Last month, I began a new series on the rights of non-tenure-track philosophers. My aim in this series is to learn more about the issues that non-TT members of the profession face, the relative importance of those issues to them, what might be done to address those issues, who ought to address those issues and how (such as the APA), and finally, which issues ought to be considered rights of non-TT faculty.
In the first entry in the series, I held an open discussion on the question, "non-TT faculty, what do you take to be important professional issues you face that you would like to see addressed in some way?". I personally learned a lot from the discussion, and put together the following list of issues that commenters identified as important issues to them:
- Absolute deprivation (e.g. poor pay and/or benefits)
- Relative deprivation (less pay, benefits, and/or job security than similarly qualified individuals)
- Lack of job-security (e.g. year-to-year or semester-by-semester contracts)
- Lack of opportunities for promotion
- Lack of union representation
- Never feeling like you belong (always feeling like a 'visitor' in your own department/institution)
- Being treated as a second-class citizen at work
- Lack of respect in the discipline of academic philosophy (e.g. only people with tenure-track jobs matter)
- Unjust inequity (unequal pay for equal work)
- Lack of academic freedom
I have now put together this informal survey to elicit how important these different issues are to non-tenure track , as well as to solicit non-tenure track people's opinions on which issues the American Philosophical Association (APA) should do more to address. If you are a non-tenure-track member of the profession (e.g. working as an adjunct, postdoc, lecturer, VAP, etc.), please consider filling out the survey. Although it is only an informal survey, not a formal study, my hope is that the answers respondents give to it will be illuminating for further discussion in this series. Please only fill out the survey if you have worked or are working in the above non-tenure-stream capacities. Please do not fill out the survey if you have only worked as a graduate teaching assistant or graduate student instructor in your MA or PhD program while in graduate school. While I think the professional issues that graduate students face are important (and indeed, I hope to do a series on the rights of graduate students in the near future!), I would like for this series to focus squarely on non-tenure-stream members of the profession beyond their work in their own graduate program. Many thanks in advance to everyone who takes the time to fill out the survey!
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