29, no. 1 (Fall 1997): 48-51 To the Editor Search

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I AM here to tell the story of the three-year process of getting renewable four-year contracts and other benefits (including sabbatical eligibility) for non-tenure-track and part-time lecturers at the University of Vermont (which—for obscure reasons having to do with the Latin name of the university and two hundred years of custom—we call “UVM”). As a semiprivate, semipublic research institution, UVM has no faculty union. Until this fall, lecturers have had no job security: they have been asked to sign nine-month or four-month contracts and often have not known whether they would teach in a given September until July or August. Getting longer-term contracts meant a significant shift in the structure of the base budget for the university, which had paid lecturers using “one-time funds” every year for decades. Our experience might therefore be instructive for faculties in many kinds of institutions.

I contend that we were able to accomplish as much as we did because we recognized that most non-tenure-track and part-time faculty members (whom we call lecturers at UVM) are women and that their bad situation—low pay, no job security, no faculty-development support, limited benefits—can be framed as a feminist issue. I acknowledge the serious problems associated with universities' heavy dependence on lecturers to teach undergraduates: I know that administrators view the use of lecturers as a cost-cutting device and that the dollars paid to lecturers might otherwise go to support graduate students or to create or unfreeze) tenure-line faculty positions; I know that this allocation means an erosion of the tenured faculty whose responsibilities include active research programs; I know that the lecturers have no obligation to contribute service or research to the university beyond what is required for their teaching and that service and research might decrease if a university includes lecturers among the permanent faculty.

When I joined the UVM faculty as a recently divorced, tenure-track assistant professor in 1983, I thought I also knew that the lecturers were in their positions by choice: I assumed those lecturers who held MAs could have gone on for their PhDs and that those who held PhDs (whose spouses—husbands, mainly—were all full-time employees at UVM or neighboring institutions) had simply decided that family life was more important than the pursuit of an independent career. I knew, of course, that the job market for PhDs was as tight then as it is today (judging by the helpful and painful statistics the MLA publishes each year), and I was dimly aware of the arbitrariness of the crapshoot (excuse me: I mean “search process”) through which I parlayed my Stanford PhD into a tenure,track job, one that had attracted over seven hundred qualified applicants. I knew, for instance, that my having been invited to Brown for a campus visit (which did not, by the way, yield an offer: nor did the seventy-eight other applications I filed that year) played a part in my invitation to UVM, as did the UVM dean's insistence that the English department invite a female candidate. I was, in effect—and believe me, I am eternally grateful for the way that effect has benefited me in the long run—an affirmative action candidate. Even so, I believed—with all the arrogance, privilege, and wisdom of a twenty-seven,year-old—that the best PhDs would get tenure-track jobs and would, of course, be the best teachers, Thirteen years of faculty experience and a feminist perspective have changed my mind.

What a feminist perspective made me see is that the “choice” to be a lecturer is overdetermined because of the feminization of the position. At UVM, lecturers make up approximately 19% of the teaching faculty; 34% of the faculty (including all the lecturers) are women, but 66% of the lecturers are women. Any academic who takes an honest look at his or her acquaintances will have to admit that heterosexual professional couples who follow the geographic imperatives of the wife's career are rare indeed. And every academic knows the geographic strictures of academic jobs: while spousal hiring policies may be making a small dent in the problem at some institutions, the phenomenon of two wedded faculty members with tenure in the same town is rare too. I would argue that the gay man or lesbian who follows a partner's tenure-track job to become a lecturer, as well as that unusual heterosexual husband who does the same for his wife, is in a feminized position carrying all the disadvantages of a job that has long been institutionally derogated as women's work. This is what a feminist perspective has made me see. What thirteen years of faculty experience has made me see is that the lecturers who do that work at UVM are doing a splendid job. They teach as only those who love to teach can, and many are active in research, advising, and committee work as well, although they are hardly paid to be. That twenty-six of the twenty-eight tenure-line faculty members in my department signed a petition supporting the concept of contracts for lecturers suggests I am not alone in admiring the work that lecturers are doing for the department.

I will not say more here about the merits of lecturers or about whether universities should perpetuate their existence: I concede the broader view of the situation to the American Association of University Professors. Instead I turn to the logistics of getting contracts for lecturers, given that lecturers do exist and that their conditions of employment have been unbearable. I begin with a summary of the rationale we used in organizing support for the movement among the faculty, and I end with a list of the players who made this effort possible.

We presented the following reasoning to the faculty and the administration: If lecturers could hold five-year, renewable contracts and received the same support (such as travel funds, sabbatical eligibility, and faculty-development grants) as tenure-track faculty members, then

1. Departments that regularly needed lecturers could plan their curricula in five-year, rather than one-year, segments, thus improving academic programming, and they could depend on greater continuity in the teaching staff from year to year.
2. Lecturers could benefit from regular evaluation and faculty development, which would ensure the quality of teaching.
3. Lecturers who had long-term commitments to the university (some had been teaching at UVM as long as twenty-six years) would not have been marked as “temporary,” while those who preferred to maintain flexibility could choose to teach without contracts.
4. Tenure-track faculty members would be free to teach more courses in their areas of specialization. To support the faculty members working toward tenure, the institution must give them adequate opportunity to focus on their research while continuing to teach. Probationary faculty members need the opportunity to teach courses (at the advanced as well as the introductory levels) in their fields. Teaching these courses enables them to produce work commensurate with the research expectations at UVM, where the annual teaching load may be three and three or three and two, depending on the department, and where tenure-track faculty members are expected to build national reputations in their fields. Employing lecturers to help cover sections of introductory undergraduate courses makes this possible.
5. UVM could continue to attract strong tenure-track faculty members. To recruit top candidates for tenure-track jobs and to retain tenured faculty members, the university must offer an appealing teaching load in spite of the requirement that faculty members teach five or six courses a year. If all the current lecturer positions were converted to tenure-track positions, the jobs UVM offers would become less competitive because junior faculty members would be asked to carry the bulk of the introductory teaching. Employing lecturers enhances faculty recruitment.

Note the strategic emphasis here on the advantages to the tenure-line faculty members of having lecturers as colleagues. While some traditionalists at UVM maintained that they would prefer carrying heavier teaching loads and teaching more introductory courses if it meant having more PhD-holding, tenure-track colleagues, they were a tiny minority. The appeal to the self-interest of the tenured and tenure,track faculty was instrumental in organizing support for lecturers' contracts.

I organize my narrative of the campaign as a list of the players who were involved in the process. On a campus like ours, it would be necessary to mobilize the following groups or the equivalent to support the lecturers' cause:

The Faculty Women's Caucus. The effort began with the Faculty Women's Caucus, an unofficial and unsanctioned body, open to all women who teach at UVM, including lecturers as well as tenure-track faculty members. The Steering Committee of the caucus includes a dozen or so senior faculty women from across the university and meets mainly so that its members may exchange what might be called gossip about administrative decisions that affect faculty women. The Steering Committee meets once or twice a month, and when anything is happening that requires grassroots action, it calls a general meeting for all women faculty members on campus. The general meetings are also brainstorming sessions on issues the caucus needs to address: the question of contracts for lecturers came up in more than one of these meetings. We put the names of the women who come to the general meetings on a mailing list, which we use to generate support for feminist candidates for university-wide committees or the Faculty Senate. To date we have had amazing results: we nominate candidates for every major position that opens up, and in the five years of the caucus's existence every candidate we have endorsed has won. The first step in the lecturers' movement was for the Faculty Women's Caucus to get a tenured woman professor elected vice chair of the Faculty Senate. Organizing the women's vote made this possible, even though the candidate had not been actively involved in the senate and indeed had almost never attended a Faculty Senate meeting before the election.

The Faculty Senate. At UVM the lecturers are full voting members of the Faculty Senate, the body that includes all sixteen hundred or so faculty members of the university. As members of the senate, lecturers are eligible to serve on senate committees and to vote at general senate meetings. Of course, the vast majority of UVM's 184 lecturers do not attend senate meetings; neither do most tenure-line faculty members, for that matter. The largest senate meeting in recent memory (in the spring of 1996, when the Faculty Women's Caucus called for a censure of the president and provost for their failure to address racism on campus) involved only about three hundred voting members, and fewer than two hundred stuck around long enough to vote, even on a matter as controversial as that; the number in attendance is usually closer to fifty. Therefore, even a portion of the lecturers can significantly affect a senate vote. The vice chair, whom the Faculty Women's Caucus had nominated and helped elect, formed an ad hoc senate committee to address the question of terms of employment for lecturers.

An ad hoc committee of the Faculty Senate. Chaired by the vice chair of the Faculty Senate, a tenured professor, the committee consisted of five part-time, non-tenure-track lecturers; the ombudsperson; and one assistant professor who had moved into her position after ten years as a lecturer. The group gathered data from the Office of Institutional Studies about the number, gender, and longevity of lecturers at UVM and researched the situation of lecturers at institutions that had reputations for handling the employment of lecturers progressively. The committee produced a document containing a rationale and proposal for granting five-year contracts to lecturers after a probationary period of two years. The committee asked for responses to the document from faculty members serving in the president's and provost's offices and from chairs of the departments involved, particularly those chairs known to disapprove of lecturers; their comments were then incorporated into the document's argument. The document was circulated through the various committees of the senate and ultimately came up for debate on the senate floor. The lecturers' community had received plenty of advance notice of the meeting and turned out in force. The vice chair of the senate led the discussion and arranged for the chairs of departments that are heavily dependent on lecturers (e.g., foreign languages, math, English, music, art) to speak in favor of the proposal.

Department chairs. Each chair who endorsed the proposal at the senate meeting brought a petition in support of lecturers'contracts, signed by the vast majority of tenure-track faculty members in his or her department. The present chair of one department preferred a strategy of converting lecturer funds to tenure-track lines and did not support the referendum. We asked a former chair of that department to speak in that chair's place.) The spectacle of five chairs giving impassioned testimony on the necessity for longer-term commitments of funds for lecturers was impressive. (Was it a coincidence that each of those chairs but one happens also to be married to a lecturer? Or that the one who is not married to a lecturer was herself a “faculty wife” and lecturer at UVM for many years? Again, I say these matters are overdetermined.) No one spoke against the proposal. It passed the senate with a strong majority of those present (many lecturers were there) and subsequently went through the process of revision into language that could be adopted into the Faculty Handbook , the code that governs contracts at UVM. Through that process the proposal changed to allow for the possibility—not the certainty—of a lecturer's being offered a contract for up to four years, not five. A carefully reworded version of the ad hoc committee's original proposal—revised by the chair of the English department in consultation with the chairs of various senate committees and with representatives from the offices of the provost and the president—was adopted by the senate as a set of formal guidelines to be followed by the provost in future dealings with lecturers. These guidelines are not yet policy, though some lecturers have received contracts, depending on the fiscal optimism and general good faith of their deans and department chairs.

The President's Commission on the Status of Women. After the senate passed the motion to revise the Faculty Handbook to allow for lecturers' contracts, the President's Commission on the Status of Women, a group of students, staff, and faculty members, which advises the upper administration on campus women's issues, maintained pressure on the president and provost. Regular meetings between the commission and the upper-level administrators made it difficult for the issue to go away once the Faculty Senate had approved it.

We sought five-year contracts for lecturers after a probationary period of two years; we ended up with the possibility of a four-year contract for lecturers who have passed a second-year and a fourth-year review. While the provision is less than we were hoping for, it's much more than the non-tenure-track and part-time faculty had before: hence I call it a qualified success. I believe the key element in that success was the existence of the President's Commission on the Status of Women and the Faculty Women's Caucus. While it is relatively difficult to introduce a group like the former into an institution, a group like the latter is easy to establish. All you need are a small group of senior faculty members committed to activism on behalf of faculty women (to form a steering committee) and one tenured faculty woman willing to take a position of leadership, in your campus's equivalent of our Faculty Senate to get the process started. That person must do a considerable amount of work, but the work is feminist activism, which that person is likely to be doing as part of her university service anyway. Feminist academics who share some vestiges of “male privilege”—academic women who for whatever reason have achieved the potential for influence that comes with tenure (such as women like me, who have greater access to tenure than others do because of our whiteness, middle-class status, heterosexuality, and nationality) —have had to reassess their relations with “other women” (women of color, working-class women, lesbians, immigrant women) inside and outside the academy. It is time for us to recognize the mark of otherness that has been placed on non-tenure-track and part-time faculty members and to do some “women's work” on their behalf.

The first draft of my paper ends here. I asked my former officemate, my friend and colleague Brian Kent, to read the draft, and his response forced me to acknowledge a note of smugness in what I had written, a tenure-track centrism that permeates my sincere attempt to see things from a part-timer's point of view. His points brought into focus an anxiety I had felt all along in preparing this paper to read at the MLA, a feeling that it was perhaps inappropriate for me to speak for part-timers on one of the few MLA panels devoted to their concerns. And while one member of the audience at the session characterized my qualms as an expression of “liberal guilt,” I want to reproduce here the rhetorical gesture I made at the end of that presentation, which was—after all—part of a panel consisting entirely of tenured faculty members discussing the situation of part-timers. Because Kent speaks directly to the exclusion of part-timers from the process of improving their working conditions in his response, I give him the last word.

The author is Professor of English and Director of Women's Studies at the University of Vermont. This article is based on her presentation at the 1996 MLA convention in Washington, DC.

© 1997 by the Association of Departments of Foreign Languages. All Rights Reserved.

ADFL Bulletin 29, no. 1 (Fall 1997): 48-51

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