What does it take for part-time faculty to be treated fairly in the U.S.?

by Barbara McKenna

Adjunct teacher Marty Slobin’s obituary in the Dec. 12, 2000 edition of the Detroit Free Press is moving for its brevity. It memorializes the lecturer who had received a distinguished teaching award from the University of Michigan-Dearborn just the year before and who also taught at Wayne State University and Henry Ford Community College.

“Words cannot describe what this man does in the classroom,” a former student says.

Outside the classroom, Slobin commuted to his teaching jobs on three campuses by bus because he could not afford to keep a car.

“Marty’s whole life was devoted to his students and his teaching,” says a fellow professor.

Suffering from heart disease, Slobin could not afford the treatment—surgery—because the income he lost during a convalescence would make it impossible for him to keep up his health insurance premium payments.

Slobin had “succeeded in making the study of political science meaningful in the lives of his students,” the paper quotes Bernard Klein, a former interim chancellor of the university.

At one point, the university asked Slobin to stop going through the trash in search of the pop cans he returned to collect their deposit refunds.

“I attended his class on congressional elections earlier this fall,” says the university chancellor, Daniel Little, “and was able to see firsthand the respect and affection his students felt for him.”

Slobin, 55, died on Dec. 6 in his office after a heart attack. He was so poor, says Bonnie Halloran, president of the Lecturers Employee Organization (LEO)/AFT at the University of Michigan, that faculty at Dearborn and the neighboring community college took up a collection to pay for his funeral.

So much for institutional respect.

Embarrassed for the university after his saga came to light, “the behavioral sciences faculty moved to get raises for the adjuncts,” says Halloran. After 14 years with no raises at all, the adjuncts got increases of $250 per course for two years. For those who knew, it was telling what it took to get the university to act. The largesse ended this year, when Michigan had to confront major deficit problems.

Slobin was one of more than 1,400 full- and part-time temporary lecturers employed by the University of Michigan on its three campuses in Ann Arbor, Flint and Dearborn. In April, they voted to unionize and affiliate with the Michigan Federation of Teachers & School-Related Personnel. Now in the midst of negotiating a first contract, LEO has raises, health benefits and more job security at the top of its demand list.

Institutions say that their use of temporary faculty is necessary to provide the flexibility they need to deal with enrollment and funding fluctuations. Leaders like AFT vice president William Scheuerman, president of the United University Professions of the State University of New York, say that’s a perfect example of trying to provide “education on the cheap,” a misguided attempt to run education institutions as if they’re businesses. Over time, the effect has been to shift college teaching from a secure, adequately supported profession to one that for many is marked by poverty-level pay scales and job uncertainty.

Where in 1987, 33 percent of faculty were part-time, by 1998, that percentage had grown to about 43 percent, according to the most recent U.S. Department of Education data. (Next year, the ED will release more current data in its National Survey of Postsecondary Faculty.) In two-year colleges, part-timers make up the majority of faculty. They were 62 percent in 1998, up from 53 percent in 1992. At public four-year institutions in 1998, part-time faculty made up 38 percent of the faculty.

The average part-time/adjunct faculty member earns less than $3,000 per course. This means that the average annual income for a part-timer carrying a full-time load is less than $20,000, usually with no benefits.

The reliance of institutions on nontenure track, full-time faculty is not as exploitative as with part-timers, but it, too, is increasing at an alarming rate at four-year schools. The percentage of full-time nontenure-track faculty grew from 21 percent in 1987 to 28 percent of all full-time faculty in 1998. That year, 18 percent of full-time nontenure-track faculty taught at institutions with a tenure system and 10 percent worked at institutions without a tenure system.

Those data bites are from a report the AFT is releasing this month. Called The Growth of Full-Time Nontenure-Track Faculty: Challenges for the Union, it documents that the use of full-time nontenure track faculty is growing at four-year institutions. (See sidebar, “Tracking the academic personnel crisis.”) Although they are better paid than adjuncts, their salaries are still below those of junior, tenure-track faculty and way below the levels of tenured faculty. Their benefits are not as comprehensive as their tenured peers, and they receive little professional support.

“The university apparently doesn’t feel any kind of moral obligation to pay a fair living wage to its employees,” Halloran observes. “They are running the place as a business. They don’t recognize the personal toll it takes on people as individuals. It’s convenient to ignore it. As a union, we have to make it inconvenient.”

Making the exploitation of contingent academic labor both public and inconvenient is the goal of Campus Equity Week Oct. 27-31. A reprise of the successful national public education campaign mounted two years ago, it involves part-time faculty, full-time nontenure-track faculty, graduate employees, academic staff and all manner of temporary higher education workers. (See sidebar, “Campus Equity Week.”)

CEW 2003 is sponsored by a large coalition of national and state higher education unions and independent faculty organizations. Two years ago, it focused on “Equal Pay for Equal Work.” Through teach-ins, rallies, lobbying at state legislatures and other organized events, thousands of part-timers drew attention to the extreme disparity in pay between full- and part-time faculty.

Despite the success of the first CEW, the need to ratchet up the campaign is great.

In California, where the idea for CEW originated, part-time/adjunct faculty have scored significant gains in the Legislature. The latest victory came at the end of this summer when the state Senate passed Assembly Bill 654, touted as a bill of rights for part-timers.

AB 654 urges community college governing boards to provide part-time faculty with rights and responsibilities commensurate with full-time faculty. These include serving on campus committees, being paid at an equal rate as full-timers for teaching, being hired well before classes begin, receiving compensation for classes cancelled just before the start of the semester, and being included in the academic life of their departments. Another point in the bill calls for part-timers to be listed in the college catalog by name, not merely as “staff,” when their class assignment is known.

This bill was carried forth by Assemblywoman Jackie Goldberg, a former AFT local president, after it was conceived by Martin Hittelman, president of the CFT Community College Council and a member of the AFT Higher Education Program and Policy Council.

“I was trying to think of a way to make some progress—or at least keep the ball rolling—in very bad fiscal times,” he says. “The most we could get this year was intent,” he notes, but he hopes that future bills will add enforcement.

Still, the Legislature and governor have been seriously addressing part-time faculty issues in the past few years. They passed bills providing pay for office hours and $57 million in funds toward correcting pay inequities in the salaries of part-timers. Even in the current round of desperate budget cuts, the governor left the equity fund relatively intact.

This time, the scope of CEW is broader, says Mary Millet, president of Palomar College Local 6161 and part-time faculty coordinator for the California Federation of Teachers. It’s not just that California adjuncts can now afford to lift their eyes from the salary schedule. At a recent union labor institute in Santa Cruz, which drew local representatives from the states of Washington and Oregon, Millet asked people for the one thing they’d most want for part-timers. The answer, she says, was “rehiring rights—or some kind of job security.

“It’s only logical,” she adds. “What good are pay and benefits if you’re not teaching?”

In fact, terms of employment are one of the standards AFT part- and full-time faculty leaders identified last year when a task force crafted a policy statement on adjuncts. In the summer of 2002, delegates to the AFT national convention passed a resolution adopting AFT Standards of Good Practice for the Employment of Part-time/Adjunct Faculty: A Blueprint for Raising Standards and Ensuring Financial and Professional Equity. The standards, which have gone into additional printings and are being reissued for Campus Equity Week, are geared to strengthen the hand of unions representing part-timers before management and boards, at the bargaining table and before state legislatures.

The standards fall into four broad categories: compensation, terms of employment, professional responsibility and support, and ensuring full rights for part-timers/adjuncts within their unions.

As intended, locals have been using the guidelines to bargain and influence state policy.

For example, at Palomar, where the union has been painstakingly bargaining its first contract, Millet says the executive board is about to adopt a resolution putting the standards into the union bylaws. “That makes it a statement of intent that goes on into perpetuity,” says Millet. It’s an important statement for a union that represents both full-timers and part-timers.

And Hittelman gives credit to the AFT standards as the framework on which AB 654 was based.

In Wisconsin, Dave Boetcher, president of the Madison Area Technical College Part-Time Teachers Union/AFT says his local has adopted the standards as “the guiding principle for what our local should be working on.” It has helped prioritize activities. For CEW, he adds that it’s likely the local and state fed will push for the introduction of several important bills in the Legislature—a pay equity bill and an unemployment bill that will give part-timers benefits during winter and summer breaks.

Part-timers working in Pennsylvania at the Community College of Philadelphia also have made good use of the guidelines. They followed through on a legislative plan that had the Legislature pass a bill calling for a study of pay equity in public higher education. In its last round of contract negotiations, the local, which includes both full- and part-time faculty, was able to get equity increases for part-timers.

“Although there is still a huge pay gap per course, at least we made some steps—modest—to close that gap,” says John Braxton, co-president of the Faculty Federation of the Community College of Philadelphia.

At the City University of New York, strengthening the role of the 9,500 part-time faculty within the bargaining unit of the Professional Staff Congress/AFT had been high on the agenda of the union leadership. In addition to signing up thousands of new members, the union has added more part-time representation to its executive council. For CEW 2003, says Marcia Newfield, chapters are focusing on seniority and the need to ensure better language on reappointments from semester to semester and year to year.

The union’s standards of good practice are an important organizing tool, say state leaders. In Illinois, legislative breakthroughs have caused a sudden warming in the organizing climate. One bill changes the definition of which part-timers are eligible to join a union, from those teaching six or more hours a semester to those teaching three or more. Another bill allows card check authorization for a union with a simple majority of signed cards.

An organizing campaign for part-timers is under way at Southwest Community College, where the AFT already represents full-time faculty, says local president Leo Welch.

Organizing the contingent academic labor force has been the highest priority of the higher ed union. In the past year, the AFT has organized 10,000 workers in 13 new locals, nine of which represent part-time, temporary full-time or graduate employees. The AFT has other organizing campaigns in motion at the University of Cincinnati (Ohio), as well as in New York, California and New Jersey.

As the full-time and part-time lecturers at the University of Michigan and elsewhere are recognizing, contingent workers in higher education have little leverage to improve conditions until they join their voices and add the leverage of a union.