THE University of Minnesota is a large public university with several campuses across the state, but the main cam pus is in the Twin Cities of Minneapolis-Saint Paul. That campus is our state's research university and its only doctorate-granting institution. The Twin Cities faculty generates millions of dollars in research money, primarily in technology, basic sciences, medicine, agriculture, and business. More than fifteen years ago, the faculties at several of the outstate campuses voted to unionize, but the Twin Cities faculty has rejected unionization twice since 1978.
Minnesota has long had a solid faculty tenure code, one that has been tinkered with by faculty committees over the past twenty-five years to eliminate problems that had surfaced in Judicial Committee hearings of complaints by professors who believed their rights had been infringed or denied. In 1995, the University of Minnesota's very strong tenure code meticulously spelled out standards and procedures for faculty hiring, reviews, promotion, and dismissal for cause. The underlying principle was protection of academic freedom by safeguarding due process and disallowing arbitrary dismissals. An individual professor could be dismissed for malfeasance, nonfeasance, or moral turpitude—if administrators could prove their case through a series of appeal mechanisms—or whole groups of tenured faculty members might be dismissed if the institution itself faced financial disaster. Individual tenured or tenure-track faculty members could not be fired at will or treated unfairly. Only rarely, in egregious cases, did departments or deans try to dismiss the few Twin Cities faculty members who were not performing adequately or who were misperforming. After all, to the human pain of having to fire a colleague were added those tenure-code procedural hoops.
By 1995, however, that carefully developed tenure code and the hoops it made administrators jump through to fire faculty members had come into conflict with two powerful factors. One was the HMO-derived near-bankruptcy of the University Hospital and Medical School (across the United States today, HMOs refuse to support teaching hospitals by referring patients to university hospital-based medical clinics and specialists). The second factor involved the increasingly corporate mentality in university administration, with a focus on the financial bottom line and management-from-the-top behaviors. Faculty committees, deans, and department chairs chafed at the consequent diminution of their former from-the-bottom-up discretion with programs, curricula, and staffing.
Suddenly, in the fall of 1995, internal university publications for the faculty and staff began to sport articles that presented faculty tenure itself as a central problem at Minnesota. Someone had called together a select group of tenured Twin Cities faculty members to discuss the “problem of tenure.” I'll never forget one sociologist's phrase that characterized the faculty as rife with “septuagenarians, nitwits, and felons,” whom administrators could not fire because their tenure protected them. Oh, there had been, in our large faculty, a recent handful of arrogant abusers. They were fired, albeit through the careful and time-consuming mechanisms of our existing tenure code. Nevertheless, the Board of Regents wanted more flexibility, to be able to follow corporate America's example of downsizing and reengineering to achieve efficiency, mostly by dismissing employees whose “product lines” or functions (read: research and teaching programs) were deemed irrelevant to the corporation's main business.
With the regents' insistence on changes to the faculty tenure code that would remove obstacles to such flexibility, Minnesota entered into a dramatic face-off between corporate culture and the culture of universities. The rhetoric of the attack on the faculty was hot: faculty members with tenure were not only lazy, incompetent, self-indulgent, unaccountable, and unproductive, they were selfishly opposed to the mere idea of change. One regent announced that the board, not the faculty, would set “the research agenda” for the entire university, and a corporate consultant, hired to handle the transition when our university hospital was sold to a private hospital, instructed the health sciences faculty members to remember that they were merely employees here. The faculty's arguments that tenure protected a necessary academic freedom were taken to be anachronistic elitism, for no one in today's business world had “job security for life.”
The administration appointed a special task force in late 1995 to modify the tenure code outside of our normal faculty senate committee structure. Secrecy and failed communication about what they were devising raised faculty hackles, at which point faculty senate committees regained control of the issue and worked frantically in early 1996 to loosen our tenure code without destroying academic freedom and due process. Two things, besides the demand for speed, complicated their work: the financial crisis in the health sciences, which no longer had enough clinical income to support tenured faculty lines, and the faculty's desire not to separate their health sciences colleagues from a tenure code that still applied to the rest of us. The committees' revision in the spring quarter of 1996 did not satisfy the regents, who hired outside corporate consultants (one of whom was the ubiquitous Richard Chait) to draw up a version more to their liking.
That revision was presented to the regents at an outstate campus meeting in early September 1996, when most faculty members were still on summer break. The consultants claimed that it was right in “the mainstream” of university tenure codes, but their proposal demolished existing due-process protections and included such gems as dismissal of individual faculty members who did not show “a proper attitude of industry and cooperation.” The regents, moving fast, as decisive corporate leaders like to do, and disdainful of both tenure and the faculty's preference for careful consultation and deliberation, planned to adopt the consultants' code within a month.
With real leadership and a flair for brinkmanship from some senior faculty members, that overt attempt to destroy tenure at Minnesota was stopped. With our backs to the wall, these well-known faculty leaders reached to a languishing unionization effort that had been created earlier in the year, urging their colleagues to sign union-authorization cards that would trigger a cease and desist order from the state's Department of Labor Relations. Cards rushed in, and under the immediate cease and desist order the regents could not change faculty conditions of employment until we voted on whether or not to unionize. We did not, in the end, although out of the more than 1,300 ballots cast, a change of 37 votes would have unionized our tenure-track and tenured faculty members. That close call shocked and scared the people of the state, the legislature, the governor, and the regents, all of whom became convinced that a unionized research faculty at the university's main campus would be a disaster. Faculty senate committees have since mildly revised our tenure code, which now prescribes periodic and non-punitive reviews of tenured faculty members, and we have a new president and a much different Board of Regents.
All that is fairly irrelevant to what's happening on the ground, in modern language departments and English composition, recently reincorporated into the English department after a few years as a separate unit. There, and perhaps in other corners of the university's Twin Cities campus that have yet to be identified, the instructional staff has become hugely populated with people hired on temporary full-time contracts.
In Spanish and Portuguese this new phenomenon dates from 1994, shortly after a senior academic administrator stated that his goal was to have less than 50% of the Twin Cities faculty tenured or on tenure-track and shortly before the regents' frontal attack on the tenure code. For years my department had refused to hire full-time instructors on yearly contracts. But in 1997–98, the fourth year since we broke with that policy, the tenured and tenure-track faculty members find themselves in the minority. The Department of Spanish and Portuguese has thirty-four full-time instructional personnel. Of those thirty-four, only thirteen are tenured or tenure-track professors; the other twenty-one teach on yearly contracts. 1
How and why did this happen? I see a circular process at work, or perhaps a downward spiral, that began with repeated large financial retrenchments in the College of Liberal Arts at the University of Minnesota. For a number of years our deans had routinely denied us the opportunity to hire new faculty members, while undergraduate demand for Spanish grew. Then, in 1994, it was decided that the department did not have enough graduate and research faculty members to teach and advise our large graduate student population, which we then reduced. To meet the demand for basic and intermediate Spanish courses, we hired our first group of full-time temporary instructors. 2 Since then our language program in Spanish has ballooned. It has become unmanageably large, and we also have hundreds of undergraduate majors and minors. No other non-English language program at Minnesota is facing this bloat of student numbers, and no other non-English language program has hired as many full-time temporary teaching staff members as we have. The growth in our enrollments in Spanish language skills courses is directly related to the growing presence in our department since 1994–95 of full-time contract instructional staff, for that is the only new element in who we are.
With nearly two-thirds of our full-time faculty members on yearly contracts and teaching a large percentage of our undergraduate program, the Department of Spanish and Portuguese on the Twin Cities campus is way out of the national mainstream for PhD-granting departments in modern languages. According to the December 1997 Final Report of the MLA Committee on Professional Employment , a sample survey of foreign language departments found that in 1996–97, “In the PhD-granting departments, graduate student instructors taught 68% of the introductory language sections, part-time faculty members 7%, and full-time non-tenure-track faculty members 15%, on average ” (Gilbert 8; emphasis mine). At Minnesota, temporary full-timers, not graduate TAs or regular faculty members, are teaching the bulk of our undergraduate program. With few part-time instructors, most of whom keep their day jobs as they teach an occasional course with our evening school, what we have is this situation: Graduate TAs teach 39% of our first- and second-year Spanish courses; full-time non-tenure-track faculty members teach 53% of our first- and second-year Spanish courses and 34% of the intermediate and advanced language courses, including a large proportion of upper-division introductory courses in literature, culture and linguistics. A number of our full-time contract adjuncts also supervise multiple-section courses in first- to third-year Spanish. Two of our twenty-one full-time contract instructors have PhDs, and all but two are women.
The thirteen tenure-track and tenured faculty members do no language skills teaching. Using Spanish or Portuguese as the language of instruction, we teach undergraduate and graduate courses in literature, culture, and linguistics. Except for the two professors who specialize in second language acquisition, none of the regular faculty members has direct knowledge of the language skills curriculum in Spanish. Indeed, it struck me during our 1996–97 search for three longed-for tenure-track assistant professors how great a recruitment advantage it was for us to be able to tell new PhDs in literature and culture that they would not be assigned any language courses, even at the intermediate level. That is a definite change from the past, made possible because our twenty-one full-time contract instructors are the superproductive, inexpensive worker bees whose activities at the undergraduate level not only permit that exclusivity, they generate thousands upon thousands of dollars in tuition surpluses that, in effect, subsidize research faculty salaries. 3
The corporate world of the past five or ten years not only has shown a preference for outsourcing functions and for hiring part-time employees without benefits, it increasingly insists that rank-and-file workers accept contracts that entail “two-tiered” salaries and benefits, where new hires get paid less and receive lesser benefits than current employees. This industry policy has proved to be divisive in the workplace, creating resentments and making long-time employees with better salaries and benefits look exceedingly, and unnecessarily, expensive to management. In Spanish and Portuguese at Minnesota we have three tiers of full-time instructional personnel, with the resentments and clashes attendant to the disparities between them. The thirteen tenure-track or tenured faculty members form the first tier; the second and third tiers are the two subclasses into which our twenty-one contract faculty members are divided: teaching specialists and education specialists.
This year's fifteen teaching specialists, who have at least an MA degree and some teaching experience, teach nine courses a year on a quarter system (the norm for regular faculty members is five courses). For those nine courses they are paid a salary that is approximately nine times what a graduate TA is paid for one course, or an initial $28,000 in 1997–98, with the probability of a small percentage of salary increment if they are reappointed for a second and a third year. Teaching specialists may not be appointed at full time for more than three consecutive years.
The more interesting new job title in our department is education specialist, because it tends to look a lot like a regular faculty position, except for the doubled teaching load and permanent lack of tenure. Like the teaching specialist, our six education specialists have as minimum qualifications an MA degree and some teaching experience, and they have basically the same workload and initial salary. The big difference is that there is no limit to the number of years they may be continuously reappointed. Like teaching specialists, they receive health-care benefits, but education specialists after three consecutive years join the faculty retirement plan. Further, their salaries rise above those of teaching specialists as education specialists accumulate years as full-time appointees and as they are promoted within their job category, from assistant education specialist to associate education specialist to education specialist. In 1997–98 the six education specialists in Spanish and Portuguese have quite different salaries, in part owing to the chair's yearly review of their performance and assignment of different merit increases to their salaries, in part owing to the number of years in the job, and in part to promotions. One of the assistant education specialists appointed in 1994 has since been promoted twice and is now a full education specialist; we have recently promoted to associate education specialist all but one of the others. My department is flying by the seat of its pants as it recommends these promotions, because there is uncertainty about evaluative criteria, review processes, and the effective differences between one rank and another, for the position descriptions available do not correspond to what these full-time teaching faculty members actually do. The latter problem stems from the fact that the University of Minnesota itself is winging it, as it proceeds to hire large groups of full-time contract teaching staff members at a research university.
Neither teaching specialists, with the three-year cap on their full-time appointment, nor education specialists will ever have tenure. They will always remain a separate and unequal class of faculty member, with salaries lower than the ones tenure-track faculty members receive, twice the teaching load, and no direct voice in departmental planning or governance. Even if we were to strive to minimize the material disparities between tenure-track and tenured faculty members and yearly-contract faculty members (require a PhD degree; raise their salaries; reduce teaching loads; provide research leaves, careful annual reviews, their own offices and computers, and so forth), the fact that yearly-contract people have no tenure rights means that their contracts can be “not renewed” more or less at the drop of a hat and without expensive legal ramifications. Therefore, their academic freedom will be as compromised as ever was that of a probationary assistant professor hoping nervously for promotion and tenure, who sits silently and opinionless at faculty meetings, only does research on “safe topics,” panics at the possibility of student course evaluations that average less than 6.5 on a seven-point scale, and tiptoes diplomatically in informal conversations with senior colleagues to avoid offending them. These temporary contract faculty members will always be reluctant to take an academic or an intellectual risk, for their jobs are only secure from one September to the next June. They may even be dismissed after long years of continuous full-time appointment, if their accumulated salary increases make them appear to administrators as less cost-effective than a beginning assistant education specialist who will earn the base salary.
Given the national job scene, many people might applaud Minnesota's Spanish program for hiring full-time, rather than part-time, adjuncts. Even in my department, protests at our current situation are met with the cry, “At least we're not exploiting them!” Seen from the perspective of beleaguered part-timers with PhDs, the “freeway fliers” who stitch together a course here and a course there to stay alive and stay in the profession for which they were trained, perhaps we are not exploiting them. After all, one can live on $28,000-plus a year in Minnesota, although not as comfortably as beginning tenure-track assistant professors on 1997–98 salaries of $40,000-plus. But what are we doing, by hiring temporary full-time instructors on the scale of the Minnesota Spanish model?
These are among the long-term, if not the immediate, effects of this kind of hiring model. We are destroying tenure in modern foreign language departments. Further, we are implicitly establishing a new faculty productivity standard for teaching loads that cannot be met by a research faculty member. We are playing to the misperception that what modern language departments and programs “do” is teach the language requirement's basic skills courses in service to other units. We are undermining our graduate programs by hiring MA-degree instructional personnel to teach what tenure-track or tenured faculty members, or graduate TAs in support of their studies, used to do. We risk our national rankings, real or potential, by hiring people with less than a research degree in ratios where they outnumber the tenured or tenure-track research faculty by two to one, for national rankings relate solely to the perceived quality of a unit's research faculty members and the graduate students they train and send out into the discipline. Unfortunately, national rankings have nothing to do with the extent or quality of the undergraduate major or the beginning and intermediate language program. Minnesota's full-time adjuncts, aside from not having the professional-level salary of their tenure-track or tenured colleagues, will always be teachers, not researcher-teachers, even if some of them find the time to publish, and they will never have tenure. Hired to be superproductive of low-cost student credit hours, full-time temporaries are a dollar-conscious, flexibility-desiring administrator's dream. They also make the high-cost research and graduate faculty look very, very expensive. Thinking corporately, why would a dean agree to pay a senior tenured professor salary and benefits worth $100,000 to $130,000, for a maximum of five courses that generate few student credit hours, when for that money one could hire five full-time temporary adjuncts teaching a total of forty-five courses in a year? In Spanish at Minnesota and similar research universities, only the existence of the graduate and research programs justifies having expensive tenured faculty members. And we were advised to cut back those programs.
In our discussions of tenure in the humanities, I see us concentrating only on the production side of the corporate model we have all adopted. As a discipline we urge each other to cut back the numbers of PhDs we “produce” because there are no jobs—no “market”—for them. We are forgetting that we, department by department, are the primary market makers for the PhDs who move through our production lines. I suggest that there is a market, at many institutions like my university, if market means a demand for certain services our “product” is trained to provide. Consider for a moment what Minnesota's Spanish program has done as a producer and a buyer of what others produce, in graduate programs. Our hugely enrolled program in Spanish, with its solid undergraduate student market on the demand side, has acted to shrink its corner of the national market for PhDs in Spanish by hiring non-PhDs on full-time contracts instead of new PhDs from other universities in tenure-track positions (the chair of my department estimates that replacing our full-time contract teachers with tenure-track assistant professors would mean hiring thirty new people). How can we expect anyone to continue to hire our PhDs, if other departments out there imitate our practice and further shrink the number of career jobs promising tenure for excellent work? We acquiesce in hiring part- and full-time temporary instructors to do what assistant and associate professors once did in the early years of their career and what indeed all faculty members should do: teach some language courses as part of their assignment.
In my view we are shooting our discipline in the foot by hiring full-time contract instructors instead of regular tenure-track faculty members in programs with steady enrollments. If we don't begin to resist the bottom-line corporate mentality that worships flexibility in staffing and hiring the cheapest workers you can find, my guess is that when my generation—or yours—has lived out its tenure, there will be no tenure in modern language departments. Or perhaps tenure will be available to a few select professors in a few select colleges and universities that still offer full undergraduate and graduate programs in modern languages, while everywhere else in higher education, basic and intermediate language skills will be taught by people on temporary contracts. Tenure as we have known it over the past forty or fifty years will disappear quietly and gradually in modern languages, but the process will be obscured by other corporate-driven factors, like the insistence on electronic teaching, course Web sites whether they enhance anything or not, distance learning, outsourcing many university functions to private companies, even remedial coursework in mathematics, English composition, and, maybe sooner than we think, first- and second-year modern languages. Some small schools are already outsourcing “remedial” coursework (“remedial” because it belongs in the high school curriculum), for the eager corporate world is convinced that anything we can do, they can do better. And faster, and cheaper.
If as teachers and scholars in modern language departments we really believe in what we do, we must take courage of our specialized knowledge and our convictions and act constructively on them. Spanish departments like mine can move in two directions, separately or simultaneously: find ways to sharply reduce the size of the basic Spanish language sequence, which would remove a great part of the need for non-tenure-track instructional staff, and increase the number of regular tenured and tenure-track faculty members who teach across the undergraduate and graduate program, including language courses.
It has been suggested that a way out of the corporatizing squeeze on my department is to appoint all full-time temporary adjuncts as education specialists, who can be reappointed ad infinitum, and then work to make their conditions of employment equal to those of the tenure-track and tenured faculty. However, even if we could level the playing field in material terms, which any self-respecting corporatized administration will fight tooth and nail because it attacks the bottom-line cost-efficiency goal, one fact will remain: by definition, faculty members on temporary contracts will never have tenure.
It remains to be seen whether our present circumstances in Spanish at the University of Minnesota's Twin Cities campus are an exception—a conjunctural blip on the screen that can be corrected—or a harbinger of things to come in modern languages across the country. It is time for us all to think about the long-term wisdom of hiring full-time temporary instructors as a solution to the outrageous national proliferation of part-time adjuncts in higher education and about how we tenured faculty members in modern foreign language—on the ground and under the radar screen of loud, public conflicts over tenure codes—collaborate in the process of hiring temporary personnel against our discipline's future, destroying the academic market for a product we ourselves are in the business of producing.
The author is Associate Professor in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities. This article is based on her presentation at the 1997 MLA convention in Toronto, Canada.
My sincere appreciation for their assistance in the preparation of this essay goes to my University of Minnesota colleagues Carol A. Klee, chair of the department of Spanish and Portuguese, and Kent Bales, of the English Department.
1 In 1997–98, the English department, with some forty tenure-track or tenured faculty members, had twenty-one full-time instructors on contract: thirteen education specialists, seven teaching specialists, and one whose appointment status was unclear.
2 Candidates for a BA degree at Minnesota must meet a graduation requirement in foreign language, with Spanish the language of choice in recent seasons. I must add, however, that a realignment of the University of Minnesota's administrative “corporate chart” combined into one unit the College of Liberal Arts and the Institute of Technology. Because it was considered too onerous to require high school foreign language study of students entering the IT and too expensive to test so many entering freshmen for their foreign language proficiencies, the university eliminated a foreign language entrance requirement to the College of Liberal Arts that had been doing precisely what we designed it to do in the 1980s: it increased enrollments in lesser-taught languages.
3 Because they receive full tuition remission, Minnesota's half-time graduate teaching assistants are much more expensive to the university than temporary full-time instructors are. Fringe benefits for graduate TAs cost another 60% of their stipend, white for teaching specialists, fringe benefits add only 13% more.
Gilbert, Sandra M. Final Report of the MLA Committee on Professional Employment . New York: MLA, 1997.
© 1998 by the Association of Departments of Foreign Languages. All Rights Reserved.