At my core, I am a professor. (A psychology professor in fact.) It is one of the most important aspects of my identity, if not the most important. I always knew I wanted to study psychology and there was never any doubt that I would get a PhD. As a graduate student, I was, naturally, aware that it would be challenging to find a full-time job given there were definitely more new PhD graduates than tenure-track positions needing to be filled. I also realized as I finished my degree that while I wanted to be a professor, I did not want to spend many (grueling) years pursuing tenure when I also wanted to have a family. So I decided to teach part-time knowing it would forever close the door to tenure-track teaching and job security. I chose this career path with my eyes open and I deeply love being a professor. But that doesn’t mean I love my working conditions or that I feel I am compensated fairly for my expertise and work. Just because I freely chose to work as a part-time professor, it doesn’t mean that I have to accept poor working conditions or unfair pay. And just because I continue to choose to apply for and teach courses on a contract-by-contract basis, it doesn’t mean that I don’t experience stress or negative impacts as a result of this.
Perhaps your story is similar to mine, and you work part-time so that you can also do “something else”. Maybe your “something else” is a full-time job in the industry you trained for or another part-time job in a different fulfilling occupation. Maybe it’s the ability to provide care for family members or your own mental and/or physical health needs. Perhaps your story is quite different. Maybe you are one of the many part-time professors who pursued a PhD in order to get a tenure track position, only to find it impossible to secure one. Maybe you would happily take a full-time teaching position if it were offered to you. Maybe you are a graduate student unsure of what you want to do after you graduate. However you have found yourself in this profession – and now in this strike – you belong, along with your complex identities and possibly complicated feelings about your work and being on strike.
Being a part-time professor in general can be a challenging identity to navigate both internally and with other people. On the one hand, we are intellectual elites; only around 1% of the Canadian population has a PhD and 8% have a master’s degree. We also have considerable autonomy in much of our work, as we typically (though not always) have almost complete control over course design and class instruction. However, with the exception of those part-time professors who have lucrative industry jobs, for the most part we are not financial elites. In addition, while we have a lot of autonomy once have secured a contract, we have almost no autonomy when it comes to what courses will be offered that we are eligible to teach, whether those courses are offered at times that we can actually teach them, when the job offers are actually posted so that we can apply for courses, whether we are offered any of the courses we apply for, and when we are given a contract to sign once we have accepted an offer.
This clash of identities – intellectual but not financial elite, no autonomy in our careers before a contract is signed but almost complete control once we have a signed contract – can make this job confusing and stressful at the best of times. It can also confuse the public, who may not appreciate just how wide a gulf there is when the adjective in front of “professor” is “part-time” and not “full-time” or who may, frankly, not even see any difference because they have a stereotype associated with “professor” that doesn’t account for different “types”.
But this clash can be even more challenging to navigate as a professor who is also on strike, given that our stereotype of an “elite” rarely also includes “striking union member on the picket lines”. In fact, being on strike really highlights just how nuanced the term “elite” really is. I certainly don’t feel like an “elite” when I’m wearing a placard in the rain on the picket line waving at passing cars but I know most of the students who walk by on their way to other classes certainly see me as more “elite” than they are! And to those outside of academia, I may be perceived as being greedy asking for more money, when “clearly” I have a “cushy, white-collar elite” job that 90% of working age adults wouldn’t even be qualified for.
So to those who have similar conflicting identities or feelings about what it means to be a professor who is also on strike, I say this: You are not alone. It’s okay to feel conflicted – or not – and to have concerns about how you are perceived by the public – or not. (Some of us are less able to ignore what other people might or actually do think of us!) But just because you or I have conflicting feelings about what we do for work or what it means to be on strike, especially because we chose this “elite” career path ourselves, we still deserve to ask for fair pay for our expertise and work. Research shows that financially insecure part-time faculty who want permanent work are “particularly at risk for negative health outcomes,” including higher levels of depression, anxiety, and stress (Reevy & Deason, 2014). The same research also found that, counterintuitively, the more we feel attached to and are committed to the university, the more we are likely to experience those same negative health outcomes. I’ve been at SMU for over 15 years and I have colleagues who have been there for 20 or even 30 years; the deep connections we have to the university unfortunately mean we suffer even more as a result of our precarity. (If we weren’t as attached to the university, it wouldn’t “hurt” as much to be treated or paid unfairly!) Even when it sometimes feels complicated for “intellectual elite” and “striking union member” to coexist in my current identity, I know I’m making the right decision every time I show up on the picket line and advocate for myself and for all of you.