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Friday, December 19, 2008
What the MLA Got Right
cross-posted from howtheuniversityworks.com
Part 1: Overview & Key Facts
Part 2: Kudos for Recommendations
Part 3: Complaints and concerns
Part 4: Interview with Paul Lauter
Along with graduate student activists, and members of the Radical Caucus like Paul Lauter, Cary Nelson has for two decades urged the MLA to commit more resources to the needs and issues of faculty serving contingently. If you’re going to be at the convention, stop by the SUNY booth to meet him and get him to inscribe a copy of the splendid festschrift devoted to his exemplary, selfless career, Cary Nelson and the Struggle for the University. Monday, December 29, 2008, 11am - 12pm
In part 1 of this series, I said that the MLA report on the workforce in English is a mixed bag—important new commitments to higher standards of data gathering and analysis and some good recommendations, but also some oversights and blunders regarding the circumstances, views, and needs of the workforce they were reporting on. I also shared some key facts from the report, including that women disproportionately fill the worst-paying jobs, and that English is unique in having lost 3,000 tenure-track lines in the ten years before 2004. All indications are that the bleeding will continue—this year’s advertised positions are down 22%, and many of the advertised searches are cancelled, or will be.
In this part, I want to focus on kudos for some of the report’s key recommendations.
RECOMMENDATIONS FOR DEPARTMENTS AND INSTITUTIONS:
Security of employment for nontenurable faculty, conversion of part-time work to continuing full-time positions, and more tenure-track hiring in writing instruction and general education. Millions of students never encounter tenure-track or even full-time faculty in English, and the tenured increasingly spend their time hiring, evaluating, and re-hiring the nontenurable.
Departments should systematically analyze the financial, scholarly, and educational costs of nontenurable staffing, rather than blindly “continue to administer the current labor system.”
Full-time continuing faculty should govern and serve, and develop the curriculum in their field of expertise. They should have salary schedules and benefits packages tied to those of ladder faculty. Plus security of employment, guarantees of academic freedom, and funding for travel, research, and professional development. In other words, as most of us at AAUP would point out, the committee is saying that most faculty will be more effective the more their situation resembles the circumstances we associate with tenure, whether you want to use the word or not.
Part-time hires should be paid at least the MLA’s per-course minimum wage, which currently ranges from $6200 to $8800 per section, a figure that is tied to the minimum wage recommendations for full-time continuing faculty.
RECOMMENDATIONS FOR THE MLA:
These recommendations are part of my mixed feelings about the report. On the one hand, hurray. On the other hand: this was long, long, long overdue. Reagan was in office and our first-year students weren’t born when MLA members were demanding attention to these issues.
A regular survey of staffing practices, correlated to major national data sets. For decades, MLA has not bothered to gather data on the qualifications and working conditions of the vast corps of faculty teaching college English—much less analyze or intervene in those circumstances. The oversight is all the more startling since this data was readily available, and analyzed in major disciplinary publications by many critics, activists, and highly visible public intellectuals. This report is a decisive break.
An inquiry into the status of the terminal master’s degree as a qualification for postsecondary teaching in English. Yup, just like Casablanca: in this report, the MLA staff confess to being shocked, shocked they tell you, to discover that the overwhelming majority of folks teaching college English don’t have a PhD, and aren’t ABD, including at least half of those with full-time nontenurable positions.
But this data has been available since the early 1990s, and outraged doctoral students, made sure that MLA staff heard all about it.
As I said at a “welcome session” a dozen years back, debunking the supply-side-inspired surplus of PhDs theory, “Most North Americans pass through a regime of required language studies and most do it without ever encountering a person holding a Ph.D.”
MLA staff simply chose to shut their ears (and, sadly, to spend a lot of time muzzling student discontent, rather than analyzing reams of pertinent and freely available data.)
This is not to assume that the PhD is always, inevitably a better qualification. As in the case of many successful contingent faculty, and even tenure-line faculty like my friend and comrade Andy Smith, there will certainly be many cases in which the terminal master’s degree is an appropriate qualification. But there are also likely to be plenty of circumstances in which a doctorate, ABD status, or additional graduate study in relevant fields—say, writing pedagogy--is the preferred qualification.
Commercial and K-12 employers find that workplace accommodations and incentives motivate their staff to advance their graduate educations. There’s no reason that campus employers can’t do the same—except their refusal to be accountable for investing in their faculty.
Next, part 3, in which I air a few concerns about the report.