by Gregory Wolmart, Ph.D., Adjunct Associate Professor, Department of Film and Media Arts, Temple University; Vice-Chair of Adjunct Constituency Council, Temple Association of University Professionals (TAUP)
I want to speak about obstacles to cross-rank solidarity by way of a short personal narrative — first as a tenure-track professor who was denied tenure, and now as an elected adjunct representative in my union, where I recently helped negotiate a new collective bargaining agreement. What I’ve come to believe is this: the tier system is not a credential-based, let alone merit-based hierarchy of positions. It is a managerial technology, and it disciplines all of us, on every tier.
On the tenure track, I was hired as the sole faculty member in my department qualified to build a cinema studies program from the ground up. I designed the core curriculum, the cinema studies minor, and ten new courses. I taught seven courses a year on a quarter system, averaging fifty-five students per class, with no teaching assistants, no course release, and no time granted to conduct the research and scholarship on which my tenure case would ultimately be judged. Once the program was running, the department stopped hiring adjuncts to teach cinema studies courses — because I was, in effect, the adjunct, at tenure-track salary but adjunct-scale teaching load, with the labor of program-building, student advising, department and college service, research, and scholarship layered on top.
I was denied tenure. My line was not replaced. Rather, adjuncts were hired to teach the courses and curriculum I had built. As I had no union, I had no recourse. The institution had extracted exactly what it wanted: a fully designed program, paid for at the lowest possible ongoing cost.
I tell this story not to rehearse a grievance but to make a structural point. Tenure-track faculty are routinely spoken of as secure, and contingent faculty as precarious. On the tenure track, I was contingent, and was reminded at every turn of my precarity. My contingency was simply stretched over two three-year contracts and adorned in the language of promises strategically unfulfilled. (My one-year “terminal” appointment following my tenure denial speaks for itself.) My case is merely one of many variations on a common theme. Particularly in teaching-intensive institutions, the tenure track has become a site of intensified extraction — of program-building, committee service, assessment labor, enrollment management, and other roles assigned by administrators to educators — performed under the threat of non-renewal. It is a form of precarity with a longer fuse.
I now teach as an adjunct and serve as an elected representative for my union of faculty and university professionals. Recently we negotiated and signed a new collective bargaining agreement, and I want to speak candidly about what I observed inside that process.
Again and again, our most ambitious proposals for adjuncts — on pay, on job security, on pathways to professional advancement — met resistance not only from administration but from within our own faculty ranks. Members of the tenure-track and tenured constituencies treated gains for adjuncts as if they were losses for them. The logic was zero-sum: a bigger slice for us would mean a smaller slice for them.
I want to name this logic for what it is, because naming it is the first step toward dismantling it. Zero-sum thinking among faculty is not a natural response to scarcity. It is a learned response to manufactured scarcity. The size of the pie is not fixed. It is carved up by administrators who have every reason to tell us it is, because a workforce convinced of its own zero-sum competition is less likely to collaborate in good faith. Meanwhile, as we argue over slices, an expanding class of vice presidents, associate vice presidents, deputy associate vice presidents, heads of Human Resources and so on draws salaries that dwarf any line item we are fighting over. Presidential compensation climbs. The multi-million dollar tab for renovations of the President’s office climbs. The salary of the coach of our abysmal football team climbs. The fees for legal counsel, who have proven their expertise at sustaining these conditions, are bottomless. The money is there. It is just being directed away from our educational mission, and the tier system is one of the principal mechanisms by which that redirection is naturalized. Not under the table, but in plain sight to those thinking outside the zero-sum frame.
This is the lesson I draw from having worked on both sides of the line. The tier system is not, at bottom, a hierarchy of merit, and it is not even really a hierarchy of security. It is a managerial technology. It disciplines adjuncts through naked precarity. It disciplines tenure-track faculty through the threat that precarity represents — the adjunct, in the imagination of the anxious assistant professor, is not a colleague but a threat and a warning, a specter of competition for credit hours and a symbol of institutional devaluation. It disciplines tenured faculty through the suggestion that any concession to those below them siphons away money that might otherwise be invested in tenure lines, thus degrading their home departments and destabilizing higher education. All of these anxieties are real. None of them are accidental. And all of them point in the same direction: upward, toward the administrative apparatus that benefits from our division by disciplining any ambition for equity in pay, job security, and professional opportunity.
So let me close with three propositions.
First, we need to recognize contingency as a condition of nearly all faculty labor today, including much tenure-track labor, and stop accepting the myth that only some of us are precarious. The tenure-track colleague without a union, facing a tenure clock under an administration that can quietly decline to replace the line, is not in a fundamentally different relationship to institutional power than the adjunct renewed semester to semester. The time horizon differs; the relationship does not.
Second, we need to stop negotiating, and stop thinking, inside the zero-sum frame, the spell that administration has cast upon us to ensure our division and subtle enmity. Gains for adjuncts are not losses for tenure-track faculty, or do not have to be. They are a floor that raises the ceiling for everyone. A contract that ensures equitable adjunct pay, job security, and professional advancement is a contract that makes it harder for any administration to hollow out tenure lines by attrition and refill them on the cheap.
Third, and most importantly, cross-rank solidarity is not a sentimental gesture or a moral preference. It is a strategic necessity. There is no durable protection for tenure without protection for contingent faculty because, as I discovered, an institution that can replace tenure lines with adjunct labor will until we collectively refuse.
The educational mission of our institutions — the teaching, the mentoring, the long intellectual relationships with students, the research that gives those relationships depth — depends on stability. Stability depends on equity. And equity, across ranks, depends on our willingness to see each other not as competitors for a shrinking pie, but as co-workers in a common enterprise that administration has learned to exploit precisely by keeping us apart.