Cyberspatialniche

Even though you’d probably expect me to post yet another link about Obama, particularly one that defends him from an attack by the Clinton campaign, this particular attack hits me rather close to home. You see, Obama and I share something in common – we’ve both been adjunct professors at a university. This attack that was put forward against Obama went like this:

Sen. Obama consistently and falsely claims that he was a law professor. The Sun-Times reported that, “Several direct-mail pieces issued for Obama’s primary [Senate] campaign said he was a law professor at the University of Chicago. He is not. He is a senior lecturer (now on leave) at the school. In academia, there is a vast difference between the two titles. Details matter.” In academia, there’s a significant difference: professors have tenure while lecturers do not. [Hotline Blog, 4/9/07; Chicago Sun-Times, 8/8/04]

Well, this is where labels can mean different things to different people, and possibly even to different schools. Besides just what your title is on paper or what your students call you, there’s the matter of which kind of contract you have signed, how many classes you can (or need to) teach, and whether or not you’re on a track to earn tenure. If this isn’t murky enough, there’s usually also unions that have different rules for each, department rules distinguishing faculty from non-faculty, and sometimes even what mailing lists you then belong to! All of this, of course, reflects the arguably undue complexity found in government bureaucracies!

So here we have Obama discussing his life prior (and concurrent) with his career in politics. He makes the statement that he was an adjunct law professor for the University of Chicago in his second book The Audacity of Hope, partly as a way in that chapter to compare his view of politics with his experience teaching students about law. The Chicago Sun Times decides to question that statement, as is their right as reporters, and somehow comes to the conclusion that he wasn’t actually a professor. Even though he did teach college students about law, which was the whole point of the statement at the time!

Well, thankfully the University of Chicago saw fit to clarify that, in fact, “Barack Obama served as a professor in the Law School”, was “considered to be members of the Law School faculty”, and “was invited to join the faculty in a full-time tenure-track position” several times over the 12 years he taught there.

I’m sensitive to this only because of the occasional distinctions made between someone like myself and full-time professor. Though most of my colleagues wouldn’t think to even make this distinction to me in some kind of derogatory way, there have been a few occasions where my “not being faculty” has affected me. I’ve even gone so far as to say that we’re considered “second-class citizens” of the department, partly out of jest anyway. In the instance with Obama, this distinction was only made to attack his credibility. While I’ve never suffered this kind of attack as an adjunct, I can still relate to its effect.

We teach college students material that we either know already, have to relearn after forgetting, or have to learn for the first time. We assume the role of a professor because of our expertise in that area of study, and that expertise grants us sufficient credibility to then be given students that will listen and learn from us. To have that experience or credibility questioned then not because of the role we’ve been assigned, the amount of experience we posses, or even by the degrees we hold. Rather, to have it questioned because of the contract we sign, the amount of classes we teach, or the mere title on our desks is misguided at best and downright misleading at worst!