The Use of Teaching Associates
Sol Saporta

To the Editor:

It is now commonplace for foreign language and English departments, particularly those at large state universities to use (I choose the word advisedly) part-time, temporary faculty members to staff elementary or intermediate language courses. There are slight variations, but in one common pattern, such persons teach three times the load of graduate student teaching assistants for two times the salary. They receive virtually no benefits and have no job security. It is not hyperbole to characterize their employment as exploitative. The fact that in hard economic times people will prefer unfair employment to no employment is inadequate rationalization for such ethically questionable policies. That much is hardly controversial and should, on would think, constitute basis enough for discontinuing the practice; but it hasn't and if the issues are seriously discussed at all, the ethical issues are ignored, and the arguments are made on the basis of "programmatic needs." Cutting ethical corners is justified on the basis of expediency and the alleged strengthening of the program.

In fact, I think quite the opposite is the case. The use of temporary, part-time faculty is shortsighted, detrimental, and ultimately counterproductive. The benefits are purely economic and the costs are high in both human and intellectual terms. Because teaching associates function neither as students nor as scholars, they are marginal and marginalized within the department and beyond. Instead of strengthening the program, their presence tends to weaken it, not because the quality of instruction is low (it is often quite high) but because a language program staffed by second-class citizens tends to be isolated from the other components of the department ("ghettoized") rather than integrated with them. It is axiomatic that that part of the program which is in the custody of marginal faculty will be viewed as marginal. This arrangement merely legitimizes the view, already pervasive, that the primary function of a language department is utilitarian rather than humanistic, a form of capitulation that in this case borders on academic suicide.

In short, the use of teaching associates, instead of being an innocuous compromise, reflects directly on the educational and intellectual climate that produces them and provides an interesting perspective on what is generally agreed to be the deterioration of the humanities.

It is usually assumed, without debate, that the difficulties facing foreign language departments are largely due to a scarcity of resources and, as a corollary, that the remedy is largely financial. A look at the recent history of foreign language instruction in the United States suggests something quite different. The passage in the sixties of the NDEA provided funds for language fellowships, institutes, and teacher training. Foreign language instruction was never better funded. But the availability of money was, not surprisingly, a mixed blessing. The strings attached were quite severe. Language instruction was to serve a rather narrow utilitarian function, within the political context of the time. Language was in the service of business and government. This was quite explicit; for example, given the prevailing rationale, there could be no justification for the support of the classical languages, which by definition were non functional. Thus, language instruction was understood to emphasize spoken language, communication was the primary goal of language instruction, and Russian and Chinese were suddenly discovered as neglected languages. The result was a rather sharp transformation in focus. Concern for truth, beauty, and virtue was replaced by the criterion of utility. And foreign language departments saw themselves as the beneficiaries, not the victims. They had more students, more faculty, more degree programs. The humanities business was booming.
Now, fifteen or twenty years later, the fellowships and institutes are gone; what remains is the ideological residue. The rhetoric of universal aesthetic and ethical values seem hollow in the contemporary university, with its concern for FTEs and SCHs. Language departments now have the worst of both worlds. We sold whatever was left of our humanistic soul to the marketplace devil and now have the benefits of neither. Our colleagues in the classical languages were on the side of the angels. Whatever their faults and limitations, nobody ever thought that the purpose of Latin instruction was to enable the traveler to buy a toga.

We faculty members in the humanities have traditionally been uniquely arrogant in our refusal to meet the most minimal demands of accountability. Anybody who questioned our legitimacy was a philistine, deserving only scorn and ridicule. Ironically, we now are required to justify what we do in the most anti-humanistic terms, succumbing to the cost-accounting mentality that completely dominates today's educational institutions.

Indeed, a comparison of the character of university faculties over the years is instructive. The previous generation was elitist, paternalistic, quite comfortable with the privilege of what was essentially a white, male province. Today's faculty member displays at least a veneer of egalitarian ism ("Call me 'Jack'"), but is more cynical and opportunistic than his or her predecessor and quite tolerant of an educational climate in which what matters are national rankings, outside offers, visibility rather than substance, and economic viability. While still preaching the values of the traditional humanistic virtues, we carry on our daily affairs according to the law of supply and demand. We are the faculty members who campaigned shamelessly for increasing foreign language requirements, without any concern for how the additional classes were to be staffed. Under those circumstances, there is nothing more natural than a kind of academic colonialism, in which elementary language classes provide the statistical rationale for the exercise of personal ambition by tenure-track faculty, whose opinion of their part-time colleagues' function is very close to contempt.

Instead of an innocent solution to a temporary emergency, the hiring of teaching associates turns out to be a rather reliable litmus test of the intellectual vigor and sincerity of the modern-day language department. Find a modern language or english department where elementary and intermediate language instruction is primarily in the hands of temporary faculty, and you are likely to find a department that is morally unprincipled and, not surprisingly, intellectually stagnant. This predatory use of cheap labor, far from being a minor contradiction, is symptomatic of a fundamental hypocrisy and lack of integrity.

Sol Saporta
University of Washington

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