The Future is Temporary: Burnout, Precarity, and the Illusions of Academic Life

[A version of this paper was presented on Friday, April 14 at All of This is Temporary: A Conference on Class Consciousness and Popular Culture, held at Bowling Green State University, April 14-15, 2023].

"As production and distribution are restructured, so are nervous systems . . . . Capital follows you when you dream."

Consciousness Deflation

We started our conference with the words of a keen critic of contemporary culture, the late Mark Fisher, who in his 2016 talk which gives our little gathering its name, explores consciousness in the age of capitalist realism. Capitalist realism, the title of Fisher’s best selling 2009 book, is described by him as “a form of  . . . consciousness deflation” which creates the sense that “capitalist social relations, capitalist conceptions, capitalist forms of subjectivity [are] calcified, inevitable, and impossible to eradicate.” These structures—both social and psychic—are seen as fixed and permanent, and without alternative.

Higher ed is a profession decomposing under the continued weight of the profound shifts that have reshaped global economies since the 1980s-- the use of the market to 'solve' social problems, the emergence of "flexible" and highly precarious employment as the norm rather than the exception, the centrality of the consumer as a "kind of template or model for the way in which citizens of contemporary Western societies have come to view all their activities" (Colin Campbell qtd. in Bauman 120). 

Over the last few decades, in the US, “campus administrations have steadily diverged from the ideals of faculty governance, collegiality, and professional self-determination. Instead. they have embraced the values and practices of corporate management” (Bousquet 1). Much like health care, higher education has become monetized and marketized, with conceptions of the public good increasingly subordinated to private, market-based imperatives. Profitability demands reduced costs and a reduction in the quality of service (“death by a thousand cuts”) such that it makes sense these days to think of universities, even publicly subsidized ones such as BGSU, as operating along neoliberal lines (and here we can think of Fisher’s capitalist realism and the neoliberal model as different names for the same phenomenon). Neoliberalism is a cultural and economic form of market-based hegemony that mandates an entrepreneurial focus on self-management (Purser 27-28). It rests on the assumption that the market offers the best solution for the ills afflicting the social and civic body. All social problems are subject to instrumental, flexible, market-based solutions, framed in socially disarticulated terms: social change, if it occurs, results from the "free market and atomized actions of individuals" rather than via collective or community-based mechanisms (Purser 35). Neoliberalism is thus a "program for destroying collective structures which may impede market logic" (Bourdieu, qtd. in Purser 27).

The onset of neoliberalism is best understood as the political expression of what amounts to a restoration of class power after the Keynesian era of a labor-management concordat that dominated the postwar decades. Mark Fisher characterizes it as a "counterrevolution" ("Acid" 757), fundamentally organized around crushing out class consciousness and replacing it instead with an appeal to the dispersive and atomized seductions of individualism.

Characteristically, neoliberalism's success has been predicated on the "disarticulation of class from race, gender and sexuality" (Fisher Ghosts 26). Neoliberalism thus amounts to a political alibi for the return of class privilege, capital accumulation, and the stripping of public assets through the disembedding of capital from social and political controls. Seeing it as such is a valuable counter to the tendency to positively associate capitalism with the new and with innovation (Fisher Capitalist 28). 

One of the great triumphs of the neoliberal era has been the illusion that we operate as singular entities in an atomized universe of other such singular entities, that—in the infamous words of Margaret Thatcher—there is no such thing as society. And as many of us know, the internalization of this illusory relationship to the real conditions of our existence leads to enormous psychic distress—to anxiety, to feelings of perpetual victimhood, to resentment, to immobilized despair, to a clinging sense of defeat and hopelessness. 

It is this twinned sense of capital and class as both a psychic structure and a set of social relations that I’d like to explore more fully in my talk today, and to do so within the context of my own lived experience in higher education in the US over the past thirty-some years, as well as within the structural contexts of the profession and the institution in which I work.

My Story

I work as an associate dean at BGSU where I've worked, in one capacity or another, for thirty five years. I came to the US from the UK in the late-1980s to do an MA in American Studies, fully intending to go home after a year. I started teaching in my very first semester, a freshman section of Interpersonal Communications. I was barely older than most of my students, and I was terrified. I'm sure it showed, but gradually of course you learn by doing. And as these things tend to happen, I decided to stay in the States, and pursued a Ph.D., working first as a teaching assistant and then, post-funding, as an adjunct. I felt fortunate to eventually land a full-time non-tenure track instructor position, teaching eight composition and literature classes each academic year. I was promoted, becoming a Lecturer (same course load, slightly better pay) and then Senior Lecturer. In 2005 I was asked to be assistant chair of my department, a job I did for ten years, scheduling the department's classes, chairing committees, leading student recruitment efforts, and helping to dampen the usual fires which pop up in a large and complex academic unit. In the process, I learned a lot about the structural tensions and imbalances of academic life, about the caste system of the tenured haves and untenurable have-nots which bifurcates our profession, about the constraints which confront those who, like myself, have forged careers in the shadows of those whose status is the normative. My home unit, somewhat typically for an English Department, was a majority non-tenure-track unit. Despite our greater numbers, we instructors, lecturers, and senior lecturers tended to teach lower-level service courses. 

Like others in my cohort of non-tenure track instructors, I was afflicted with a gnawing sense of grievance and inadequacy at the disparities in pay and opportunities and the generalized ambience of job insecurity that haunted each semester. I had made it as far as I could in terms of an academic career and, well---this was my lot. What did I expect? I occupied a non-tenure-track, teaching intensive position. I channeled my itch for a richer intellectual trajectory into prepping for new courses, devising elaborate pedagogical excursions into modernism, the avant-garde, Vietnam War literature, critical theory, psychogeography, memoir, and interdisciplinary studies, as well as tinkering with the surveys and introductory seminars that were my regular bread and butter. But still, I reminded myself, I was lucky (and I was, it's true)--I had a full-time gig. I consoled myself with defiant pride in my generalist capacities and a well-honed ability to draw inspiration from the least inspiring of instructional assignments. 

By 2017, I'd taught over one hundred and sixty sections of forty different courses, twenty straight years without a break from the classroom, save for one glorious semester when I earned a research fellowship that released me from the hamster wheel, a brief but blessed glimpse of another life--time to think, space to write, the luxury of stretching my creative wings. When the fellowship ended--I'd stepped down as assistant chair--it was back to the eight-course load for me, back to "the trenches." 

That last year teaching I had six different preps and, given the evaporation of my unit's tenure-track lines, three of these were graduate courses. O fortuna! Lucky me, thought I, in that curious alignment of the captive's interests with those of the system that holds him fast. Grad classes! Now I can show I'm equal to any tenure-track colleague: just look at the daring and rigorous intellectual journey I have planned for my students!

A few weeks in, the reality was I was moving through my days in a perpetual knot of exhausted anxiety and generalized dread, wincing as I crashed the cognitive gears switching from an American Literature survey, an introductory general education literature course, two graduate seminars, one on pedagogy and the other on psychogeography, and back through the gears again, a well-read flagellant scourging himself with the knotted lashes of his own struggling self-esteem, looking forward to the evenings and weekends even if weekends and evenings were filled with class prep and Sisyphean loads of grading, grading, grading.... Looking back now, I see that the choices I made (accepting departmental administrative positions, or graduate teaching assignments for instance), constrained as they were by the contingencies with which I was confronted, were choices that gave me some sense of agency, of control in a career in which agency (over working conditions, over future opportunities) were limited by the relentless treadmill of non-tenure track life. 

In 2017 I applied for and was offered a full-time academic administrative appointment in the College office as an Associate Dean, an opportunity made possible only be the progressive-minded willingness of the then Dean of Arts and Sciences to forego the usual tenure-only requirement attached to such job postings. My non-tenure track status confers on me an awkward betwixt and between liminality--I am, I joke, that rarest of creatures, the zebra with spots. As such I straddle the taxonomic borders that define a profession still wedded to the privileges and principles of a powerful but shrinking tenurable elite. My presence unsettles the boundaries of a discourse that constructs the experiences of tenure as the norm even though, AAUP data tells us, almost three quarters of all instructional positions in US higher ed are off the tenure-track (AAUP). “For the most part" write the AAUP authors, these non-tenured (and untenurable) positions "are insecure, unsupported [and] with little job security and few protections for academic freedom” (AAUP). 

Precarious Rhapsody

Since the 1980s, universities and community colleges have turned increasingly to contingent, non-tenure-track faculty to carry out their undergraduate teaching mission. The conditions governing the working lives of this growing and diverse cohort of academic professionals mirror those of other contingent workers facing temporary or contract employment arrangements—they “earn less, are less likely to have work-provided benefits . . . and are more likely to experience job instability than standard workers” (GAO 1).

Tenure, the great golden calf of our profession, is becoming increasingly rare. For example, between 2007-8 and 2017-18, the Modern Language Association advertised 55% fewer tenure-track positions in English (828 as opposed to 1826). "Considered as a whole" writes Jonathan Kranmick, "the situation is dire." Mandatory retirement ended in 1986 as a consequence of the Age Discrimination in Employment Act. The provisions ending mandatory retirement were applied to tenured academic positions in 1993. Tenured faculty no longer had to retire at 70. Combined with declining tenure-stream hires and the increasing incentive to hire faculty into contingent, poorly paid and insecure positions, faculty in American higher education has become a bifurcated system of contrasting castes, the tenurable professorial haves, and the non-tenurable mish-mash of instructors, lecturers, adjuncts, and graduate students.

Major changes have taken place in the composition of the faculty at institutions of higher education. Today, around a third of faculty at traditional research-oriented universities are tenured and/or tenure-track), a percentage that is halved at two-year institutions.

• Fully "65% of all new faculty appointments are NTTF" (Kezar and Sam vii).
• By 2016, 73% of all instructional positions at US institutions combined are NTT (Figure 1, AAUP).
• Between 1995 and 2011, the percentage of NTTF employed at two- and four-year institutions increased
• from 57.6% to 71.6% (US GAO 8).

It's difficult to make generalizations about a class of faculty work which encompasses everyone from the retired tenured professor teaching a class or two, the aspiring scholar who cobbles together a living from adjunct appointments at multiple institutions (the "true" adjunct), the full-time instructor or lecturer, to the industry professional who teaches a class as a sideline to her primary field of employment.

In many universities and colleges, NTTF teach the majority of lower-division undergraduate classes. The AAUP authors write: “For the most part, these are insecure, unsupported positions with little job security and few protections for academic freedom” (AAUP). The absence of systematically gathered data on NTTF either at the national or local level exacerbates the difficulty in making accurate assessments of the cohort's working conditions and experiences, and developing meaningful policy initiatives that address the needs of NTTF and the institutions that employ them. NTTF are a diverse group for whom reliable data is needed at both the national and local level. The diverse character to NTTF identity is crucial to understanding their experiences.

Most universities and colleges do little in the way of systematic tracking or data gathering on NTTF, especially with regards to adjunct/part-time faculty, the data for which changes "so rapidly that it is difficult for institutional research offices to sort out how many and what types of non-tenure-track faculty are hired" (Kezar and Sam 10).

Adjunct and "Part-Time" Faculty

A lot of the growth in contingent faculty positions comes from part-time and adjunct positions, which made up 47% of all instructional faculty in higher education by 2016 (Yakoboski 2). 

• As of 2016, part-time and adjunct faculty made up 47% of all faculty positions at Master's and Baccalaureate-granting institutions (AAUP uses the Carnegie Classification of Institutions of Higher Learning criteria to distinguish these institutions from R1, R2, and R3 Doctoral institutions).
• At two-year schools, the proportion of part-time and adjunct faculty rises to 65%. The AAUP makes the point that, at the Doctoral granting research-intensive institutions, "graduate-student employees perform labor that is performed at other institutions by part-time faculty."

In surveying [1] adjuncts working in higher education for their survey Adjunct faculty: Who they are and what is their experience?, The Teachers Insurance and Annuity Association of America (TIAA) Institute disaggregate various sub-groups of part-time non-tenure-track faculty, who as a class make up 47% of the academic labor force in US higher education.

'True' adjuncts thus represent 31% of all faculty types working in higher education (Yakoboski 3). Adjuncts earn, on average, $3,000 per course, but 58% of adjuncts are paid less (7). Half of all adjuncts surveyed report wanting a tenure-track position (10), although 66% are "satisfied overall with their academic careers." Those less likely to be satisfied in their careers are those adjuncts under 40 and those with a Ph.D. (9).

Full-Time Non-Tenure Track Faculty

According to the AAUP's October 2018 "Data Snapshot: Contingent faculty in US Higher Ed" (which includes data as of 2016), NTTF who enjoy the relative security of full-time contracts.

At four-year institutions:

• 38% are on annual contracts;
• 20% have multi-year contracts, and;
• 38% indefinite at will contracts;
• 4% are hired on contracts of less than a year.

At two-year institutions:

• 63% of full-time NTTF are hired on annual contracts;
• 28% on multi-year or indefinite contracts, and;
• 8% have sub-annual contracts.

The authors of the AAUP data snapshot caution however that the notion of an "indefinite" NTT contract is a misnomer, as in practice such faculty are "effectively at-will in many states; that is, the institution can end the contract with no notice at any time for any reason." Such contracts, they point out, offer little in the way of protections for academic freedom or job security.

Full-time NTTF are concentrated primarily in the four-year institutions (Kezar and Sam 6). The proportion of full-time NTTF ranges from a high of 24% in research universities to a low of 13% at the public Baccalaureate colleges. At R1, R2, and R3 universities as of 2016, full-time NTTF positions made up 27%, 22%, and 19% of all instructional faculty respectively. At Master's universities, Baccalaureate and Associates colleges, the proportions were 18%, 21%, and 17% respectively (AAUP "Data Visualizations").

Tenure in Principle and as Policy

Despite the increasingly outsized role NTTF play in undergraduate instruction and the changes that have transformed the academic labor landscape over the last four decades, policies and procedures governing faculty working conditions and benefits in higher education typically reflect the assumption that tenured and tenure-track faculty remain the normative category of faculty appointment. As a result of this tension, NTTF as a group typically remain marginalized if not invisible when it comes to long-term strategic planning to meet the continued challenges faced by higher education. Along with the ongoing conversion of tenure-track lines to NTTF positions, these circumstances pose a significant strategic threat to academic institutions whose policies still assume a ready supply of available tenure-track positions to fulfill graduate missions and staff unit- and college-level leadership positions. Kezar and Sam call for more "intentional planning" around NTTF issues (3). Unfortunately, few administrators are working towards conceptualizing the NTTF cohort's relationship to the larger issues facing higher education (7).

The usual arguments advanced to defend the existence of tenure--that it is an essential safeguard for academic freedom and a fundamental tenet of democracy and the proper functioning of scholarly life—are challenged by tenure’s widely unequal distribution in American higher education today. A majority of higher education faculty live entirely professional careers without the benefit of tenure’s protections. 

Here it might be useful to use independent scholar John Warner’s distinction between what he calls "tenure in principle" (freedom to voice and teach unpopular opinions, faculty role in institutional governance), and "tenure as policy." Warner argues that the very fact that tenure is only available to a subset of the faculty actually working in academia undercuts its value as an organizing principle in scholarly life and renders it a tool for administrative control. 

'Tenure as policy' harms tenured faculty by increasing their responsibilities and workload. By making those eligible for the status increasingly scarce, over time, more burdens fall on those who remain. 'Tenure as policy' also weakens the strength of 'tenure as principle' for those who do still have it, as that scarcity creates an atmosphere where using' one's tenure appears risky. Indeed, I hear from many tenured faculty that even with tenure they are "powerless" to do anything for the status of contingent faculty. 'Tenure as policy' harms non-tenurable faculty to a much greater degree, both in economic and non-economic terms. They both receive less compensation for the same work, and labor without the protections for their academic freedom, which again are believed to be necessary for the full expression of our values ("19 Theses").

"If tenure is to be meaningful" writes Warner, "it must be something close to universal" (comments to "19 Theses"). In other words, for tenure to function as originally intended, as a principle that is fundamental to the work of faculty, then its protections must be extended to _all_ ranks of faculty.

An End is a Beginning

A number of factors have given rise to the emergence of a precarious labor market. Rosalind Gill and Andy Pratt cite "globalization, information and communication technologies, and changing modes of political and economic governance" (2).  Between 2005 and 2015, for instance, according to economists Lawrence Katz and Alan Krueger, precarity's “alternative work arrangements” such as temporary/contingent work, independent contracting, adjuncting, and so on, accounted for 94% of net job growth (cited in Nussbaum). As unpredictability becomes a feature of the newer, 'flexible' arrangements of capital and labor, and in order to adapt, neoliberal subjects must be ready to respond to shifting conditions (of emotion, of labor) at a moment's notice. 

The flexible and contingent labor arrangements that typify work in a neoliberal economy assume a general preference for "free-floating, unattached, flexible, 'generalist' and ultimately disposable employees (of a 'Jack of all trades' type, rather than being specialized and subjected to a narrowly focused training)" (Bauman 9) [2]. Sociologist Arlie Russell Hochschild calls this new type of worker a "zero drag" employee, after a term popularized in the 1990s in Silicon Valley. Hochschild traces the origins of the term "zero drag" back to 1997 and Silicon Valley (qtd. in Bauman 9). A term that was originally intended to refer to the physical properties of frictionless movement is applied instead to employees whose absence of social obligations make them attractive to employers. Social relationships, proximity to the job, a willingness to be flexible about work arrangements and so on, are all factors that make up a particular person's 'drag coefficient': the higher the drag coefficient, the less attractive the person is as a potential employee. 

Precariousness is used by Gill and Pratt to refer to "all forms of insecure, contingent, flexible work--from illegalized, casualized and temporary employment, to homeworking, piecework and freelancing" (2). The creative or cultural industries (made up of media workers, artists and ancillary labor—we can include academics among this cohort) are typically considered as part of the service and knowledge economies and have been identified as emblematic of emerging patterns of precarious labor. Rosalind Gill and Andy Pratt characterize workers in these industries as the "poster boys and girls of the new 'precariat'" (2)

Precariat is a neologism that draws together the connotative charges of both precariousness and the proletariat "to signify both an experience of exploitation and a (potential) new political subjectivity" (Gill and Pratt 2)]. The term precariat invokes new forms of political activism that have emerged following the decline of the traditional working arrangements of the industrial working classes, and also evokes the proliferating arena of unstable, insecure, and contingent working and living arrangements that have accompanied the shift to a post-Fordist economy (2). 

Gill and Pratt assert that this doubled meaning is vital if we are to understand both the perils of precariousness and the potentialities inherent in the identification of the emergent labor fraction of the precariat.  An important rubicon for faculty to cross as they consider how to resist the corporatization of higher education is to view themselves as precarious laborers rather than elite knowledge workers. As laborers, faculty have far more in common with staff and those workers who run the institutions at which faculty teach than they do with administrators.

Mark Fisher, in his 2016 talk, suggests that we can learn something from the era before the neoliberal counterrevolution, an era when talk of consciousness and its consequences was everywhere, namely the 1960s and ‘70s. This era of psychedelic consciousness and consciousness raising is important today, Fisher argues, because of the implication that consciousness, psychedelic in the widest, non-narcotic sense of the term, is plastic and mutable, not fixed and static. Consciousness can be changed, can be raised, by connecting, as the second wave socialist feminists and other subaltern groups of the 60s generation did, feelings and psychic landscapes to structures and social realities. Feelings are produced by systemic structural forces—low wages, poor working conditions, the postmodern and digitally induced shattering of lived time into chaotic and ever-smaller segments. “The power of consciousness raising is it's a kind of molecular contagion" he writes, 

that any group of people can engage in a form of consciousness raising. . . . And I think the point of consciousness raising is that we can have confidence in what we feel. And so that we can feel what we know and know what we feel and that we're not stuck in our feelings, that we can relate these feelings to their actual causes ("All of This").

----

[1] The TIAA Institute surveyed 502 adjunct faculty in May and June of 2018 employed at various points through the 2017-2018 academic year.

[2] Here, Bauman cites Hochschild as well as Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello's _The New Spirit of Capitalism_.

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References

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