Some academic societies do this thing where they offer free conference registration to a limited number of students, and in turn, those students earn their keep by donating their labor for to help run the conference (at registration tables, projection tech support, etc).

I think this is problematic.

You might think that this increases accessibility and allows students who otherwise couldn’t afford to attend the conference to attend. And I think you’re right about that. But just because a practice provides access, this doesn’t make it equitable or just. This practice brings students who are already at a structural disadvantage and then literally treats them like the hired help. Because these students are replacing workers who otherwise would have to be hired by the organizers.

The students who come from well-funded labs or who have the means to pay out of pocket aren’t going to be volunteering. They’re going to be there to fully enjoy the meeting, and they get to choose how to use their time.

The student volunteers are the hired help. Only they’re not hired. They’re the poors who have their labor extracted for free so that the Society can balance the budget.

I get that balancing the budget is important, and also that it’s hard. And I really get that it’s difficult and under appreciated work to do all the work in organizing the conference. Hats off to you. Thank you, in full sincerity. But also, please listen carefully when I’m saying here that there’s else something to change up to make the meeting more equitable and to stop othering the students who have fewer resources.

You might argue that volunteering gives students an opportunity to do networking and be exposed to science that they otherwise might choose not see. There is a bit of truth to that but if it’s such an opportunity, then shouldn’t the conference be charging students who want this networking opportunity extra for the privilege? Or at least let students volunteer at no extra charge? But you know that won’t fly. Because you know and I know that volunteering for free registration is metaphorically sitting in the back of the bus.

The bottom line is that these volunteer positions exist because organizers are trying to make the conference accessible in two ways: lowering the cost for everybody by reducing registration fees, and allowing some students who need the support to attend without having to pay for registration. Those are really good priorities. But operationalizing them by making poorer students volunteer to be able to have a seat at the table is Diversity 1.0. IWe can do better than that. We should expect better than that from our academic societies.

But what can societies do to make sure that students who can’t afford registration can still attend the meeting? I think there are a variety of more accessible ways to approach this.

You could increase registration fees to actually hire people to do the work, and then offer registration waivers for applicants who can’t afford it.

You could require full professors to volunteer.

You could require that every person who has attended the conference four previous times, on their fifth meeting they need to volunteer.

You could sweeten the pot for those who pay for registration but still volunteer. For example, many conferences only allow a maximum of one presentation per person. You could allow those who register to give two presentations. Or you could promise a better talk time slot for those who volunteer.And you can come up with a fancy ribbon or sticker or something for volunteers to make them feel good. (Which indeed would indicate more something tangible about being an “ally,” because that ribbon would indicate actual work.)

To be clear: You don’t need to ask the students in the society who are already already marginalized on the basis of their financial status to further marginalize themselves by having to work for free. You can find other ways to be creative and save money. As our current president (of the country, that is) has said: “Don’t tell me what you value. Show me your budget—and I’ll tell you what you value.”

And I’m telling you that making your poorest students have to provide free labor to have their seats at our table doesn’t indicate good values. You know this. Institutional change is hard, slow, and requires consistent effort. Maybe you could make this your next target to make your academic society more equitable?

Anyhow, I wrote about this a few years ago, but I thought I’d bring it up again as I noticed that one of my societies (the Ecological Society of America, of which I’m a life member, but not as a matter of honor but simply because I paid a bunch of money) is still exercising this practice.

The ongoing conversation about inequitable outcomes in the National Science Foundation’s Graduate Research Fellowship Program (NSF GRFP) is scaffolded on a steady trickle of inappropriate remarks from reviewers that applicants share on social media.

Take, for example, the howler from this weekend, which said, “His Hispanic pride prevented him from seeking mentorship and advise [sic] from other [sic] that would have helped him avoid and lesson [sic] some of his struggles and progress further.”

Even taken out of context and imagining it was written with functional grammar, the content of this review is highly problematic. You can’t invent a universe in which that sentence is okay.

This isn’t just a one-off situation. I think that the vast majority of reviews are actually lacking in obviously racist bias, and the vast majority of them don’t even have classist bias. In my experience, which is not insubstantial, the reviews are by mostly from people who are thoughtful and are genuinely working with good intentions (if not constructive approaches) to broaden access and participation. But I also have seen a plenty of people in the process who aggressively do not aggressively do not understand the forces at work that structurally exclude folks on the basis of their identity and personal backgrounds.

It’s a problem because the review process involves the human beings who comprise our academic community. These problems are a reflection of us, and the racism in that review is a mirror for us to see ourselves. One thing to keep in mind is that these reviews are coming from the panelists themselves. The call is coming from inside the house.

So how bad is the situation? There are enough overt problem that Science wrote a news article about it last year and called it dysfunctional. I spent a few minutes searching twitter for screenshots of problematic reviews, and considering the volume of those you have to wonder about all the applicants who aren’t on twitter and how only the extremely rare applicant will make the choice to share that kind of thing publicly, and well, yeah. It’s a problem.

While the absolutely number of such damning screenshots is finite and perhaps small, this relative frequency belies the depth of implicit bias that happens. While I’ve seen some folks claim that the folks at NSF doesn’t care about this bias, from my observations and interactions, I’m confident that there is plenty concern about bias. But I think there’s more concern about bias in the process than there is about outcomes that may not result in broadened participation. I think there are varying levels of concern that process that winds up principally elevating those who have already had access to prior advantages. If you’re going to measure “merit” and “potential” — which are the building blocks of the program, that’s hard to do when you have a pool that has experienced different levels of opportunity. And measuring achievement relative to opportunity is a hard thing to do, especially when the reviewer pool is replete with people who have succeeded under the current system.

Anyhow, the specific question I came back to my slumbering blog to try to answer is: “Why does NSF share reviews even when they happen to be incredibly nasty and racist?” I obviously can’t provide any accurate answer to this because I don’t work for them and haven’t been involved in the stuff that program officers do. In the absence of an explanation from the GRFP program, I hope I might be able to shed at least a little light for those of you who know even less about how the place works than I do. Here are some unordered things I have to say about this.

• As far as I am aware, NSF hasn’t made any kind of public statement about how it is that they end keeping reviews that have highly problematic statements. Which means that they end up being part of the process before winding up in the hands of the applicants.
• Considering the funding rates and the number of awards, they get at least 10,000 applicants or so? This is a ginormous program. And each application gets a few reviews. I’m not sure it’s quite possible for every review to get that the level of attention that would be needed.
• There is a small number of program offers who operate the process year-round. When they operate the review panels around the winter break, it’s an all-hands-on-deck situation where people who don’t operate the program are brought in to support the program.
• Who gets to decide where the line is on what constitutes overt bias? I think there is probably a philosophy at work where transparency is valued and the idea that the occasional overtly biased review might be preferred to the idea that someone behind the scenes is tainting reviews by removing content that was intended by the reviewer. In my opinion, in a perfect world all of the reviews with overtly problematic bias would be simply deleted from the process before anybody on a panel would be exposed to them. But there a lot of this is a big grey zone. The howlers are very obvious of course, but that’s just the long end of a tail, and who’s going to draw that line. Maybe it’s better that no line is drawn so that we can see the reviews when they are a problem?
• I think there is the prevailing philosophy (which I admittedly don’t radically disagree with, though I’m not sure if I agree with it) that overtly biased reviews are best addressed by not squashing them, but instead, by giving them sunlight. I’ve been involved in enough of these kinds of situations where I’ve seen problematic statements in reviews either get entirely ignored and that these statements just obviously devalue the weight of the review in general, and sometimes it’s brought up and discussed in the way you hope it would be discussed. (Then again, sometimes it’s me bringing up the issue and I don’t have knowledge of rooms when I am not in them.) I think it’s worth asking, “Is it better to just delete these reviews and move on, or is it better to share them so that everybody can see these horrible statements for what they are?” I think how you answer that question might be connected to your level of trust in the idea that most panelists find these horrible comments to be truly horrible.
• I sure do hope that they find who these people are and make sure that they never participate in the review process again.
• According to a current rotating program officer who took to twitter about the review process (though not explicitly about the GRFP), getting the content of a review redacted is quite a big deal.

One way to ameliorate this problem is to have a deeper reviewer pool. That’s a thing I’ve long been talking about. Of course this doesn’t fix the problem.

(For what it’s worth, I’ve mentioned on occasion the idea of limiting the number of applications from a given institution based on enrollment. Of course you’ll have several dozen undergrads from MIT applying each year, and relatively few from, say CSU Dominguez Hills. So if you think that there’s a problem with representation in the pool, then you can change the composition of the pool by making sure that you’re increasing representation from universities that have more representation.)

Anyhow, if you’re wondering why NSF lets these bad reviews happen be a part of the process, I’m wondering right along with you. But I also know enough about how bureaucracies work and how simple fixes to big problems are often not that simple. I think part of the accountability here is to make sure that when there are problems, that they get exposed to daylight. For those of you who have had the courage to be vocal about the bias you’ve experienced, thank you for your service, and I’m sorry that you have gone through this. You, and our entirely community, deserves better. (I suspect most everybody at NSF agrees with this too, but they aren’t well positioned to come out and say it for themselves.)

Looking at social media today, I have developed an unambiguous case of FOMO because I’m not at the SICB conference in Austin.

But did I even give any thought to attending this meeting? Heck no. A meeting during the January break? Count me out. Have I ever been to one of these meetings? Nope. This time is just too valuable for personal time and/or research for me*.

Granted, there is never a good time to hold an academic conference. We are busy people (which is not inherently a bad thing), and taking time away from family, work, and basically all other commitments to go to some distant place, all for the pleasure involved in listening, learning, and connecting with with science friends and colleagues, is quite a luxury. Finding that window of time when everybody is most available is impossible. Once an organization picks an annual time frame for that meeting, then people who are regulars at this meeting plan their calendars around them.

Just in case you thought blogging was dead: I read an interesting blog post that I want to share with you, and comment on it in my blog.

This post was about disappearing faculty positions at Small Liberal Arts Colleges (SLACs), on a blog for early career philosophers. It points out enrollment declines in SLACs, and a notably substantial drop in the number of new tenure-track positions being offered at these institutions. The comments section in that post are quite illuminating and it communicates the precarity of being a tenure-track or tenured professor in an institution that may have trouble with enrollment and keeping the lights on.

Once in a while, I get an email that sounds like this:

Hi everybody I know who is driving distance from campus,

We’re looking to hire an adjunct to teach [something] for us before the semester starts in a few weeks. Ideally this person has a PhD related to this topic and some teaching experience, but if you know of a grad student who is looking to gain experience teaching a course of record and would appreciate a few thousand bucks for a ton of work, please send them to us.

Sincerely, an overburdened departmental chair”

Meanwhile, let’s contrast this with the emails I get for tenure-track faculty positions:

Hi everybody in the entire galaxy,

Our department has opened up a tenure-track search in the area of [specialization]. Please encourage everybody to apply, because we want a really deep pool. That way, we can pick the candidate who has the most publications in the most impressive journals, has the biggest chance of bringing in big grants, and we need a large pool to convince HR that we are following their lightweight compliance process for equitable searches. The search will take several months and the position starts about one year from now. We anticipate spending a good amount of money on startup, there will be reassigned time from teaching for this person to launch well, and we work hard to support this person to make sure they earn tenure. We’re a great place to work, so send us your best!”

Sincerely, an overburdened departmental chair

I think we all appreciate the factors at play in our system that result in this dynamic. When we hire non-tenure-track positions, the process is slapdash, whereas tenure-track searches are whatever the opposite of slapdash is. I think it’s worth thinking about hat this slapdash hiring of non-tenure-track (NTT) faculty means for communities.

Adjuncts* are hired with little to no vetting because departments looking to hire these instructors are often in great need. Considering the workload and compensation associated with these semester-long gigs, when you find someone who is willing to take on a section, then many folks are positioned to be too picky. As far as I know, at most universities, the HR process for NTT faculty is wafer thin. Because it appears to be very common at some places for adjuncts to be hired literally moments before a class starts. Or maybe during the first week of classes.

I think in many departments, chairs are tasked with not only creating a schedule, but also hiring all of the people to teach those courses. There’s no hiring committee. The search process is whatever the chair decides it to be. If there’s anything in the process designed to create a fair and equitable outcome, then in every department that I’m familiar with, that’s entirely at the discretion of the chair who has to fill those slots. But this usually is little or nothing, because there are a lot of slots to fill and this search process is probably about 1% of the workload of the person who is responsible for filing these posts.

I have not (yet) been in this position, but I can’t imagine fitting in a full and proper search for every NTT position that needs to be filled in the midst of all of the other job duties. I think due diligence often consists of a phone call or two to check references to make sure that they’re not horrible, and maybe that’s as good as it gets. I once knew a department chair who joked/not-joked on occasion that hiring NTT faculty is just like hiring day laborers at the Home Depot parking lot (but that the pay and working conditions for the day laborer construction jobs was better).

Is this a problem? Yes, it is. What kind of problems does this cause?

First of all, does the absolute lack of any kind of fair hiring process for NTT instructors mean that you might be increasing the fraction of bad teachers? I don’t think so. I think you’re just as (and perhaps more) likely to bring bad teachers on board when you have a huge process of hiring a professor into a permanent position. Most of contingent faculty that I interact with are passionate about teaching and put a ton of effort and concern into their course. Are NTT faculty phoning it in? I would say that’s a bigger problem with tenured faculty. At least NTT faculty know that they’re being paid (albeit poorly) to teach, whereas tenured faculty might be under the impression that teaching is not necessarily the most important part of our jobs, and behave accordingly. While some NTT faculty are duds, let’s be honest here and recognize that there may well be a higher fraction of duds among the tenure-track and tenured professoriate. Even if you wanted to argue that the lack of a formal process results in more faculty who aren’t good at teaching, I don’t think that’s the biggest problem we have.

So, then, what’s my problem with the process if it doesn’t result in the hiring of bad teachers? Gosh, it’s hard to know know where to start.

While our institutions are exploiting NTT labor to some extent (and that extent varies greatly among institutions), we still are hiring for professional positions and there should be a transparent and equitable process. Think about all of the time and trouble that gets involved into hiring undergraduates for REU positions. Big applicants, statements, letters of reference, a committee. All for a position that pays a few thousand dollars over the summer and then ends. The amount of money for NTT positions is not smaller and all of those concerns about equity, justice, and representation matter. If the opportunity to become an instructor of record is one of the major stepping stones to becoming a professor (and in many places, it is), then how come the process providing access to such an opportunity is so darn inequitable?

I don’t know about your university, but at mine there is a sizable community of NTT faculty who are very important on our campus. Not only do they do so much teaching, they contribute in a lot of other ways (even if their employment contracts do not expect such a a contribution). They serve on our academic senate and help make big decisions about the institution. They help run our student research conference, and are advisors to student clubs, and so much more. (Not all NTT instructors have this level of engagement, but it’s been several times where I’ve worked with someone for months only to discover that they’re not tenure-track, and that they’re doing this stuff even though they don’t have to, but only because they want to.) There are many folks who are making a career out of this role. The people who evolve into this position come at it sideways, usually by getting hired by a departmental chair in a slapdash manner, and then they stick with it over the years.

I think it’s a problem that we have parallel professional pathways for university faculty, with one pathway getting more support, scrutiny, and respect. It’s been a while since I’ve written about how tenure-track faculty are essentially parasites of non-tenure-track faculty, but that situation still is exploitative, even if our universities have been working in earnest to professionalize what it means to be NTT faculty.

Perhaps one of the reasons that faculty and other people in universities aren’t investing enough into NTT faculty is that there’s such little care or concern invested when we recruit people into these roles? Everybody deserves respect and professional support, and perhaps we might begin this process as we should proceed: by putting thought and concern into who gets hired.

I honestly don’t know how to operationalize this idea of conducting a transparent and equitable process for hiring adjunct faculty, and if I were in the position where I was expected to do this, I would be asking, “with what kind of support?” Because we only are creating the academic calendar a few months in advance of when these job opportunities arise. And sometimes because funding is short, we can’t float sections we want to, and sometimes because of demand, some get added at the last minute. The HR and faculty affairs offices wouldn’t have the staff to handle this, and are we asking people to sit on more committees? What does this look like? It sounds like a disaster.

But what we have right now is a disaster, of a different kind, that we’ve just grown to live with. I don’t know what to do with it, and the lack of professional support for NTT faculty is a downright epidemic and the slapdash hiring procedures is just one small consequence of a much bigger problem.

Final note: this post isn’t about anything specific going on at my institution or at any other institution. It was triggered by one of those emails that I got this morning, but those emails are a steady trickle near as we prepare for a new semester. It’s not about you, it’s not about me, except for the fact that it is about everybody and you and me are part of everybody.

* a short note on nomenclature: “Adjunct” can mean a lot of different things. What are the differences among contingent faculty, adjunct faculty, lecturer, non-tenure-track instructor, and other terms of art? There are a lot of subtle differences, and some of these differences vary depending on the institutional context. (For example, in the California State University system, all faculty who are not tenure-line faculty are “lecturers,” that’s the terminology built into the collective bargaining agreement.) “Contingent” simply means that you’re hired at will and don’t have a long-term contract. This gets complex because some non-tenure-track faculty are more contingent than others, depending on policies and guidelines for employment in your university. (For example, in the CSU, the CBA provides for entitlement for NTT faculty who have been on the job for a little while. It’s not exactly tenure, and not a guarantee of future work, but it’s makes it harder to give those teaching assignments to anybody else.) “Adjunct” can be interpreted as a label that a person isn’t a part of the regular faculty, but they’re just a temporary add-on. So this term, when applied to folks who are a well engaged with the campus, isn’t quite appropriate and can be othering.

If your university is like mine, then you hear a lot about everybody is working hard to make sure that students have exposure to high impact educational practices. We all want to make sure that while students are in college, that they have the chance to have meaningful experiences.

For students in a bunch of science fields, it’s pretty clear that one of the most transformative and impactful educational practices in our toolkit* is bringing students to places in nature for genuine field experiences. Yes, it’s possible to become an ecologist or a geologist without going into the field. But I think everybody who is getting professional preparation at the undergraduate level in the field sciences should have ample opportunity to go out into the field with their courses and their instructors, right?!

But it seems a lot of our universities aren’t on the same page. They might think it’s a good idea, but there are also so many bureaucratic obstacles to taking students into the field, that we’re doing it less than we should be. I know so many people who aren’t taking students on field trips simply because their institution is making it too hard to make this happen.

Usually we talk about accountability when people are getting it wrong, and perhaps on the occasional moment when someone or some organization experiences appropriate negative consequences for their own actions.

That’s only the first step. Accountability includes taking the steps to right the wrong, to move forward doing the right things.

So: I’d just like to take a brief moment to say thank you to the National Science Foundation for showing some accountability and doing the right thing. Good on ya, NSF.

This is a sign that I’ve been getting it wrong. When people start talking to me by saying, “I know you’re busy, but…” then I feel like I have already failed a little bit.