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IN RESPONDING to Robyn's description of how lecturers at UVM got contracts, I should note that I have benefited directly from the effort. After twelve years of being hired to teach introductory English courses on a semester-to-semester basis, last year I received a contract to teach three courses a semester for the next four years. I must confess this change improved my sense of my relation to the department in a number of ways. And on a more general level I recognize that the shift of continuing one-time funds to the English department base budget is a significant achievement for lecturers.
Nonetheless, when I look back on the process that brought about the changes, I'm left placing much more emphasis on the “Qualified” than on the “Success.” Despite my own experience, the effect of the changes Robyn describes is largely theoretical and likely to remain so, given the language adopted in the Faculty Handbook . More important, the fundamental relation of lecturers to the university has not changed at all—lecturers remain a group with no voice and dependent on the good graces of others who are not lecturers. In the end, as ungrateful of me as it may seem, the process primarily underscored that status.
Like Robyn, I feel the need to acknowledge that this whole discussion dances around the issue of whether lecturers should exist on college and university campuses. My remarks are premised on the simple fact that they do. I believe that a separate teaching line for lecturers benefits all faculty members, students, and, yes, administrators concerned about the bottom line, but if tenure-line faculty members and administrators decided there should be only one kind of instructional employee, I would consider their position honorable (many lecturers would disagree with me, I'm sure). I would certainly lose out in such a system because I don't wish to become a tenureline faculty member as that position is now defined. But I still have to grant an integrity to the ideal of a fully tenured teaching staff, assuming, of course, that racial and gender imbalances had been rectified.
What seems dishonorable to me is that this ideal gets lip service while year in and year out lecturers serve as a kind of invisible faculty, Either they should have a place in the structure of higher education, or they shouldn't. Right now they are there because they are needed and because most of them are fine instructors, yet they are not recognized as full participants in the university community, because administrators and some tenure-line faculty members do not want to grant them any kind of formal status. Robyn sees this condition as a feminist issue, and given the percentages it's hard to argue with her reasoning. I can't claim that sense of injustice based on gender, but I do recognize the way my job has been feminized.
I agree with Robyn that my job carries all the disadvantages of historically derogated “women's work.” That's what makes the issue of status so important. The contracts address the issue by offering some measure of institutionally recognized continuity of service. In a strict, limited sense, four-year contracts do erase the stamp of temporariness from a lecturer's forehead. But in a larger sense the stigma of temporariness remains because of lecturers' status in relation to tenure-line faculty members and because of the relative status of teaching and research. As long as teaching is seen as the stepchild of research and as long as lecturers are primarily teachers, lecturers will be viewed as lesser beings.
I was pleasantly surprised by the level of support in the English department for our petition to improve working conditions and I have come to believe tenure-line faculty members genuinely admire the work lecturers do, but I'm still convinced that most of those who signed think we do less important work than they do largely because we are in some way incapable of going the route that would lead to tenure-track positions. I can't even begrudge them that attitude since they did labor through what I consider an odious process to get where they are.
I don't mean to suggest that this attitude is expressed meanly or maliciously, although I wouldn't be surprised if it is in other departments and at other schools. I feel fortunate to be in a department where I'm treated with kindness and respect. Still, given the professional priorities and ambitions of tenure-line faculty members, it is not surprising that when they consider lecturers' role and lack of formal status, they wonder why anyone puts up with the situation. This thought occurs to me most when I listen to tenure-line faculty members discuss the importance of upholding academic standards. Even among those who are sympathetic to lecturers' less-than-ideal circumstances and who see lecturers as necessary to the functioning of higher education, one can detect the assumption that relying on lecturers automatically compromises those standards.
So the mark of otherness Robyn mentions will remain, whatever the changes in working conditions. That structural and hierarchical component of lecturers' position may or may not go beyond the feminist considerations Robyn has outlined. Personally, I no longer care about being perceived as a lesser being for doing what I do as opposed to what tenure-line faculty members do (however, I won't claim it was easy to arrive at that state of mind). Ultimately, though, this all raises a more important issue about power and having a voice in the decisions that affect one's job and one's life.
Robyn and I have discussed before the issue of appealing to the self-interest of tenured and tenure-track faculty members in organizing support for lecturers. This approach seems politically and procedurally expedient. But consider its implications for lecturers. The process Robyn has described left me with, above all, a sense of the utter powerlessness of lecturers as a group. When all the bureaucratic procedures necessary to creating change at the institution had finally been navigated, the president simply said no; so to salvage something from the two-year process, the committee accepted a change in the language of the proposal that created the possibility , rather than the certainty, of a contract once a lecturer qualified. More specifically, the wording went from “shall” to “may.” This is a huge change. And it reveals two important aspects of how lecturers are perceived.
First, let us examine the practical effect of the language, of the possibility of a contract. A lecturer colleague of mine referred to this provision as the “whatever clause.” Because when it comes right down to it, what the new guideline says is that department chairs and, more important, the administration are free to give or refuse to give contracts for any reason. Nothing in the language ensures lecturers a chance at a contract even after long years of effective service, and the language certainly offers them no recourse when they feel they have been treated unfairly.
What the language boils down to is that if a lecturer is fortunate enough to have a chair who will fight the administration on his or her behalf, then maybe the lecturer can obtain a contract. We lecturers in the English department at UVM have had such a chair, but still only slightly more than half of us have received contracts. And since the department chair serves a three-year term, every time a given lecturer's contract comes up for renewal there will be a new chair who may or may not see the value of setting aside base-budget funds for lecturers.
That's the practical failure of the language. The more damaging aspect of it is the casual request that lecturers rely on the good graces of others to secure just recompense for their services. That position is professionally humiliating. And as for the guideline's chances of improving conditions, all one has to do is look at the situation lecturers are in right now to see where such paternalistic dependence has got them. This is not to knock tenure-line faculty members. They have their own battles to fight. Why should we lecturers expect them to fight ours?
Which leads me to the second way the change in language reveals perceptions about lecturers. Robyn describes how faculty members and department chairs marshaled support and made passionate pleas on lecturers' behalf at the Faculty Senate meetings. I will admit I was happily taken aback by the statements of support offered for the work lecturers do. But another thing struck me as well—that lecturers (myself included) did not offer their own defense of their role at UVM. In part, their silence has to do with the hierarchy of the institution. I understand that. But it is a big obstacle to lecturers' making real gains. Within the larger culture of the university it is somehow unseemly for lecturers to argue their importance. If they protest their value too vehemently, they risk alienating even those tenure-line faculty members who generally support the move for improved working conditions. And without that support, there will be no improvement. Lecturers' place in the hierarchy is very clear.
The status of lecturers was quite apparent in the way the administration dealt with the proposal for lecturer contracts. As Robyn indicates, the key factors in the process were the President's Commission on the Status of Women and the Faculty Women's Caucus. Both are admirable in their pursuits, and I appreciate that they worked on my behalf, but they also represent a top-down approach that allows lecturers to remain invisible. Even the caucus, which is open to all women, relies on the Steering Committee of senior women faculty members to set the caucus's agenda for women's needs. As for the commission, Robyn makes clear its meetings with upper-level administrators ensured that the issue could not go away. But shouldn't lecturers have that responsibility themselves? That they don't reflects many aspects of their working conditions, including the influence of status on how they perceive themselves as well as on how they perceive their relation to the university and their tenured colleagues.
From the start, the proposal for contracts was aimed at tenure-line faculty members. They have power to make change at institutions. Lecturers do not. And that's the situation that institutions must address if lecturers are to improve their lot.
The effort to pass the final proposal and have it accepted in its revised form by the administration took two academic years. I am sure administrators followed the events carefully. I am also sure that if administrators had had their way, the issue would have simply disappeared. As Robyn suggests, the reason it didn't go away was that committed people, working within bureaucratic structures put in place to effect change at the university, wouldn't let it. But as administrators responded at each stage, they responded because of the authority and respect accorded tenure-line faculty members, not because they felt the need to recognize the work of lecturers. Only at the end, when it appeared that lecturers would get language in the handbook that required contracts once certain conditions were met, did administrators put aside the influence of tenure-line faculty members and deal with lecturers directly. And then they simply said no. Because, ultimately, what could lecturers do about it?
In a familiar administrative ploy, the final vote on the proposal was delayed, as most votes on potentially messy issues are, until the last senate meeting of the academic year. Thus if tenure-line faculty members were to continue this battle on lecturers' behalf it would mean beginning the process again next fall.
I don't believe administrators will ever take lecturers seriously until lecturers begin to demand change for themselves, by themselves, using tenured and senior faculty members as much as they can in support but not having faculty members run all the interference. The university hierarchy makes that difficult, if not impossible, which is why it has to be done outside that structure. This means organizing separately from the tenure-line faculty. If lecturers must align with other groups, it makes more sense to organize with graduate students and staff, whose working conditions resemble lecturers' more than tenure-line faculty members' do.
Will this happen? Probably not. It's hard to imagine a group of employees more vulnerable to the risks of union activity than lecturers. But lecturers will never know their own strength and the degree to which institutions need them until they begin speaking with their own voice, rather than through the voices of others. Otherwise, administrators will continue to simply say no, because, as they see it, they are addressing only shadows.
University of Vermont
© 1997 by the Association of Departments of Foreign Languages. All Rights Reserved.
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