1) This is good and informative. I want to add something about a component of what this reporting reveals, which is the view that tenured faculty don't know or care enough about contingent faculty, so there's a motivation gap in solving the problem of contingency. ... https://twitter.com/EmmaJanePettit/status/1253454450036965376

2) I think there's certainly some truth to that view, and certainly some people who, unfortunately, exemplify it, but I also think it misses an important part of the picture.

3) Which is that the governance structure of most higher ed. institutions is structurally designed to 'hear views' and 'listen to concerns' while largely shutting faculty out of rubber-meets-road decision-making on budgets and hiring.

4) I think Ginsberg's _Fall of the Faculty_ gets the history of how this happened exactly right: Over time faculty abandoned institutional governance. That happened a long time ago, and the consequences are that faculty are not even in the room where such decisions happen.

5) Not only that, the terms of those decisions and the actual budget figures are not shared with faculty. How many tenured professors out there can open up a PDF of an institutional budget for a given FY right now on your computer? Maybe more than I suspect, probably not.

6) Add to this the fact that for reasons that are epistemologically dubious and administratively convenient, faculties are organized into *divisions* and in larger institutions entire administrative units called 'colleges' or 'schools.' Which is to say...

7) There is no process by which *colleagues* in the math dept., econ. dept., English dept., bio dept. etc. etc. or their representatives get together and decide who needs what. The mechanism is rather everyone presupposes a zero-sum game in which we must fight each other...

8) ...for resources. We make a case to an administrative entity. That administrative entity makes a decision, the terms of which, again, are opaque to the faculty. That is, we don't collaborate, we compete in a competition with opaque rules.

9) My point here is that all the caring and yearning and good feelings and solidarity and awareness are moot issues when the primary stakeholders of budgeting and hiring decisions aren't even in the room *and* have no mechanism for getting in the room.

10) And I get that a lot of people think the solution is all about striking and unionizing and labor solidarity, but frankly I'm not sure that's the magic pill. I think it will also take faculty crossing disciplinary and divisional divides to reclaim a real role in governance.

11) Instead of having the mentality of 'How come they get new faculty and we get none! It's neoliberalism! It's the death of the humanities!' No, it's the death of faculty governance. /end