{"id":1701,"date":"2020-07-30T12:41:58","date_gmt":"2020-07-30T12:41:58","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/digitalfeministcollective.net\/?p=1701"},"modified":"2020-07-31T11:58:01","modified_gmt":"2020-07-31T11:58:01","slug":"gutter","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/digitalfeministcollective.net\/index.php\/2020\/07\/30\/gutter\/","title":{"rendered":"Reach for the Gutter"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

by Dawn Marlan<\/a>, 30 July 2020<\/p>\n\n\n\n

A few long weeks ago, I submitted an essay to the Digital Feminist Collective about my position as Career Faculty at a state university. In the midst of a pandemic, the problems of structural inequity associated with such positions become more urgent, whether they concern job security or access to health care. The time seemed ripe to describe an experience about which people are usually silent.<\/span><\/p>\n

That was before a police officer killed George Floyd in cold blood, and protests against racism and police brutality gained renewed intensity and attention. It was before that officer was charged with murder, drawing attention to the murders of Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery, and countless others. It was before moves were made to disband the Minneapolis Police Department, and before confederate statues started coming down.<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Finally, <\/span>it seems like we might be on the verge of real change.<\/span> We can imagine a world, for example, in which fewer Black men will be incarcerated for petty drug charges, and one in which victims of domestic abuse will have social workers show up on their doorstep rather than men with guns. Coming on the heels of a \u201crevolutionary\u201d impulse that is altering the Democratic party platform, the current protests also allow us to imagine a world that considers the intersections of racialized, gendered, and international vulnerability in academic labor, highlighted further by the racialized vulnerability to the impact of Covid-19.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Both the pandemic and the protests are forcing universities to make changes they would not have contemplated on this scale before. For example, the president <\/span>of my state university has finally agreed to rename a building he had previously (after much study) decided to retain, since the namesake\u2019s \u201cabhorrent\u201d racist views had \u201cundergone a metamorphosis\u201d after the Civil War. But while symbolic changes are significant and have incalculable effects, we must continue to apply pressure for structural changes to our institutions. The pandemic both exacerbates very real threats faced by those in non-tenure track positions and exposes the extent to which the university resists any challenge to its self-conception and its entrenched culture of petrified relations.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Non-tenure track positions are disproportionately filled by underrepresented minorities and by women, whose interests here are bound together. <\/span>According to a recent study from the TIAA Institute, most of the slight increase in faculty diversity in the last twenty years has been in \u201cthe most precarious positions\u201d (<\/span>Inside Higher Ed, <\/span><\/i>August 22, 2016). I would like to describe my own experience of occupying such a precarious position in a time of crisis.<\/span><\/p>\n

***<\/span><\/p>\n

Ever since the shelter-in-place orders sent shockwaves through the university, and the administration scrambled to respond, my job has been at risk. The university realized that, faced with the prospect of prolonged online education, it could lose a substantial portion of its funding, because students might decide that the cost is disproportionate to the value of remote learning.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

An off-hand conversation with a colleague in a situation like mine alerted me to a danger I had not fully considered before. She told me that her course-load had been reduced to five a year, putting her below the \u201chalf-time\u201d status that comes with health insurance. To stay insured, Career Faculty need to teach six a year, one course more than a full-time load for a tenure line. She was filled with anxiety because her husband had pre-existing conditions and she did not feel safe relying on his insurance.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

I had always felt well-protected, one of the many delusions of whiteness, although so much of my experience has reinforced my sense of social strength. Examples are arbitrary, but also endless. As a white woman schooled in conventional femininity, I\u2019ve been favored in housing applications. I get friendly warnings for traffic violations. I dress up in airports to give myself bargaining power. I pursue an impractical vocation believing that things will \u201cwork out.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

My whiteness and my education enable a certain magical thinking that\u2019s allowed me to operate without paying the kind of attention to economic reality that would be unthinkable for people who don\u2019t share these privileges. My kids and I are on my husband\u2019s insurance plan. Those for whom such precarity is a part of everyday existence would never be so easily comforted by the thought that they might rely on someone else for their health and safety. Whereas, I thought I had nothing to fear. Then the pandemic turned the world upside down.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

But a world-in-the-making is a world that can be re-thought. It\u2019s one where old assumptions can be challenged. I\u2019d like to begin with an assumption favored by corporations, namely that in moments of scarcity, employees must be fired to protect the company\u2019s bottom line. This has always been the university\u2019s <\/span>modus operandi<\/span><\/i>.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

But what if those being discarded were among the university\u2019s richest resources? What if this conventional tactic were an act of self-immolation that would squander the very abundance the institution desperately needs to preserve?\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

***<\/span><\/p>\n

I graduated from the University of Chicago with a PhD in Comparative Literature and a child on each hip, surviving a ten-year stint as a grad student by virtue of sheer stubbornness and a touch of masochism. The prevailing culture of single-minded devotion to the profession meant that some looked askance at my decision to get pregnant at age thirty, which constituted a sort of betrayal.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

My colleagues can probably imagine the circumstances that landed me in my position\u2014that of Career Faculty, sometimes called Non-Tenure Track Faculty, or Adjuncts. We teach as much as Tenure Track Faculty when we are working part time, earning a dollar to their two or three, without insurance and without job security.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

My husband had tenure by the time I was ready for the job market. He is eight years older. If I had decided to take a tenure-track job in another city, it would have meant splitting up our family, or asking my husband to leave his job for mine. We would have given up job security and a more substantial income without solving the problem of one us being underemployed.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

No one trains ten years for a profession they don\u2019t intend to practice. But life happens. Part-time teaching allowed me to write in modes that the tenure clock and the university culture would have prevented. Writing fiction was the silver lining to my disenfranchisement.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

I have watched peers apply for jobs without the burden of considering how that job might affect a partner or a dependent. I have witnessed some of them land jobs, buoyed by their partners\u2019 clout. Whether attached to things we possess or the burdens we lack, our arbitrary privileges increase productivity and yet are read as merit. Once deemed meritorious, one\u2019s accolades grow, just as being out of \u201cthe game\u201d tends to produce more indifference to its rules and fashions.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

That \u201cficto-critical” traditions and poetics (and affect in general) are now in fashion might seem vindicating, except that the university only recognizes formal experiments by those who paid enough of a debt to traditional scholarship\u2014which one does (and has to do) when one has the privilege of being in the game. When one has a job, one does what one must to keep it. When one doesn\u2019t, one is freer to write in less traditional scholarly or more experimental modes, a habit that can then be used by the university to justify one\u2019s place teetering on the edge of the academy. This circular logic is crystal clear to me. But sometimes I wonder if my colleagues think that I am where I am, and they are where they are, because they\u2019re worthier, kind of the way rich people often think about the poor.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

***<\/span><\/p>\n

I was anxious about the Coronavirus from the outset. I had vividly imagined what I thought were worst-case scenarios, all of them centered on losing the people I love. But I hadn\u2019t quite realized that if my husband died, I would also lose my house and health insurance. The serendipitous social strength I enjoy in the world could instantaneously evaporate.<\/span><\/p>\n

My economic privilege makes my institutional vulnerability hard to recognize. But this privilege depends on my husband and his invulnerability, and on being tethered to him, no matter the circumstances. That I had not thought this through before testifies to the strength of our marriage, which I enjoy by grace of chance.<\/span><\/p>\n

Now I am forced to think it through. If the worst were to happen, the conditions under which I would be working, if I were still working, would feel very different. As it is, there is something galling about working for an institution that condemns exploitation while blatantly profiting from it.<\/span><\/p>\n

I want to pause here to acknowledge that I feel unusually lucky to have landed with my particular colleagues, people I admire, appreciate and enjoy, and whose good intentions I tend to trust. I am especially grateful for the warm, collaborative relationship I have with my department head, a woman my age, whose respect I feel every day.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

But for me, there is no escaping the fundamental structural hypocrisy undergirding our university operations. I know it\u2019s not personal. Like many fields in the humanities, the discipline of Comparative Literature frequently devotes itself today to analyzing power inequities. The faculty pride themselves on identifying with victims of discrimination, while blithely participating in the exploitation of an entire class of workers. They tolerate the contradiction, because the system is built on it. Because that\u2019s the way it is.<\/span><\/p>\n

I <\/span>make excuses too. There are a million things I tell myself so that I can keep going. Systems <\/span>feel<\/span><\/i> inevitable.<\/span> I chose to work under these conditions. For a while, I made my peace with it. But the more I have worked and the longer I have been working, the more the profound injustice of it becomes impossible to ignore<\/span>.<\/span>I\u2019m tempted to try to lay out the professional logic behind the pay discrepancy, the reasons given and the refutations available for its justification, as if a demonstration of the faulty logic would prove my worth, my right to make a living wage. But in this impulse, the devastating effects of the system are demonstrated.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

This has been the surprise. Somehow, I tricked myself into thinking that if I came to the university without seeking a tenure track position\u2014without hanging on the hope that a line would open that would be appropriate for me, or that my valuable contributions would move them to create a line for me\u2014I would spare myself the pain of seeking from friends something they were unable or unwilling to give. But I wasn\u2019t spared. <\/span>\u00a0<\/span>Despite the appreciation I feel from my colleagues and despite my affection for them, I\u2019ve not been able to resist feeling the structural attack on my value. And it is a constant, pervasive, leaden weight on all of my professional interactions, though they probably don\u2019t know it.<\/span><\/p>\n

Visiting friends in New Mexico, friends with whom I share the most intimate things, I reddened with shame before admitting my salary, at which point I felt their marked pity.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Sometimes at faculty meetings, I feel it too. In the midst of a discussion about someone\u2019s needs and how we might advocate for them, I see it flash across their faces. A fleeting moment of recognition when they remember the conditions under which I am working. It seems to embarrass them. Worse, though, is when they don\u2019t remember.<\/span><\/p>\n

Years ago, I had a brush with death, when I contracted a serious case of pneumonia. It developed out of a flu, a much less virulent virus. It took months to recover. The risks of this virus are real to me.<\/span><\/p>\n

It is hard to insist upon one\u2019s value, especially when one knows that others have it worse.\u00a0 I have never experienced the fear Black Americans feel during any encounter with the police. I have never been at risk of deportation to a country I don\u2019t even know. It is difficult to really acknowledge this inequity and to insist nonetheless that after ten years of graduate school and over twenty years of teaching, I should not be working for bus fare and lunch money without my own insurance policy. But I don\u2019t pretend that the work I do or that the time I\u2019ve put into learning to do it makes me worthier of insurance than those who perform other kinds of labor. The ten years I spent being in graduate school\u2014drinking coffee in caf\u00e9s and getting excited about books\u2014of course doesn\u2019t make it less outrageous that housekeepers are uninsured, when they\u2019ve spent those same years scrubbing other people\u2019s grease and making order out of other people\u2019s chaos. It just makes me more privileged. However, my relative privilege doesn\u2019t change the fact that if my husband dies or if I\u2019m a casualty of the university economic crisis, I\u2019ll be a middle-aged woman competing for jobs during a time of record unemployment. And yet right now, I type from a deck overlooking a yard of blooming peonies.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

I am in a position of power in the world and of weakness in my profession, and these worlds\u2014formerly separate\u2014could collapse and I won\u2019t know whether to feel rage, or sorrow, or guilt.<\/span><\/p>\n

***<\/span><\/p>\n

Even before the Coronavirus, social changes had begun to make themselves felt in the university. For instance, students had become more pragmatic and career focused, less interested in an education for its own sake. But this shift was partly due to the fact that the university started charging for each individual credit, undermining language learning and fostering the conventional wisdom that an education is a means to an end, the more direct, the better.<\/span><\/p>\n

As much as I worry about the anti-intellectualism that accompanies a purely pragmatic relationship to education, some of the changes have been partly positive ones. For example, with fewer jobs requiring academic literacy, students have become less interested in learning to write like scholars. The upper administration noticed. While learning to write academic papers is good training regardless of one\u2019s career goals, it\u2019s not the only kind of writing we should be teaching. The administration began to call for innovative assignments that would engage students with different career trajectories. Suddenly, I had something unique to offer for having spent so much time engaged in \u201ccreative pursuits.\u201d This was an instance in which, as Career Faculty, I was both less attached to the old way of doing things and prepared to innovate quickly.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

This is perhaps even more true for faculty of color, whose lived experiences, professional expertise, and creative energy could help shape a generation of young people. Many of them are already (under)employed and overworked as contingent faculty at universities across the country. Offering them full-time work and job security should be part of diversity initiatives. Their enfranchisement would help the university to evolve, not just by teaching white faculty about unconscious biases, which is necessary but insufficient, but by allowing faculty of color to flourish as thinkers and producers, which in turn enriches our world. It is time to expand what we mean when we talk about the \u201cproduction of new knowledge.\u201d\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

In my own experience, the less the university is attached to traditional markers of \u201cexcellence,\u201d which usually means traditional (i.e., white) modes of expression, the more excellent it becomes. The more I was freed from the necessity of teaching scholarly writing exclusively, the more I could innovate, holding up models like the Black legal scholar, Patricia Williams, who writes compellingly by combining personal writing with fierce argumentation. I\u2019ve been able to introduce alternative ways to access and process material, which can reach a broader, more diverse student population. Now, I can ask students to write personal essays, imitate literary stylists, and take photographic \u201cself-portraits\u201d in dialogue with various artists.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

In many ways, I am extraordinarily lucky. The ideas I\u2019m offering have a place here. But it\u2019s the department that carves out that place and the department that recognizes those efforts. The administration doesn\u2019t seem to notice that a lot of the innovation they want to see is being carried out by Career Faculty to whom it feels no loyalty.<\/span><\/p>\n

Our union is fighting for us valiantly, from trying to protect our FTE to suggesting symbolic changes I never thought possible, for instance, that we Career Faculty be given a title with some degree of dignity\u2014Teaching Professor. So far, the administration has rejected this shift that would cost them nothing and would align with the nomenclature the students have always adopted. They call us, \u201cProfessor.\u201d Just like they call Assistant Professors \u201cProfessor.\u201d\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Symbols matter. They don\u2019t compensate us for the fact that we have no health insurance, or that we could be destitute if our spouse dies. But such a change would show respect.<\/span><\/p>\n

Things are changing, but I will not be surprised if we lose our jobs before they come to pass.<\/span><\/p>\n

***<\/span><\/p>\n

Today there was a message from the Dean asking for input about how we might \u201cexplore the creation of shared administrative services.\u201d He insists that this is not \u201can exercise to downsize,\u201d but rather to \u201ccreatively use our resources\u2026and rebalance our staff\u2019s portfolios.\u201d He claims to want them to feel \u201cless harried and more satisfied.\u201d\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

I have a suggestion for creatively using our resources. Maybe it\u2019s time, not to cut the very faculty who are their best bang for their buck, but to fully engage and employ them.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Consider this example. I am the Director of Undergraduate Studies for our Department. Among other things, I do student advising. But recently, the university president has hired large numbers of professional advisors, staff unconnected to the university\u2019s primary teaching and research mission.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

This enormous expenditure largely duplicates a function that was already being filled, but with more confusion and less knowledge of each discipline.<\/span> But the university President, whose mind was on building and filling a shiny new building, had made \u201cadvising\u201d his fancy pet project, and we are now stuck with it. It occupies a prominent place on the quad, while we fight for classrooms to teach in. Meanwhile, the College of Arts and Sciences has begun laying off Career Faculty in Romance Languages at a time when the university actually needs more teachers.<\/span><\/p>\n

Yes, it needs more teachers, in spite of the fact that teaching is going remote and the same lecture could potentially reach a thousand students. We need more teachers because the students don\u2019t have the stomach for passive learning.\u00a0 After ten minutes the anxiety about a disintegrating world creeps back in and they can\u2019t focus. We need more teachers because reaching these students now requires the individualized attention that was always the best pedagogical idea.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

But even if the university can\u2019t bring itself to hire more of us in a period of retrenchment\u2014because there are science buildings to erect and athletics to fund\u2014they don\u2019t have to fire us. Because there\u2019s an alternative to hiring new staff and firing teachers and hoisting gleaming buildings for all to admire.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

What if this raging virus reshaping our world were seen as a challenge to name our values? What if instead of clinging to outdated hierarchies, the university were to commit to the people who are already here?\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

This hiring freeze could be an opportunity for the administration and faculty to stop endlessly demonstrating the principle of imitative desire by chasing the next bright object or shining star, whose otherworldly sparkle fades the moment they appear among us as an actual human. It could be an opportunity to look to the talent and energy and capability all around them. It would require recognizing that\u2014out of necessity\u2014some of that talent, especially among faculty of color who are carrying additional burdens, might be less \u201ctraditional\u201d than the fantasy hires departments were contemplating. But it will be worth it.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

It is not more important to hire someone who represents this year\u2019s niche trend or that unrepresented area of specialization (we can\u2019t cover all of them anyway) than to invest in people already on the job, who have proven records and developed relationships. We do not serve our students better by abandoning their teachers in the name of \u201cnew knowledge,\u201d which is almost always \u201ctweaked knowledge,\u201d or by insisting on the absolute priority of another traditional scholarly monograph. We do not serve students better by featuring those with the largest number of citations captured by flawed algorithms in an intellectual popularity contest. Students will not abandon the university for supporting their teachers or for further expanding and redefining what we mean in the humanities when we talk about \u201cresearch,\u201d which is a model borrowed from the natural and social sciences.<\/span><\/p>\n

What would it mean to fully commit to the highly qualified people who are already here or to take the university seriously when it suggests that creatively \u201crebalancing portfolios\u201d isn\u2019t code for downsizing?<\/span><\/p>\n

The university could, for instance, \u201cbalance\u201d the portfolios of Career Faculty by<\/span> fully employing them<\/b>, perhaps by dividing our time between teaching and administration without overloading us to the point where they make us ineffective.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

At my own university, there are projects already underway\u2014for instance, new schools being conceptualized\u2014that require more time and energy than the tenured faculty have to give. Some Career Faculty also have a good deal of administrative experience. For example, I was previously the Associate Director of a Humanities Laboratory at UIC responsible for creative programming. My current institution might not know this, because they don\u2019t look closely enough at the people around them and because they have developed the habit of disqualifying people for the very disenfranchisement that the institution creates. \u201cWe don\u2019t respect you, for the compelling reason that we have already deemed you unrespectable.\u201d\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

The sort of change for which I am advocating might require recognizing that those in the upper administration who are paid the big bucks have the very same degrees as the Career Faculty who make an infinitesimal fraction of administrators\u2019 salaries. Their portfolios are overflowing. We could do some of that work.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

No, they should not pull up more TTF to do it, which is where the upper administration always comes from. The logic of advancement has been that those who already make money deserve more money, because their salaries reflect their merit, just as titles once allegedly reflected the innate virtues of the nobility.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

But when faculty become administrators, they generally stop researching, which was the principle justification for their promotion to a tenured position, which was in turn the condition of their eligibility for a position in the upper administration. So maybe putting seasoned researchers into administrative positions is not the best or only way to advance the university\u2019s research mission.<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Further, as we all know, there is no necessary correlation between research productivity and administrative prowess. The skillset is different. And thinking \u201coutside the box\u201d doesn\u2019t happen when those boxes are comfy, cash-lined sanctuaries for those inside them. When you want innovative ideas, don\u2019t turn to people making bank and otherwise thriving from the old ideas.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Instead, they might consider my modest proposal. Rethink the way you view contingent faculty, a diverse group of people teeming with energy and new ideas. Reach for the gutter. Put us in charge.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Then, this crisis could be the occasion not to fire indiscriminately, not to wound, but to rebuild, taking stock of the value that is already here, and that has been here all along, hiding in plain sight. <\/span><\/p>\n ","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

by Dawn Marlan, 30 July 2020 A few long weeks ago, I submitted an essay to the Digital Feminist Collective about my position as Career Faculty at a state university. In the midst of a pandemic, the problems of structural inequity associated with such positions become more urgent, whether they concern job security or access … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":9,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_exactmetrics_skip_tracking":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_active":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_note":"","_exactmetrics_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[75,69],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1701","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-covid-19","category-just-futures-2"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/digitalfeministcollective.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1701","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/digitalfeministcollective.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/digitalfeministcollective.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/digitalfeministcollective.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/9"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/digitalfeministcollective.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1701"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/digitalfeministcollective.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1701\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1711,"href":"https:\/\/digitalfeministcollective.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1701\/revisions\/1711"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/digitalfeministcollective.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1701"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/digitalfeministcollective.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1701"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/digitalfeministcollective.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1701"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}