Alex PattersonThis series is written anonymously by contract instructors at the University of Alberta. Unlike fully-tenured professors who have a higher salary and job security, contract or sessional instructors often have a heavier course load, must renew their contracts each year, and earn significantly less than what most tenured professors make. But even though working conditions as a contract instructor aren’t great, obtaining a tenure position isn’t easy.
Read The Gateway‘s feature on contract academic staff: https://thegatewayonline.ca/2016/11/contract-instructors-feature/
Higher education in North America has been undergoing many changes over the past several decades. Most of us working in academia are all too aware of these changes, but those outside the ivory towers often are not. One of the most significant transitions is the gradual trend away from a professoriate composed primarily of those who either have tenure or are in a tenure-track position (meaning that they are likely to achieve tenure once they have completed the relevant publication requirements set by the university or college that they work for). Tenure, literally “holding,” in a university context means that an academic employee holds their position until retirement. The position cannot be terminated unless just cause can be shown; with very few exceptions, you have a job for life.
As noted in a previous installment, this situation affects more than just a tiny minority of Canadian academic employees. In fact, according to the 2015 Almanac of the Canadian Association of University Teachers, the combined total of those in higher education who do not have permanent full-time employment is 33.1 per cent for University Professors and 35.5 per cent for College and Other Vocational Instructors. In other words, one-third of those teaching in the Canadian post-secondary sector do not have stable employment. It’s much worse in America, where (according to a 2010 report by the American Association of University Professors) “by 2007, almost 70 per cent of faculty members were employed off the tenure track.” And that statistic is already ten years old.
I ended the last article in this series by mentioning the similarities between contact and tenured academic employees. Just like those with employment security, those of us without that security do all the things that are involved in teaching, whether course preparation, delivery or assessment. Things like designing a syllabus, choosing a textbook or other readings, preparing and delivering lectures or other classroom activities, designing assignments, setting exams, marking assignments, papers and exams, meeting with students, answering their emails and so on.
In addition to our teaching duties, many of us are also involved in other academic activities on a regular basis (which by and large we do not get paid for if our employment contracts are teaching-related); we too write books and journal articles, we edit volumes and contribute chapters for edited volumes or entries for academic reference books, we write book reviews and peer review articles for consideration in academic journals, we speak at conferences and give invited talks. Between our teaching (paid) and other (generally unpaid) academic duties, we (like our tenured and tenure-track colleagues) are well acquainted with late nights and work-filled weekends.
The point here is that we are not academic losers who are not good enough to teach at a university; if that were the issue, we would presumably not be teaching at the U of A. There may be many reasons why we have not managed to find permanent employment in academia, including the extremely bleak market for university teaching jobs (especially since the 2008 financial crisis) and the general neoliberal outlook of many university administrators across North America, where education is increasingly viewed through the lens of corporatization and market forces, resulting in an increased focus on cost-cutting measures, including the cost of academic labour. However, an inability to teach effectively (or more generally a lack of fit with the academic world) would not be one of the reasons employment stability has escaped us; we are not academic bottom-feeders. On why some of us might sometimes feel that way though, the conversation continues in another installment.
