"Haven't we heard this all before?": Contingent Faculty and the Unchanging Times

Abstract

In exploring the experience of contingent faculty amidst models of postsecondary education in Canada, I find my task fraught with a central contradiction. From the vantage point of contingent/part-time/contract/per course/sessional (insert your own label of choice) workers, are we really experiencing a change in postsecondary models? Any current description of sessional work, in fact, repeats what has been part of our common knowledge for decades, particularly since the publication of Judith M. Gappa and David W. Leslie's groundbreaking Invisible Faculty: Improving the Status of Part-Timers in Higher Education (1993). Inadequate office space, classroom overhead projectors serving as classy coat racks, treacherous commutes, last minute hirings, contracts that do not compensate for pre-term preparation ... the list of difficulties is endless, and we have said and heard it before. If I am, thus, dealing with an aspect of the postsecondary education system that in changing times remains largely the same, then perhaps the more necessary task is to consider why these experiences remain unchanged and thereby begin to conceive of ways out of this perpetual cycle of poor working conditions. Why do we, particularly those in the humanities, who frequently claim to be making our students into more socially conscious and responsible citizens, allow such an inequitable system to be the site for their learning? Yes, material changes--such as provincial or national unionization--could help improve basic working conditions. Nevertheless, in an economic and governmental environment likely not conducive to such seismic shifts, I am left thinking that maybe the most immediate attention should be paid to dismantling our attitudes and behaviours that serve only to entrench the place of sessional workers at the bottom of our institutional hierarchy. Funny story: In my current appointment as a limited term faculty member, I have found myself negotiating a tricky space of liminality. From my second floor office window, I look down upon the portable I used to occupy as a sessional instructor and in which my sessional colleagues still have offices. One of my friends from that portable and I have joked that my current position literally offers me a position in the ivory tower! As an undergraduate, and even as a graduate student, I admit I was utterly naive of an academic Chain of Being, but every glance out my window confirms this fact. To continue with this Darwinian metaphor, I have become curious in recent months about just how often the rhetoric of makes it into our discussions of our careers. For example, I have frequently been told by colleagues that getting a tenure-track job is all about endurance, that if I just persevere that elusive job will come (they don't then serenade me with Somewhere Over the Rainbow, but sometimes I imagine they do). Quality of work, of course, is foundational, but ultimately it seems that my career will come down to whether or not I have the mental and physical faculties to survive the process. Herein lies the problem: since the rhetoric of is innately involved in the construction of hierarchies--those who survive versus those who languish or perish--perhaps it is this depiction of our careers as the product of that we must necessarily upset. We likely have encountered the attitude that those who have permanent positions are somehow more fit as than their non-tenured faculty. I have heard stories of sessional faculty being called failed academics to their faces; I have heard of tenured faculty who have questioned whether or not sessionals are qualified to teach courses above the first year and those who have demanded for more checking up on the courses staffed by sessionals. This survival of the fittest mentality assumes that those who have achieved permanent work are innately (and abstractly) better. While the great majority of my tenure-track and tenured colleagues at various institutions do not overtly subscribe to the arrogance suggested by this mentality, I do frequently encounter an attitude that is its by-product: Pursuing a permanent position is hard; it's supposed to be hard. …