Caryn McTighe Musil

In A Measure of Equity: Women’s Progress in Higher Education, my coauthors and I argued that the sea change in the profile of the modern professoriate, in which three out of four recent job offers were for non-tenure-track positions, made the pipeline analogy of earlier years obsolete. The largest pool of new faculty is not in pipes at all, but in reservoirs. Unlike the reservoirs that replenish our cities’ water supply, these reservoirs, for the most part, hold waters that will not flow anywhere. Offline, out of sight, and untapped, they exist alongside rather than integrated within the larger system of delivery. In the academy’s case, they hold not water, but the talent that fuels education itself (Touchton, Musil, and Campbell 2008).

The earth movers that created these reservoirs have been busy for decades. The observant saw the change happening. Its scale, however, caught many by surprise. As Ashley Finley explains in her OCWW article, part-time or full-time non-tenure-track appointments now comprise almost two-thirds of all academic employment in our colleges and universities. In the last five years in particular, this startling shift has prompted many to write books and articles, organize conferences, and establish task forces. But few have addressed the question, “Who are the people relegated to these reservoirs?”

Why a Gender Lens Matters

Having known a decade ago that women were disproportionately represented among part-time faculty, I presumed they were likely to be similarly represented in the larger reservoirs everyone was beginning to write about. At meetings, I kept asking lead researchers if women were the majority in this pool. All but one responded with stunned silence. It hadn’t occurred to them to ask. The person it had occurred to was Judith Gappa, who, with her colleagues Andrea Trice and Ann Austin, had just published an important book, Rethinking Faculty Work (2007). Because of researchers like them and Ashley Finley in this issue, we learn that women are the majority in this group, are 10 to 15 percent more likely than men to be there, and earn 27 percent less per course than their male colleagues while there.

So lesson number one is, as Ida B. Wells-Barnett cautioned: Be vigilant and use your expertise to reveal what others don’t see. The impressive writers in this issue have applied their sharp analytical minds and a gender lens to make the unseen visible—and understood. Finley explains the complicated structural factors of institutional type, field, and the limits of choice that converge with the seismic shift in the professoriate, while Noreen O’Connor explains how being a parent in graduate school almost derailed her academic aspirations. All of this issue’s authors offer concrete suggestions about what to do in the face of what likely will be a permanent dimension of academic life.

Treating Real Faculty as if They Were Really Faculty

Our authors’ advice is simple: treat both men and women in the new contingent demarcation as if you needed, wanted, and valued their talent—because that is actually the case. Without new lifeblood, the academy can’t perform all the functions necessary to reshape itself to offer the kind of education students need in the twenty-first century. The academy is tackling that formidable task while also educating the most diverse set of students ever, students who are filled with talent and promise but who often lack adequate preparation to succeed in college without additional supports.

Of course, treating the contingent faculty like “real” faculty, especially women and women with children, is a radical act. It requires considerable shifts in attitude, in economic remuneration, and in job security. It means incorporating these faculty members as equal partners in departments, welcoming them as academic colleagues, and nurturing their professional growth. Higher education will need these faculty members to become department chairs, deans, and presidents in the coming years, but as Judith White warns in her article, they will never get there in the current two-tiered, rigidly stratified system. These changes should have been made yesterday, but today is not too late to start.

Change is Better than Rigor Mortis

The academy figured out how to rethink entire fields when DNA was discovered and mapped, when technology changed everything about our lives and work, and when women’s studies and ethnic studies forever altered the foundations of knowledge. The academy should be able to make this other change too. At AAC&U, although we acknowledge the importance of academic leadership from presidents and administrators, we know that faculty members are the academy’s red blood cells. Just as red blood cells are the principal means of delivering oxygen to the body and removing its wastes, faculty oxygenate students’ minds, advance human knowledge, and are the lifeblood of institutional leadership.

Among the faculty, it is women, whether tenure-track or contingent faculty, who have disproportionately fueled educational reform movements in higher education. As a group, women have more student-centered classrooms, invest in the life of the college more generously, are more likely to experiment with curricular and course designs, and—because they now represent the majority of fresh doctoral recipients in many fields— carry with them the precious intellectual capital of new scholarship. The academy can’t afford to let this talent, energy, expertise, and leadership stagnate in a reservoir or plasma reserve. If it does, drought and then rigor mortis might set in before anyone even notices.

References

Gappa, J. M., A. E. Austin, and A. G. Trice. 2007. Rethinking faculty work: Higher education’s strategic imperative. San Francisco, CA: John Wiley & Sons.

Touchton, J., C. M. Musil, and K. P. Campbell. 2008. A measure of equity: Women’s progress in higher education. Washington, DC: Association of American Colleges and Universities.