The AFT's Faculty and College Excellence Web site just got a face lift, so to speak. Along with a new, easier-to-use design, the site now incorporates the popular blog, FACE Talk, on its main page. But don't take our word for it. Go to the site yourself.

FACE is a national campaign that AFT Higher Education started last year to address the academic staffing crisis in higher education. With years of shrinking support for higher education, support for instruction has eroded as well. Now fewer than 30 percent of college faculty are tenured, and more than half of all undergraduate courses taught in all sectors are led by contingent faculty.

The PBS show To the Contrary recently featured a segment on tenure and the growing use of contingent faculty. View the blog entry and video here.

The FACE campaign has two prongs to address those trends: bringing compensation equity to part-time/adjunct faculty, nontenure-track full-time faculty and graduate employees, and working to rebuild the pool of full-time, tenured faculty.

AFT locals and state federations have been able to find sponsors to introduce FACE legislation in 11 states. Many of these legislatures have held hearings to learn more about the academic staffing problem. The FACE site gives up-to-the minute progress reports on the legislation's status in those states. It also has a political action tool kit that has all the resources for mounting a public relations/legislative campaign.

The site also has:

• links to blogs and media outlets that cover part-time/adjunct faculty issues;
• contract updates and bargaining language for dealing with the issues;
• FACE stories—true-life, first-person accounts of life as Freeway Flyer or Roads Scholar. Truth is stranger than fiction; and
• the ever-popular FACE Talk blog, where you can find daily commentary from FACE's stable of bloggers who write on the news events or latest controversy in the world of contingent faculty organizing.

Visit the FACE Web site and put yourself on the list to receive the "FACE Bulletin," read more about FACE or add a comment to today's FACE Talk post. And make FACE a regular stop on your higher ed news gathering circuit.

May 13, 2008