From Scarlet Adjunct to Professional Academic

I recently read a piece by Sara Tatyana Bernstein on the Inside Higher Education site, entitled, “Portrait of a Budget Cut.” (January 15, 2018) It describes her experience with the instability and lose of employment common to the current higher education institution (HEI) model for higher education (HE), especially for adjuncts of which she is a Scarlet A member.

Bernstein’s piece identifies several personal pain points that the PSA model can address:

1)  Academic [HEI] calendars are complicated and inflexible and require a lot of advanced planning.

2)   For me, “stable” would mean teaching six classes a year at two institutions and earning a small stipend to work about 15 hours a week for the public university’s adjunct union.

3)   After roaming the country collecting advanced degrees for 10 years…

4)     … a smart kid from a small town, whose parents had no money to contribute to tuition…

5)   It [faculty position at a public university] also provides the luxury of colleagues. Adjuncting is lonely.

6)   Also the union bargained for a health fund that offsets the cost of my individual health insurance premium, which means I’m losing an additional $700 a term.
                  

7)   …but I’ll be OK. As long as absolutely nothing else goes wrong, the tower won’t fall. Yet. But it could.

8)   But you can’t really believe that 44 percent of your faculty won’t mind when you suddenly change course because the model is less cost-effective. (Is it a coincidence that this is happening just as adjunct pay is rising and the union is getting stronger?)

9)   Aside from the economics of it, losing my job is a huge loss to me -- how I think of myself, how I use my skills and creativity. It has meant I need to rethink what to do with the rest of my life, because … I love teaching.

10) And by the way, those economics were not insignificant. Among other things, [losing] the job corresponded with my husband making a principled, though untimely, move and quitting his job, so I had to scramble for health insurance.

PSA has an effective response to these and many other problems with the current HEI model:

1)  Academics set their own calendars and class schedules. These are work conditions and so the prerogative of professional academics in private practice, not HEI employers. When and where one works, what facilities and services to use, how many and which students to teach, what (if any) research and publication to undertake, and countless other conditions of work are a matter of professional prerogative. 

2)  Income stability depends on several factors, which PSA addresses. As a start, under conditions of (1), consider the possibility of teaching 80-160 students per year for $90,000-$140,000/year, with a teaching assistant working by your side earning $40/hour for 20 hours/week of assistance. PSA can make this happen for every full and part time faculty in the current model.

3)  Students can fulfill their education aims in the geographic area of their choosing, rather than chasing HEIs based on the availability of programs, faculty, funding, enrolment capacity, reputation, etc. This means students can better maintain and develop the personal and professional relationships they create in a single geographical area. Of course, travel for education remains an option – especially since PSA eliminates the distinction between in-state and out-of-state tuition.

4)  The model can provide tuition-free and even expense-free HE for less than the public now spends on the current HEI model. This means many more students can get the education they have a right to and which in the end benefits all of society.

5)  Professional association, practice partnerships and digital technology allow for any level of collegiality an academic might desire. And since PSA is not subject to the instability of institutional employ, but rather opens HE to as many academics as want to practice, there will be many more colleagues with which to relate.

6)  Healthcare coverage and pension are also subject to professional prerogative. Taking the American Bar Association as an example, such “benefits” can be made available through professional society. But never mind professional group rates, could you afford stable, independently secured insurance if you earned $90,000-$140,000 per year? No matter the circumstance, PSA finance includes costing for such expenses.

7)  As another factor affecting income stability, PSA is far better able to respond to changes in local and global economies. It is also far better insulated from the vulnerability of government funding than is the current HEI model. Professional private academic practices can expand or contract, diversify, relocate, or otherwise adjust business models/practices far more quickly than HEIs – at the prerogative of the individual academic.

8)  Keeping (7) in mind, PSA eliminates the current need for an adversarial employer-employee dynamic, with its inherent conflicting interests. The current HEI employment model cannot afford an adequate supply of non-union faculty, let alone the more expensive union variety. Under PSA, academics are entrepreneurial, self-employed practitioners represented by professional association, not union represented institutional employees. This is how best to empower labour. Even so, PSA is so flexible that it is consistent with the continuation (and improvement) of HEIs.

9)  PSA provides the mechanism by which to create a professional identity. This is an identity that is not dependent on institutional employ or status within that apparatus. Further, if you love teaching - over research and publication - then through specialization of your practice you can so identify, placing an emphasis on pedagogy, not publication. And you can do so without loss of status, as is common in the current institutional model.

10) There is also greater stability in personal life under PSA, since a private academic practice has far greater flexibility than is possible with searching for vacancies at HEIs and cobbling together part time contracts. A professional, private academic practice allows you to forecast, plan, and respond to the personal idiosyncrasies of life on your own terms.

All of this (and more) is achievable with PSA. And without the introduction of MOOCs, unions, are additional government and philanthropic funding.

Bernstein ends her article with a linguistic point about the relation between language and power:

That is why we need to stop using terms like “budget cut.” It’s the kind of empty language that obscures power. Like swapping “employee” or “worker” for “associate” and “team member.” My office mate once pointed out that there’s no such thing as a budget cut. There are only resource cuts, class cuts, people cuts. Budgets don’t hurt when they get cut. I do.

The hurt caused by the HEI model impacts academics, students, support staff, and society on a global scale – after all, if the US can’t afford this model, then neither can the BRIC. PSA suggests a transformation from “employee” to “professional” which connotes a paradigm shift in power from institutions to individuals, that not only substantially reduces the harm but introduces profound benefit.