Content area
Full Text
It's a dirty job but someone's gotta do it
Oh, it's a dirty job but someone's gotta do it
-Faith No More, "We Care a Lot"
In English studies, both faculty and those who practice in the field expend an abundance of energy attending to instruction and research. Despite all of this, we risk seeing our efforts undercut by a handful of recurring riffs, like those in jazz music, that reinforce a disparity in status between some kinds of teaching in relation to others, between teaching in relation to research, and between teaching faculty in relation to research faculty. Those riffs circulate in formal documents-such as collective bargaining agreements, personnel handbooks and policies, trade publications like Inside Higher Ed (IHE) and the Chronicle of Higher Education (CHE), and blogs and social media posts-much more frequently than the copious amount of excellent scholarship on teaching to audiences that include high-ranking decision-makers on our campuses who likely don't read this scholarship.
I've been making pieces of this argument for years in blog posts and social media threads, but the exigency for it has become heightened as three problems intertwine. First, as is well documented (see, e.g., Flaherty, "NonTenure-Track," which cites AAUP and IPEDS data everyone uses), the proliferation of both teaching-emphasis tenure-track/tenured (TT/T) positions and non-tenure-track (NTT) positions primarily-if not solely-require/ support teaching that is almost always focused on general education writing or literature or basic writing. Faculty in these positions are, in almost all cases, compensated worse than faculty who don't "just teach." Second, as the number of tenure-track positions shrinks and tenure expectations rise, those tenure expectations are often based on increased research productivity at the expense of attention to and respect for teaching. (For the record, I'm not making a causal claim, but it's hard to believe those aren't connected.) Third, even secure TT or long-term NTT positions that emphasize teaching are respected less; for those of us in tenured positions, a position I've been in for years, that's irritating, but not especially damaging. The most direct damage happens to graduate students and job seekers who are actively dissuaded from pursuing teaching positions because they aren't prestigious enough or don't afford enough research time and to faculty in NTT positions who suffer profound professional...