Making a Place for Teaching Faculty: Some Thoughts on David Bartholomae's "Teaching on and off the Tenure Track"

The report "Education in the Balance" represents a significant new acknowledgment of the centrality of teaching faculty to the academic project on the part of professional organizations in English studies. David Bartholomae is right to worry that the emergence of positions for teaching faculty may "enact an argument about the separation of teaching and research" that should be resisted, and healthy models of the academic workplace should make sure that teaching and research remain meaningfully responsive to one another. Recent developments in higher education, which promise an ever finer fragmentation of the academic labor force—along with new possibilities for labor abuses—make this especially urgent.