Speaking Up, Speaking Out

Lived Experiences of Non-Tenure-Track Faculty in Writing Studies

Jessica Edwards, Meg McGuire, Rachel Sanchez, Jessica Edwards, Meg McGuire, Rachel Sanchez

• Publisher: Utah State University Press
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781646420759
• Topic: Filología
• Subtopic: Lingüística

Speaking Up, Speaking Out addresses the lived experiences of those working in the non-tenure-track faculty (NTTF) trenches through storytelling and reflection. By connecting NTTF voices from various aspects of writing studies, the collection offers fresh perspectives and meaningful contributions, imagining the possibilities for contingent faculty to be valued and honored in educational systems that often do the opposite. Challenging traditional ways of seeing NTTF, the work contains multiple entry points to NTT life: those with and without "terminal degrees, " those with PhDs, and those who have held or currently hold tenured positions.Each chapter suggests tangible ways that writing departments and supporters can be more thoughtful about their policies and practices as they work to create more equitable spaces for NTTF. Speaking Up, Speaking Out considers the rhetorical power of labeling and asserts why contingent faculty, for far too long, have been compared to and against TT faculty and often encouraged to reach the same or similar productivity with scholarship, teaching, and service that TT faculty produce. The myopic ideas about what is valued and whose position is deemed more important impacts contingent faculty in ways that, as contributors in this collection share, effect and affect faculty productivity, emotional health, and overall community involvement.Contributors: Norah Ashe-McNalley, Sarah Austin, Rachel Azima, Megan Boeshart Burelle, Peter Brooks, Denise Comer, Jessica Cory, Liz Gumm, Brendan Hawkins, Heather Jordan, Nathalie Joseph, Julie Karaus, Christopher Lee, John McHone, Angie McKinnon Carter, Dauvan Mulally, Seth Myers, Liliana M. Naydan, Linda Shelton, Erica Stone, Elizabeth Vincelette, Lacey Wootton

Part I

Definitions

1

Practice Doesn’t Always Make Permanent

Directing a Writing Center as a Professor of Practice

Rachel Azima

DOI: 10.7330/9781646420759.c001

“People say ‘practice makes perfect,’ but that isn’t really true,” my childhood piano teacher would say. “You can practice something over and over and you’ll remember it, but if you’re practicing it wrong, you’ll remember it like that. So it’s more like ‘practice makes permanent.’ ” I’ve taught this saying to my son, too, as we battle our way through preparing for his cello lessons and recitals. My piano teacher didn’t have my current state of employment remotely in mind when he was talking to teenage me, but as someone who presently serves as assistant professor of practice on a fixed-term contract, the connection amuses me anyway: practice does not always make permanent—at least in academia.

When I was first on the job market, I did not particularly want the tenure-track R1 job that was supposed to be my goal, with its attendant pressure to generate scholarship on a strict timeline. I ended up in a tenure-track job with a 4/4 teaching load at a small private university in the Midwest. My experience there was . . . not ideal. At one point, a senior colleague tried to start an insurrection against the department chair, attempting (unsuccessfully) to recruit me and my friend—both new assistant professors—for the cause. How could this possibly have been a good idea for us? That senior colleague was also teaching climate-change deniers in his philosophy of science class while I was discussing global warming in my nature-writing course. You may well imagine whose arguments our mutual students found more authoritative.

While these situations made my job unnecessarily difficult, I don’t mean to overstate the role of this particular colleague or even interpersonal dynamics more generally. I simply disagreed with the “holding the line against the fall of Western Civilization” philosophy that undergirded our curriculum and pedagogical practices. I was expected to enforce a Banned Error List that involved docking a student half a grade for a lack of subject-verb agreement, another half a grade for one run-on sentence, and so forth. Suffice it to say, my friend left after two years to return to the Pacific Northwest without any specific job prospects. I hung in for four years, but truth be told, I was on the job market in one way, shape, or form from the moment I started.

But that moment was also 2008, and (as we know) the recession did not spare the academic job market. At first, I dutifully applied for other assistant professor positions. But classroom teaching had never been my favorite, and I’d been inspired by wonderful administrative role models: my stepdad, Allan Saaf, who ultimately retired as a community college vice president, and Bradley Hughes, the director of the UW–Madison Writing Center, who is legendary in the writing center world for his mentorship. The strategic, visionary work of program building appealed to me, so I had always intended to seek out an administrative role eventually. Seeing what teaching jobs were out there after a year or two—or, more to the point, what weren’t there—I began looking to move into administration sooner rather than later, ultimately narrowing my focus to writing center administration. I had found writing center teaching and leadership far more fulfilling than classroom teaching as a graduate student, and here was a line of work for which my unwillingness to specialize would be an asset!

In the third year of my assistant professor gig, I did indeed land an offer for a writing center directorship, but I was pregnant at the time and turned it down. Instead, I parlayed the job offer into a raise and a semester off from teaching.

This move was truly the beginning of the end for me at that university. It crystal clear my chair and dean had not appreciated the way I’d played hardball, and I was increasingly made to feel as if my pregnancy was a liability. “I’m not jealous or anything, even though that’s not something I’m going to experience in my own life,” my chair told me—which I found a peculiar thing to say, unless the reverse were actually true. She’d been a major cheerleader at first, but it became more and more evident that I wasn’t meeting her (murky, to me) expectations. I had a course release for some administrative duties, which I realize now could be considered WPA work: selecting textbooks, hiring and mentoring part-time faculty, and setting the schedule for all English faculty in the department. I literally lost sleep over the scheduling, but this labor wasn’t visible enough: I wasn’t going to be seen as a team player if I didn’t up my participation in recruitment efforts. My chair assigned me to staff an event that kept me mostly on my feet just weeks before I was to give birth. I was made to feel as if I wasn’t pulling my ever-increasing weight, and my third-year review indicated as much: I was doing well with teaching and administrative duties, but I wasn’t doing enough to promote the English major.

As a new mother and sole breadwinner, I would have done whatever it took to be successful there if it came to it, but I hoped it wouldn’t. I took a hiatus from the job market until my son was a few months old, but when a writing center director position opened up a couple of states away, I applied without hesitation. I was offered the job—a staff director position at a large research university with an engineering and agriculture focus—and this time I accepted. “Congratulations!” said my chair. “This is definitely for the best.”

The new position could not have been more different. The writing center was housed in Student Affairs—a division I knew nothing about. It was difficult transitioning from a flexible schedule to a twelve-month, at-your-desk-from-eight-to-five mentality. Still, the pay was excellent, the actual writing center work was congenial and well supported, and although I lived in terror that the vice president for Student Affairs would call me sometime at 8 a.m. and catch me being late, I did okay for a while.

But the job itself ended up not being quite what I had been allowed to believe, in ways that were professionally demoralizing. So, when my current position became available—an assistant professor of practice position in an English department at a different large midwestern research university—I applied for the job.

After I agreed to a campus visit, however, I belatedly remembered this was a public university, so I could look up pay rates—and was enraged to discover professors of practice in the department made $15,000 less than their tenure-track colleagues of the same rank. The salary was also considerably lower than what I was currently making. But it was too late to back out, so I went through with the visit.

When I got an initial offer, I let the chair know I was not prepared to take a pay cut and could not accept. It was true I had liked the folks I met in the department, the university was in a pleasant midsized city with far more to offer than where we were living, and I was constantly frustrated in my present job. The offer did include generous start-up funds, which I had never had access to before; the travel budget was much larger than I’d had on the tenure track, and it also exceeded that of one of my recently tenured graduate-school friends. If I took the job, I would also have the same access to faculty development (sabbatical) leaves as tenure-track members of the department. There were a number of temptations, in other words. So when the chair came back with a better offer that included partial summer support, plus the promise of summer teaching—an offer with a total dollar amount just barely to the threshold at which I was willing to consider it—I found myself tempted to accept. “You’d better be sure this time,” said my husband, the long-suffering trailing spouse. Problem was, I was anything but sure. I knew being “of practice” would make me a second-class citizen in many ways; the pay gap was evidence of this. I also knew taking a pay cut in general was ill-advised, to put it kindly, and moving for the third time in six years would be unpleasant at best.

But I just couldn’t stay with my current job any longer. I felt as though I should but could not bear to wait for other opportunities. I needed to save my mental health, if possible, and I wanted to move before my son started school and was old enough to put down roots. So, with myriad doubts and hesitations, I accepted the offer.

Working as a Professor of Practice

I’ve now been writing center director and assistant professor of practice in English for over five years. It can’t be said I didn’t have my eyes open when I took on this role. Nevertheless, while some developments haven’t surprised me, others have. I initially found it difficult to make inroads into the campus community. When I sent my first batch of emails to department chairs, introducing myself and offering as much or as little collaboration as they would like with the writing center, only one responded—and in only the most basic fashion. When I arrived, I was one of just three professors of practice (PoPs) in a department with approximately forty full-time faculty members. Like most English departments, we also employ a large number of part-time lecturers, quite a few of whom are recent graduates of our program. Our department chair was just beginning his term as I arrived. I was the first PoP in our department who was hired via a national search.

The most painful moment came during my second year, when we were looking to complete a senior hire. My PoP colleagues had previously served on numerous search committees and voted on hiring decisions; during my first year, I myself had attended job talks and voted on a hire, being only too happy to be back in an English department whose dynamics I understood, for better and worse. Since that time, however, our department chair had found language in the bylaws that questioned PoPs’ ability to participate in hiring decisions. After a lot of back and forth over email, my PoP colleagues and I attended a meeting where a hiring recommendation was to be made, expecting to vote as usual. To our surprise, the chair began by talking about interpretations of the bylaws versus established department practices of allowing PoPs to vote, effectively inviting our tenure-track colleagues to decide our fates—while we sat right there. A senior colleague—who, incidentally, knew me from my prior life as an ecocritic—kindly spoke up and said, “I think we should go ahead and follow established practice.” I appreciated this immensely, but nevertheless I found it profoundly humiliating to be held up for public judgment about whether we could be considered full colleagues.

Furthermore, it turned out our ability to vote that day was a one-off decision. Our department was again trying to hire during the following semester, but when we inquired, our chair said we would not vote on these decisions again until our department handbook was revised and the by-laws clarified. My PoP colleagues and I had been invited to dinners for prospective candidates; once I found out we couldn’t participate in any decision-making, I sat out the hiring process entirely. (The chair said he would have done the same thing himself.) The whole business felt absurd: an associate PoP in our department who had recently been hired as an associate dean in our college interviewed these candidates individually in her new administrative capacity, but she was unable to vote on hiring in her home department! We’ve since resolved this question and now have separate votes for hiring (a simple yea/nay for joining the community) and hiring with tenure, if the latter is necessary, which allows PoPs to participate. I grant this is better than in other departments on campus where PoPs are not accorded this right at all—though arguably, the inconsistency points to the problems inherent in liminal positions, even if some who occupy them have relatively positive experiences.

Regardless, you never fully recover from feeling the rug pulled out from under you—the sting of having no choice but to confront the notion that your ostensible colleagues do not view you as a full member of the community, just as you had feared.

And yet, the reasons I took this job are still here: I have kind, supportive colleagues in our composition and rhetoric faculty group who have welcomed me into the fold, despite the roundabout way I’ve come into the field (my PhD is in literary studies). And the nature of the PoP position allows me to distribute my workload sensibly: I spend the bulk of my time focused on directing the writing center, which is considered teaching for the purposes of my appointment, with smaller amounts of time allocated to research and service. I appreciate working in an environment that values research and having it included in my apportionment; I can set the scholarly agenda I prefer and feel encouraged to pursue it, without the “publish or perish” pressure I was never looking for in the first place.

And part of what I enjoy most about working at an R1 instit...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: Negotiating Non-Tenure-Track Identities
• Part I: Definitions
• Part II: Critical Perspectives
• Part III: Lived Experiences
• Part IV: Next Steps
• About the Authors
• Index