have begun agitating for better deals nationwide – including part-timers at UC Davis and within the California State University system. In fact, a recent Washington Post feature reported that "California has been one of the leaders, setting aside $57 million last year to increase part-time salaries at community colleges and an additional $7.1 million to pay adjuncts for office hours."

Academics and organizers alike do not see tenure and unionization as mutually exclusive. Rather, they believe the best model might include a reform of the tenure system alongside a unionized faculty.

A labor activist herself, the University of Illinois's Owens Daniel is an advocate of unionization. "However, pushing in that direction seems to be an acceptance of this split into two separate and unequal categories, even among instructors who have the same qualifications," she says. "The fact that the increasing use of part-time, contingent faculty has become so commonplace that they're saying they need a union is an acknowledgment that this is what administrations are going to do."

Tenure, she argues, is still needed to ensure that there are enough full-time faculty dedicated to the long-term health of our educational programs and that they have the freedom to question without fear of retribution.

E-mail Camille T. Taiara at camille@sfbg.com.