Background
Scholars
of higher education have developed a large body of scholarship that addresses faculty
careers. Within this scholarship, there are consistent themes: the importance
of disciplinary background in forming faculty views of the world and their work,
how the type of college or university where one works bears down on the roles
and expectations that a faculty member is expected to fulfill (and supported to
fulfill). Higher education researchers have also illustrated how faculty
careers are not immune to the bent of the wider political-economy, most often
characterized as neoliberal, market-centered, commercialized, or austere (see Harvey,
2005 for history of neoliberalism). In fact, neoliberal critiques abound, not
only in the U.S. but also throughout Australia, England, Canada, Mexico and
many other countries (Apple, 2013; Torres & Schugurensky, 2002). Most of
this research demonstrates how the professorial role has been unbundled,
de-professionalized, and transformed (sometimes in the face of resistance) into
a distinctive entrepreneurialism (Slaughter & Rhoades, 2004).
Within the neoliberal critiques,
studies show that faculty tend to work long hours in order to keep up with
growing work load demands; that their work is increasingly understood for its
fiscal or cultural resource generation; and that evaluation of faculty work is
contingent on their ability and willingness to self-surveil and document what
they do with their time (e.g., What was their percentage contribution to a
manuscript; How many students did one graduate; How much revenue was generated
via one’s course offerings?) (Gonzales & Núñez, 2014). As with most
institutionalized patterns of valuation and resource allocation, the effects of
the neoliberal turn are often disbursed unequally with female faculty members,
individuals of racially or ethnically minoritized statuses, those working in
disciplines further from the market, or faculty employed by institutions with
fewer resources and limited infrastructure feeling the brunt of inequality. Indeed,
Among those most effected are contingent faculty who teach a vast majority of
undergraduate courses across American colleges and universities, and who are poorly paid, marginalized, and find themselves with limited or inconsistent access to teaching and learning professional development opportunities and materials from employing institution(s).
To date, the field has learned a
great deal from studies that use a neoliberal lens to explore faculty careers. However,
as just suggested, this research has tended to document the ways in which
faculty expectations and/or productivity/output patterns have changed, and how
those changing expectations often reproduce inequities along the lines of
discipline, institutional type, gender, and race (Misra, Lundquist, &
Templer, 2012; Niehaus & O’Meara, 2015; Renzulli, Reynold, Kelly &
Grant, 2013; Treviño, Gamez-Mejia, Balkin, & Mixon, 2015). Beneath or
perhaps behind the pressures to publish and to demonstrate tangible outcomes are
daily seemingly invisible or small micro level processes and experiences that
the neoliberal moment also bears down on, but which are currently
under-examined. To this point, Bastedo (2012) urged higher education researchers,
and especially organizational theorists, to take a close look into “educational
work” (p. 10) as it unfolds in a daily, perhaps even mundane, way. The goal of
this post is to explore three ways of doing so, and I begin, drawing from the
work of Anna Neumann, by asking if and how we might shift to studying faculty
careers not only or primarily as a producing enterprise, but as a learning one.
Understanding the Faculty Career as a Learning Enterprise
In her work, Anna Neumann (2009)
encourages scholars and college and university leaders to remember that the
work of faculty hinges on continual learning—an idea that is often muted in the
desire to understand outputs, outcomes, and productivity. Although, the focus
on output or productivity, in general is important and connected to an
overarching concern with how the neoliberal bent positions colleges and
universities, and in turn their faculty, as market competitors, there is also much
work on the part of faculty that goes into “producing,” which the field knows
little about. Specifically, the field knows little about how faculty members,
embedded in (and producers of) the productivity culture, extend their scholarly
learning: how they form and explore ideas, test out or articulate their
thoughts as they grapple with old and new theories and developments. Given this
gap in knowledge, there is merit in exploring such phenomena, broadly, and also
in trying to understand how faculty learning efforts fall out differently among
different groups of professors, such as those on and off the tenure-line, across
gender lines, among faculty members who hold racially and ethnically
minoritized status inside an institution constructed by and for White, wealthy
males and for those who have come to know the world with Western-centric
ideology and epistemology.
Indeed, history has shown that
women, women of color and communities of color, more broadly, create and engage
in productive learning outside of mainstream apparatus. Martinez Aléman (2000;
2010) illustrated how the learning experiences for young traditionally aged
women and women of color differed (in terms of space and content) from that of
young male students, and also from that of the other female group. Espino,
Muñoz, and Marquez Kiyama (2010) shared how their friendship and bond has been
central, indeed integral, to their intellectual development. With the power of
these examples in mind, we need more studies that systematically focus on how
faculty commit and recommit to learning over the course of their work lives,
the ways in which community and friendship play a role in allowing academics to
form ideas, to talk out loud about their work in ways that allow them to be
vulnerable, and what such efforts look like across gender, race, familial
composition/commitments; disciplinary affiliations; appointment types; and across
different institutional types. Such work would not necessarily shed light on
productivity, as it is typically defined in the current neoliberal moment, but
it would remind researchers and leaders that meaningful productivity must be
fed by scholars’ ability to extend their learning.
Deploying
Intersectionality to Trace the Differential Effects of the
Neoliberalism
on Faculty Mobility
As already alluded to, cultures (e.g.,
disciplinary norms, normative dispositions toward work, professionalism) and
structures (e.g., appointment types, hiring processes, tenure and promotion
guidelines) do not operate in the same way for all faculty members. Faculty
members enter academia as raced, gendered, classed, and otherwise marked bodies.
However, beyond the personal and biographical markers that faculty carry, they
also enter academia with particular forms of capital such as that attached to
the type of institution where they completed their doctoral work, unearned
capital attached to the cache of their major advisors, their methodological
experiences/stances, and myriad other forms of privilege that are not well
documented in current research regarding faculty hiring or mobility. In other
words, like the hidden curriculum that many scholars have documented in the
context of K-12 schooling, there are hidden and not well understood forms of
capital that allow/constrain movement within academe (Margolis, 2001). It is
notable that that women and racially and ethnically minoritized women and men,
occupy the majority of non-tenure-track positions (Finkelstein, 2015); that racially
and ethnically minoritized people are more likely to graduate from a non-Ivy
League school, and more specifically, from a Historically Black College or
University or a Hispanic Serving Institution as documented in emerging work by Dongbin Kim.
When one holds these latter pieces
of information in one hand, and then considers the fact that the majority of
tenure-track hires are drawn from a tiny portion of doctoral-granting
universities as noted here and here, it becomes evident
that understanding faculty hiring, promotion, and mobility patterns demands an
intersectional approach: one that accounts for personal identity markers; organizational/field
markers or forms of capital; and also academic
markers (e.g., research topics, methodological approaches) as each of these
markers holds a certain value in this neoliberal context.
By incorporating this three-dimensional
approach to studying the composition of the academic labor force, higher
education researchers might be able to investigate the manifestation of
neoliberalism differently: perhaps as the layered reproduction of hierarchy,
where scholars of color or otherwise minoritized (class, college generation)
scholars, most likely to graduate from non-Ivy League institutions are fed into
ranks of a labor market that are not promising pathways to mobility. While
neoliberalism is currently understood for its de-professionalizing and
unbundling effects on faculty roles, there is a need to understand how
neoliberalism works in tandem with the deeply institutionalized logics of the
field of higher education in ways that hamper access and mobility within the
professoriate.
Emotions
in Academia
One final line of inquiry that might
be developed within the broader neoliberal critique deals with emotion. At ASHE
2015, my colleague David Ayers and I put forward a new theoretical framework to
explore the labor experiences and expectations of community college faculty in
this neoliberal moment. We borrowed from an eclectic set of literatures,
including institutional logics, nuanced discussions of neoliberalism, and emotional
labor (Hocschild, 1983). In developing our argument, we recognized that one of
the most powerful expectations for contemporary faculty, particularly those
working in under-resourced colleges and universities and in the least secure of
positions, especially contingent labor, is that of emotional labor. Our
argument differs from recent writing that stresses the emotional toll and anxieties absorbed by non-tenure-track faculty
(and faculty, writ large), and instead focuses on the idea that faculty members,
especially those working in under-resourced settings, like community colleges,
are expected to remedy structural inequities that stem from austerity politics
and neoliberalism through their passion, commitment, and creativity. Adopting
this vantage point, researchers might consider how calls for creativity and
passion are actually attempts to draw on the emotional resources—particularly the
passions—of those who attach a deep sense of purpose to their appointment as
teachers, researchers, or academics, writ large.
There are other ways that emotional
labor might be studied within academe while holding in mind broader political-economic
contexts. For example, the personal identity markers—gender, race, class,
sexuality and so on—discussed throughout this post often seep into the work
that faculty do, how that work is perceived, and how they, in turn, strive to
position that work (see Gutierrez y Muhs, Niemann, González, & Harris, 2012
for many examples). Scholars whom occupy one (or multiple) marginalized
statuses and whose work is explicitly
focused on critical questions concerning race, equity, power, inclusion, and
Whiteness receive several warnings about the risks of such work: they will be
perceived as overly political; as one-dimensional; as subjective or biased. Such
critical work is imperative to understanding the inherently political
production of knowledge, and how knowledge shifts and expands over time, but the
field has yet to investigate how scholars engaged in this work negotiate,
recoup, and thrive in spite of threats to or warnings offered about their
intellectual viability. In other words, higher education researchers might
consider exploring how scholars, who are engaged in critical— or less mainstream
work (in any discipline)— move through and subvert the warnings they receive,
but also what it takes to sustain such scholarly agendas. Such movement, it
seems, would require a great deal of emotional energy, and as such, is
deserving of close study as yet another way that neoliberalism collides with
power and politics in the production and evaluation of knowledge.
Closing
Thoughts
Although the field has a
well-established body of work concerning the academic profession, there are
many questions and angles that remain unexplored. My hopes for this post were
to motivate new ways of thinking about the study of faculty work and roles, such
as what lays behind productivity (learning), how the opportunity to enter and
be mobile within academe hinges on hidden curricula attached to historical and structural
inequities, or perhaps what is expected or what it takes—emotionally—to move
through academia today.
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