Faculty, but…

Non-instructional faculty.

That is the brand I wear. That is what my public state university system calls me in its contracts, its HR classifications, its administrative correspondence. Not librarian. Not faculty. Non-instructional faculty. Defined, from the outset, by what I am not.

Notice the grammar. The negation comes first. This is not incidental. To be named by absence is to have the terms of your existence set before you open your mouth. I am faculty, sure, but a particular kind of faculty. Faculty-minus. The hyphen carves out a category that grants just enough status to prevent complaint, while simultaneously withholding just enough to prevent equality.

My librarian colleagues who defend the label are technically not wrong about the facts. The jobs are structured differently. Twelve-month contracts, forty-hour weeks tethered to the building, work assignments made by administrators after consultation. These are not the conditions of instructional faculty work, and pretending otherwise would be its own kind of dishonesty. The label, on this reading, is simply accurate.

Accurate to what, though?

When my colleagues say the label accurately describes reality, they are standing inside a set of assumptions so thoroughly naturalized, they have stopped looking like assumptions. Instruction equals faculty. Faculty equals instruction. A particular kind of instruction. The semester-long course, the syllabus, the recursive intellectual relationship with students over a term. This is what legitimate academic labor looks like. It has a known silhouette. Work that doesn’t fit that shape — the one-shot instructional session, the research consultation, the systematic literature search, the collection built over years to support scholarship that will never cite the person who made it possible — is assumed inside that imaginary. But as service. Helpful. Supportive. Ancillary. 

Even the one-shot instructional session — already diminished in the faculty imaginary as transactional, not recursive, not a real course — only happens at the invitation of the instructional faculty member. Who can decline. Who frequently does. The person classified as non-instructional has no standing to insist. The label doesn’t just describe the hierarchy. It enforces it.

I’ve written about this elsewhere. The work that doesn’t fit the shape doesn’t disappear. It becomes invisible.

What I want to press here is not the invisibility itself, but the apparatus that produces it. “Non-instructional faculty” is not a neutral description of difference. It is a taxonomic decision. It is made by University Human Resources, encoded in Technical Notes and Glossary language, handed down without justification. Each of these takes one particular imaginary of faculty labor as its baseline and measures everything else against it. The differences it describes are consequential. But the hierarchy it installs is a choice, presented as a fact.

Someone decided what counts and what doesn’t.

What does it look like when that choice gets handed to you in a casual conversation by someone who means well?

In a recent discussion about my preoccupations with my dissertation, my writing, and whether any of it mattered, the professor I was talking to asked me the question I had been asking myself, too. Why am I working on a PhD? It’s a fair enough question. I am tenured. I am gainfully employed. He knew I wasn’t interested in becoming an administrator. So why? 

The answer that came out was more truthful, less guarded than I would have normally given. I consider him a friend, so the answer just came out. It’s because I’m tired of being treated like I’m not faculty. 

He was quick with his retort. “They just don’t know,” he said. 

It also felt like he was talking about himself.

I made the murmurs of concession, the nods of silent acquiescence. What else do you do in a casual conversation with someone you like, someone who means well, someone who just handed you the most generous interpretation available? You nod. You absorb it. You carry it home and turn it over.

I granted the ignorance. I still do, actually. He doesn’t know, and neither do most of my instructional faculty colleagues. I believe their not-knowing is genuine. It is not performance. It is not malice.

But here is where I have to stop being generous.

Why don’t they know? We are both members of the faculty of this university. We are workers in an institution of higher learning, built on the foundation of the production and transmission of knowledge. Our entire business is to know. The capacity and the means of knowing exist and are available. It’s not secret knowledge. So why don’t they know?

The conclusion I’ve settled on: They don’t know because the institution has never required them to know. They don’t know because not knowing is easier than knowing. Because knowing would require something of them. It would require them to see me, to see twelve-month faculty, to see librarians and their work. It would require them to act on our marginality. It would require them to examine their own position inside the same institution that erases mine. Ignorance inside a knowledge institution isn’t innocent. It is made (Mills, 2007).

The incoherence runs deeper than you might expect. The institution cannot hold its own language together. 

The above screenshot is an image from a recent example: a job advertisement for a Research & Instruction Librarian at one of the University’s campuses. Notice how the University is having a moment of administrative confusion. The work type displays instructional faculty, but then later says non-instructional faculty. This is more than an oxymoron. The institution is having an argument with itself and losing. It is confused over what research and instruction librarians actually do. This condition has hard consequences on the people who perform this work (Springmier, Caffrey & Luce, 2024). It’s a funhouse mirror that comes about when an institution tries to reflect reality but distorts it instead. Funhouse mirrors are not lying, exactly. They’re just so warped that the reflection that returns bears only a passing resemblance to what is standing in front of it. 

The University’s classification system is a funhouse mirror. It’s not trying to produce absurdity. It’s trying to describe a position accurately within its own categorical logic. And the categorical logic is so internally incoherent that the reflection it produces is this…. this. This weirdness. The institution stepped in front of its own classification system and couldn’t recognize what it saw.

He said, “They just don’t know.”

I met his generous interpretation with grace and courtesy. But I also told him, plainly, how I felt. Now he knows. I’m tired of being treated like I’m not faculty. 

I don’t want sympathy. Right now, I don’t even want simple recognition. I don’t need a plaque or a shout-out during the convocation address. What I want is to be shown respect and dignity. I want to stop feeling the dissonance of walking past the library display case — the names of instructional faculty publications, none of them mine — on my way to the desk where I’ll be working my fortieth hour of the week, tethered to the building, while your instructional faculty colleagues are home writing. 

You had the power to invite me into your classroom or not. That choice is not innocent. That’s the institution moving through you. You give me that respect and dignity when you make it your business to know that I and my fellow non-instructional faculty are indeed faculty. 

Counselors attend to the mental well-being of students. Coaches focus on the physical demands placed on student athletes. Librarians organize and describe knowledge necessary for intellectual development of students and faculty alike. We librarians also guide student, faculty, and staff researchers through the terrain of intellectual inquiry. 

None of us are instructional faculty. All of us wear the label. I am not the only one who has made the murmurs of concession in a casual conversation with someone who meant well.

We are all employees of the University. The institution built this structure we live in. It maintains it. We all act, make choices through these structures. Those choices are never neutral, never quite innocent. Reckoning is not yet had. That too is a decision someone is making.

Decide.