ATHE Presidential Address

Our section devoted to content from ATHE 2015 in Montreal begins with Patricia Ybarra’s presidential address. The speech, delivered on August 1, 2015, to a crowded ballroom at the tail end of the Annual Membership Meeting, set the tone not only for her presidency, but also the theme of next year’s conference, “Bodies at Work: Performance, Labor, and ATHE at 30.” Notably, this speech was posted on the ATHE website over much of the fall of 2015, and Theatre Topics’ editorial staff has chosen to archive it as important ephemera. We thank Patti for sharing her important thoughts on academic labor across these various venues.

—G.A.

When sitting down to write this speech I started where I often do with my students when thinking through a concept that we think is familiar, but is not. In this case, the word whose definition is in question is adjunct. According to Webster’s online dictionary (2015), an adjunct is: 1: Something joined or added to another thing, but not essentially a part of it; 2a: a word or word group that qualifies or completes the meaning of another word or other words and is not itself a main structural element in its sentence; 2b: an adverb or adverbial phrase (heartily in “They ate heartily” or at noon in “We left at noon”) attached to the verb of a clause especially to express a relation of time, place, frequency, degree, or manner. The third definition finally comes to issues in our profession: “An associate or assistant of another or an adjunct faculty member at a college or university.” We are then directed to the second definition if we are interested in adjunct professor: “Added or joined in order to be used with something; added to a teaching staff for only a short time or in a lower position than other staff; [or] added or joined as an accompanying object or circumstance.” The second definition elaborates on this, suggesting that an adjunct is “attached in a subordinate or temporary capacity to a staff.” Webster’s also offers some synonyms as food for thought: “Helper, adjutant, aid, aide, apprentice, assistant, coadjutor, deputy, helpmate, helpmeet, lieutenant, mate, sidekick.”

How we journey from adjunct as a term defining grammar, emergent in the late 1580s, to one that in the twenty-first century is primarily used to define labor relations and subordination is hard to trace. It is not hard to recognize, however, adjunct today is a synonym for the contingent laborer in the university, who is often subordinated for no good reason because, in fact, they are essential to education in the United States. I have heard from association members who hate this term contingent, in part because it seemingly slights the very present and permanent contribution these scholars, artists, and teachers are making to the field, to their schools, and perhaps most importantly, to their students. I employ this term not to undermine these contributions, but rather to point out how institutions have made the livelihood of their employees and students contingent, because many institutions have convinced themselves that the only way they can survive in a market economy is to place their employees lives in contingency in order to meet the bottom line. And that is not acceptable.

The bitter irony one encounters when looking at the definition of adjunct is that adjunct faculty members are no longer hired “for a short term or in a temporary capacity as staff,” but as a permanent part of the university—forever.

Today, fewer than a quarter of university faculty are full-time tenure and tenure-track members; over 40 percent of instructors are part-time instructors, many of whom receive limited or no benefits usually accorded to full-time tenured, tenure-track, or contract professionals—meaning that what was meant to be temporary is permanent. We are being asked to normalize being contingent: living subject to chance and perpetually dependent on conditions out of our control. Precariousness is being institutionalized. And it effects all of us, even tenured and tenure-track faculty, who are thought to be the lucky ones.

I point here to the...