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We don’t talk much about staff.
When we do talk about staff, it is often in relation to various erosions and declines of faculty.
Staff are thought of as the other side of the equation - and sometimes the driving force - behind the growing adjunctification and precariousness of the faculty.
The conclusion that the decline of secure, tenure-track faculty jobs has come about due to the unchecked growth of postsecondary staff positions almost always goes unchallenged.
Throughout higher ed, staff are treated more as costs than as assets.
The creation of new faculty lines and the recruitment of star faculty members is celebrated - while the reduction in staff positions is cheered.
As far as I know, there is no sociology of postsecondary staff.
No active research agenda to understand the changing role of higher ed staff members.
Questions about higher staff that might lend themselves to investigation include:
- How have higher ed staff jobs changed?
- Who becomes staff, what is there background, and how and why has this story been changing?
- What new roles do staff perform in core areas of teaching and research?
- How does the staff role and composition differ by institution type?
- Where do staff add value, as well as costs, within institutions and across the postsecondary system?
Questions like these, however, tend to go unanswered - mostly because they mostly go unasked.
My hypothesis is that the actual role of postsecondary staff - and here I’m talking about professionals who are not on the faculty and can’t fall back to tenured / tenure-track lines (ie not deans or provosts) - is undergoing significant changes.
Staff are increasingly critical to the core work of education and discovery, as these tasks more and more require the varied skills that a team can bring to the work.
At the same time, I would hypothesize that higher ed staff work under a sort of existential vulnerability. They do not enjoy any of the same legal or organizational protections of (some, if fewer) faculty - while also lacking much in the way of cultural goodwill.
A larger number of postsecondary staff occupy that liminal position between educator and administrator - scholar and manager - and therefore find it necessary to negotiate a treacherous and challenging career path without much in the way of mentorship or community.
Can we imagine a situation where the study of postsecondary staff was thought of as a worthwhile avenue of inquiry?
Can we interest our colleagues in the social sciences in higher ed staff as a legitimate unit of analysis?
Is there room in our analysis on the changing world of higher ed to include staff in our research?
