So I’ve had a backlog of posts building up for about a week now, but I haven’t had much time or energy to devote to writing. One of the colleges I teach at decided to cut 50% of its sections, and I was laid off.
Oh… wait, I’m sorry. Since I and my colleagues are all classified as temporary part-time, there’s no such thing as a layoff in higher education. Rather, my spring sections have been cut.
Except, darn it, that’s not quite right, either. They only cut one of my sections, which cut my salary in half and made the forty-minute commute infeasible, so I was forced to withdraw from the other section. So, as you can see, it’s my fault completely that I will be underemployed come January. My employers had nothing to do with it.
See, here’s the reasoning for the “temporary part-time” classification: non-tenure-track college faculty, like so many other types of workers, are expected to exist in an “informational” mode. This means that, like data on a computer screen, we’re meant to start existing at the moment that we’re needed, and then stop existing as soon as administrators are done with us. You don’t bargain with information. You don’t work out a deal with it so that both your needs (affordable, reliable labor) and its needs (stability and reasonable compensation) are addressed. It’s not human. It doesn’t have needs. As soon as you run into problems and need to protect your own salary by cutting sections – blip! It’s gone. The informational mode saves you not only severance package bucks, but also the trouble of planning ahead so that you don’t have to abruptly cut sections in the first place. (For more information on the concept of informational labor, see How the University Works.)
I’ve been criticized, in the past, for trying to masquerade as a common worker. This type of thinking is dangerous for a couple of reasons. First off, it’s incredibly naive to assume that systems of exploitation stop at the poverty line. If Agriprocessors perfected the art of exploiting their workers, why in the world would you assume that college administrators can’t figure it out, too? Why would you assume that your own employer won’t come up with the same idea? Secondly, thinking that white-collar workers and professionals, including us pointy-headed brainiacs teaching freshman composition, are “above” exploitation not only prevents solidarity among our movements, but is a classist and racist way of looking at blue-collar workers and the working poor.
In any case, smell ya later, academia. I’m going to quit my other temporary part-time position, too; I’m now looking for something full-time in another field. (In an economic crisis. With a humanities degree. Sigh.)
I’m writing this not to vent – well, okay, to vent a little – but to emphasize the fact that US higher education is in serious trouble. There is a major brain drain going on among current and future college faculty. I should know; I’m part of it.
I’m also writing this to get some opinions on something. When I emailed my department chair to ask if his decision had anything to do with my teaching ability (he said it didn’t), he assured me that I’m a “very bright person.” It took me a while to figure out why the remark felt so backhanded. Then it hit me: isn’t “bright” the adjective you usually use with children?
I could be wrong on this, but I can’t remember the last time I heard someone call an adult man “bright.” If a man is intelligent and hardworking, you say he’s intelligent and hardworking. If a woman or child is intelligent and hardworking, you say they’re bright. If employers see me as childlike (Maybe it has something to do with being overly polite? Does that make women seem less mature? Funny, since being too collegial makes us seem presumptuous or even ball-busting), then I and my female colleagues are kind of screwed. In other news, water is wet and the sky is blue.
Like I said, though, I’m not sure about this one.
(Cross-posted at Modern Mitzvot.)
fwiw I said 40+ year old mechanical engineer was “pretty bright” the other day and believe me it has nothing to do with him being polite, or collegial. He’s neither. But he is really very bright.
I’m glad to hear you’re going to look for work outside of academia. From your other posts it didn’t seem as if your circumstances were making you happy. I don’t think the opportunities of people who want to be college professors will be better until there are fewer of them. Good luck with your job search I’m sure it won’t be easy and there’s a very good chance I’ll be joining you on moster.com in the near future.
FWIW, the Chronicle of Higher Ed recently had an article on courts upholding contingent faculty’s rights to collect unemployment. So you may want to see whether that’s an option for you, to tide you over while you move on to better and brighter things.
Here’s the info that I can get up-front without subscription:
CASE IN POINT
Indiana State University v. LaFief (2008)
Who Should Receive Unemployment Benefits?
Courts are tending to side with faculty members who seek unemployment payments when their contracts are terminated through no fault of their own
By NICOLAS M. MANICONE
Oh, and FWIW I agree that it seems that “bright” is a term that people with more status use to describe people with less. As opposed to “smart,” for example. “Bright” seems to imply a certain kind of validation– it’s a word that a superior would use in a recommendation or report, for example, not a word that one peer would use to describe another.
I don’t think of “bright” as necessarily describing someone who is “intelligent and hardworking.” Your association of it with children might have to do with its connotation of creativity, curiosity, a potential to surprise. For example, I would say my sister is intelligent and hardworking, and smart, but I wouldn’t necessarily describe her as “bright” — her intelligence is steady, consistent, reliable, but not ever out of the ordinary.
Though thanks to Daniel Dennett, I now have a different negative association with the word “bright.”
“Bright” always sounded extremely phony to me, for several reasons–the people who applied it to me usually had no real idea of my capacities so they were just blowing smoke, that one comes to mind first. But also, it just plain sounds facile. If they had gotten more specific and said “You’re good at reading”, or “You don’t believe everything you hear,” or “You can see a part of something and figure out what the whole looks like”, that would have started to make sense. But this vague crap is what they say to someone they are trying to pull something on, as a dstraction. Not what they’d say to someone they really respected the intelligence of. E.g., the person who called me bright would like as not then launch some sort of attack on me, using my supposed intelligence as a standard I was supposed to meet.
Also it gives more credit to nature, or what nature supposedly did for me, than to me for my hard work and thought. Well, it wasn’t nature that struggled to learn, that thought and questioned and reasoned, it was me–often despite handicaps that nature as well as society had put in my way.
It sounded phony right from day one, and articles like this have helped me figure out why.
Oh, and with every thing like this a person can figure out, they become a tiny bit less screwed, because when they know enough, they can overcome the enemy, so don’t give up.
I’m not sure about ‘bright’ — I generally use ‘brilliant’ for people of either/any gender who display remarkable intelligence — or ‘smart’ for non-stupid people who I would not peg at the level of brilliance. (I’m a doctoral student, so my sense of these ‘levels’ is probably a bit different from that of most other people.)
I suspect that your discomfort had more to do with the emphasis on a suposed natural intelligence (which doesn’t mean much at your level — every PhD grad is probably ‘bright’) over a recognition of your efforts and achievements. I would personally much prefer to be described as a ‘promising’ or ‘accomplished’ scholar (depending on my place in my academic career).
I’ve been criticized, in the past, for trying to masquerade as a common worker.
Tell them to FOAD. You’re a worker. Just because you don’t do manual labor or blue collar work doesn’t mean you don’t have the same problems of dealing with exploitative situations, health care insurance problems, etc. that they do. My choirmaster at my church is an adjunct professor of music at a well-known university in Chicago. We were astonished to find that he didn’t even HAVE health insurance from them. We ended up providing it to him, and let me tell you that it’s a real sacrifice for us – about 8% of our church’s total annual budget. But we didn’t think it was right for him not to have it and for us not to do something to provide it.
That’s awesome. Good for you and your church, Ron.
I think the general idea behind a professor not being a ‘common worker’ is that a PhD is generally believed to have
1. Access to skills and training that give them more opportunity than say, a UAW member.
2. Come from a lot of privilege when compared with the children of the working poor.
BOCTAOE
Also, Ron what your church did was great.
Well, if Joe the Plumber is raking in $280K a year, and he gets to be a common worker, then I see no reason why a lecturer making $45K doesn’t get to be one.
I generally use “bright” to compliment someone when there is nothing else compliment-worthy about them. I wouldn’t use it to describe someone about whom I have a generally good opinion.
I’m not saying a lecturer can’t be a common worker. I’m just saying it’s not a natural association in my mind. From that I made the natural and usually incorrect assumption that everyone things more or less like I do. Anyway I thought about it a little bit and the reasons above are why. I also put in the word ‘generally’. Since when it comes to people there are no universal rules. (At least there usually aren’t)
BOCTOE means But Of Course there are Opposite Examples.
But what’s your income point for Common Worker? (Assuming US average cost of living, I know Manhattan is higher.) 45K is $22.50 an hour on a 2,000 hour work year. That’s pretty good in Madison Wi.
“I wouldn’t use it to describe someone about whom I have a generally good opinion.”
I might… I wouldn’t necessarily read anything into the word choice, unless you have other reason from your interactions with this guy to suspect him of using it in a condescending way.
Also, dude, complain away. That sucks and I’m so sorry!
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