Posts in category: Work

In the unlikely event that you, Internet Reader, wish to write to me, please note that Rutgers’s university e-mail system, provided by our friends at Microsoft at who knows what cost, aggressively misidentifies almost all non-Rutgers-origin messages (and many Rutgers-origin messages!) as spam. Over the last few months I have regularly been finding important messages from former students in my spam folder. I try to check my university spam folder regularly, but occasionally I neglect that particular Augean stable for too long. It seems Microsoft’s advanced machine learning technology is tuned to annihilate literally every message originating from Gmail.

I can be reached at first name dot last name at gmail. I cannot be reliably reached on social media.

This figure represents changes in the different types of instructors employed at Rutgers-New Brunswick since 2013 (the year Rutgers merged with the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey), with Rutgers’s Big 10 “peer” campuses added for comparison. It spells bad news for tenure at Rutgers, and, since Rutgers is in many ways exemplary of national trends, bad news for the rest of US higher education too.

Only in the course of preparing a graduate seminar session on Pascale Casanova’s World Republic of Letters did I learn that Casanova died, far too early, three years ago at the age of 59. No one would have appreciated better than Casanova the significance of delayed uptake. But, all ironies about myself aside, I was quite moved by the memorial notices by Gisèle Sapiro for the Institute of World Literature and by Joseph Jurt for Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales. Here’s a brief belated tribute of my own.

Over the course of the last 18 months, Rutgers has been in crisis mode, laying off hundreds of employees (part-time lecturers and staff), imposing a near-total hiring freeze, stealing contractually agreed-upon salary increases, and generally acting like an institution which is struggling mightily to stay afloat. University management claimed that it was facing major budget deficits, and only severe austerity would carry us through: the scarifying bottom-line deficits were $58 million for FY2020 (ending June 2020), $97 million for FY2021, and now $45 million for FY2022 (ending June 2022). More than two hundred million dollars altogether! Faced with numbers like these, a casual observer might think austerity was the only choice. Certainly everyone in management, from the university president down to the dean of the School of Arts & Sciences, presented cuts as a painful necessity.

But all this appears rather different in light of the recent disclosures about the Rutgers athletics program’s finances, reported on in great detail by Abbott Kolloff and Jean Rimbach for NorthJersey.com (this link is to a follow-up story; their first report is subscribers-only). Rutgers’s athletics’ own true 2020 deficit, the report calculates, was $73 million. Years of deficits and broken promises have left the program $265 million in debt. In other words: without the financial failures of the athletics program, failures that predate COVID-19 and will, doubtless, continue after it, the university’s overall deficits in the pandemic era would practically have disappeared. So would the justification for the layoffs and the cuts to academics. It is one thing to imagine Rutgers painfully laying off workers in order to keep the classes and labs and libraries going—though, in fact, our union’s analysis showed its unrestricted reserves (around $600 million then) and its share of federal emergency funds (at least $133 million through July 2021 [edit 10/5/21: make that $365 million]) were more than adequate to the size of the emergency need. But even setting that aside, it is quite another matter to trade the livelihoods of people essential to the university for Big 10 football pretensions.

I have just learned about efforts among staff at Oxford University Press USA to organize a union. Oxford published my first book, and so, as an OUP author, I call on the press to recognize the union. Every worker should have the right to participate in collective bargaining. Furthermore, every academic should be concerned with this unionization effort. The working conditions of university press staff—and OUP is one of the largest—are the conditions for the dissemination of knowledge. Press workers should have a say in those conditions.

[These are the remarks I delivered today to a special meeting of the faculty of my school.]

[Adding this, the next week: the resolution I proposed at the meeting after making these remarks carried in the subsequent vote by 482–46, but the status of the laid-off staff and faculty remains uncertain.]

Let me remind you why we have called this meeting: across Rutgers, since March, hundreds of staff have been laid off; several hundred part-time lecturers lost their teaching; your raises, due this past July 1, have been withheld. Two weeks ago, Old Queens made an unprecedented attempt to eliminate all PTL courses from the English department’s writing program, a move to, in effect, terminate seventy instructors. And plans are still underway to lay off 15–20 staff members in SAS, with at least nine already having received notice.

Let me remind you that our collective response has already had an effect: since this meeting was called, some part-time lecturer courses have been restored. I would like to acknowledge that, in helping to restore veteran PTLs to teaching this spring, Dean March has demonstrated that he understands the importance of more secure working conditions for part-time faculty.

However: staff layoffs are still happening; many part-time lecturers still face complete uncertainty under the hiring freeze; our contractually guaranteed raises are being held back on the basis of a baseless “fiscal emergency.”

You have heard from David Hughes that neither the overall financial situation of the university nor the budgetary situation of SAS justifies these austerity measures; you have heard from Amy Higer about the hardships created, now more than ever, by eliminating PTL courses and leaving instructors in uncertainty.

So the question is not: How much should we all sacrifice?

The question is: Why are faculty and staff being asked to sacrifice in order to fill deficits in auxiliary enterprises like athletics?

The question is: if austerity budgets were planned on the assumption of $350 million in state funding, what will be done with the 437 million—$87 million more—that the state is actually appropriating for Rutgers?

The question is: will decisions about priorities at Rutgers be made by managers through budgeting mechanisms, or will they be made by faculty governance?

When we petitioned for this meeting, Old Queens was not simply micromanaging English courses on the basis of enrollments: Old Queens was attempting to direct the Writing Program about which courses could be offered and who could teach them. And the Writing Program is still being forced to limit its more advanced offerings.

Right now, you may say, this issue is local to the Writing Program and the English department. But its implications are global. If we concede that a vice provost or a vice president can meddle in a particular department’s course offerings, we no longer have faculty autonomy in the matter of instruction. Undergraduate and graduate program directors will have no more freedom in assembling and staffing a curriculum.

Dean March’s September 30 letter to chairs speaks of “using the teaching capacity of full-time instructors more efficiently.” But I submit that questions of what courses to offer, and which instructors should teach what, are best decided, as they have customarily been, within departments. It is department officers and committees who know colleagues and students best: who has the expertise? who has the experience? where are enrollments likely to go? where are low-enrolling courses nonetheless essential to programs of study?

“Efficiency” cannot justify interfering in the academic affairs of departments to rewrite curriculum. “Efficiency” cannot cloak layoffs that undermine research and instruction. And “efficiency” cannot excuse decisions that, by harming the quality of our classes, ultimately harm our students.

So I think we need to pause and re-evaluate priorities across Rutgers and within SAS in particular. If additional state funds are now available, we can re-examine budgeting decisions. We can say: No to layoffs. No to PTL cuts. And we can say: Faculty expertise, and not “efficiency” as interpreted by administrators, decides about curriculum.

So I have a resolution to introduce. It begins with a series of motivating statements that amplify what I have just said, and then it proposes a way to re-evaluate priorities within SAS.

Since news of professional developments is slow to cross into my relatively social-media-free information bubble, I have only just learned of the transformed MLA Job Information List, and I have an opinion.

The MLA’s preliminary report on the 2016–2017 Job Information List is out, with the predictable and disheartening finding that job listings in both English and modern languages are down to another all-time low. Actually the situation is worse than the report’s first chart suggests, since the proportion of tenure-track positions has also been on a steady decline. Meanwhile the number of new PhDs in English is largely steady.

The Guardian, as part of its “Outside in America” series on homelessness, has published a feature about homeless adjunct instructors by Alastair Gee. It is painful reading. The protagonists of the story include a homeless English adjunct professor at San Jose State and an anonymous adjunct who pays the bills through sex work.

On July 1, my job security improved. I am now part of the ludicrously small proportion of the academic workface with tenure: 21% in the U.S. in 2015, according to this AAUP chart based on IPEDS data, as against 57% part-time and full-time non-tenure-track faculty (the other 22% are grad students and junior faculty on the tenure track). I first applied for full-time academic jobs in the fall of 2008—that glorious season! Though private and public university management used the financial crisis to justify the austerity they imposed, austerity did not end with the official end of the Great Recession, at least when it comes to hiring faculty into good jobs. The MLA’s most recent report on its Job Information list begins by remarking that four years of decline in both English and foreign-language job ads brings numbers to “another new low,” having sunk beneath the level of the “troughs” of earlier decades. “How’s the market this year?” the senior academics ask Ph.D.-job-seekers, as though they were asking about the weather. But as with the weather, short-term fluctuations do not disguise the menacing trend.