Today in Bad Activisting

Not just today, but also today.

This morning, I saw this meme on Facebook, posted by somebody I trust and with accompanying links to news stories that document the situation. I reposted, with a note along the lines of, “If you’re less beer-snobby than I am…..” It didn’t take but a few minutes before the first (of now several) comments about the low quality of the beer on this list, and that’s what I’m interested in thinking about for a minute here.

Facebook call for Molson-Coors boycott in response to Toronto brewery lockout

It happens every time I post anything calling for people to boycott or avoid a product, a la: “I’d boycott Papa John’s, but their pizza sucks!” Or, “Chik Fil A is bigoty, but their chicken sucks!” You get the idea.

I’ve often wondered about those comments’ relevance. If you don’t like the food/beer/clothes/whatever, that’s your call; it just means you’re not in the audience for the boycott call. But today I realized my reaction goes a little further than that. I imagined being the person who sees that post, thinks, “Damn, I should read the comments to see if there’s more information here,” and the finds myself being insulted for my terrible taste, at which point I’m a lot less inclined to participate in a boycott.

If you see a call for a boycott of something and aren’t a customer of something, fine! But if you see somebody trying to organize an action, don’t undercut it by insinuating (or saying explicitly, but most of the time it’s unintentional) that anyone who might have listened to the call has poor taste. Think it if you want, but don’t say it where the actual audience for the thing can hear you.

Some thoughts on responding to accusations that faculty “aren’t teaching” during remote instruction

My university, West Chester University of PA, announced on Wednesday that we’ll be primarily remote again for Spring 2021. Responses to this news in social media have been… not all positive. Respondents, some apparently current students and their families/guardians, are accusing the faculty of “not teaching”; accusing the university of “stealing” from them; and so on. None of this is especially unique to us. I got on one of those threads this morning (Friday) and was responding to a “Faculty aren’t doing their jobs” comment when I realized the rhetorical complexity of the situation.

As I commented on a friend’s wall yesterday, I think one of the reasons students aim their angst at us is that we’re their primary point of contact for the university; I’ve asked most of 1,000 students over the years how many could name their academic dean and can count on my fingers and toes the number who said they could–and I didn’t check them on it. Also, for entirely understandable reasons, most people don’t really care much (or know) how decisions get made at our institutions, and “the faculty” become a proxy for “all the white collar employees.”

Responding to this situation is hard, especially where management/faculty relations are healthy, because the obvious responses sound self-aggrandizing/whingy (“Hey, cut us a break! We’re trying harder than you think!”) or like we’re deflecting blame onto managers who don’t deserve it either (“This wasn’t our decision, it was [insert title here]!”). Further, as I argued loudly on Facebook threads in last spring, every time we screech publicly about how much on-line education sucks and how much we hate doing it, we’re authorizing students to think less of it.

Honestly, I think the approach to these conversations, to the extent they’re worth having (and that’s open question, to be honest), looks something like this. There’s a way to make the point more gracefully than I’m about to, but in substance….

Many of you may in fact be less medically vulnerable to COVID-19 than faculty and staff are. But that doesn’t make us less vulnerable. Are you really asking us to risk our lives, or at least risk serious illness* for us and our own families, for our jobs? You could say that (hooray for free speech), but be honest about it. If that’s not what you mean, then please don’t say it. If you need support you aren’t getting, we can work on that. If you’re just disappointed that things aren’t normal, so are we. If you’re nervous about your future, we can talk about that too. But none of those conversations will go well if they begin with accusations that we** made this decision in spite of you or without regard for you, and that our best efforts to make this work are earning zero credit from you even for the attempt.

If you’re just angry and blowing steam, that’s entirely understandable. I hope that’s the case for most of you, at least.

*If you’re a COVID-denier, I’m not addressing that. Why bother?

**To be clear: President Fiorentino’s announcement emphasizes the scientific and public health policy reasons for the decision, for which I’m grateful. But he and the rest of the university’s management team know that most of the faculty have grave concerns about the safety of the campus if too many people are on it. I don’t want to undersell the extent to which most of us are relieved–not happy, but relieved–by this news.

Open Letter to Provost Zayaitz, Kutztown University re: COVID-19 notifications

Dear Provost Zayaitz:

I’m a WCU faculty member who’s been following the situation at Kutztown with regard to the university’s plans to emphasize face-to-face instruction this fall. A colleague posted on social media this morning a copy of a note you sent in which you indicate that faculty will not be notified if a COVID-19 positive student is one of their classes:

The university will not be informing faculty if a student/students in their classes tests positive due to HIPAA. However, it is possible that a student might self-disclose to you. I hope this is helpful.

That’s an alarming position for a number of reasons, not least of which is that CDC, HHS, and other federal guidelines are all clear that disclosures to prevent serious and imminent threats are well within the law. Put most directly by the Office of Civil Rights:

Health care providers may share patient information with anyone as necessary to prevent or lessen a serious and imminent threat to the health and safety of a person or the public – consistent with applicable law (such as state statutes, regulations, or case law) and the provider’s standards of ethical conduct. See 45 CFR 164.512(j). Thus, providers may disclose a patient’s health information to anyone who is in a position to prevent or lesson the serious and imminent threat, including family, friends, caregivers, and law enforcement without a patient’s permission. HIPAA expressly defers to the professional judgment of health professionals in making determinations about the nature and severity of the threat to health and safety. See 45 CFR 164.512(j).

It’s not against the law to notify people who are at significant risk of that risk. And if the university’s position is that the risk level isn’t clear enough to justify that legal position, that’s an even stronger reason to be cautious rather than cavalier. “We don’t know how dangerous it is, so let’s assume it isn’t” is a position I can’t believe anyone would take.

At the very least, it’s crucial that you revisit this decision about notifying faculty about infected students. Faculty must know if somebody with an infection is in our classes. Furthermore, given the certainty that this will happen, you need to issue clear guidance to the faculty about their rights and responsibilities to students who become infected. I know you’ve already done some of that, which makes it even more confusing that you expect faculty to comply with those directions but refuse to tell them who the directions apply to. Furthermore, it’s hard to understand how this position comports with any meaningful contact tracing. If students are in face to face classes, the faculty for those courses are obvious contacts.

We could nibble around the edges of the law all day long, but the simple fact of the matter is that your current position will harm the campus community by making it more dangerous for people to comply with your direction to teach face-to-face as much as possible. Please rethink this response to a simple question and recognize that your faculty are, in fact, taking on substantial personal risk to themselves. Don’t amplify that risk unnecessarily.

I appreciate the difficulty of running a complex institution in such circumstances, but this issue should be one of the simple ones. If you’re putting faculty at risk by making them teach face to face, you owe it to let them know if they’ve been exposed.

Thanks for listening, and I hope we can all get through this safely.

Seth Kahn, PhD

Professor of English

West Chester University

Union resolve revisited

[Note: This is my personal blog, and while I talk about some union work in this post, and I’m talking to union members–and non-members, and other people–I want to be clear that the claims are mine, not on behalf of the organization.]

Facebook Memories tells me that four years ago today, I wrote a post for the State APSCUF blog (which I can’t link to for some reason) in advance of our strike where I tried to articulate what I see as the key emotional stance of solidarity: resoluteness. We can be angry; we can be scared; we can be lots of other things. But the moment at which we resolve to stay together, arms linked (metaphorically while we’re socially distancing), we have tremendous power.

That reminder couldn’t be timed better as we approach Fall 2020 semester; across the PA State System of Higher Education, management’s willingness to hear and react humanely to our professional and personal concerns about safe working conditions is all over the place. Last week, West Chester University announced what I think is a model policy: most activities, including classes, will be online. Courses like clinicals, some labs, and some performance courses, will be face-to-face following strict safety protocols. Some campus common spaces and resources will be open and will follow strict safety protocols. We make everybody, including people who need access to campus, safer by sharply reducing the number of people who go there. A few days ago, East Stroudsburg University announced a similar policy.

At the other end of the spectrum, stories like this one from my friend and collaborator Amy Lynch-Biniek at Kutztown are appallingly common. I’ve heard from faculty at at least four universities that HR departments are rejecting requests for flexible work arrangements that aren’t specifically ADA-mandated. Faculty report being instructed to disclose confidential medical information and then being denied accommodations; being told if they don’t qualify for ADA accommodations that they can take unpaid FMLA leave (because we can all afford to go a semester or two without pay, amirite?); being told that childcare responsibilities aren’t the universities’ problem; you get the idea.

Our union’s response to such positions has been clear; these rejections of simple arrangements because the law doesn’t strictly require them are unacceptable morally (it’s inhumane to risk people’s lives where alternatives obviously exist) and professionally. Our chancellor was lavish in his praise of our emergency move online in Spring 2020, and his own System Redesign plan requires the exact pedagogical commitment to remote teaching that our institutions are denying so many of us. Apparently, we did something heroic and must keep doing it to save the system, but we can’t do it when the lives of tens of thousands of students, staff, and faculty are at risk from a global pandemic.

APSCUF President Jamie Martin responded to this…awkward logic in her remarks to the Board of Governors on July 17:

We are asking that our faculty be permitted to feel safe, that their concerns about their health and the health of their loved ones be taken seriously. My colleagues want to teach — they just do not want to become sick.

All of which leads to calls that are burbling up from faculty. Even those of us whose local management made smart decisions are angry and scared for our friends/colleagues/union siblings across the system. Faculty on campuses where local management is being inhumane have every reason to feel those and more. The call that’s emerging from the ground level takes on several different voices. A petition drafted by the APSCUF Statewide Mobilization Committee (disclosure: I chair the committee) calls on the Chancellor to recognize that faculty’s commitment to safety isn’t selfish but is motivated by the same concerns for our most vulnerable community members as he is. We need him to respect faculty’s decision-making about how we can best protect safety and do our best work, and he needs to tell his campus managers to do the same. A group of faculty at Shippensburg University are circulating a petition calling for online teaching across the system until safety protections for everyone are much stronger, and also calls for an array of justice-based overhauls around fighting white supremacy and other forms of bigotry. A Facebook post from Kevin Mahoney, APSCUF member and one of the best labor activists I know, calls on us to follow the lead of K-12 teachers around the country, and refuse to work until it’s safe for everyone–students, staff, and faculty alike.

As chair of the APSCUF Mobilization Committee, my primary responsibility is to work with the campus chairs to mobilize members at the direction of our leadership. For right now, that direction is to get signatures on the petition. I have also signed and promoted the Ship petition because I share its broad vision of how interconnected the issues of labor justice and racial justice are. I would commit in a second to a collective action aimed at refusing to threaten tens of thousands of lives for no discernible reason.

If you’re not resolved to the last one, then at least do the first two. And think hard about your reasons for hesitating to go further (there are explicable reasons). But we have about six weeks, in some cases not even, before students, staff, and faculty are made to return to conditions that aren’t safe for anyone and are profoundly threatening for many. Our system leadership needs to know that we will not sit idly while lives are risk. Let’s hope that saying collectively-but-quietly (via petition) is enough, but I’m asking you start thinking hard about what you’ll do if it isn’t.

“If they’re trying to save money, they should hire MORE adjuncts instead of firing them” is not helping

Too many times in the last several days, I’ve seen well-meaning faculty on Facebook responding to mass layoffs of NTT faculty by pointing out that “adjuncts cost less,” and if universities really want to save money, they should hire more adjuncts instead of fewer.

I will take as given that people saying this believe they’re making an argument for protecting adjunct faculty. But please think for a minute or two about the logic of this before you say it.

The reason they cost less is because of a terribly inequitable system.

If you mean to make an argument against exploiting the contingency of contingent faculty, just say that. Tossing faculty to the curb in the middle of a pandemic is a profoundly inhumane thing to do. It’s inhumane at any time.

Re-re-re-redux: Contingency Is Worse, Pandemic Edition

Earlier this week, I talked with a reporter researching a story on the impacts of COVID-19 on higher ed. Among a flood of things I said to her, the one I’m left still thinking most about is: right now, universities are understandably nervous about what’s going to happen with enrollments in the upcoming year. But too many of them are reacting to that nervousness by hammering even harder than usual on the precarity of their contingent faculty members. The list of universities that has announced cuts to their adjunct/contingent/NTT staff is growing every day: Rutgers, Miami of Ohio, Ohio U, UMass-Boston, several Cal State University system campuses, St. Edwards University, and those are just the ones I remember off the top of my head.

For years, managers have been saying they need more “flexible” (read: contingent) faculty. Crassly paraphrased, their rationale is because they never know when they’ll need to let a bunch of people go because of enrollment dips, or [reasons]. Ironically, at this moment, they still don’t know whether there will be enrollment dips, so they’re making decisions about people’s livelihoods based on guesses. And they can do it because contingent positions are designed for this exact move.

Even in less fraught times, as I’ve been arguing for years, contingent teaching positions are more stressful than secure positions. Coupled with low pay and crappy working conditions, the possibilities of suddenly losing work, or having your schedule shifted capriciously at the last second, are always hovering and palpable if not actually happening (and they do happen quite a lot).

The COVID-19 pandemic is exponentially increasing the problems of contingency. Social media (including several closed FB groups I follow, which is why I’m not linking to them here) is full of examples:

• Lecturers with multi-year contracts that are supposed to roll over automatically learning that those renewals are not forthcoming.
• Layoffs like the institutions I listed above.
• Fears among some non-renewed faculty that after soaking in some desperation, their universities will offer to rehire them at lower wages into less secure positions. [UPDATED 5/14: The more I think about it, the more I’m concerned that this is a baked-in part of the strategy. Corporations have fired workers, let them stew for a little while, and then “generously” offered to give them their jobs back for less money, dozens of times, and that kind of corporatism has certainly found a foothold in US higher ed.]
• Threats of pay reductions [which is awfully nasty to people who are already severely underpaid, y’know?] and paycheck delays.
• Classes cancelled weeks, if not months, earlier than they’d usually be, or taken from adjunct faculty and given to tenured faculty as overloads.
• Adjunct faculty being told they can teach enough courses that they’d ordinarily qualify for health insurance they’re denied, but not being given access they’re almost certainly legally entitled to.
• Mixed messaging, at best, about unemployment insurance claims and whether their institutions will fight them.
• Out-of-pocket costs for equipment/access to accommodate the move most of us have made to remote/online teaching. As an example, I know at least ten people who teach in multiple institutions, who all wound up paying for their own private Zoom accounts because their various school accounts were conflicting.

Two more things I’ll say about this list: (1) it could be a lot longer, but you get the idea; and (2) you get the idea because almost nothing on here is actually new–it’s just a whole lot worse because (pardon the French) we’re in a [bleeping] pandemic.

As part of the series of posts this re-re-re-redux is re-re-revisiting, I once wrote:

For years now, I’ve been arguing that a first principle in the campaign for contingent faculty equity/equality is:

Don’t abuse the contingent status (i.e., the ability to hire/fire at will) of your contingent faculty as a tool for solving other people’s problems.

That’s exactly what’s happening right now. The people who earn the least, have the least job security, and face the most stressful versions of the job we do are being treated the worst because their positions make it easy, by design.

If you’ve gotten this far and aren’t sure what you might do to help, there are lots of efforts happening all over the place. One place where a lot of them circulate is the Facebook page for Tenure for the Common Good. Feel free to leave others in the comments. It’s not hard to find people doing good work with contingent faculty for academic labor equality. If for some reason you haven’t taken the time to join us, the middle of a [bleeping] crisis seems like a good time to fix that.

 

 

Open Letter to the President and Board Chair of the University of California System

I just sent this letter to President Napolitano and Board Chair Perez.

***

President Napolitano and Chairman Perez:

I’m a faculty member in Pennsylvania who has been following the situation at UCSC (and now Davis and Santa Barbara). Yesterday, news broke of the termination of 54 graduate workers because of their participation in the strike.

The union I belong to, APSCUF, sent you a statement on Thursday in which we pointed out, among other things, that firing striking graduate students accomplishes nothing useful. It doesn’t get the work they’ve been withholding done any faster. It doesn’t make housing more affordable for the people you hire in their places. It serves no purpose whatsoever except to be punitive. Worse, you’re punishing people whose concerns you’ve agreed with but refused to redress, and firing them seems like an effort to erase the problem rather than fix it.

I can assure you, having participated in a strike, that nobody takes the decision lightly. It’s a terrible thing to have to do. Furthermore, while I recognize that they are violating policy, the fact that they have to violate policy to do it should be reinforcing the desperation they’re feeling rather than, well, whatever you’re attributing to them that makes you treat them as disposable.

Therefore, I’m writing–as an individual faculty member, not claiming to represent my university, my system, or my union–with these calls.

First, rescind the firing letters. That was a terrible mistake. You are damaging the lives of people who have worked hard to redress a serious issue, and dismissing them accomplishes nothing.

Second, work in good faith with the students to solve a serious problem that you, as leaders, have the power to address and so far just haven’t. The simple fact of the matter is that the labor situation for graduate students at these universities is untenable, and nothing will change that except supporting them better.

I sincerely hope you can understand why your decision to fire 54 students who are desperately trying to improve their working situation so that they can serve your institution better is Orwellian and needs to be reversed. And I hope you’re noticing that national and international press are covering the situation. We’re all looking to you to do the right thing.

Sincerely,

Seth Kahn, PhD

Professor of English

West Chester University of PA

Tenure isn’t the problem; exceptionalism is the problem

Making the rounds on Facebook currently is the article “Tenure is Not Worth Fighting For” in the Chronicle of Higher Ed.

The title is clickbait. Historian Greg Afinogenov isn’t arguing that nobody should have due process protections or academic freedom, or that we should just give in to the anti-intellectual forces of hegemonic neoliberal capitalism (the new normal!), that tenure is anti-innovation, or any of the conventional anti-tenure nonsense we’re all too familiar with.

Instead, he makes two points, one that shouldn’t be controversial, one I can see why it raises some hackles.

The uncontroversial claim: every worker deserves workplace protections against at-will firing and capricious discipline. I won’t invite you to “fight me” on this because I don’t even want to know if you don’t agree.

The more controversial claim: faculty don’t do anything all that special to confer/demand protections other people don’t get.

When we advocate for increasing tenure-track hiring, we do so in the hope of breaking down at least some of this hierarchy. But why should graduate students [and non-tenure-track faculty!] — who have been leading unionization drives and campaigning against abusive and harassing faculty members around the country — be left out of the charmed circle of academic freedom? What about other campus workers, such as janitors, administrative personnel, and food-service staff, who keep universities running and know more than most faculty members about what goes on behind the scenes? The idea that there is a neatly bounded group of people whose occupation entitles them and only them to speak to civic concerns is hard to sustain.

He doesn’t use this term, but he’s calling out tenured faculty for a kind of exceptionalism. I’m not going to spend a whole bunch of time unpacking the term exceptionalism; in short, it’s the idea that a class or group of people (often a nation) is special and thus excepted from rules/norms that govern everyone else.

Afinogenov isn’t calling on tenured faculty to forego the protections that tenure offers. He’s calling on us to stop claiming those protections for our own and not fighting for others to have them also.

Reversing the cancer of academic neoliberalism and upending the increasingly rigid hierarchy of faculty positions would require the kind of financial and political investment that can only be produced by a broad-based social movement with a much more sweeping agenda. There are signs that a movement like this is building today, but it is hard for academics to take part in it as long as we demand privileges that other workers won’t share.

You might buck against the term “privileges,” believing that academic freedom and due process are necessary for academic work. Academe needs them (I applaud the thousands of NTT faculty and graduate instructors who work without them and do well–but you shouldn’t have to). Again, the problem is when we make ourselves the exceptional class of workers who need and deserve such strong protection.

Maybe you, if you’re a tenured faculty member (or a tenured K-12 teacher), haven’t had this conversation, but I’ve had it dozens of times.

Person at busstop/gym/coffeeshop when they learn I’m a professor: Tenure is silly. Nobody deserves to have a job for life.
Me: That’s not really what tenure is. Tenure ensures we can’t get fired without due process, and that we have the autonomy to make professional decisions about our work. Why shouldn’t everyone have that?
PABGC: ….

A meme circulates on union social media feeds from time to time that says, basically, “Don’t complain about my union wages. Organize and fight for your own!” I feel that, but Afinogenov is helping me clarify some discomfort I’ve also felt with it.

The part I fully feel: don’t blame unions for the fact that your boss can screw you. The part I’m queasy about: go fix it yourself.

I’m not queasy about the claim that the protections of tenure are important. And to be clear, I don’t think many of us go out of our way to deny similar protections to other workers (although I’ve seen a lot of faculty claim that others “don’t need it”). But when we claim them unto ourselves and don’t fight for them more broadly, the practical effect is the same: we sound like we’re declaring ourselves exceptional, and thus shouldn’t be surprised when others think we’re being self-aggrandizing and arrogant.

Abusing Contingency for the Sake of Political Expediency

Four years ago, I wrote a post called Abusing Contingency for the Sake of Logistics, in which I argued that it’s an abuse of human decency to use a contingent faculty member’s (or any contingent worker’s, for that matter) contingent status as a way to solve a problem that has nothing to do with the faculty member’s performance.

Friday morning, the AAUP’s Academe blog reported on the firing of an adjunct faculty member at Babson College in Massachusetts. Read the story there for details; for now, what’s relevant is that the faculty member, Asheen Phansey, said something snarky on Twitter, drew a bunch of right wing outrage that got directed towards college management, and was summarily dismissed even though he apologized for the post.

I’ve made this point before, most recently in a talk at the National Communication Association conference in November 2019:

Fresno State University was confronted twice between Fall 2017 and Spring 2018 with faculty who posted “inflammatory” tweets that weren’t work-related. Lars Maischak in August 2017 tweeted “Trump must hang!” Randa Jarrar responded to the hagiography of Barbara Bush after Bush’s  death in April 2018 with a profane tweet about how much of a racist Bush was. When Trump supporters screamed at the university to fire Maischak, they did. When right-wingers screamed at Jarrar, she responded, “They can’t fire me. I have tenure!” In response to demands that she be fired, the university disowned the content of her tweets but explained that she has First Amendment rights they can’t contravene, and rightly didn’t discipline her.

The NTT person got fired, and the tenured person didn’t. And for the record, no, I’m not wishing she’d been disciplined.

What really surprised me about this situation was the reaction I got when I said something on Facebook about Randa Jarrar’s proclamation that tenure would protect her. My post said, basically, that I wish she hadn’t invoked tenure as cover for already-protected free speech because it just invites people who hate tenure to blame it for protecting her, and worse, by implication, asserts that non-tenure-track faculty shouldn’t be protected for their speech.

So here we are again. Asheen Phansey has been fired for a tweet. If you’re inclined to say something about this, and if you’re concerned in the least bit about academic labor, you should be, feel free to use or ignore any of this letter I sent to President Spinelli at Babson:

Dear President Spinelli:

I read with grave dismay on Friday morning about the firing of Asheen Phansey for his admittedly bad-taste social media post satirizing President Trump’s threats against Irani cultural sites.

Whatever your opinion about the social media post itself, even if it weren’t satire and even had Phansey not apologized profusely for it, your willingness to dismiss him without even a sniff of due process is distressing. According to the AAUP, your own college website makes clear that there are governance standards that have been broken in this case. The fact that he’s adjunct faculty, and also serves in a staff position, does not absolve the college of following your own rules and standards.

Worse, and without knowing your personal politics (obviously) maybe I’m just encouraging you by saying this, by giving in to the whims of a handful of loud rightwing anti-academics, you’ve encouraged them to do more of the same every single time anyone associated with any college or university says something they don’t like. I wish there were a polite way to say this, but your college’s response is as dismal a failure of leadership as I can recall seeing. If I were a faculty member there, I’d wonder if there are any circumstances in which I could expect you to protect and support me.

As a faculty member, it saddens me to no end to know that I have colleagues anywhere who so easily get hung out to dry when they say something a handful of highly reactive people don’t approve of. It scares me to know that I have colleagues at Babson who may not feel like they can do or say anything the least bit controversial. It distresses me to know that a minor mistake and an apology are firing offenses. None of this is right.

On behalf of Prof Phansey, the faculty of your institution, and of adjunct faculty everywhere who live in fear of dismissal over nothing, and whose fears you’ve now reinforced, I encourage you to reverse the firing decision and allow Prof Phansey due process as provided by the faculty senate and your own governing documents. Academics all over the US are watching to see how this goes. You have an opportunity to reverse a terrible error and provide a model for how to handle a faculty member’s mistake, his contrition, and a political subculture’s belief that it gets to make the rules for everyone.

Thanks for your attention, and I dearly hope to see public updates that you’ve done the right thing.

Seth Kahn, PhD

Open Letter to Managers Who Expect Contingent Faculty to Prepare for Courses But Won’t Compensate Them When Those Courses Are Yanked

Dear Administrator/Manager:

Around the beginning of every academic term, contingent faculty report the same story. They were scheduled to teach a course, and spent the time any faculty member would preparing for it, but something requires you to cancel or reassign it: a tenured faculty member needs to fill out their workload; or a change in time or day of the course meeting means the section conflicts with the contingent faculty member’s obligations elsewhere, especially if they’re freeway-flying; or…. I understand that sometimes circumstances call for changes in schedules and workload assignments, and that you don’t intend to harm your contingent faculty even though they’re the ones who are, in fact, harmed.

Taking work from faculty who have prepared in good faith to do it is bad enough, even when explicable. Worse, and nearly as common, is how often the faculty who spent time preparing for those courses are refused compensation for the preparation itself. As a labor issue, this practice is unethical on its face. Your employees* are doing work that benefits your organization, and is in fact de facto required (more on this below). You should pay them for doing it. You might cry poverty, but that doesn’t change the logic.

And if that logic doesn’t convince you, I hope this will. Think about the message you send when you won’t pay them for preparation. You’re telling them (and everyone else) that preparation is worthless–literally. Is that really what you want to say? Or worse than worthless, depending on your calculus: preparation is a leisure activity, or valuable only as an exercise in self-fulfillment, or as a donation to the institution. Except we know that none of those is true. If your faculty are unprepared for their teaching assignments, that damages both their future prospects and your institution. The practice of denying compensation for preparations while punishing faculty who don’t donate their preparation time is exploitative at best. And the impact of that multiplies when it happens to the faculty whose positions pay the least and are most tenuous.

There are institutions that have addressed this problem; for your convenience, here’s a very partial list.

Ithaca College, Article 22F

University of Michigan Lecturers Employees Organization, Article 12.D.1

Loyola University-Chicago, Article 30

Wayne State University, Article 16

Western Michigan University, Article 18.3

Connecticut State University System, Article 4.6.1

University of Massachusetts-Boston, Article 21.2

American University, Appendix 2

Community College of Vermont, Article 20.H

Northeastern University, Article 9, Section 16

Lane Community College, Article 34.8

University of San Francisco, Article 11.5

I found those with a Facebook query and about 30 minutes of Googling. Most of the contracts SEIU has negotiated for contingent and/or other non-tenure-track faculty have this kind of provision in them; there are plenty of others as well. You’ll also notice that the level of compensation ranges widely, as do the means of calculating it. I have opinions and preferences among those, but for now, the important points are:

1. Reasonable people do this it’s worth it to the institution not to reinforce the message that time spent preparing is time wasted when contingency rears its head.

2. The work contingent faculty do is valuable just like the work tenure-track and tenured faculty do, and to treat their labor as disposable just because the law says you can is rotten.

As a manager/administrator, you have both financial and academic/professional responsibilities to your institution. Sacrificing the ability of your contingent faculty to succeed by telling them they shouldn’t prepare for courses they may not wind up teaching meets neither of those responsibilities, and neither does extorting their preparations for free by threatening not to employ them if they don’t donate their work to you.

Sincerely,

Seth Kahn, PhD
Professor of English, West Chester University of PA

*I can hear some of you saying, “They’re not our employees when they’re in between contracts.” Technically true, perhaps, but how many of you would deploy that same logic if one of those faculty suddenly drew national attention to themselves for an inflammatory social media post and was identified publicly as faculty at your institution? Would you honestly respond, “Well, they posted that over Winter Break, so it’s not our problem?” I didn’t think so.