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When "The Research" is Me: Women's Experiences as Contingent Instructors in the Contemporary Academy |
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| Lucy E. Bailey |
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This essay is a small auto/biographical slice from a long-term qualitative project on the experiences of female adjuncts, instructors, and graduate teaching assistants in the contemporary academy, an ongoing project with an origin story traceable, in Donna Haraway fashion, to a 1999 mini-study undertaken for a doctoral seminar in qualitative research. Since those pragmatic beginnings, it has grown to include 19 women who teach or have taught in varied college and university settings in the mid-western United States and with varying degrees of elation and despair, have helped to constitute the category of "contingent worker" imperative to the machinations of the contemporary University. In this paper, I weave excerpts from the narratives of contingent teachers with field notes, research reflections and contextual information regarding contemporary teaching conditions. My goal is to create an autoethnographic snapshot of my current allegiances and preoccupations in the larger research project and to contribute to the continued expansion of feminist work on "narrative forms" (Smith and Watson 11). Recognizing, in Patti Lather's words, the "totality of possible statements and the finitude of what is actually written or spoken" in representational work (123), my emphases in this paper are purposeful and particular. I foreground connections and commonalities across women's varied subject positions, health conditions, and teaching circumstances over other experiential differences to render visible common emotional and economic themes that shape teachers' lives. This methodological position and approach to data analysis is auto/ethnographic in that I position myself within this category of workers and speak from this position (Smith 437). Emphasizing connection, I narrate a "discourse of affiliation" (Pagano 11) among "adjunct," "part-time," or "contingent" instructors on the basis of our common institutional positioning as categorically distinct from and Other to tenure-track instructors. Accordingly, I omit particulars strategically in my data excerpts such as interview dates to maintain privacy and to retain a methodological focus on patterns of collective experiences that emerge from and attach to the institutional positioning of "contingent teacher" beyond particulars of women themselves. This potent and recurrent theme of difference that surfaces in the narratives o f women I interviewed is also visible in larger University and public discourses. For example, a letter to the editor, written by a former adjunct instructor at a Midwestern university amidst a push for unionization among part-time teachers on that campus responds in anger to a University spokesman's characterization of the adjunct's workload and institutional involvement as "nowhere near the calibre of that of full-time faculty" (Barton A 12). Her description of 50 to 60 hour work weeks, minimal institutional support, and meagre monthly compensation of 1,060.00 before taxes for teaching four quarter-length courses reflects not only an effort to detail the conditions of her labour but palpable anger for what she sees to be its categorical dismissal as less valuable, less substantive than the contributions of full-time teachers. As this example indicates, among the many tales that could be told (Wolf 2-16) about the experiences of contingent teachers in higher education is one of invisibility, economic insecurity, and professional marginalization from their discursive and institutional positioning as Others within the academy. Teaching Among 'The Ruins' In The University in Ruins, Bill Readings argued that epistemological and structural shifts in the mission of the American university, from its origins as a liberal institution tied to forging citizens of the nation-state to its contemporary expression more consistent with the workings of a transnational bureaucratic corporation, has resulted in an array of changes in educational practices. Among those changes are efforts to cut administrative costs through increasing tenure and promotion demands, hiring more part-time instructors and adjunct faculty, and also relying more heavily on graduate teaching assistants, who constitute a steady, committed, and comparatively cheap labour force. Data from the U.S. Department of Education, for instance, reports that tenure opportunities are decreasing in higher education nationwide, with only about one in four hires during the 1990s to full-time tenure track jobs. This trend has been accompanied by a corresponding shift is the rise in the number of part-time positions held by adjunct faculty: by 2001, 44.5 percent of faculty appointments in universities were part-timers (Finkelstein and Schuster 5). Such figures lead some to describe non-tenured academics as "sweatshop" and "seasonal" workers (Bradley 1), because they, too, labour under temporary contracts and insufficient compensation, and they, too, must travel to job locations.
A striking gender component exists to these figures as well, as women make up the majority of non-tenured, adjunct and part-time lecturers at universities in the United States (West 26; Thompson 278). This trend is particularly marked in the humanities and social sciences. A less consistent but suggestive finding is scholars' arguments that diminished opportunity is spurring some men to leave academia, a phenomenon long visible in other professional fields (i.e., psychology). That the "feminization of higher education" at the lowest levels of the University system (Thompson 278) resonates linguistically with the "feminization of poverty" is a compelling connection for many given the pecuniary spirit and instability accompanying many "part-time" or adjunct positions in the contemporary academy.
My methodological allegiances in this project are feminist, critical, and unavoidably, contingent, with data collection and analysis shaped significantly by my own position as a worker with multiple responsibilities and limited funds extracting nuggets of time from others with multiple responsibilities and limited funds. Interviews have thus taken place during various adjuncts' one to two hour work commutes, on quarter breaks, over email, in hurried segments between teaching and child care drop offs or retrievals, and, when small grants have permitted, across cheap lunches as vital but inadequate gestures of reciprocity for participants' time.
The women who have contributed to the larger study from which these excerpts are drawn range in age from 23 to 58, with most over 30, holding positions as graduate teaching assistants, adjunct instructors, and/or part-time faculty in community college and public University settings. About half are women of colour, about one-quarter identify as sexual minorities, the majority have advanced degrees. Their teaching positions have been held in disciplines ranging from History to Political Science to English, with the majority teaching for Women's Studies at least once in the course of their work in higher education. Some have taught in multiple departments and college settings simultaneously. Their relationships to me vary: some are intimate friends, some are former colleagues, some are new acquaintances recruited through word of mouth snowball sampling, and some have been students in graduate seminars that I've led for the last few years. Some have purposely left teaching for other forms of work.
Although women expressed a range of emotions about their work and those who left teaching did so for varied reasons, one area that evoked consistent feelings of frustration, rage and powerlessness was their constant uncertainty about the availability of work.
Women reported feelings of vulnerability, insecurity, anxiety, and fear regarding their temporary, often term by term contracts. Feelings of competitiveness over resources imagined as "scarce" (Nelson 4) commonly accompanied such insecurity; for example, several instructors felt resentful when they discovered others earning wages of 100 to 300 dollars more per term for similar teaching positions. Several expressed frustration over limited, shared, or regularly changing office space. One woman refused to use the office she was assigned with two other teachers because she felt symbolically slighted by her department and utilizing this space necessitated negotiating scheduling complexities with equally busy office mates. As a more extreme example, an instructor who had been offered one of few summer teaching slots available in her department felt concerned enough for her job security and its 1,100.00 monthly pay check that she taught the first class of the term-against doctor's orders-the day after undergoing surgery.
Such employment uncertainty can also shape orientations to time and money, such as describing a nine-month contract in terms of its relatively "long-term" nature and a one hundred dollar raise as "fortunate." In addition, race and class positioning can undermine women's feelings of entitlement to basic knowledge about their working conditions amid employment uncertainties. One woman of colour with limited financial means who had been assigned a coveted teaching section never asked, and was never told, how much money she would earn for the position and when she would be paid.
The Possibilities of Auto/ethnography Autobiographical and autoethnographic work offer useful avenues for ushering teachers' "life worlds out of obscurity" (Grumet 61), for expanding feminist work on "narrative forms" (Smith and Watson 11), and for emphasizing the inherently social and political elements of what can appear in isolation as solitary and individual experiences. Indeed, feminist educational scholars have long viewed autobiographical work on teacher's lives as a viable vehicle for contributing to understanding the ways that women navigate male-dominated educational institutions and the masculine character of academic work. In "The Resistance of Women Academics," Janet Miller argued that self-reflection serves teachers by contributing to the percolation of resistance in arenas that encourage women's alienation, by bridging the private and the public, by linking the personal with the political (100-107). Similarly, philosopher and educator Madeleine Grumet has viewed female teachers as "working in the shadows cast by the institutions of the public world." She stressed the importance of crafting and probing teacher's autobiographical accounts to work against invisibility, to "draw our life worlds out of obscurity," and to expand the borders of knowledge systems that have been historically patriarchal (Grumet 61). The use of the word "our" in her reflections explicitly positions her within the identity of "teacher," the history of shadowed labour she identifies, and the auto/biographical imperative she advocates as antidote to erasure. Autobiographical and autoethnographic work also offer compelling ways to narrate the inherently social and political character of female contingent teachers' experiences. Simultaneously "outsiders within," contingent teachers contribute classroom, grading and advising labour foundational to the current academic system but have little institutional authority and few safe, viable avenues through which to enunciate publicly the contours of their daily experiences. The popularity of the weblog created by an anonymous Ph.D. who called herself "The Invisible Adjunct" speaks to this phenomenon (http://www.invisibleadjunct.com/). A woman in her thirties, The Invisible Adjunct described her futile quest for a tenure-track appointment and the years she spent hovering on the fringes of academic departments in part-time teaching roles. She captured national attention by articulating contemporary predicaments for Ph.D.s seeking permanent jobs in the academy amidst structural changes that include an overproduction of humanities graduates, the decreasing availability of tenure-track positions, and the increasing reliance on contingent instructors. Significantly, when she retired from both the weblog and fringe-dwelling academic work in early 2004, she remained anonymous. It is precisely this spirit of anonymity and safety that autoethnography offers for conveying collective experiences of female contingent workers selectively without exposing individuals in ways that might complicate employment circumstances often experienced as tenuous. Indeed, concerns about anonymity are palpable among women in this study: A number shared circumstances "off the record;" one spoke in generalities when conversation turned to acquaintances known to both of us; one asked me initially to withhold her ethnicity when excerpting her interviews. In this latter case, despite the importance of heritage to this instructor's identity and to elements of her teaching, she preferred to remain ethnically unmarked in text rather than making herself vulnerable by risking recognition. Characterizing some work experiences and interactions with co-workers in negative terms might have interpersonal repercussions for her work life. Whether real or imagined, these concerns speak to the tangible stakes in visibility that women perceive. Grumet's metaphor of teachers' "shadowed" labour and the illuminating potential of auto/biographical work are useful for framing aspects of contingent teachers' experiences. Stefano Harney and Frederick Moten claim that academic workers often "disavow" the social dimensions of their labour and their "mutual interdependence." Such individualized notions of subjectivity can undermine the possibilities of recognizing shared experiences and collective organizing (154-155). Similarly, women in this study often maintained steadfast silences about varied conditions in their teaching lives with friends, colleagues, students. Details about our comparatively low wages, meagre benefits, and unstable employment conditions are often cloaked in humour, resentment, and shame or omitted altogether in interactions.
Sensing that the contours of their working lives may be unfamiliar to many both inside and outside the university, women sometimes choose silence rather than risk that glimpses of their minimal institutional power, benefits, or pay may undermine their professional authority or be misconstrued as reflections of value. As one graduate teaching assistant said, students "don't know the difference between the positions that are available, the kinds of teachers they could have." And she never told them. To maintain authority in the classroom and deflect any gendered assessments of her abilities that might have arisen from student knowledge of her institutional status, she remained silent about academic hierarchies and her place within them. Given that teacher's lives can embody the gendered and racialized institutional inequities that constitute the curriculum of the social justice oriented fields in which they teach, such silences can be awkward and contradictory to bear. Power differentials and pay are similarly cloaked through humour. When students mobilize prominent customer/product metaphors too readily in their interactions ("you're getting paid for this"), one instructor handles it with simple classroom witticisms such as "yes, try not to bump into my Mercedes in the parking lot on the way out." Such remarks may reveal morsels of auto/biographical teacher "truth," perhaps, but they are of limited value in capturing the social, shared, and collective elements of layered and complex experiences. Compare the tenor of the extemporaneous "Mercedes" response with that of the following statement made in a private interaction:
Although these separate examples capture connected elements of teachers' labour, the emotion, gravity, and detail with which they do so differ dramatically. The light-hearted classroom banter contrasts strikingly with the intensity of the emotion shared during a private dinner between two similarly-positioned women. Paired, these examples offer glimpses into silences operating in contingent teachers' daily lives that obscure knowledge about their gendered experiences, working conditions, and the emotional reverberations of such conditions from public discourse. These contrasting passages also suggest the potential for shared identification foundational to auto/ethnography to create conditions of possibility for the enunciation of less visible aspects of daily experiences. Utilizing this space between "traditional" ethnography and auto/biography provides a public and anonymous venue for articulating the experiences of women who sometimes feel as if they are mere apparitions floating through the spaces of higher educational institutions with occasional moments of recognition and appreciation. My own experiences, allegiances, and investments as a contingent instructor offer a potential basis for shared understanding and serve as a reminder of the collective and political elements of teachers' personal experiences.
Indeed, drawing from John Berger, the statement "'I am' an adjunct instructor" suggests a form of biography: "'I am' includes all that has made me so. It is more than a statement of immediate fact: it is already biographical" (Berger 370-71). Exploring my subject position as a contingent teacher, my experiences as a graduate student, and my "relationship" to the field of inquiry-experiences of contingent instructors-could be considered auto/biographical labour, a kind of "homework" in Kamala Visweswaran's use of the term, a way of making sense of my own experiences through researching the lives of others (Visweswaran 111; St Pierre 261). Such an interpretation is persuasive if we add Norman Fairclough's understanding of textual interpretation as a "dialectical process resulting from the various interpretive resources people bring to bear on the text" (Fairclough 71). Lived experience and reflection upon it, certainly, are among those resources.
Auto/biographical Tales In The Auto/biographical I, Liz Stanley argues that the auto/biographical genre has historically reflected codified ideas of whose lives are worthy of study-typically men, typically those deemed great men. Feminist auto/biographical work has often grappled with these exclusionary historical realities by foregrounding women's accounts of theirs and others' lives as also worthy of study, their personal narratives offerings to a fuller, more textured portrait of humankind. To draw from this auto/biographical framework in this research, then, would be to foreground the implicit message that these contingent teachers, too, are lives and activities worthy of study. Indeed, this tale of contingent teachers' contributions to others' lives, like those of any teacher, could easily be told. One instructor shares a teaching evaluation at the close of her term that expresses exactly those sentiments:
Auto/biographical scholarship can serve as an arena to mark and affirm in visible ways the impact any given teacher might have on individual students. Indeed, these student affirmations may offer one of the few tangible palliatives for contingent teachers in light of their low wages and transitory positions. However, praising noteworthy contributions of individual instructors, our "accomplishments" and "successes" amidst our "oppression," might concretize further, as Stanley cautions, which features constitute female lives "worthy" of study. Auto/biographical experiences of under-compensated instructors might also be used to tell another kind of tale, one that laments the passing of an idealized and nostalgic liberal academic past and mourns contemporary constructions of higher education. As Bill Readings has noted, this kind of tale is readily available; reading the data through this lens carries the potential of marking the effects of cultural shifts on individual lives and raising critical consciousness about instructors' contemporary plights. An e-mail I've written to a graduate teaching assistant captures this kind of tale:
I read the increasing metaphorical mobilization of categories like "migrant worker" and "sweatshop worker" to describe contingent instructors partly through the lens of mourning the loss of past, perhaps idealized, conditions in higher education. Conceptual linkages between adjuncts and farm/factory workers are drawn in efforts to raise consciousness about shifts in higher education and the material circumstances accompanying such shifts in language that will make such changes intelligible in public discourse. A taxonomic Cliff-Notes of sorts, these linkages gain purchase because the labour forms they describe appear to share not only similar origins in transnational economic shifts and an epistemology of consumerism but also some similarities in sex and race demographics. Thus, they invite metaphorical uses of and analytical comparisons to the fast food industry, migrant labour, sweatshops, piecework (Thompson 278), and factories (Aronowitz 1-14) as well as ideologies of consumerism and disposability (Pratt 275). The increasing legibility of these frameworks and their material and conceptual linkages are evident in instructors' descriptions:
Drawing from Sandoval's analysis that "hegemonic classifications operate as sets of imaginary spaces socially constructed to severely limit what is possible," (5-6) we can ask questions about the implications of such steady and cavalier mobilizations of "migrant" metaphors. Certainly the comparisons convey where instructors off the tenure track feel like they rest on the academic hierarchy. However, this imagined analogue also might wreak epistemic violence on subaltern subjects in Spivak's sense by glossing over fundamental differences between the social position of field hands/immigrant maids and the cultural capital and wider choices of highly educated but underemployed teachers. Such language collapses significant race, class, mobility, and citizenship distinctions, among others, in an instant. Despite the troubling implications of these terms, one explanation for their common use might be the terms' emotional resonances as linguistic vehicles for enunciating the rage, despair, and impotency of underemployed educated professionals, who, outraged at structural conditions beyond their control, feel "reduced" to field workers in their teaching work. In other words, drawing conceptual linkages between teaching and agricultural labour may capture for some the despair that the American dream or even a reasonable standard of living feel out of reach even for those whose hard work has earned graduate credentials with its accompanying cultural capital. This emotion is clearly visible among women I interviewed. To return to a previous excerpt:
Similarly, Aronowitz's "knowledge factory" (Aronowitz 1) springs to mind as interviewees describe the physical cost and deadening repetitive activities involved in teaching introductory classes over time. One instructor describes,
Although riddled with conceptual dangers, language that captures such feelings of despair might be perceived by some instructors as the most viable conduit for casting into sharp relief the contradictions between the rhetorical mission of higher education and the labour standards sustaining it. Contemporary students who "don't care much about their education" and signal a consumerist mindset to the teacher cited above further exemplify changes in the University that merit alarm. "Migrancy" and "piecework" might articulate for some the mourning and loss accompanying the decline of the liberal university that force teachers to concern themselves with "mere money matters" when they want to be focused on the texture and richness of their lessons.
Teaching, particularly feminist teaching, is depicted in this excerpt as an activity that transcends the polluting concerns of the market. She stresses, "this is...my life." This vision of feminist teaching as identity is another auto/biographical tale that can be told about the experiences of contingent teachers. For many of us, the classroom is an arena in which aspects of identity are expressed, elaborated, and challenged. Contemporary changes that reduce our contributions to mere informational exchange with wages and working conditions that contradict the significance of these teaching roles to sustaining higher education today may necessitate forms of scholarly representation and interpersonal expression that emphasize collectivity and visibility. Unionization efforts, networking, and supportive coalitions for contingent workers are all potential vehicles to strengthen a sense of collective identification. Another arena to work for such visibility is the classroom.
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