Inside Higher Ed: Age Bias or Anti-Adjunct Bias?
“You would have been hired, but it was your age. We are not supposed to discriminate because of age, but, let’s face it, we do.”
According to a lawsuit filed by the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission on Friday, a former department chair at Wilbur Wright College used those words to explain to Rosemary Crane why she kept getting passed over for jobs. Crane had years of experience teaching English part time at the college — one of the City Colleges of Chicago — and won awards and rave reviews for her work. But according to the EEOC, the college was happy to have Crane teach class after class — without a full-time job.
Some activists for adjuncts say that the case is important — beyond the questions of age discrimination — because it draws attention to the way part timers so rarely win a shot at full-time positions that open up.
Over the course of 11 years at the college, Crane (who is still teaching part time there) applied for full-time jobs four times and never was offered a job. In 2004, there were two openings and Crane didn’t even get an interview. She was 68 at the time. The two people hired were then 29 and 30. An EEOC spokeswoman said that she could not reveal too many details about the backgrounds of those hired, but she said that Crane was clearly comparable in qualifications and that the positions were for generalists, so there was not some rare specialty that Crane lacked.
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