Debate on “Diversity”: Do Contingent Faculty Represent a New Diversity Category?

Session Submission Type: Roundtable

Session Description

Research demonstrates that the status of contingent faculty (full-time and part-time) greatly benefit from membership in a union. However, efforts to organize unions have failed on many campuses and alternative strategies must unfold to persuade decision-makers to adopt fairer policies. Contingent faculty is a professional category, whose underrepresented status intersects with that of women, Blacks, LGBT, Latinos, and others. Encouraging “diversity” among staff, students and faculty has become a central goal of academic bureaucracies. Why not claim for contingent faculty the status of diversity, and therefore claim also the respect and fairness, which other underrepresented categories justly demand? However, are needs and demands across these various professional categories sufficiently similar to fit under the “diversity tent”? What is to be gained or lost in adopting this strategy? This contradictory debate will start with 5 minute presentations on each side of the issue by 4-6 members of the panel, drawn from several status committees. It will engage the audience in a lively contradictory debate, and thus stimulate ideas/strategies that might be of use to all APSA status committees.

Sub Unit

• APSA Panels and All Meetings and Receptions

Chair

• Nathan A. Paxton U.S. Senate

Presenters

• Catherine Blanche Guisan University of Minnesota

• Vincent G. Stine Senior Director of Goverment and Global Affairs; AACC

• Susan E. Orr SUNY, College at Brockport

• Veronica Czastkiewicz University of Colorado Colorado Springs

• Candis Watts Smith PennState University

• Mala Htun University of New Mexico

• Jennifer Gaboury CUNY-Hunter College