In this episode of Rocking the Academy, co-hosts Roopika Risam and Mary Churchill talk with Maria Maisto, co-founder and coalition president of New Faculty Majority, The National Coalition for Adjunct and Contingent Equity. We talk with Maria about her journey into organizing and advocacy, the successes and challenges of the contingent faculty movement, and what tenure-track allies can do to support contingent faculty.
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Mary Churchill: [00:00:00] Rocking the Academy is a podcast that's changing the future of higher education. Your hosts, Mary Churchill and Roopika Risam, bring you conversations with the very best truth tellers who are formulating a different vision of the university. Do they rock the boat? Yes, but in doing so, they rock the academy.
Rocking the Academy is sponsored by Johns Hopkins University Press, publisher of excellent books on higher education.
Roopika Risam: [00:00:35] On this episode of Rocking the Academy, we chat with Maria Maisto, co-founder and coalition president of the New Faculty Majority, a national non-profit focused on improving the quality of higher education by transforming the working conditions of the majority contingent faculty. Known for her groundbreaking work and advocacy for contingent faculty members, Maisto is the former president and executive director of the New Faculty Majority Foundation and previously worked as an adjunct in English in Ohio.
Mary Churchill: [00:01:08] Well, first, welcome and thank you for joining us. We're both big fans of yours. You have been an incredible advocate for contingent faculty, and we'd like you to share with us and our listeners your journey and how you came to this work.
Maria Maisto: [00:01:21] Well, first of all, thank you, and thank you for inviting me to do this. So my journey, actually I like to say, was both typical and atypical in the sense that I became an adjunct in the same way that a lot of people become adjuncts--unwittingly and a little naively. I had done my Master's at Georgetown and I was doing a Ph.D. at University of Maryland at College Park, and I was teaching classes as a TA at Maryland. But then, when I moved out to Ohio with my family, I wanted to get a part-time job and I thought, like so many people do, “I'll just get my foot in the door at the University of Akron, and that will lead to a full-time position.” And, like a lot of people, I discovered to my chagrin what the conditions actually were.
Now, what was a little bit atypical for me was that when I was in D.C., I had worked at the Association of American Colleges and Universities, so I was not unfamiliar with higher ed, and I worked with the American Conference of Academic Deans. But in all that time that I had worked there, I had never really heard about contingent faculty. So when I was confronted with it, the betrayal that I felt was, I think, a little bit more sharp because I sort of felt like I had been in higher ed, how did I not know about this? How did my professors not tell me about this? How did the higher ed community not tell me about this? So that was, you know, it was very much an eye opening experience. And in Ohio, adjunct faculty cannot unionize. Actually, it's not that they can't unionize, but there are obstacles in the law that prevent them from unionizing. And so we were not unionized.
And I started looking into it and I started meeting faculty who had been advocating for quite a long time. Everything sort of came to a head in the fall of 2008. I was teaching a few classes where I had students who were parents. I had students who were returning veterans with significant injuries. And the challenges of that--combined with the lack of support and then the impending recession--really hit home because my husband lost his job. So, I was faced with the growing indignation that my students were suffering because of my lack of support, and then also experiencing having to try to support my entire family as an adjunct faculty member. And so, I felt that I really, really had to do something. And it just so happened that I got connected to a national listserv for contingent faculty. I sort of lurked on it for a while and was learning about the long history of contingent faculty activism. But I was learning a lot and starting to meet people. And then in fall/spring 2009 people started talking about starting a new organization. And I said, “Well, you can sign me up for that.” And as I say, I was punished or rewarded by being asked to chair the organizing committee and eventually to head the organization. And it made me feel empowered and it made me feel the importance of the community that I was meeting, in a way that really helped prepare me for everything that I was going to learn about the labor movement in general.
And it was also, I think, interesting that it was happening around the time that social media was really starting to become more ubiquitous. And, so we were graduating from the listserv into Facebook and Twitter and everything else. And so I think that we happened to form at a very opportune moment where there was an opportunity to build a real community that could be very active and could do something a little bit different. Because we were also trying to sort of find our way in relation to other advocacy organizations and efforts, including the unions, including the disciplinary associations. And so we were able to carve out, I think, a niche for ourselves, and I think relate to those other entities in a way that I hope was helpful and in a way that was, I hope, moving the movement forward in positive ways and learning from when and where we were making mistakes.
Roopika Risam: [00:05:29] We greatly admire your work with the New Faculty Majority: The National Coalition for Adjunct and Contingent Equity. What's the reception been to this work and what kind of challenges have you encountered?
Maria Maisto: [00:05:40] Well, like I said, when we started out, partly because of my experience, sort of realizing that higher ed was somewhat ignorant and in denial. When I first started speaking, I remember being at an AAC&U meeting and we were talking about contingent faculty working conditions--and there were administrators and I guess other faculty, tenured faculty, in the room who were so angry that we were talking about this and challenging them, that there was palpable hostility in the room, and one person even got up, walked out, and slammed the door.
And over the years, as we have tried to reach out to as many constituencies as possible in higher ed to get them involved in the advocacy, I have been really gratified to see that attitude shift. Now I get asked to speak to administrators. So there's solidarity forming in those constituency groups as well. Tenured faculty have also come a long way. I don't know if you're all familiar with Tenure for the Common Good, which is a group that Carolyn Betensky started, which is a really terrific and much-needed organization.
So the obstacles were ignorance, were denial. There was, I'm sorry to say, quite a lot of sexism that I encountered and many of my women colleagues encountered early on. There was also sort of a resistance to thinking about the work that we were doing in the context of the labor movement and to think about academic work as work and to think of ourselves as being in solidarity with other workers in the economy.
Mary Churchill: [00:07:21] Oh, I love that. Really, I think the strongest allies that contingent faculty have are really tenured faculty, right? Or people who are on their way to being tenured. So, in your opinion, what do you think are some of the most critical ways that full-time tenure-track faculty can improve working conditions for contingent faculty?
Maria Maisto: [00:07:43] Yeah. It's such an important question, and it's also a question, you know, that sometimes is a little bit controversial. Because, within the movement, you have people who say, “We don't want tenured faculty doing the work for us. This is our movement, and we need to have our own voice.” On the other hand, the reality is that contingent faculty have few resources, both in terms of actual financial resources and time and energy. There's a lot of burnout within the movement to really sustain the work in the way that it needs to be sustained. And that is something that the tenured faculty and tenure line faculty do have. I know that many would be hard pressed to agree with that statement, just given the kinds of pressures that they have.
Advancing the profession must, by definition, entail advocating for the most vulnerable members of the profession. So, what can they do? I mean, clearly educating themselves, coming out of the bubble is really, really important. Connecting with other tenured faculty like Carolyn has started to do with this group and that AAUP has done to a large degree is really important. The idea of the One Faculty Campaign that AAUP has put together is really important.
There are very practical things that they can do. For example, supporting contingent faculty when they apply for unemployment which is one of our big campaigns to get folks to apply for unemployment in between terms. Tenure line faculty can help their departments to understand that this is a really important resource for contingent faculty and support their applications and support them when they are appealing their claims. And the reason that that is important is because it's part of a broader strategy around policy and around organizing that could really help invigorate the movement. But unfortunately, that doesn't always happen. And sometimes tenured faculty think that they're helping contingent faculty by saying, "Oh, don't worry, I will reasonably assure that you that you will have work," and they don't realize that what they have to do is help contingent faculty prove to the state unemployment agency that they don't have reasonable assurance of continued employment.
My pipe dream for what tenured faculty could do is a national walkout. Tenured faculty could stage a walkout and have it be impactful in a way that could really make a difference. And building that kind of solidarity and having that kind of an expression of solidarity and risk, I think would be just phenomenally important for calling attention to the problem and starting to come up with real practical solutions.
Roopika Risam: [00:10:34] Thank you so much. I mean, as a tenured faculty member, I asked that question, right? Because I want to know what I can help do. I can see how doing all this work, it can be incredibly challenging, but where do you find hope and inspiration to keep going when you encounter these challenges?
Maria Maisto: [00:10:54] Yeah, well, I have to say as someone who always kind of had a love-hate relationship with higher ed, as many of us do, I recently had the experience of working completely outside of higher ed, and it made me really appreciate what we have in higher ed. The decency of the people that we have in higher ed, the honesty and the commitment of people, not just to the mission of higher education--to learning and to teaching--but also just the basic decency I think is something that I had to be reminded of. I mean, I think we tend to be very self-critical within higher ed, and I think that it's important that we also realize that we come to this endeavor with really important and admirable goals--that we have a role to play in our society, especially now in terms of preserving and protecting democracy. And so that's part of what gives me hope. In spite of the really scary nature of the time that we're in right now, I think that there's a lot of inspiration coming out of the renewed commitment that people have made to advocacy, to self-expression, to solidarity.
If we can make a better connection with what's happening outside of the academy, then I think that there are real opportunities going forward to make a difference and to really transform the academy the way that it needs to be transformed. And that we can be both a partner and an inspiration--a partner with, and an inspiration to--our students and our communities. And we can learn from them as well. So, there's a lot of mutual benefit that is there to be had if we make the commitment and we open our eyes and get out there and do it.
Roopika Risam: [00:12:51] You have been listening to Rocking the Academy. Rocking the Academy is sponsored by Johns Hopkins University Press, publisher of The New Student Activists: The Rise of Neoactivism on College Campuses by Jerusha O. Conner, available where books are sold.