By Chris Storer, De Anza College

 

    The increase in contingent employment in higher education is a result of the past 40-50 years of academic employment practices, stemming from the impact of corporate managerial practices being applied to higher education. This has resulted in a nearly exclusive and inappropriate focus on fiscal matters, when the public good is really the only justification for public higher education, and should drive all decision making.

    In the long and sorry history of the profession of higher education, as fiscal pressures increased faculty workloads, the regular FT faculty have slowly abdicated their responsibility of shared governance, allowing their control of entry into the profession to be weakened. Decisions regarding entry into the profession have ceased to be made on the basis of the single set of professional standards established through the traditional tenure process. Rather, convenience and personal interests of the regular faculty have allowed the work of faculty professionals to be turned over to weakly monitored TAs, Grad. Assistants, part-time and full-time contingent faculty, all avoiding the professional rigor of being vetted by the tenure review processes which are needed to maintain the integrity of the profession and of higher education itself.

    This situation is similar to an electrician's apprenticeship program, where a good program is modified first to allow the hiring of "assistants" to merely pull wire, but once present on site, they began to be given additional tasks by the certified electricians (to free up the electricians from the undesirable grunt work) until soon the assistants are given whole projects with little professional supervision.

    The major difference between this situation and that of higher education is that, in electrical wiring, systems have been designed 

 

 

How We Got Here

 

 

to provide safety so that the result of shoddy work is only an inconvenience and not usually lethal, whereas, in the case of higher education, the fundamentals of program integrity and the holistic cognitive development of students are at risk. We have no systems in place, or even contemplated, to insure the service to the public good which validates the role of higher education in a democratic society.

    Similarly, it is instructive to think about what has happened to K-12 as the system has restricted the role of academic freedom and shared governance, turning the teachers into wage laborers in the guise of salaried professionals. The failures of the system are legend, and the cost in human lives and dreams are beyond measure, not to mention the social, political, and economic costs. The only response of those who want to protect their own power and interests has been to test outcomes and hold the teachers responsible for failure without giving them the professional time, academic freedom, and shared governance structures necessary to do the work education requires. Lower division undergraduate work  is now falling prey to the same set of narrow managerial blinders, and the upper division is not far behind.

    Where the work requires professionals, it should remain the work of professionals. Shared governance in higher education must remain universal in its inclusiveness f those with professional responsibilities and obligations. If some work is to be hired out to workers who have not been vetted by the tenure review processes established to assure the professionalism of  the faculty, then that work must be determined to be non-professional work by the full shared governance processes of the institution, and it must then be properly identified rather than sold as full credit instruction.

    If the tenure review process has been weakened by its response to the pressures of the modern academic environment, it must be redesigned with a goal of maintaining professional integrity in the service of the public good, not thrown out to be replaced by the failed structures of misapplied corporatization.

    All of this goes back to some of the initial concerns about unionization in the professions. Many professionals argued that the union focus was too exclusively on the personal interests of the worker and would thus undercut professional integrity. Others argued that the personal interests of professionals were dominated by the integrity of their profession so there was no conflict.

    History has proven both true in different circumstances, but more often than not the two points of view have worked together to obscure the importance of institutional integrity to the shared governance responsibilities of the faculty.  Many union oriented people have limited their focus to "working conditions and salaries" at the institutional level, while academic committees have tended to narrow their focus to the specialized  interests of departments.

    Thus, the shared governance responsibilities for the integrity of institutional  hiring structures has drifted in a sea of competing temporary interests with little concern for long term impacts on the institutional mission. Thus you get managers running schools with their major concern being money, instead of teachers running them with their major concern being students' education. Only be reversing this trend can the system be fixed.