Patricia Ybarra
President’s address
August 1, 2015
When sitting down to write this speech I started where I often do with my students when thinking through a concept that we think is familiar, but is not. In this case, the word whose definition is in question is “adjunct.” According to the Webster’s dictionary, adjunct “is something joined or added to another thing, but not essentially a part of it,” or “a word or word group that qualified or completes the meaning of another word and or words and is not itself the main structural element in its sentence,” or it is an adverb or adverbial phrase (as heartily in “They ate heartily” or at noon in “We left at noon” attached to the verb of a clause especially to express a relation of time, place, frequency, degree or manner.” The third definition comes final to issues in our profession, which defines the term as “ an associate or assistant of another or an adjunct faculty member at a college or university ” We are then directed to the second definition if we are interested in adjunct professor-- that definition is : “added or joined in order to be used with something ; added to a teaching staff for only a short time or in a lower position than other staff or “added or joined as an accompanying object or circumstance.” The second definition elaborates on this, suggesting that an adjunct is “ attached in a subordinate or temporary capacity to a staff .” I will also offer some synonyms as food for thought:
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“helper, adjutant, aid, aide, apprentice, assistant, coadjutor, deputy, helpmate, helpm eet, lieutenant, mate, sidekick” 1
How we journey from adjunct as a term defining grammar, emergent in the late
1580s, to one that in the twenty first century is primarily used to define labor relations and subordination is a long journey that is hard to trace. It is not hard to recognize, however, adjunct today is a synonym for the contingent laborer in the university, who is often subordinated for no good reason because, in fact, they are essential to education in the US. I have heard from association members who hate this term contingent, in part because it seemingly slights the very present and
permanent contribution these scholars, artists, and teachers are making to the field, to their schools, and perhaps most importantly, to their students. I employ this term not to undermine these contributions, but rather to point out how institutions have made the livelihood of their employees and students contingent because many institutions have convinced themselves that the only way they can survive in market economy is to place their employees lives in contingency in order to meet the bottom line. And that is not acceptable.
The bitter irony one encounters when looking at the definition of adjunct is that adjunct faculty members are no longer staff hired “for a short term or in a temporary capacity as staff,” but as a permanent part of the university forever.
1 “Adjunct” Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary. 2015. http://www.merriamwebster.com/dictionary/adjunct . Accessed September 20, 2015.
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Today, fewer than a quarter of university faculty are full-time tenure and tenure track members; over 40 percent of instructors are part time instructors, many of whom receive limited or no benefits usually accorded full-time tenured, tenure track or contract professionals. Meaning that what was meant to be temporary is permanent. We are being asked to normalize being contingent –living subject to chance and perpetually dependent on conditions out of our control. Precarity is being institutionalized. And it effects all of us, even tenured and tenure track faculty who are thought to be the lucky ones. I point here to the case of Meghan Brodie, at the University of Southern Maine. Her story was part of an incredible panel I attended yesterday on the changing labor environment; I felt it appropriate to bring her voice into my own address. As she tells it: in March 2014 the President of the
University of Southern Maine announced the elimination of four programs, including a graduate program in American and New England Studies, effective the following semester. Additionally, nearly thirty seemingly cherry-picked faculty were given individual appointments with the provost who read from a prepared statement and laid off each one. USM never declared financial exigency, but cited budgetary problems as the reason for the layoffs, despite nearly 200 million dollars in unrestricted net assets.
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For ATHE member Meghan Brodie, this meant that, despite her tenure track status, she was made precarious. Here is her story in her own words: “I began working at
2 Tom Porter, “USM’s Financial Woes Questioned at Forum” MPBN News. October
23, 2014. http://news.mpbn.net/post/usms-financial-woes-questioned-forum.
Accessed September 20, 2015.
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USM in 2008 as an adjunct. In 2010, after a national search, I was hired as a 4-4
Lecturer. In 2012, my position, because it was created via a national search, was converted to tenure-track. A year and a half later, in March 2014, I was laid off. It is because of the efforts of dozens of Theatre students past and present that I got my job back (the day I was laid off was, without a doubt, the best day of my career because countless Theatre students lined the hallway of the provost’s office to support me and demand my job back). I was on the chopping block again in Fall
2014. The Theatre Dept. was told it needed to lose one full faculty line to be ‘rightsized’ and balance the budget. Administrators expected two senior faculty members who had only one semester of phased retirement left to retire a semester early to save a more junior person. These senior faculty members, perhaps targeted as former presidents of the faculty union, declined to retire. Consequently, my colleague, the department’s costume design faculty member and chair, was laid off again (she was laid off with me in Spring 2014 and then had that layoff rescinded only to be laid off again six months later). Several months later, a mid-career faculty member took early retirement to save the costume design faculty member’s job, but was told that his retirement could not save her position. The mid-career faculty member retired effective May of this year and the costume design faculty member was issued a notice of contract non-renewal because she is not yet tenured. As a result of a contract hole, she was given no severance, but the option of teaching through the 2015-2016 academic year. When I came to USM in 2008, the Theatre
Department was a department of twelve including our administrative assistant. In
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the absence of new hires, in 2016, the department will be a department of three faculty members, one professional staff member, and one administrative assistant.” 3
Not surprisingly, an investigation by the AAUP found that the supposed financial crisis that constituted these actions was based on false premises. As Brodie reports from the AAUP findings: the University of Maine system is in strong financial condition; the system has strong reserves, manageable debt, and strong operating surpluses and cash flows. Bond-rating agencies cite all of these issues as justification for the system’s strong bond rating; and revenues exceeding expenses in both 2013 and 2014; So, while enrollment at USM has declined, the university is still generating revenues larger than expenses, and there are still solid reserves.
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This story is nothing short of horrifying and it was, frankly hard to hear. It signals a future where contingency is the norm in the name of economic rationalization untethered from economic facts. Despite our title and position within the university, we are all vulnerable.
But I also stand here to remind us that the word contingent can also be a noun. This is where I think hope lies. We, as ATHE, can be a contingent, a contingent that fights voraciously, creatively, performatively and theatrically to make theatre, teach theatre, critique theatre and performance as an essential act while demanding
3 Meghan Brodie, “Presentation” Considerations of Contract Labor: The Changing
Landscapes of Academic Employment . ATHE conference paper delivered on July 31,
2015.
4 Academic Freedom and Tenure: University of Southern Maine. American
Association of University Professors. May 2015. http://www.aaup.org/report/USM .
Accessed September 20, 2015.
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the best labor conditions possible. I ask you to join me in making yourself a contingent to work against our contingency.
I say this as someone who is very aware that this “we” is also contingent as well as a contingent. Many people who are in the most contingent positions in the profession are not here; they often can’t afford the conference. Some can’t really afford to be members. And we still need to be there for them. I take this charge over from Henry
Bial, who has continually asked how we can be ATHE for all theater educators, even those who have not come and logged the hours and financial commitment you have to the Association. Many people in room are in secure positions, and will called upon to be allies. Many of you in the room are students and do not know how you will work in the profession yet. We need you too. We want to make ATHE work for you; this is easy to say and hard to do. Certainly this incredible conference always provides riches and it will continue to do so. We must recognize that. I am not suggesting we leave art behind in our advocacy. I am suggesting, however, that we put our heads together to do the long slow work of making it work so we can do our work. We must do the long slow work of protecting the valuable but inefficient work of making theatre happen under our current conditions. I am asking that we must keep making work that does not fit the new mold. In our institutions right now, there is a lot of talk about creativity, its role in innovation, and wealth production and management, but this often still leaves art making which is not aimed at profit or the creation of human capital “extra” “luxurious,”or adjunct. That needs to end.
Next year’s ATHE conference in Chicago is dedicated to this topic. Titled Bodies at
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Work: Performance, Labor, and ATHE @ 30 , the conference will ask get to the heart of the matter. As the call for the conference itself asks, “ Given the intense push to assess every aspect of higher education, how do we hold on to an improvisational spirit in our classroom labor? What are ATHE’s responsibilities and opportunities in the context of the academic adjunct labor crisis (or in the context of professional theatre’s increasing reliance on unpaid internship labor)? What does it mean to put bodies on the line in theatre and higher education? Whose bodies end up disproportionately on the line? Whose bodies end up doing disproportionate labor for academic departments, institutional committees, and arts organizations? Being in Chicago will allow us to look at this questions in a rich and local way in a place deeply important to ATHE’s history.” 5 I thank the inimitable Kelly Howe and the conference committee for this labor in advance. Outside of the conference, we are currently spearheading a committee on adjunct labor in collaboration with the ASTR subcommittee on Working Conditions led by Jill Stevenson; we are working with
Chase Bringardner of the Membership and Marketing Committee to make the conference more affordable; and we are thinking through how to meet the 21 st century by consciously working on diversity and inclusion, access and equity as part of ATHE’s strategic planning. While we respect many forms of diversity, including the aesthetic, we are thinking long and hard about how we can be more inclusive for members who inhabit various cultural and ethnic designations, class positions and the many different gender and desire expressions known as gender, sex, or sexuality whom have not been included, explicitly or implicitly, as amongst the universally
5 Kelly Howe, “A message from your 2016 Conference Chair,”ATHE Website. http://www.athe.org/?page=2016_Conference . Accessed September 20, 2015.
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human. We would be blind not to see a resurgence of violence in the country undergirded by those excluded from the “human” by their perceived racial, ethnic and gender identities. We can’t be naïve about the fact that it is our job as educators to confront how we might exist in the landscape of the twenty-first century, with its increasing ethnic and cultural diversity so as to make it possible for the university population to look like the US. As theatre educators we are crucial to the making the theatre what Daniel Banks calls a welcome table.
6 We can do this because we teach people how to create worlds, to inhabit the subjectivity of another, to reach across; one can do this without assuming that one comes to an unmarked universal human place in this transfer. We come instead to a not universal human place that is nonetheless understandable across cultures. We must inhabit multitudes while understanding the privilege we experience in doing so. We must produce plays in our university seasons that reflect the world as it is and will be; we must produce plays that reflect where we are when we are there; we must produce new plays by the full range of voices in the chorus. We can lead the US theatre, demand that it come to us, to our diversity and inclusion rather than feel we must shape it to follow the commercial demands of the market . We can stop asking our students to simply comply with these conditions. We can get rid of the idea of the slot—the Woman slot, the Black slot, the Latina slot, the Asian American Slot, the Queer slot, the
Native American slot, and the international slot tomorrow. Tomorrow. Or at least by the 2016-2017 season if we act now. We can urge the commercial theater to meet
6 Daniel Banks, “The Welcome Table: Casting for an Integrated Society,” Theatre
Topics 23.1 (March 2013): 1-18. Banks points out in the article that The Welcome
Table was a title for James Baldwin’s last, unfinished play.
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us, at least halfway. And we can do this by producing very good theatre created in nurturing yet challenging processes in our institutions. We can do it by making the full range of theatrical experience present within our scholarship. We can do it by moving to the center of the university, by refusing to be contingent, marginal and adjunct. And we can hold our heads high while wearing the label adjunct arguing for our centrality. I ask you to join me here with the ventures we can do going forward.
Join us for the conference in 2016 where we are partnering with BTN to celebrate both of our 30 year histories as institutions and think together about these labor conditions. Email us, write us, grab our arms in the hall and let us know what we can do.
I now end this speech where I began it—with definitions. And here I must move to that ever tricky word, association. The definition is listed as
“a group of people organized for a joint purpose, or as a connection or cooperative link between people or organizations.” 7 It also has a series of synonyms, which include” relationship, relation, interrelation, connection, interconnection, link, bond, union, tie, attachment, interdependence, affiliation.” 8
Here I ask that we make association as a noun into something more akin to a verb without lapsing into jargon. Let’s think the root of association, to associate as an action, full of attachment, bonding and interdependence. Let’s think of it as a going forward together. This action is parallel to choosing Aristotle over Plato,
7 Angus Stevenson, ed. “Association” Oxford Dictionary of English. 3rd Edition,
(Oxford, New York: Oxford UP, 2010).
8 Maurice Waite, ed. “Association,” Oxford Thesaurus of English (Oxford, New York:
Oxford UP, 2009).
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to defining mimesis not as a static representation haunted by the false but as a making and a doing. This is how we will remain, how we will avoid being banished from the republic, or being banished from the university in thought or deed. This is how we will avoid being co-opted into being what we are not. This is how we will be ATHE.
Thank you.
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