Judith White

Excluded by Choice? Contingent Faculty and the Leadership Core
By Judith S. White, president and executive director of HERS (Higher Education Resource Services)

In 1989, Charles Handy described the future of work with his theory of the shamrock organization. His description provides a valuable lens for focusing on the issue of gender, contingent faculty, and leadership in academic life today. In The Age of Unreason, the shamrock metaphor provides Handy with a useful image: three distinct leaves on one organizational stem. One leaf he calls “the core.” The people composing this group “are” the organization: the well-qualified, committed professionals who expect rewards and “some guarantee of their future[s].” The second leaf is the “contractual fringe”: consultants to the “core,” presumably well rewarded, who are paid for results rather than for time. The third leaf is the “flexible labor force.” This group, Handy says, “is too easily seen as the hired help division, people of whom little is expected and to whom little is given” (99).

Handy’s shamrock makes clear that regardless of how one defines “contingent” faculty, no matter how broadly the positions may range across and beyond the categories of “fringe” or “flexible,” none of these faculty are central to the institution. They will not hold structural leadership roles in higher education. They will not be considered for senior leadership positions. They will not even vote on who fills these positions. In sum, these faculty—the majority of faculty hired since 1990 (Touchton 2008, 20)—are outside the shared governance system. The women and men of the contingent faculty can make a great impact in the classroom, and they can help shape the institutional climate for their students and colleagues. But unless dramatic change occurs in higher education, they will not be part of the diverse senior leadership higher education needs in order to renew our institutions.

A Question of “Choice”

Handy asserts that the shamrock organization results from the choices of workers who no longer want to commit themselves to lifelong affiliations. I would suggest that in academia, a more likely explanation lies in the systematic withdrawal of public funding from higher education. For nearly thirty years, state allocations to colleges and universities have been decreasing. Federal funding of grant aid has also declined significantly even as the numbers of students needing such aid have risen. As a result, more tuition and endowment dollars are going to financial aid--as well as to other rising costs, including facilities, technology, and health insurance--and fewer dollars are going to funding full-time tenure-track faculty lines.

These conditions may have led to contingent faculty growth, but did they inevitably lead to a significant gender imbalance in the leadership core, with only 23 percent of college and university presidents being women? (Touchton 2008, 27). Was it unavoidable that women today would hold only 7 percent more of tenured faculty positions than they did in 1976—moving from 24 percent to 31 percent? (Touchton 2008, 20; Benjamin 2003). Probably not, had the rhetoric of “choice” not been so successful. While Handy indicated in 1989 that he did not see the shift toward the shamrock model as “inevitable,” he did predict the gender gap, asserting that women in particular exercise their choices in the matter of workforce employment. For Handy as for many others, even with clear evidence that rational people would not choose worse working conditions over better, the “choices” of mothers are always a reliable explanation of gender inequities.          

Women, Handy says, especially mothers, are opting not to have “careers” and instead simply want to “work.” Applied to the contingent faculty, this observation has little bearing. If we define careers as working situations requiring preparation and commitment, offering challenges and support for continuing professional development and contribution, then few in the contingent workforce can be said to have chosen not to have a career. These are, after all, women and men who have spent many years of their lives preparing for teaching, research, and service (many managing all three even in the face of challenging working conditions). Rather than choosing not to have “careers,” they are exercising the choice to stay involved in their passions for their disciplines and their students. The alternative “choice” would be to leave academic life. 

If, however, we define careers as working situations in which commitments to organizational assignments take precedence over all other commitments at all times, then faculty with family and other personal responsibilities often have no option but to step away from such demands. Thus the rhetoric of choice functions in place of outright exclusion. Important civil rights legislation in the 1970’s outlawed sex discrimination, and for a while the academy seemed to have the openings necessary to create a more diverse professoriate. But the decline in public funding of higher education since that period has created economic incentives to keep the faculty “core” small. With fewer lines for tenured faculty, the expectations of faculty careers have been redefined in ways that exclude many women and men. It is no longer legal to say, “We won’t hire women--they have babies and leave.” It is, however, still general practice to communicate the expectation that anyone who puts any commitment, however important or of whatever duration, ahead of research will not thrive on most campuses. The pool of potential leaders is smaller and less rich than it could be.   

More than Numbers

I admit that I find this topic very painful. As a feminist administrator and activist, I feel partially responsible for trying to create the diverse professoriate and leadership our institutions need by filling the academic “pipeline” with such leaders. But while I and others like me have been watching the pipeline, we have not kept our eyes on the real prize: a new environment for academic life and leadership. We mistook our presence for new power, and our pipeline was diverted to create a new pool of surplus labor.

I should not have been so naïve. In 1987, while Charles Handy was theorizing the shamrock organization, I was transitioning from non-tenure-track faculty member to full-time administrator. Along the way, I accepted a one-year appointment as visiting assistant professor. At the year’s opening faculty meeting, I met the forty tenured or tenure-track faculty in my department, eight of whom were women. Then I and the eleven other new members of the department—all of us women—were introduced. As the department chair finished reading our names and titles, he chuckled and said, “Next year we’ll work on affirmative action for men.” The audience’s response—forced laughter from many, and silence from others—signaled that something was wrong.

What the head count masked was the power reality. Eleven of the women introduced were starting non-renewable contracts as lecturers and visitors; only one was a new tenure-track faculty member. So while women’s numbers were up, making life less isolated for the still-outnumbered continuing women faculty, the power and leadership structures remained unchanged. Only one woman of twelve had even a chance of becoming a decision-maker, both within the department and at the university. The rest of us could contribute and help shape a new climate. But we could not vote. We could not chair. We would not become dean or provost or president.  

New Avenues for Leadership

As long as most presidents come from the faculty—and women presidents are even more likely than men to come from academic positions (Touchton 2008, 28)—the imbalance in women’s participation as tenured faculty will mean that only a small, predominately male core is eligible to set the institutional agenda. The numbers of people of color among the tenured faculty are even smaller. Thus the diverse perspectives needed to reenvision higher education for the century ahead are not adequately represented. 

The American Council on Education (ACE) has two projects underway that may offer new avenues for increasing the diversity of our senior leadership pool. With support from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, ACE is awarding grants to institutions that seek routes to “Faculty Career Flexibility.” The goal is to provide new tenure-review models that reflect the varying circumstances of faculty lives. ACE also recently launched the Spectrum Initiative: Advancing Diversity in the College Presidency. Through this initiative, ACE will work with potential candidates, search firms, and boards of trustees to broaden the pool for senior leadership roles to include more candidates from less traditional paths. 

Obviously, leaders and sites of creative leadership exist throughout our institutions, and women have a history of leading from wherever they are. Strengthening women’s multicultural alliances (a core value of the Campus Women Lead project) will make new models of institutional change possible. At the same time, senior leaders who look for such models and recognize nonpositional leadership are key to moving this work from the margins to the center of our organizations. Creating a cadre of such senior leaders means making the choice of leadership a real option for many now excluded from the core of our academic shamrock.

Judith S. White is a member of the Campus Women Lead Project on Inclusive Excellence. Campus Women Lead believes that women can advance inclusive leadership in higher education institutions by building multicultural alliances. If you want to raise questions on your campus about how to increase engaged education using diversity as a key vehicle for expanding intellectual and practical choices, consider bringing a Campus Women Lead workshop to your campus. For more information, visit our Web site or contact Kathryn Campbell at campbell@aacu.org.

References

Benjamin, E. 2003. Disparities in the salaries and appointments of academic women and men: An update of a 1998 report of Committee W on the Status of Women in the Academic Profession. Washington, DC: American Association of University Professors.

Handy, C. 1989. The age of unreason. Boston: Harvard Business School Press.

Touchton, J. 2008. A Measure of Equity: Women’s Progress in Higher Education. Washington, DC: Association of American Colleges and Universities.