Monthly Archives: January 2012

January 29, 2012 · 5:10 pm

Reflections on the New Faculty Majority Summit 2012

A few hours ago I returned to Chicago from the New Faculty Majority (NFM) Summit, which took place this Saturday from 8am to 5pm at the Grand Hyatt Hotel in Washington, D.C.  I was invited there along with Josh Boldt, Lee Bessette, Brian Croxall, and Karen Kelsky as part of a “social media” team.  Our job was to amplify the voices of those at the summit and make its issues and conversations known to audiences all over the world.  From what I have seen so far–I think we succeeded.

The first session began with a discussion of the origin, development, and scale of the shift from tenured to non-tenure track labor in Higher Education.  Much of the material in this panel has been covered by writers such as Marc Bousquet (http://howtheuniversityworks.com/wordpress/) and will be familiar to those who have been working and researching Adjunct and Grad student labor.  However, given the nature of the coalition that NFM seeks to forge, joining Faculty, Staff, Students, and Parents, it was necessary to first set the context for the discussion before we could proceed.

Following this opening session the summit moved on to examine successful campaigns for adjunct’s rights (see in particular Vancouver Community College’s Program for Change http://www.vccfa.ca/program-for-change/index.html), effective strategies for coalition building, and ways to change attitudes towards Adjunct faculty on campus.

The post-lunch sessions involved small group meetings where each room examined NFM’s own Program for Change draft and made suggestions for what to change, add, or leave out.  Summit participants closed the day with a reflection on the results of their break out sessions.

If it’s possible to be energized, daunted, and disappointed all at the same time that is where I am at following the close of this summit.  I think Josh Boldt’s recent post (http://karmaslide.com/2012/01/29/nfm-12-post-two-stop-looking-for-the-treasure-map-and-start-laying-bricks/) describes my emotional state as well.  Perhaps you should read his words before proceeding to finish reading this post.  Of course, he puts me to shame as a writer in that piece.  So maybe you should wait to read it until later.

I really loved the energy generated early in the day and gained some really useful insights, many of which ended up in my twitter feed under the hashtag #newfac12.  These included:

  1. You don’t need to form a Union to organize.  Something of a revelation for this Chicago Democrat.
  2. Coalitions should include more than one interest group.  This relates to point one.  Unions only allow those seeking a labor contract under the law to join.  A non-union coalition isn’t hampered by this.  Parents, students, staff, and even administrators could join.  As Joe Berry put it during the summit, to have a successful coalition you need both “insiders” and “outsiders.”  The outsiders raise hell and the insiders create a framework to make sure that changes stick.
  3. Changes in Adjunct labor begin with attitude.  In particular, Adjuncts should act “as if” they were not contingent but stable members of a department.  Show up to social events, colloquia, open meetings.  Have conversations with tenured faculty over coffee and tell them what you are working on in and outside of the classroom.  And don’t be afraid to keep looking for a better job.  We are devoted workers but we shouldn’t be martyrs.  (Shout out to Karen Kelsky goes here.  See her website and in particular this post:  http://theprofessorisin.com/2012/01/24/adjuncting-and-stockholm-syndrome/)
  4. Not all Adjuncts are teachers.  Don’t forget the Alternative Academic community.  Librarians, Technical Support, Laboratory workers, Research Assistants, etc.
  5. Educate yourself.  coalition building and advocacy depends on accurate information, which includes budget numbers, faculty appointment data, and documented working conditions across campus.  We should also relearn the old fashion skills taught in civics class such as how to lobby our congressperson and get legislation introduced at the local, state, and federal level.  It’s your government.  Find a way to make it work for you.

Ok, now for the disappointed and daunted part of my post.  As Josh Boldt expressed it, I was hoping for some concrete goals to take back home at the end of NFM.  Some things that NFM wanted me to do to get the national coalition off the ground.  I didn’t get that direction.  Reading through their Program for Change draft (http://newfacultymajority.info/PfC/?page_id=2) I couldn’t help but fear that I’d be another “guy with a clipboard.”   You know, the person on the sidewalk trying to sign you up for a worthy cause for reasons that as yet remain unclear.

There are just too many petitioners for our time and money in realtime and online.  How and why does NFM stand out from this large number of social activist groups?   My hunch is that NFM’s niche is as a higher education advocate whose special focus is Adjunct labor rather than simply a labor focused organization. Unfortunately, this strength does not stand out in the current Program for Change language.  This puts the would-be organizer for NFM at a daunting disadvantage.  Not only do they have to create the coalition but also create the language to convince it to come into being.

The lack of direction in most break-out sessions reflected the overly “squishy” (Lee Bessette’s word) nature of the Program for Change document.  I fully understand why it was made general–to allow for variances at campuses across the United States.  However, this decision puts too much pressure on local groups to create the NFM message without proper guidance from a national office.  To borrow the metaphor from Peter Brown (cited by Josh) we only have the walls of the building.  But I would argue there are not four walls (a full shell).  Instead, we have two.  Give me two more and I can put up a roof and start filling the interior.

What would those two walls consist of?  Here are two suggestions.  First, an organizer’s kit with “suggested” talking points and statistics gathered by NFM on Adjunct labor.  Some of the materials from the summit (contained in the tote bag) might double in this role.  I need to read through it all before I can come to a conclusion on this.  Sorry, I was busy tweeting all day yesterday.  Second, some mechanism to check in on locals and see how they are doing.  Even if you don’t plan to mandate standards for local NFM groups, you still need to make sure they are doing something to justify the affiliation.  An occasional request for a status update would help.  This information could then be uploaded to the NFM website to demonstrate progress (even of the smallest nature) and would help boost morale in other parts of the NFM network.

I can’t end this post without expressing my immense gratitude to NFM for inviting a relative nobody like myself to take part in the summit and paying for my travel as well as part of my hotel expenses.  Let’s face it, Washington, D.C. isn’t cheap.  To show my gratitude I will continue to write on NFM’s behalf through twitter, Facebook, and my blog.  I will also get to work on coalition building here in Chicago with groups such as P-Fac, Occupy Chicago, IFT, and CACHE (the Coalition Against Corporate Higher Education).  Most importantly, however, I’m going to put my money where my mouth is and join the New Faculty Majority.

If you’ve read my post and want to get involved in shaping and sustaining the great work being done by NFM, you can donate online at their website (http://www.newfacultymajority.info/national/).  I’ll be doing that tonight.

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January 22, 2012 · 7:39 pm

Booth Family Drama

Nora Titone’s My Thoughts Be Bloody (2010) provides an interesting new perspective on the Lincoln assassination.  Unlike most books on the topic, Nora begins with the colorful exodus of the Booth family patriarch, Junius Brutus Booth, from England in 1821.  Fleeing his first wife and a three-year old son back in London, Junius Brutus Booth sought to begin a new life in the United States with his mistress Mary Anne Holmes.  He would eventually sire ten children with Mary Anne, including Edwin and John Wilkes Booth.

The first portion of the book is largely devoted to the life of Junius Brutus Booth who was not only a Romantic in every sense of the word, he considered himself a pantheist and was fiercely vegetarian, but also a drunkard.  By doing so, Nora strives to illustrate the environment from which the president’s assassin emerged.

John Wilkes Booth was forced to live as a boy with great economic privation and shame as his father’s first wife found out about Mary Anne and moved to Baltimore expressly to taunt and expose her through the courts as an adulteress.  The first Mrs. Booth would follow the family around the city’s streets screaming ”whore” at the family as they went about their daily chores.

Nora also exposes a Oedipal struggle of sorts between the father and his two most famous sons, Edwin and John Wilkes, which later metamorphosizes into a struggle between the two brothers.  Edwin was by all accounts the son who inherited his father’s theatrical talents while John Wilkes merely obtained his old clothing and stage props.  Yet John Wilkes refused to concede that he would forever be outshone by his older sibling.

By the time that Nora reaches the last chapter of the book and the fateful night of Lincoln’s death at Ford’s Theater, we are already prepared to see this horrendous tragedy as in fact another dramatic play in the struggle for ownership of the Booth name.  Through killing the president, she implies, John Wilkes did not so much seek to influence the southern cause as he did to win the struggle that began between him and his father and then continued with his older brother Edwin.

Hindsight suggests that John Wilkes won the contest that Nora outlines as his name remains far better known than that of his brother Edwin or his father.  The great tragedy, however, that becomes apparent in this book is that John Wilkes could no longer distinguish between life and life on stage.  The two had merged towards the end of his days into one tragicomic stream.

My only complaint with the work is how long it takes the narrative to begin.  In her quest for proper contextualization, Nora runs the risk of losing the reader in the early sections of the book.  Nonetheless it is refreshing to see that “well-researched” popular history is alive and well as a genre.  Here is a work that is both authoritative as well as fun to read once you get past the first 30 pages.  Who would have imagined that in killing the president John Wilkes was actually killing the image of his brother?

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January 13, 2012 · 5:53 pm

The High Cost of Networking–Some Thoughts on the Academic Conference

Imagine this scenario:  After weeks of preparing your talk and struggling to cut it to fit the 20 minute time slot of your three person panel, you arrive in the conference room to find that not only is your session chair missing but there are three people in the audience, one of whom is your best friend from grad school.

Think I’m making this up?  Well, I’m not.  It really happened.  I was one of the three people in the audience at the above named conference panel and I felt bad for the presenter.  I did my best to ask her insightful questions but I couldn’t help wondering where the other attendees had gone.  Where was the loyalty to intellectual inquiry and more important where was common courtesy, which should have dictated to the panel chair that he contact his panel in advance to let them know he would be absent?

Although I have no way of knowing exactly what led this scenario to occur, it is possible to make two assumptions.  The first (in the venerable tradition of Stanley Eugene Fish) is based on the Convention program which was well over 1,000 pages long and listed hundreds of events each day starting at 8am and ending around 8pm. Even the most dedicated audience member couldn’t help but crash after about four panels.  I tried to listen in on five or six a day but found myself succumbing to the “museum effect.” All of the talks started to merge into one huge cluster of meta-discourse in my brain.

Some professional organizations such as the MLA (Yes, I am complimenting them.  Try not to gasp too loud.) have made positive steps to ameliorate this effect by implementing new conference presentation formats.  The dominance of Digital Humanities at this year’s MLA convention made this change much more prominent than it might otherwise have been as presenters in these fields are quite frankly much better at using audio-visual equipment than traditional humanities scholars. They also seem to have learned how to be succinct without omitting essential information in their talks.  This allows more time for discussion and is less overwhelming for the audience.

The second assumption  I gleaned from listening to conference attendees talk in the hotel lobby.  As I sipped a coffee and prepared for my own presentation, it became clear that cost concerns or job pressures forced many to attend simply for the day of their talk.  It was also clear that some convention attendees were more interested in sightseeing than their were in listening to the latest scholarship in the field.

Bearing all of this in mind, it is worth asking–What exactly is the purpose of the large academic conference in 2012?  In the age of social media such as Twitter and Google + why not simply hold a “tweet-up” or create a “google hangout” for scholars in a particular field of study?  These virtual arenas would cost participants far less and could be used at any time during the year.

The short answer to these questions seems to be career networking.

Now don’t get me wrong, I understand the value of face to face interaction with scholars in my field.  I value it greatly.  However, $800, which is the average amount I’ve spent attending academic conferences, seems a steep price to pay for networking.  Almost as much, in fact, as my monthly rent.  That is why I make a habit of attending conferences only if I’m either presenting or chairing a panel.

I wonder how many make the same choice and are thus shut out of the opportunity to network and exchange ideas in real-time.  Yet another way that non-elite faculty are prevented from full participation in the discipline they help sustain.

Among the many changes that I hope will take place as the discipline of English is forced to evolve or disappear is a reexamination of the annual convention model.  It seems at best overly bloated (a point made by Fish that most of his readers conveniently ignored) and at worst hopelessly out of date.  Fewer panels of shorter duration, new presentation methods, new division structures, less pressure to conduct face to face membership business one time a year.  These changes are all desperately needed.  Maybe regional conferences affiliated with national ones could pick up the slack.  Or perhaps a lot of the work needed could be done online.

In any event, if we want all the members of the profession to have a say in its future, we need something better than the traditional annual convention.  The premium for attendance is too steep.  Even if you might get to shake hands with Michael Berube.

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