Bourgeois Delusions and the Working Class University: Why Universities Should Hire Based on Seniority

On October 14, 2021, the workers at John Deere went on strike. While they had many demands, among them was the demand to halt the introduction of a two-tier pay and benefit system. Under such a system, existing workers would get to keep their existing rates of pay and benefits, but new hires would be brought in under a new tier, in which both their pay and benefits would be lower. On November 17, workers approved a new contract that had eliminated this tiered provision. And on this day, the John Deere workers demonstrated that they knew something that my colleagues in academia do not: a tiered employment system decimates the power of workers.

Over the past few decades, tiered systems have been introduced in many workplaces. Perhaps most notably, the UAW accepted a two-tiered system as part of their 2007 contract with General Motors. These contract provisions are always sold in the same way: given employer’s demands to drive down costs and employees’ demands to increase wages and benefits, a tiered system offers the illusion of a win-win solution. Current workers get to keep what they have while cost cutting only effects future employees. Moreover, because those future employees don’t really exist yet, no one appears to get harmed, because future employees will know their pay and benefits before they apply for the job. That is, their remuneration isn’t going down, they’re merely applying for a job that happens to pay less. However, beyond the superficial way in which everyone—at least everyone currently associated with a company—seems to win, such contracts serve as potentially fatal blows to any group of workers.

The power of unions has always resided in solidarity. Whereas any individual worker lacks the power to negotiate the terms of their work because they are easily replaceable, unions allow workers to act collectively. And together, workers have tremendous power in negotiating the terms of their work. But tiered labor systems undermine the foundation of this power. Rather than a united group of workers negotiating in their collective best interest, tiered systems fragment workers into multiple groups, each of which have their own specific interests. Consequently, unions can’t negotiate as a united front balancing against the power of employers, but instead become fragmented as they necessarily prioritize the demands of some workers over others.

Given that the power of the working class lies in solidarity, it is little wonder that employers spend as much time as they do trying to sow division among workers, with tiered labor systems contractually codifying such divisions. However, what is surprising is that an institution that not only has a reputation for progressivism but whose explicit mission is to “think about things” should fail to understand such a fundamental and simple idea. But that’s the case in academia, where a tiered labor system has been the rule for decades, and where all-too-often the workers who are members of the upper tier are the first to defend this system, even though it’s weakened their power too.

For instance, it's estimated that 75% of all higher education faculty members are part-time adjunct laborers, working for a tiny fraction of the pay and benefits of their full-time colleagues. Fifty years ago, these numbers were reversed. With numbers like this, it’s clear that higher education would simply collapse without this massive workforce of contingent laborers. But aside from the terrible pay and benefits for which the majority of faculty work, life as a full-time faculty member is hardly the desirable job that many imagine it to be—or that it once was. Outside of the ever intensifying pressure to publish, teaching loads and administrative responsibilities have ballooned, so that faculty workload has risen while pay and benefits have stagnated for the past fifty years.

One obvious source of the lack of worker power among faculty members is the fundamental divide that has fractured this class. On the one hand, you have better-off full-time faculty, who, despite the slow deterioration of their jobs continue to report relatively decent levels of job satisfaction. On the other hand, you have a growing—really, an exploding—class of contingent faculty who work for a fraction of the pay and often without any benefits at all. And given that we have long accepted a workplace reality that other workers, such as those at John Deere, went on strike in order to prevent, it should be little surprise that these trends show no signs of abating.

However, this begs the question: what would have to be done for this to change? What would have to be done for the numbers of contingent faculty to shrink while full-time positions took their turn “exploding?” And what would have to be done, not only for contingent faculty to be replaced by full-time faculty, but for the quality of those full-time positions to improve too?

Unfortunately, it’s here where we run into the real problem. While shrinking budgets and the rise of administrative power are real problems with which any worker-faculty movement would have to contend, before that struggle even begins, an even bigger struggle would have to take place. And this struggle is one amongst ourselves. The simple truth is that as with any worker struggle, only solidarity can help us overcome. But when it comes to full-time faculty members, solidarity is an afront to our self-image.

The adjunctification of academia is a problem so large that it has become impossible to ignore. And as it has intensified, no one has been spared, so that graduates from even the most elite universities struggle to find full-time academic employment. As a result, sympathy for adjuncts has also grown, as even the most high profile of faculty members likely has students who’ve had difficult times finding employment. The problem, however, is that this sympathy only goes so far.

A couple of years ago, I was chatting with an acquaintance who happens to be tenured at a relatively prestigious University. He was lamenting the terrible situation faced by the adjuncts with whom he works, and he wished—honestly, I believe—that he could do more to help them. As it turns out, there was an opening for a tenure-track position in his department, but alas, none of these adjuncts would be hired. It wasn’t stigma, though, it was merely that the position required a national search, and in such a search, these adjuncts wouldn’t be competitive.

Over the course of our conversation, this friend asked for advice. But at that time, I had none. However, I do now. His school, as with all others, needs to hire in the way that union shops often do: they need to hire based on seniority.

In the face of this suggestion, I suspect that most of my peers in academia would recoil. After all, our institution is one of the few remaining institutions that continues to maintain the belief that we operate meritocratically. For instance, we have national (really, international) searches for each and every full-time vacancy, and these searches are followed by a rigorous (or at least onerous) hiring process. With such a system, mistakes might be made, but it’s easy to see why a faith in meritocracy endures.

However, with any degree of scrutiny, this house of cards falls apart. Perhaps the simplest way to do so is merely to acknowledge a fact that is widely accepted, both inside and outside of academia: academic achievement largely correlates to socioeconomic status. And if this is the case, the difference between those who are hired on the tenure-track and those who languish in adjunct purgatory has little to do with merit and much more to do with that ever-present American sacred cow: money. Those who get jobs have it (or come from it), while those who don’t, don’t.

For instance, we like to say that factors like academic pedigree don’t matter when it comes to hiring, while publishing track record does. But it doesn’t take much to debunk this belief (if someone even wanted to defend it). It’s extremely uncommon for well-published graduates of public universities to be hired over unpublished graduates from the Ivy Leagues, while the reverse (unpublished Ivy Leaguer’s hired over well-published lower tiered graduates) is so commonplace as to be the rule. Last I looked, the vast majority of new hires in my field came from a tiny handful of top-tier institutions, with everyone else fighting for the scraps left over. And what this reveals is less that we’re a meritocracy and more that academia is one of the most class stratified sectors of our society.

This isn’t so much of a secret when we academics talk about education in general. For instance, the fact that an individual’s socioeconomic background determines their future academic success is so widely accepted that it serves as the basis for contemporary understandings of racial segregation. Whereas we once lived in a society that had legal or de jure segregation, we now live in a society where segregation remains de facto or in fact, because of the way that class inequalities (and our own racialized class inequalities) perpetuate themselves across generations. So, it’s not enough to merely eliminate legal discrimination, you also have to eliminate the consequences of discrimination, such as the impoverishment of an entire race of people, if we want a truly equal society. And without such equality, meritocracy is little more than a sham.

I suspect that it might be easy for many full-time faculty to accept the suggestion that our meritocracy is deeply flawed. Yet, I would also suspect that many would still defend our “meritocratic” hiring practices, rather than moving to a system like a seniority based system, in which adjuncts were given priority for full-time positions over the “winners” of national competitions. And I suspect the basis for this defense isn’t actually on moral grounds but on practical ones: while it might not be fair that our educational system discriminates on the basis of economic class by providing wealthier students with an “elite” education and others with an education that is less so, but by the time of the hiring process, the damage is done. That is, it might not be fair that people with means are able to receive a higher caliber of education, but the “truth” is that they do. Given this, a hiring committee might say, our hands are tied because we have no choice but to choose the most qualified candidate even as we recognize the privilege that went into those qualifications. Granted, the frequency with which publication-less ivy league graduates are hired above well-published graduates from other schools would seemingly call this into question, but despite this, there is nonetheless a point.

At this point, it would be only natural to begin calling into question the real value of an elite education. For instance, it could be pointed out that the value of an ivy league education might lie in the networks into which students are introduced rather than any innate quality of the education itself. Or, it could be pointed out that what these schools excel at is a form of professional socialization that is less present at other institutions. Or, it could be pointed out that these institutions are actually quite good at producing graduates that produce the particular type of scholarship that academia considers excellent, but that the actual value of such scholarship should be up for debate. Or, it could be pointed out that the people determining what qualifies as excellent scholarship are the very people who have been taught to produce this particular type of scholarship at these very same institutions. Or, or, or. But this is all besides the point (or at least besides the present point).

Instead, it’s only necessary to acknowledge that the very belief that maintains our divided workplace is the kind of belief that ruling classes typically expend tremendous energy getting workers to believe. But no one’s pressuring us to believe these things, we believe them because we want to believe them. And as with any other belief in meritocracy, the real utility of the belief lies in the way that it legitimizes what the meritorious possess. Yes, we might have achieved what we achieved because of the privilege we possess (we can often acknowledge this much), but we nonetheless achieved these things, and we therefore deserve what we have. Problem is, we also face a choice: we can either continue to maintain this meritocratic belief about ourselves or else we can begin to develop the kind of worker solidarity that might halt the slow but inexorable decline of our profession.

Unfortunately, it’s a choice we’ve already made, but that doesn’t mean we can’t change our minds.