Contingency and “Co-Being”: A Dialogic Approach to Adjunct Faculty Support

Introduction

In late 2022, controversy arose at Hamline University in Minneapolis, Minnesota when an adjunct professor of Art History was removed from her position¹ after a student complaint to university administration that the professor had demonstrated Islamophobia in her course curriculum. The professor had presented in class a painting that depicted the Prophet Muhammed, thereby creating an experience that for many Muslims is forbidden. Recognizing the significance both of this critical cultural nuance and the painting’s important historical context, the professor warned students about that class’s content and offered alternatives for presenting and discussing the material. And given these details, recent higher-education discourse has attempted to identify the true root of the Hamline University administration’s decision not to renew the adjunct professor’s contract. Sahar Aziz (2023), law professor at Rutgers University, argues that the crux of the Hamline controversy lies with the lot in life of adjunct – or contingent – faculty, specifically the apparent fact that the existence of an adjunct’s position hinges on if and how their full-time colleagues and administration support them. Aziz writes,

In this statement about the professional position of a contingent faculty member, Aziz articulates the ontological, social, and educational implications of contingency as a philosophical concept. The contingent faculty position faces an issue of being, as its existence is dependent on the existence of another, necessary entity. Herb Childress (referenced in Mintz, 2021) suggests that this type of relationship manifests in higher education as a complex set of economic factors – such as “shifts in institutional spending priorities” related to fluctuating student enrollments; a heightened focus on staff who support the fulfillment of regulatory and compliance requirements; and the changing potential for government funding – that drive administrative decisions. Meanwhile, Aziz suggests, contingency is a social phenomenon (like Kessler, 2016 describes), where discourse among faculty, administration, and students could have caused the Hamline University situation to turn out differently. Indeed, Aziz’s commentary suggests that the outcome of the Hamline controversy, and even the necessary-contingent relationship among administration and adjunct faculty that generated that outcome, could have been otherwise and could have spurred a productive dialectic. Aziz posits that, had a dialogue among faculty, students, and administration occurred, a “transformative teaching moment” – a synthesis of new understanding rather than a controversy – could have occurred. And this discourse is inherent to the tenets of social constructivist learning theories, which for decades have been key approaches to teaching and learning at all educational levels.

Both the dependence of one being’s existence on another’s and the notion that the way things are is not the way they had to be are core themes of contingency, and they inspire this essay’s intervention in discourse about supporting adjunct faculty. Instead of accepting the relationship between higher-education institutions and adjunct faculty as an inevitable consequence of the contingency of the adjunct role, this essay suggests how to put contingency in service of adjunct faculty support by treating it as requisite for understanding one’s sense of being and for continuous learning, two acts that are essential to adjunct faculty members’ professional positions. To accomplish this, the essay discusses fundamental literary and learning theories that connect the concept of contingency to the concept of being a part of a community, specifically a community of learning.