What Can We Do Now That Adjunct Sections are Written Into Universities’ Fiscal Survival Strategy?

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by Jennifer Ruth, English Department, Portland State University

This is the second of a two-part post.  “Why are Faculty Complicit in Creating a Disposable Workforce?” appeared last week.

We need rapidly to increase pressure on university administrators for change. I believe that administrators are slowly digesting the (academic and public relations) downsides of relying on instructors to whom the institution makes no real commitment, but at the same time they are under unprecedented budget pressures. Chris’s post on public austerity spelled out many of these pressures. We desperately need to build a coalition that unites university constituencies in efforts to increase state funding.

But the adjunct crisis is tricky in this context. It is hard for university leadership to translate the ethical and political disaster we’ve all created with contingent labor into any form of public appeal. Most obviously, administrators attempting to explain the deleterious consequences of adjunct reliance might be interpreted as insulting a significant percentage of their employees. It seems inescapable that at least this part of the fight to restore the public university is going to have to be assumed by the faculty, primarily at the level of departments. We can try to mitigate the degree to which the fight is an adversarial one pitting departments against central administrators, but some conflict is unavoidable.

In Part One, I argued that we should insist on the funds for full-time tenure-track positions by withholding the use of cheap adjunct sections. I spent most of my time discussing the inter-departmental psychological obstacles that must be overcome to pursue such a strategy.

Let’s say, though, that your department successfully makes it through the discussions needed to build consensus. You collectively have decided to dramatically reduce adjunct usage as part of a plan to rebuild decent positions. What happens then?

Here, in part two, I explore what such a recommendation could possibly mean given that adjunct usage is baked into university budgets. Were we to do this—i.e., tell everyone expecting adjunct sections that we are trying to get good positions by not putting these sections on our schedules and then do just that—just how big a bomb would be set off?

First, we should consider the scope of our universities’ economic dependence on adjuncts. I’m going to use my own university as my basis so please bear with some details regarding Portland State. State support for the university has dwindled to only 11% of the budget. Our endowment is negligible. Consequently, our revenue is driven almost entirely by tuition. Tuition has been raised repeatedly over the years and, for a number of good reasons, cannot be raised any higher for the foreseeable future.

The professoriate at PSU consists of three faculty groups: tenured and tenure-track, full-time non-tenure-track, and adjunct. If we set aside the (very important) issues of job security and academic freedom, we can consider TT and full-time NTT faculty to be comparably-treated groups in pay, benefits, and work expectations. (There will be objections to this characterization but relative to the third group of faculty – adjuncts –it certainly holds true.) We have seen considerable tensions in a full-time workforce birfurcated into those with access to tenure and those without. The term “2nd-class citizen” for NTT faculty is invoked regularly, which tends to crowd out the more fundamental problem--the existence of our “3rd class citizens.” True to the national stereotype, adjunct faculty are largely invisible within the PSU University community. Full-time NTT serve on Senate, interact regularly with their TT colleagues and administrators, and are represented alongside TT faculty in the union (PSU-AAUP). To the extent that adjuncts’ voices are heard, it is primarily through their union, which bargains separately. Finally, it’s worth noting that a higher percentage of PSU’s professoriate are full-time (TT or NTT faculty) relative to the national average (29% vs. the 20% the Delphi Project cites as typical[1]).

Adjunct faculty deliver roughly 30% of PSU’s student credit hours (SCH) while full-time (TT and NTT) faculty deliver 70%. A whopping 92% of every tuition dollar earned by an adjunct instructor is net revenue compared to 24% of each dollar for full-time faculty. This means that after deducting expenditures (salary, etc.), the percentage of university base revenue contributed by adjunct SCH is 42% compared to 58% by the full-time faculty SCH. Nearly half of the university’s budget is built on adjunct usage.

In other words, the adjuncting that was once rationalized as a stop-gap and ad hoc measure is now the lifeblood of the budget. Were there to be a coordinated effort across departments to stop offering adjunct contracts, the university would go into full-blown cardiac arrest. I understand why the comparisons of adjunct faculty to slaves strikes many of us as both inappropriate and offensive, but one can see from this information why the analogy is tempting. To economically sustain itself, the public university needs people to perform work that it cannot afford to compensate, at least not remotely adequately. It goes without saying that this situation is hardly unique to PSU, though our desirable urban setting in Portland, Oregon probably gives us an unusually large pool of qualified people to exploit.

In this context, what would happen were departments to resist adjunct usage by imposing what amounts to an adjunct strike (albeit one initiated by the professionally-salaried full-time faculty)?  Most likely, they would meet with enormous and frantic resistance. Chairs and directors who won’t sign adjunct contracts could be pressured or forced to step down. Rumors would fly that administrators plan to retaliate by finding ways to shut down participating departments and to deny their junior faculty tenure. Second only to the guilt you’d feel for abruptly turning your back on the talented adjuncts who taught for your department for many moons is the guilt you’d feel about the panicked students piling up in the main office because they couldn’t get the classes they need. Forced to take out more student loans to extend their time in school, they would feel swindled. What university admits students, they would rightly ask, and then makes it impossible for them to graduate?

Who would knowingly go down this road? And yet if we don’t start taking some steps in this direction, nothing will change. It is true that without radical intervention on anyone else’s part, adjunct organizing, where it is legal, will make adjunct usage more and more expensive. This might ultimately land us in a similar place, but how many years from now? We need more good jobs now and some pain in reform is unavoidable. We have been getting something for cheap that allowed us to do things we wanted. That most of these things were worthy, such as keeping students on track for graduation, is beside the point. With no sudden windfalls (from the state or federal government or from donors) on the horizon, we have to bust our way out of this predicament with the same pint-sized budgets that pushed us into it.

Here’s how I suggest we start: Have the discussion within your department. Learn your own university’s numbers and then your own department’s specific numbers. Explain to your Dean that you feel you can no longer in good conscience be complicit in the abuse of adjuncts. Simultaneously reassure him or her that you are prepared to do everything in your power to lessen the “damage” done to all the constituencies that in one way or another benefited from the adjunct abuse.

What is within your power to change will vary widely by department. How your department organized its labor thus far, the disciplinary protocols driving research expectations (and, thus, promotion and tenure), the service needs: all of these things and more will play a part in determining how much room you have to maneuver. The goal, though, is to offer up as much as you can in return for new lines. The idea is that you might have to absorb some of the work previously done by adjuncts but, in return, you will get new full-time lines and you will no longer be complicit in adjunct exploitation. Remind your Dean that you are only doing now what you always should have done and what you will have to do in the future. Remind him or her that if you wait, you will be making these changes on a union’s terms not on the university’s.

Some further steps: Assess the department’s past in relation to the growth in adjunct use. When did your department start the practice and why? Take a fresh look at existing circumstances. Are there faculty who went down to half-time but you never argued to restore the missing instruction in the form of a new hire? Are there people who once carried full courseloads but are now directors of programs or otherwise engaged but you never made up the loss (except by way of adjuncts)? Figure out how you got where you are and what the lost opportunities for new full-time hires were in the past. It is important to document this background.

Find all low-hanging fruit. Are there enough funds for sections that could be bundled into full-time positions before asking for new investment? Are there funds for “perks” (and, yes, I mean heretofore necessities like travel money) that could be redirected? Are there ways to avoid low-enrollment classes? Are you and your colleagues willing to resume advising and mentoring, making a professional advisor unnecessary (freeing a salary plus benefits that could go to a full-time instructional position)? Are there staff positions that could be economized?

Eliminate as many course releases for full-time faculty as possible so that it’s clear that whatever adjunct sections are left over are not there to benefit full-time faculty but are the result of real need. Putting up some of your “own” money is how you buy good will with, build trust with, and minimize the possibility of retaliation from administrators.

This is already more than anybody wants to hear so I’ll stop for now. Believe me, I get why nobody wants to hear any of this. Mounting this full-frontal assault in real life resulted in scorched earth among full-time departmental colleagues, some of whom were old friends. (Weirdly as I’ve discussed for this blog before, the earth was less scorched between the department and the university administration.) It also resulted in a few new tenure lines and a few saved national searches.

Given how far we’ve gone down Contingency Road, the way back is going to be more painful than anyone wants it to be. But the rewards make the effort necessary and worthwhile: less exploitation, better education, internal relations based on improved equity, and a larger contribution to the public good.

Confronting Our Permanent Public University Austerity

This post focuses on the University of California's budget situation, but it is broadly applicable to public colleges and universities across the country.   More evidence of the national pattern came in this week, with reports of Moody's negative outlook on higher education's finances.  The Chronicle of Higher Education's Don Troop provided highlights of Moody's view of the overall sector.  UC reflects the convergence of all but the fourth of these trends.

1. Growth in tuition revenue remains stifled by affordability concerns, legislative ceilings on tuition levels, and steep competition for students.
2. State financing of higher education will increase, on average, just 3 to 4 percent—not enough to meet the growth in expenses.
3. Already stiff competition for sponsored-research dollars is getting stiffer, with success rates for proposals dropping from 19 percent in 2008 to below 15 percent last year.
4. One in 10 public and private colleges is suffering “acute financial distress” because of falling revenues and weak operating performance.
5. Public colleges will begin to feel the impact of underfunded pensions and health benefits for retirees.
6. Most public colleges and many private ones will be unable to achieve a 3-percent annual growth rate in operating revenue, Moody’s benchmark for sustainable financing at a time of low inflation.

Moody's also slapped UC with a minor downgrade, from the second-best rating to the third.

1. Did Tuition Hikes Make Up for State Funding Cuts?

As the UC Regents discussed the budget this week, the headline figure for California higher ed is the five percent public funding increase over last year. This has convinced most people that UC and CSU are getting a good deal from the state.  I've heard the same from some faculty, who tell me that UC is on the mend, and that we should stick to our work and let the economy recover.  Sadly, I don't see this mending in the Regents' budget documents.  What I do see is a hardening of the downward definition of public higher education through budgetary means, with no public debate.

The overall state picture is the same today as it was in November, when I wrote an overview entitled "The Old State Funding Model is Dead."  It is still dead, and if you are rusty on our current budgetary framework, you might want to (re)read that summary of the state government's perspective on UC and glance at the chart of the past fifteen years of budget trends. 

In the coming year, UC will receive around $2.8 billion in general fund (GF) receipts, which is about $2.2 billion below where it would have been had its budget grown in step with state personal income after 2000-01 (I use UCOP figures here, page S-4).  That GF total now includes debt payments on UC's General Obligation (GO) bonds, which the state had formerly paid on its own, so operational GF receipts are more like $2.6 billion. This is exactly where GF funding was ten years ago--not counting for inflation or enrollment growth, which Jerry Brown has decided the state will no longer fund.  Proposed future state increases are too small to move the University much off this bottom.  

The state has convinced itself that UC has made up for state funding cuts with huge tuition increases.  But as big as they are, they haven't replaced the cuts.  UC grossed $727 million in tuition in 2001-02 (Table 1, or about $1 billion in current dollars) and about $3.2 billion this year (same table), for a gain of nearly $2.2 billion in today's dollars, which seems at first to make up exactly for the GF cuts since 2000-01.  

But the net tuition gain is under $1.5 billion after financial aid is taken out, so we now have a net loss of $700 million.   Throw in enrollment growth of 55,000 students, which is the same as having added two additional UCSB campuses (and not just one hamstrung UC Merced).  UCOP continues to claim that they spend $19,590 per student, but let's say they only spend a third of that: we've just added $330,000,000 in additional operating costs and pushed the net loss in the GF-tuition swap to well over $1 billion per year.   In other words, tuition increases have only made up for something like half of the state cuts.  UCOP's claim, with somewhat different assumptions, that tuition increases have made up for about one third of the state funding cuts, is also plausible.  

Public universities, in short, did not have a "tuition option" for solvency even when they could raise tuition a lot--which they no longer can.

2. Austerity and Institutional Debt

The current public university path, if UC is an example, is a perverse combination of austerity and structural deficit. It is perverse because the only good thing ever alleged about austerity is that it pays down deficits, whereas this kind of public university austerity will not.  Perverse austerity is conventional wisdom in many lands, as Paul Krugman has tirelessly pointed out.  In Austerity: the History of a Dangerous Idea, Mark Blyth argued that austerity isn't about fixing its target institutions--like public colleges--but about hurting those institutions in order to help others--like banks.  UC austerity is about hurting UC -- or, more precisely, about defining it downward in part to lessen its budget claims.  

I'm making this point because another dangerous idea is for faculty, staff and students to sit back and let  projected economic growth fix the university.  It won't.  All Regents budget documents now contain sentences like this: 

Given the funding shortfall, campuses will need to weigh and balance among competing priorities with the understanding that there is not enough increased revenue to fund mandatory cost increases, let alone the other high-priority costs identified in the November budget plan.

The is the equivalent of the older, tactful Surgeon General's warnings about smoking cigarettes: "this budget may be hazardous to campus health."

OK, this is not big news for those of us who've been following this for years.  But there's something poignantly revealing about the documents this month.  The state offers small bits of funding to UC here and there, mostly on a one-time basis, for specific projects, normally known as earmarks.  A particular one-time item, $50 million in supplemental funds based on higher-than-expected property tax receipts, was cancelled by the governor before the Regents had a chance to celebrate it.

Then there's the pension.  UC employee contributions have now risen to 8 percent of salary, and UC's employer share is going to 14 percent of payroll.  UC asked for the state to fund just next year's new increment on the employer contribution to the pension. This would be $64 million to cover the increase from 12 percent to 14 percent in 2014-15.  The state rejected even this fractional contribution.  

The state's point may be that the pension is UC's problem because the UC Regents created it, with their two-decade pension "holiday" in which neither employer nor employee made contributions.  But it's not like the state wants to force accountability by naming names and cleaning house: Gov. Brown recently reappointed several long-term regents who among other things were directly involved in this ongoing lack of basic fiduciary responsibility. I assume that the pension liability helps Sacramento keep the financial dunce cap on UC's head, forcing humility in its budget demands.

A major result of the university's political weakness and the resulting austerity is more institutional borrowing.   A normal sign of an improving economy is that institutions start paying down the debt they accumulated to get through a downturn.  That isn't happening here. UC needs to borrow to make its contribution to fully funding the UC Retirement Program (UCRP) by 2042.  It has been borrowing from its Short Term Interest Pool (STIP) for several years, and now wants to borrow another $700 million next year to make all of last year's (2013-14) planned payment.  Without getting into the weeds of this issue, I'd summarize UCOP as saying it still can't afford to return the pension, by 2042, to 95 percent of the level at which all liabilities are covered, without continuing to borrow. (Two weeds: UCOP is saying it can't afford "modified ARC" for that year on its own; and although the document claims faculty Senate endorsement, this plan appears to be less than the Senate's call for 100 percent liability coverage by 2042).  The pension is set to be significantly underfunded for most of the next thirty years. It will be a permanent political target and a burden UCOP will set against operating funds, with the likelihood of future liabilities incurred to pay down the pension liability.  

The sadder example of ongoing debt is the request for "external financing for the UCPath project." UC Path was UCOP's flagship solution to UC inefficiencies that were allegedly wasting taxpayers' money--in other words, new enterprise software for the systemwide consolidation of payroll and human resources functions.  This is boring, important back office stuff, hardly good material for a political campaign to show the state "UC means business," but that's what it became.  Rather than funding each campus's decades-old effort to upgrade its systems on its own, UCOP sought centralization, which predictably introduced new levels of cost, complexity, and inefficiency, since centralization is often not actually efficient.  

I had heard nothing good about UC Path from people trying to implement it on campuses, and have tried to ignore it, but this week it has resurfaced as a problem at the Regental level.  The project timeline has grown from 48 to 72 months, and its costs are said to be $220 million (it had spent $131 million by May 2014) . Worse, the repayment schedule has mushroomed from seven to twenty years. Annual payments are to be something like $25 million.  Campuses are to be taxed to pay for 2015-era systems until 2035, which is like taking out a twenty year mortgage to pay for your refrigerator, except that your fridge will be working better in 2035 than next year's PeopleSoft product.  Since the concurrent budget document  notes efficiency savings of $30 million per year (top of page 4), UCOP may be spending $220 million to save a net $5 million per year over a couple of decades--and going into debt to do it.  In the end, an efficiency measure has turned into a literal liability.

3.  How to Respond? 

Moving forward, I'm afraid that officials are going to have to get much better at admitting mistakes like UCPath, and then actually undoing them. I couldn't listen to the recording of the UCPath conversation, but Cloudminder made it sound like a lot of restrained finger-pointing with no solution in sight. Did anyone say, "well, this seemed like a good idea at the time, but it's not. Let's just cancel it, figure out where we went wrong, and come up with something better"?

A related issue is getting over the idea that technology will save us.  It won't. Technology is always a sociotechnical system, with people adding tacit knowledge, relationships, and much else that tech really can't replicate or replace.  Universities need de-bureaucratization, not more technologized bureaucracy.  They need organizational redesigns, including large scale simplification and task reduction.  That's where the real savings are, but it's not about pooling, herding, or firing people, but about first fixing the jobs that they're supposed to do.  Of course technology is part of the solution: it just can't decide organizational functions and purposes.

On the plus side, UC officials have gotten good at describing the funding shortage. In a recent op-ed, UC Berkeley's Vice-Chancellor for business and finance, John Wilton, bites the hand that feeds him micro-restorations:

Despite UC Berkeley’s [strong] performance, state funding has been cut more than half in real terms over the past decade. Consequently, “public” funding now accounts for only about 13 percent of our total operating budget. While this year’s state budget reflects a 5 percent increase, this results in a 0.6 percent increase in Berkeley’s total revenue. At this pace, it will take us until 2026 to reach the same level of state funding, in nominal dollars, we received in 2003.

This kind budget memory is helpful.

Second, universities have been testing the message that cuts damage educational quality.  I don't see any other issue that will get the public to care about X percentage of cuts vs. X minus Y percentage of restoration by year Z.  The only meaning the numbers have is students missing the boat to the next society because public universities can't give them cutting-edge knowledge and cognitive skills.   Mark Yudof said as much at a Regents' retreat almost two years ago, where he stated that cuts have meant "a quiet but steady erosion of our academic quality at almost every level.” 

What we don't have but desperately need is a consistent public explanation of the educational quality problem, a clear articulation of the budgetary fix, and a mobilization of university communities, students' families, and the wider community. The time of change by political counternarrative has come and gone.  VC Wilton's ended his piece with a general exhortation: "We are in this together, and time is not on our side. We should all take up this cause now, before it is too late."  True. But were we to take up the cause, what would we actually do?   

Why are Faculty Complicit in Creating a Disposable Workforce?

by Jennifer Ruth, English Department, Portland State University

The Modern Language Association (MLA) is under fire for not fighting hard enough against the adjunctification of the professoriate. An excellent piece in Inside Higher Ed criticizes the recent MLA report on doctoral programs for accommodating when it should challenge the trends that destroy PhDs’ prospects. In blog posts and in The Chronicle for Higher Education, another group calls for the MLA to consider a 4:1 salary ratio: the highest-paid person (the Association’s executive director) should be compensated no more than four times the lowest-paid person in the profession (the adjunct). The intent here, Marc Bousquet writes, is to “goose” the MLA leadership into action by forcing it to glimpse its ample-salaried self standing in disturbing proximity to the anorexic adjunct.

Taking the MLA to task makes sense. One of our biggest professional organizations, why is it helpless to stem—much less reverse—deprofessionalization? It’s not that it doesn’t take the problem seriously. As the people rising to its defense in the comment threads observe, the MLA has formed committees and organized panels on the topic. It has issued important policy recommendations (a recommended floor for adjunct wages, for example). Indeed, it is confusing to know what to think when you move from one person’s righteous denunciation of the organization’s foot-dragging to someone else’s list of the worthy steps it has taken.

Whatever the MLA’s record, the urge to hold somebody accountable is a good one. I hope that it indicates that we are sick-unto-death of distracting abstractions. Who can stand to hear the phrase “systemic forces” again? “Market forces” is even worse. However brilliant and even accurate it might be, another David Harvey-inspired argument about the impact on the university of the post-1970 neoliberal transformation of the global economy won’t help us. If anything these analyses contribute to a feeling of fatalism in which we assume any actions we could take will just be swept into the neoliberal tidal wave. Over the last few years, for example, the term “structural adjustment” has begun to replace “crisis.” While the former term is surely more honest when referring to deprofessionalization—how long can something continue and still claim to be a crisis?—it’s also chillingly impersonal. At least “crisis” suggested emotion and emotion suggests people. And I have the strong and unhappy conviction that if we want to effect change, we have to hold flesh-and-blood people accountable for what’s happened and what continues to happen.

The urge to hold specific people accountable is one that people understandably suppress. Nobody wants to blame people she might actually know for what is obviously a complicated national problem. One solution to this queasiness has been the safe but largely impotent invocation of the nameless, faceless Administrator. I’ve been in too many conversations—perhaps you have, too?—in which hand-wringing leads to an appetite for blame and this leads to happy agreement that “administrators” are the source of all evil. We identify a common enemy in a group of people with whom we do not identify. This was my go-to conversational move when I was an assistant professor, but now that I’m tenured and even more so now that I’ve served as department chair, I can’t go down that well-worn discursive path without feeling ashamed of myself. My experiences at a state university relying on a high number of contingent faculty have taught me that nothing is likely to change until we take personal responsibility for what has happened to the profession.

I don’t know Rosemary Feal (MLA executive director) but I bet she thinks more about adjunctifaction than some people I do know. It’s not comfortable to say this but I know too many people who are skilled at not connecting the dots of their own actions to the profession-wide devastation they read about online or in magazines. Feal got it right when a few days before these recent controversies, she was quoted in an Atlantic.com article as saying that along with the help of trustees and accreditation agencies, this fight needs the support of middle administrators.

By “middle administrators,” I assume Feal has in mind people like the tenured faculty who start new minors with off-track labor, the directors growing programs out of thin air, the chairs who have to graduate majors on woefully strapped budgets, and the associate deans and deans who advise these afore-mentioned people that it is easier to get permission for an off-tenure than for a tenure-line appointment. These are the middle managers who have built our current academic labor system much more intimately than have the highly visible obscenely-paid presidents of tier-one universities.

The middleman “needs to choose not to be complicit in a system that abuses adjuncts,” Feal is quoted as saying. Yes, we need to choose not to be complicit. By “we,” I refer to all tenured faculty. Why do we have tenure if not for the freedom (or luxury) it affords to avoid acts that contradict our consciences? Tenure means we don’t have to fix lab results for the pharmaceutical companies who donate to our universities. It also means that we don’t have to write and sign contracts that make for widespread misery.

I think many people would agree with this. So why do we do it? Why is creating adjunct sections so tempting for people who know better? My department has done it for years. Hiring off the tenure track has enabled us to: 1) hire people with higher courseloads to meet student demand without undertaking the hard work of time-intensive searches (rather, a chair makes a phone call); 2) hire people with higher courseloads without asking how this might—or should—prompt us to rethink our more desirable conventional jobs bundling teaching, research, and service; 3) hire spouses not as spousal hires but into non-tenure track positions since they are easier to secure; 4) hire people for curricular areas we find alluring without committing to those areas in perpetuity; 5) grow niche programs on all-adjunct labor to boost our overall student-credit-hour numbers so that we have more capital to ask for tenure lines; 6) hire adjuncts to give full-time faculty course releases for research and other projects; 7) add new sections at the last minute when all the others fill up so that our students have the classes they need to graduate; 8) hire our graduate students in the hope that teaching experience will make them attractive for full-time jobs elsewhere; and, of course,  9) continue to run the full gamut of courses during budget crunches that we hope are short-term but that often become long-term. Some of these motivations are more understandable than others but all of them have made the world in which we now live.

I once talked to a chair of a different department who felt very guilty about her use of adjuncts. She brightened, though, when she told me that she was working on a plan to improve the situation. She had submitted a proposal to the dean for a full-time non-tenure-track position to both teach and manage the thirty-odd adjuncts she typically employs. This new person, she said, could improve the adjuncts’ lives by holding occasional social events and developing a helpful handbook. This woman is an excellent chairperson in many respects but I don’t understand why we don’t use the power of our privilege to stop running our programs on disposable appointments. Sure, it is a hell of a lot of work strategizing, re-arranging, coordinating with other bodies (such as Senate), cajoling, foot-stamping and stonewalling to insist that we grow responsibly – but it’s easier to sleep at night.

Actually, the truth is that I know perfectly well why we don’t do more about this problem: because when you tackle it, you don’t sleep better. You may even sleep worse. We do nothing in large part because the people who came before us or we ourselves have already done the damage. At first each contingent position was a canny solution, a short-term and apparently victimless strategy for weathering tough times. It is now our collective disaster that (flesh and blood) people depend on even the worst non-tenure-track positions. It turns out that bucking the system that is already in place is as hard on the conscience as maintaining it. Even if in the long run better jobs with access to tenure are created and this improves the university (and, in turn, society) by strengthening academic freedom, particular individuals likely will lose out. No matter how ingenious the circumstances designed to move us from a majority off-track to majority on-track workforce, no matter how irreproachably conscientious, there will be outcomes that feel unjust from someone’s perspective. This is by far the hardest part of making change. Since both options—bucking and not bucking—are painful, the path of least resistance (doing nothing) is the one we typically choose.

Hard, too, but in a different league from taking people’s jobs away, is that bucking the system wins one enemies because tenure-track faculty have come to benefit from the compromised labor system we deplore. It’s really nice, for example, to tell that treasured junior faculty member that you will hire an adjunct to cover her class so she can finish the publication she needs to achieve tenure. It’s really nice to learn that you can drop next term’s class to complete the book that’s been weighing you down for five years, the book that will change the world . . . or slightly reframe a small part of it for the five people who read it.

I can hear in that last sentence that my tone is turning sour. I am in danger of ranting about university plantations and caste systems, about lifeboaters and migrant workers, so I’ll stop. But you see what I’m getting at. I’d like us to help our middle managers to not be complicit with the deteriorating conditions of the profession. We might start by understanding that when we ask for releases from our chair (for whatever more or less excellent reason) we are often asking them to hire adjuncts. We also need to resist the temptation to ask for adjunct sections so that esteemed friends, perfectly qualified lovers, and prodigiously talented graduate students can earn a small income.

Let’s be even bolder by asking our directors and department chairs to stop hiring off the tenure track for any reason and by helping them use this strategy to demand new tenure-line positions. The first baby step towards getting good positions is refusing to create adjunct sections. Insist that your department wants to meet student demand but can only do so ethically and professionally with tenure-track positions.

You will be called naive. That’s to be expected. What’s harder is when people call you doctrinaire because you resist the creation of an adjunct section for, say, someone’s brilliant son or daughter when teaching one class is everything to this adult child at this moment in time but isn’t it, really, nothing—infinitesimal—in the grand scheme of adjunctification? Might you also inadvertently make it more difficult for your students to graduate? Might you have to spend many hours forging alliances with faculty across your university to put pressure on deans and your provost to create new tenure lines? Yes and yes. It could be worth all of this, nonetheless, because you could move from hand-wringing to turning the system around, job by job.

“Why are we complicit in creating a disposable workforce?” is part one of two parts. Moving from refusal to possibility is the subject of part two, which appears next week. How do we effect change when contingent labor is now written into our universities’ fiscal strategy for survival?