Illinois to study status of its part-time faculty

The Illinois Legislature is demanding the true facts about the state's use of part-time faculty. In a bill passed Nov. 30, the Legislature directs the Illinois Board of Higher Education to collect data from each of the state's 12 public universities and 48 community colleges. The data on the use and compensation of temporary faculty must be turned over to the Legislature in a year.

The bill was drafted and championed by leaders of the University Professionals of Illinois working with the Illinois Federation of Teachers over the course of a year and a half, says Sandy Flood, president of the UPI chapter of instructors at Northern Illinois University. The bill sets the strategic stage for a strong budget offensive in the future by asking the board to "consider policies designed to discourage overreliance on part-time and nontenure-track faculty and to make recommendations concerning the establishment of minimum salary and fringe benefit provisions indexed to tenure-track faculty compensation for part-time and nontenure-track faculty."

At community colleges, the use of part-time faculty has been a growing and continuing problem for many years, reflecting national trends, says Leo Welch, president of the Belleville Area College Employees Union/AFT, the faculty union at (the recently renamed) Southwestern Illinois College. "We have an underclass of education professionals being exploited by the community college boards," he says. Citing a September 2000 report of the Illinois Community College Board, Welch says that in the prior year, his institution employed 123 full-time instructional staff and 755 adjuncts.

"We're one of the worst examples in the state" of how community colleges exploit part-timers, he notes. The part-timers are paid based on credit hours, education and experience, but receive no benefits. "They make $11,000 or $12,000 a year. They cannot make a living."

The same report shows that the community college board employed a total of 4,393 full-time faculty and 16,225 part-timers statewide. The community colleges are "where the problem is the worst," affirms Ron Ettinger, UPI's vice president and legislative director. But he says there is ample evidence that the problem is growing more severe at the universities as well.

For example, last winter, the North Central Association of Colleges and Schools warned the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana about its overuse of nontenure-track faculty. In its accreditation review, the association said the university overly relies on graduate employees (who are represented by the Graduate Employee Organization/AFT and have just won the right to bargain) and visiting lecturers, who receive $22,000 a year. In 1989-1990, the North Central report notes, tenured or tenure-track faculty delivered 63 percent of instruction; in 1997-98, the percentage had dropped to 54.

Instructors at Northern Illinois University, who earn $26,000 per year on average, do better in pay, says Flood. "God only knows where we'd be if we had no union." Flood, who helped organize the union in 1992, has been a temporary instructor at NIU for more than 20 years.

She has been trying to educate her tenured colleagues--who are not represented by the union--and state legislators for years about the situation. Flood thinks the data the higher education board must deliver to the Legislature next year will open a lot of eyes.

"We provide flexibility for the university," she says, noting that the instructors' presence allows the tenure-track faculty to teach fewer courses. Yet, many faculty are so involved with their careers, she notes, "they are blind to the lack of benefits, offices and pay" that is the sorry reality for many of their teaching colleagues.

While Flood is heartened that the bill will bring the exploitation issue to light, she notes that the union had been concerned about a possible backlash if people were to associate the issue of academic quality being compromised with the part-timers themselves, rather than with the conditions under which they are forced to work. "We have an important measure in the bill," she notes, to ensure that the jobs of "those instructors performing effectively in such positions" are protected.

Look who's teaching

The era of relying on anecdotal evidence of part-time faculty exploitation came to a close in December, when the Coalition on the Academic Workforce released "Who is Teaching in U.S. College Classrooms? A Collaborative Study of Undergraduate Faculty, Fall 1999."

CAW, a group of 25 academic societies, hired Roper Starch Worldwide, a survey organization, and together they surveyed all the departments within 10 disciplinary fields in the humanities and social sciences. The survey was conducted in fall of 1999. The results surprised even those who had long been questioning institutions' overreliance on temporary faculty. The disciplines represented in the survey are anthropology, cinema studies, English, film studies, folklore, foreign languages, linguistics, history, philology (classics), philosophy and freestanding composition programs. The results are sobering.

Who teaches

• In all but three of the disciplines, traditional full-time tenure-track faculty members accounted for less than half of the instructional staff. Part-time and adjunct faculty made up between 22 percent and 42 percent of the instructional staff in these departments.
• The composition programs had the smallest proportion of full-time tenure-track faculty teaching--14.6 percent.
• English and foreign language programs reported that just over one-third of the instructional staffs in their departments were full time.
• Part-time faculty made up from 17.6 percent of instructional faculty in cinema studies to more than 32 percent in art history and English programs.
• In most disciplines, graduate students accounted for 15 percent to 25 percent of the teachers.

Who gets benefits

• Almost all full-time, nontenure-track faculty had access to some health benefits at least partially paid for, and 65 percent to 87 percent had access to retirement and life insurance.
• For part-timers, the majority are offered no benefits, except in linguistics where only 46.8 percent of departments offered no benefits. In history, 77.4 percent of departments did not offer benefits.
• Seventy percent of full-time, nontenure-track faculty got help with travel to conferences; for part-time faculty, it was less than 26 percent.
• Contrary to popular perception, most in the survey had access to shared office space.

Who gets a living wage

• In the temporary-staff hierarchy, full-time, non-tenure-track faculty are at the top. Large majorities earned $32,000 a year and up, plus benefits.
• Part-timers receive less than $3,000 per course. One-third earn less than $2,000 per course--and one-half of those in English and history earn at this scale. Says the report: "At this rate of pay, part-time teachers--almost all of whom have the master's degree and many of whom have the Ph.D.--would have to teach more than four courses per term to earn over $15,000 a year. Most could earn comparable salaries as fast food workers, baggage porters, or theater lobby attendants."

The full report can be found at www.theaha.org/caw/cawreport.htm.

AFT gearing up to fight -- but prefers cooperation

What will be the fate of legislative proposals to reduce class size and repair rundown schools under the new leadership in the White House? Will vouchers and block grants for Title I again rear their ugly heads during this session of Congress?

If President Bush is successful in implementing a massive tax cut, will that limit funds available to boost Pell Grants as candidate Bush promised on the campaign trail? Will the federal government change policy regarding other financial aid programs, affirmative action and research funding priorities?

These are some of the questions that confront the AFT and its members in the new political world that the nation has embarked upon in the aftermath of November's elections. Both the White House and some congressional leaders may be poised to push for regressive measures--such as vouchers, block grants and the elimination of the federal E-rate program--that could threaten the recent gains in achievement made by public school students.

As AFT On Campus went to press, Congress was beginning hearings on the president's Cabinet appointments. The AFT was joining labor in expressing the interests of working families. The union will be closely monitoring the legislative proposals coming from Congress and the Bush administration, and is prepared, if necessary, to mount an all-out fight to protect public schools and educators from wrongheaded notions about how best to improve public education. However, the union stands ready to work with the Bush administration and leaders on Capitol Hill on bipartisan legislation aimed at improving the quality of education for all students. "There's a real opportunity to create a consensus on those issues on which we can all agree," AFT president Sandra Feldman says.