Equitable Labor Statement for Faculty

Academia is steeped in a predatory culture of overwork, justified by a discourse of passion and excellence, that exacerbates the burden of those who already speak from the margins. This discourse configures “excellent” and “passionate” professors as those who cheerfully immerse themselves in both the paid labor they agreed to—primarily teaching and assessment—and the institutionally unrecognized and uncompensated invisible labor of supporting and advocating for students, many of whom are alienated, marginalized, and even traumatized; dealing with grade contestations; coping with microaggressions and academic entitlement; negotiating departmental requests for voluntary committee work; and managing other forms of unpaid labor implicitly presented as essential for continued employment. In this framework, “excellence” hinges on round-the-clock availability, rapid-fire responsiveness, and measurable outputs, while “passion” encourages self-exploitation to meet those demands. Self-care becomes co-opted into this neoliberal discourse as a means of optimizing productivity for the university, not cultivating individual well-being.

We, the faculty of the Dept. of English, Writing, and Cultural Studies, believe subscribing to this discourse impoverishes our community. Furthermore, it would be hypocritical to ignore the conditions faced by our faculty as we use our labor-based grading contracts to establish a “culture of support” in our classrooms. Thus, we recognize that the weight of labor accrues differently on different bodies, contingent on gender, race, socioeconomic status, able-bodiedness, and other axes of intersectionality, and that these factors render some forms of labor injurious or impossible. We recognize that women and BIPOC faculty shoulder a disproportionate amount of invisible labor in academia, and that writing programs largely rely on contingent part-time instructors who lack benefits and job security and are exploited, disempowered, and underpaid. We see our labor-based grading initiative as an opportunity to create and sustain equitable, inclusive labor conditions for our faculty as well as our students.

We developed our labor-based grading contracts to accommodate and support our students, but it is a system that is also considerate of the material, lived realities of faculty who are women, BIPOC, disabled folks, caregivers, or who embody other contexts that increase precarity or demand time and energy. We face different obstacles in doing our jobs; our bodies and personal responsibilities differently dictate our limits; and consequently, we experience, understand, and use time differently. What is a swift task for one might be painstaking work for another; where some have uninterrupted workdays and are able to meet even last-minute deadlines, some require flexible schedules due to familial obligations, personal health, external teaching assignments, graduate school, or other factors. The work of preparing for courses, giving feedback, and assigning grades is arduous and time-intensive, and we attempt to accommodate multiple forms of time perception and management and to restore free time. For instance, labor-based grading contracts lessen the likelihood of grade contestations, thus freeing faculty—women or BIPOC professors especially—from the emotional labor associated with anxious, combative, or academically entitled students. Labor-based grading also eliminates time and energy expended on making sure the grade is justified and ranking student papers so the grading seems fair.

We want all our professors to have a seat at the table and be comfortable occupying that seat as their whole, authentic selves, without fear of censure, institutional repercussions, or being deemed less capable of academic work. We therefore work to ensure shared governance by inviting contingent faculty, who are often sidelined in decision-making processes, to serve on committees. At the same time, we remain sensitive to the fact that labor accrues most on those who are most disenfranchised. We respect that people are not always able to take on extra labor or meet inflexible deadlines without detriment to themselves, and that not all faculty members can perform the same duties or complete work in the same span of time. Furthermore, we recognize that the work of shared governance and professional development often comprises unremunerated labor that settles especially heavily on contingent faculty, women, BIPOC, disabled people, caregivers, and other identities generally denied professional power and privilege. Since compensating labor makes labor visible, we offer stipends for attending our summer faculty workshops and serving on departmental committees, and we strive to finance other forms of invisible labor as the departmental budget permits, evidenced most recently by contingent faculty having conference fees paid for by the Department of ENG & MLS and Dyson College. At minimum, we support the inclusion of some forms of invisible labor in faculty annual evaluations. While providing yearly self-assessment is in fact additional labor, we feel that such an approach allows for a more equitable review of your teaching commitments.  

We can’t ethically continue to reproduce for ourselves the structural inequities and imbalances we aim to rectify for our students with our labor-based grading contracts. As such, we see this labor statement for faculty as an essential companion to our labor-based grading contracts, and as a valuable intervention into the problematic discourse of neoliberal academic productivity. Through reconfiguring the discourse of excellence, passion, and productivity to labor, bodies, time, and authentic being, we work to both accommodate our students and make our own labor expectations explicit and bounded, normalizing invisible labor as work that deserves material reward. We hope that this philosophy and its explicit commitments begin to address the material realities faced by our faculty members and to continue restoring equity in our program.

We see this as a living document, drafted, edited, reviewed, and modified by members of our department at all ranks, and open to further modification as we collaborate on developing a progressive future for labor practices in our writing program. Feedback is welcome and encouraged.