Use this space to report back on the results of your campus discussions and what you learned from the questionnaire about employment practices for non-tenure-track faculty members. For all other discussion, including your suggestions regarding what the MLA can do to help, please visit the General Discussion page.
Please note that comments not related to your department’s discussion of the questionnaire have been moved to the General Discussion page.
On October 1, 2015 David Palumbo-Liu and I held a town hall meeting for contingent faculty in the language and writing programs at Stanford. It was a productive two-hour meeting of 11 lecturers, all from the Program in Writing and Rhetoric, and included the chair of the Division of Literatures, Cultures, and Languages, Dan Edelstein; another meeting is planned to address the specific situation of language instructors. We hope to bring more department chairs into the next meeting.
This is an interim report, because David, Dan, and I are still gathering information and ideas about how TT faculty at Stanford can be enlisted to improve working conditions for our NTT colleagues. One promising idea that emerged from this discussion is to develop a set of metrics that would capture the often unrecognized work of NTT faculty: contact hours, numbers of papers read and graded, hours of coaching and critiquing students’ work, and so on. The metrics would show NTT faculty in the thick of departmental activity, and would establish measures on the same scale for NTT and TT faculty. We would then encourage our departments to integrate these criteria into their departmental evaluations. A small group of lecturers agreed to work on this idea and report back to all of the attendees. We will share their thoughts here.