There’s been some brief discussion in and around my department regarding the role of contingent faculty (i.e. non tenure-track/tenured faculty) in the department’s governance. Our organizational plan allows these faculty a 1/2 vote on "non-personnel" issues. However, in my experience, this vote has rarely been exercised. Though we invite contingent faculty to attend department meetings, they are not required to do so. Now there has been some discussion of whether or not contingent faculty should have a vote in the election of department chair. It’s been concluded that neither department nor SUNY policy would afford them this right.
I don’t want to comment on that conclusion. But the whole matter did get me thinking about this in broader terms. I suppose one could say that it makes sense that contingent faculty have a vested, personal and professional interest in who gets elected chair, just like tenured and tenurable faculty.
Beyond this though I believe there is a strong desire among contingent faculty to be recognized as equal colleagues in the department. Participation in department governance is clearly a part of that.
Here’s the difficult part. We don’t ask contingent faculty to do service or advise students or otherwise participate in the department beyond their responsibilities as course instructors. The simple fact is that they aren’t paid very well, and it would be impolitic, indeed unethical, to ask them to undertake this work. When viewed in terms of labor, department governance is just more work that needs to be done. However, when a department is viewed as a community, as an academic commons, then governance is the right and responsibility of its citizens. Like any community, in any department, some members will be more active than others. In this respect, community participation should not be required but rather encouraged and supported. The question is how or when to view a department activity as work, when to view it as community participation, and when perhaps to view it as a professional, career-building activity.
If we view all our activities strictly as labor, then we would say to contingent faculty (as we might often say to ourselves for that matter), don’t do anything "extra." I have not forgotten the primary piece of advice I was given before entering my first tenure-track job: learn to say "no." However, you can’t really become part of a community by saying "no" all the time. That wasn’t the point of the advice. The point was to not become so buried in obligations that my teaching or scholarship suffered. Of course, we all do "extra" all the time, including contingent faculty, when they meet repeatedly with students working on their papers. There are contingent faculty teaching in Professional Writing who have managed to make it to more of our students’ open mic readings than I have (though I swear I will be there on Friday!). Another instructor has made service learning connections with the community for his class. Others have voluteered to lead workshops with our student literary magazine association.
Who would tell these committed faculty not to do this work they freely enter into? Who would wish to take away the value they are adding to our community?
Some might consider such acts a poor political decisions (who will buy the cow etc, etc.). But perhaps not. Perhaps generosity is a savvy response to the miserly actions of higher education.
I believe one of the biggest challenges in this regard is professional development. Let me note right at the start that by this I do not mean that contingent faculty are unqualified to do their jobs! All faculty require professional development. For tenured/tenurable faculty, this development is part of our job, and its scope and nature are largely self-determined or come out of our participation in our discipline at large. For contingent faculty, professional development is not part of the job. In our discipline this problem can be reinforced by perception (among non-rhetoricians) that writing instruction (of the kind contingent faculty most often do) does not require professional, disciplinary knowledge, that there is no professional development associated with it!
From a department perspective, one cannot require professional development. However, my experience is that contingent faculty are intellectually curious and thoughtful humans (the way one might hope all academics to be) and might welcome an opportunity for professional development, if the content of that development were not predetermined for them (who would want that? I mean who would want to step into a room where someone else had predetermined the readings, the topics of conversation, and the work? right?). Again, if professional development is viewed as labor, as a means of improving the college product, then we must insist these faculty get paid for their time. On the other hand, reviewing research, discussing teaching experiences, and evaluating new practices, technologies, textbooks, etc. is an important part of being in an academic community. Furthermore, some of our contingent faculty may be looking to advance in their careers, either by landing better positions at Cortland or moving elsewhere. Professional development can be an important part of boosting one’s career. I know that when I was contingent faculty at Georgia Tech, I took classes and volunteered for a pilot program and so on. Of course, I knew I was looking to find a tenure-track job somewhere else, so it really does depend on what one’s objective is.
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Alex Reid, professor of digital rhetoric, Media & Artificial Intelligence 
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