An MLA Agenda: Too Little Too Late
Friday, 15 May 2009
In many places, laudable efforts to professionalize institutional policies and practices for faculty members off the tenure track have established an intermediate tier consisting of full-time contingent faculty members who hold renewable multiyear contracts. While these faculty members have more job security than part-time or short-term instructors, they are still far more vulnerable to cutbacks than colleagues on the tenure track, typically have heavier teaching loads than their tenure-track counterparts, and usually play limited roles in student advising and curriculum planning. Compared with the opportunities for professional development and institutional advancement of tenure-track faculty members, theirs are scant; their lot is to live with the frustration and resentment inherent in second-class academic citizenship.
MLA Newsletter, Summer 2009, “An Agenda for These Times,” Catherine Porter
I have to say my profession, especially my professional organizations, drive me a little batty. Everything seems laced with a bit of irritating class bias. I love the people who love technology and who incorporate it into their classrooms, but they are also too often uncritically consumerist. I enjoy the conventions (well, mostly) but they seem utterly disconnected from economic reality. Everything is priced for the tenured-expense-account-professors.
Notwithstanding the fantasies of the hard-right, academia is shockingly conservative, loath to accept even the most minor change. Porter calls tenured faculty “a discomfited elite, caught up in awkward relationships with their less-privileged colleagues.” That’s great to hear but it would have been even better to hear it a decade ago, when graduate students (yours truly among them) first began to sound the alarm.
A cynic might see the establishment of the Academic Workforce Advocacy Kit as a kind of sudden realization on the part of this elite that they may well have killed the goose that laid the golden egg of their discomfited privileges. Honestly, I am not sure how to judge it, although there must surely be some goose killing paranoia in the mix somewhere. Maybe, though, we might see this as the long-slumbering beast slowly awakening.
