At most universities, and certainly at most research-intensive doctoral institutions, service courses are not taught by tenure-line faculty. These lower-level courses are often seen as not offering the opportunity for research and publication that upper-level or graduate courses would, and thus there is little incentive in the form of pay raises, tenure, or promotion, for teaching such courses. At four-year baccalaureate institutions, this practice isn’t so prevailing, but is nonetheless common. Thus it is that an overwhelming percentage, some 84%, are taught by contingent faculty (“contingent” meaning faculty who will not gain tenure and who are employed on a yearly, often part-time, basis).
The majority of technical writing service courses are offered by English Departments, and for a more thorough explanation of how this came about you should read Robert Connors’ “The Rise of Technical Writing Instruction in America” (Journal of Technical Writing and Communication, 12(4), 1982). The main plot points of this sad tale have to do with an increasing number of technical colleges producing an increasing number of graduates who were perceived as lacking in writing ability. The seemingly-logical solution was to ask the local English faculty to “fix” the problem. Thus it is that in departments whose primary tenure and promotion focus was literature and cultural studies we nonetheless see the rise of lecturers hired to teach technical writing. Some colleges recognized that technical communication was a fertile field of study, sometimes lucrative, too, and developed their own successful TC programs. We see evidence of such success at RPI, Texas Tech, and Michigan State.
Commonly, though, literature departments simply continued on in the money- and time-saving practice of hiring adjunct lecturers to teach technical writing, thus playing a starring role in some of the most common problems in technical writing service courses today.
Problem: Contingent Faculty are not Paid Well, Supported Well, or Treated Well
The going yearly salary rate for full-time contingent writing faculty in the state of Texas is half of what the tenure-line faculty make. This is true for colleges with or without strong TC programs. Thus, the people teaching the classes which (a) are in highest demand and (b) are the classes the tenured faculty do not wish to teach, are the people paid the least.
Vacation and Sick Leave
In Texas, it’s not unusual for contingent faculty to not accrue any vacation leave. For instance, at Texas A&M I taught in the English Department year-round. I taught fall, spring, and summer, teaching a total of 12 sections per academic year. I accrued sick leave on a monthly basis. As a long-time state employee, I should have also accrued vacation pay at the rate of 10 hours per month. However, the English Department does not consider adjunct faculty to be full-time, and thus they do not accrue vacation pay. This situation is, to my knowledge, fairly common across the state. I do not know if it is common in other states.
Contingent faculty layoffs
When tough economic times hit, it is common practice to lay off the contingent faculty first. For instance, the Bryan/College Station Eagle ran a story on February 18, 2010, entitled “A&M English lecturers advised to start job hunts.” The story states that around 30 lecturers (one-third of the department’s total faculty) were advised to start looking for jobs. Quite frankly, the English Department should be applauded for letting the lecturers know this early in the semester. It’s not unheard of for departments to wait until the end of the semester to make such announcements. Regardless, the classes taught by those lecturers are clearly the ones in highest demand at A&M; nonetheless, they’re the ones whose instructors are first to be laid off.
Attitude of Tenure-line Faculty Towards TC Instructors and TC
A tenured administrator once told me I’d be able to still work on my dissertation while teaching four classes because they were technical writing, which can be taught “with the brain turned off.” Within the comments appended to the BCS Eagle story above, one commenter (identified as “englphdmom”) wrote
“The much-touted technical writing . . .is about nothing more than rhetorical evaluation of audience, formulaic templates, and communication of ideas in grammatically correct, straightforward language. Any English major will be able to apply these concepts in teaching technical writing.”
Any practitioner or researcher in the field of TC will of course see the problems with that statement. In fact, it’s ironic that englphdmom indicates that all writing—including, presumably, poetry, novels and other forms of fiction—is merely the end result of audience analysis and grammatical construction. But of course this attitude towards TC is also not uncommon; however, it’s important to note that I have only run into it within English departments whose primary focus was literature. It’s also important to note that if effective communication were only the sum of what the commenter listed above, then effective communication would still be quite difficult.
Taken together, the problems listed above make the expectation of quality technical writing instruction at a research university almost laughable. And at many schools, laughable is certainly what we get.
So what’s the solution? Many research intensive universities are already forming TC departments, sometimes within the existing English department and sometimes not. For instance, some TC programs are called “engineering communication” and are housed within a college of engineering. At others, the TC program exists as its own department, fighting for classroom space and money just like all the others. I’m not sure what my own inclination is. For one thing, colleges of engineering tend to be quite sympathetic to the need for quality writing instruction, and thus they often make for a good home for TC. But its nature, though, TC is encompasses more subject matter than simply communicating about engineering, and thus constraining a TC program to engineering doesn’t make much sense. What about schools of business and law, or medical schools, or all the technical communication that happens within the social sciences or humanities? Given that TC is seen as a service—and in many ways, it is—that exists to help other disciplines, it seems likely that TC may never settle into its own department. But that subjugation of the word “service”—implying that one who serves another is less than the one served—is logically flawed. A parent who serves a child is nonetheless the parent, and doctors serve patients all the time.
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Nice post. Maybe a possible solution is to simply add Technical Writing as another area within the Writing Department (i.e. the English department) and to add academics who have specialized in that field - much the same as an English department may have someone who specializes in Elizabethan Literature, while another's specialty is Modern Poetry. Universities don't usually have the funds for a separate department devoted to "Poetry" despite the fact that there are sure to be students whose main interest is poetry - so maybe, by the same token, Technical Writing can be another specialty within the English department as well.
ReplyDeleteOf course, like poetry, or novel writing, another solution is for people to simply go to private institutes who specialize in those areas. The instructors at such places such as Writing Classes in New York, or like my own YEDA Center for Technical Communication, are usually experienced and active writers themselves and have the ability to combine theory with more practical know how.
Mati Schwarcz
www.yedacenter.com