"The High Stakes of Contingency"

“I don’t want the students to see me at Planned Parenthood.”

-- Jessica Brouker, Adjunct, English Department     

The largest portion of Fulwiler and Marlow’s film is devoted to exploring the consequences of the institutional practices explored in earlier segments for higher education’s contingent faculty. These negative impacts range from not being able to afford groceries to struggling to pay for health care. As indicated in the selection above, the latter problem affected Jessica Brouker directly when one of her students walked into Planned Parenthood, only to find her in the waiting room, an event that raises the question of how contingent faculty can be expected to inspire their students when their own economic outlook is so bleak.

Indeed, the experiences of Brouker and the other faculty members whose voices are heard in this portion of Fulwiler and Marlow’s film point to a central hypocrisy within higher education.

So much is done by schools to market themselves to students as a means of elevating oneself up the economic ladder, but the employment practices of these schools, namely their overreliance on a vast, exploited pool of contingent faculty, serve to undermine their liberating message. If we accept that many of the students lured to these schools by the suggestion of dreams coming true are themselves going to graduate only to occupy these contingent positions, then we must question the purpose these institutions of higher education serve.

Are they makers of dreams or the architects of nightmare?

While the narratives viewers encounter in Con Job are generally critical of the treatment and status of contingent faculty within higher education, many of the people interviewed still express a strong investment in their jobs and the communities they serve. For instance, Paul Lamar, an Adjunct of English, states that he “love[s] [his] adjunct life,” though that is “partly because of where [he is] in terms of age and experience.” Lamar goes on to say that, “[i]f [he] were younger and starting out and didn’t have some experience behind [him],” he would “be hoping [he] would always land somewhere full time.” Likewise, Julie Demers, another Adjunct of English, states that “[t]here’s nothing [she] would change about the students or the other teachers. It would just be to have . . . a full time position.”

Statements like these serve an important function within Fulwiler and Marlow’s film because they help to off-set the potential criticism of the film as simply a collection of conversations with angry, part-time teachers.

These statements, along with many others, tell the audience, “Hey. We’re serious about our profession, and we do the work of full-time faculty. We’ll keep working hard no matter what our work conditions are because we are passionate about what we do, and we are passionate about the communities we work with and serve. However, all we ask is that you respect our labor as you would the work of any full-time faculty member; don’t devalue what we do simply because the word “Adjunct” appears on our pay roll slip.”

Ann Wiegard, who is Secretary of the New Faculty Majority, powerfully expresses the misunderstandings that often surround the term “part-time:”

“I think that teaching conditions equals learning conditions is an equation that can go really in the wrong direction when people say, ‘Oh that means that part time people aren't teaching as well because they're not paid enough’ and so on ‘to do a good job,’ and that's not what it means. It means the same thing that it would mean if you were looking at a hospital and there was a nurse who was responsible for 75 patients by herself. . . . The working conditions there are going to affect the patient care. Even if she doesn't sit down all night, if she doesn't get dinner, if she's doing her very, very best, and ninety percent of the patients would say, ‘Gosh, this is a wonderful nurse, and she's treating me great,’ it's inevitably going to affect the quality of care.”

As Wiegard indicates, one of the “high stakes” of contingency within higher education that is explored in Fulwiler and Marlow’s film is a dilemma that can be quite punishing to adjuncts. Operating upon the assumption that part-time instructors do not share an investment in their departments and institutions that is equal to that of full-time faculty, it can be easy to assume that the quality of instruction being delivered by contingent faculty is somehow sub-par compared to the work being done by full-time instructors. However, such a view adds insult to the injury that adjuncts have already suffered.

Not only do adjuncts do the work of college instructors, often without benefits or equal pay, but they also suffer from the stigma that the work they do within these conditions is inadequate. Wiegard’s statements, along with others in “The High Stakes of Contingency” portion of Con Job, draw attention to this practice of undermining contingent faculty’s labor. This practice is all the more shocking, since it is unclear how maintaining dismissive attitudes toward the efforts of almost 75% of higher education’s faculty can possibly help departments, colleges and universities ensure the “retention” of their students, a “concern” that should, according to Mary Fitzsimmons, an Adjunct of English, lead these institutions to envision all of their instructors as “people who are committed to the college [and] committed to the students . . . ”

“The High Stakes of Contingency” portion of Fulwiler and Marlow’s film builds on the information and perspectives provided in previous sections by illuminating the real-life consequences that result from the devaluing of contingent faculty in higher education. Through the creators’ skilled editing of their interviews with faculty, they present viewers with a powerful argument, an argument that is delivered by the very faculty who have so much at stake.

Poor working conditions for contingent faculty set aside, higher education is doing itself a disservice by structuring its colleges and universities like pyramidal structures in which full-time and tenured faculty rest atop a crushed mass of part-time laborers. The real victims of higher education’s dismissiveness toward contingent faculty are the students themselves, the group of people such institutions pay so much lip-service toward trying to serve.