Thanks for your perspective on this, comparatrice. But Chicago most certainly does use adjuncts or non-tenure track lecturers: for example, the most famous adjunct faculty member in the world!

Chicago (my alma mater) wouldn’t have had a lot of adjuncts teaching a subject like history; IME they were always reluctant even to let grad students teach, apart from foreign languages. It’s part of the pseudo-SLACky culture of The College. When I read “a college in Chicago” I figured it was Columbia College (I don’t know why; you just get certain pictures in your head of the happy mid-90s life of a history PhD running into his Columbia students at the Empty Bottle, apparently), and that he was using his friends’ anecdotes to authorize the leap to the general case about tenured faculty and adjuncts.

I think people do often have these conversations, over drinks or whatever: consciousness-raising derailed by conspiracy theory. “OMG, we are all adjuncting, the tenure-stream faculty is against us, this is The New Normal, this is The Way It Works…” Turning it into a Harper’s article 15 years later, though… yeah, you want to do a little more research first. We could take up a collection and send him Marc Bousquet’s book.

I’m sorry that the administration at your uni is taking advantage of your determination to serve your majors well.

I don’t think Frank really knows what he’s talking about. Tenured and tenured-track faculty are not the ones clamoring for more cheap labor. That’s something I’ve never come across, at all.

I’d love to know where Frank was temping back in the mid-1990s. My bet that it wasn’t Chicago State or Northern Illinois, and that it was someplace like Chicago or Northwestern. (Although even at those unis I truly doubt his implication that somehow tenured faculty teaching loads were reduced as a direct result of the use of adjunct labor.) Like most critics of academe who never spent years on the job market and have never worked in a tenure-track job, he doesn’t get it that most of us end up at Chicago State or Northern Illinois, not Chicago or Northwestern.

This is not, I think, what Frank imagines is going on.

My department regularly offers our adjuncts a mixture of service classes and upper-divison lecture courses (and even sometimes senior seminars.) It is true that they teach more service courses than the regular faculty, but I’d say that there’s some logic in that: only regular faculty, for example, teach graduate classes, and regular faculty have been recruited in national searches to teach specialized courses in their fields, whereas adjuncts and lecturers usually come from a local pool and aren’t necessarily hired because of their particular area of specialization (although frequently that’s of use to us as well, given the gaping holes left among our regular faculty.) And, in my department T.A. assistance is distributed equally–anyone teaching a 100-level class gets a T.A., period, regardless of tenure-track or adjunct status.

Early in my career I had some course releases and then a medical leave, so I was in the position of having to teach a 100-level class while the department Chair had to find a specialist in my field to teach some early American classes because of our previously inflexible rule that regular faculty had to teach one 100-level class per year. That was an unnecessary burden on the Chair, and a ridiculous waste of my expertise, in my view. That’s one reason we changed that rule.

But I agree with you in principle that teaching should be more fairly distributed across the curriculum.