Category Archives: Contingent labor

Inside Higher Ed: Progress for Adjuncts

In the last six months, three national unions representing college faculty members have begun or planned major efforts on behalf of those off the tenure track. Washington State has been a focus of attention and the results suggest that sustained efforts can yield some results for adjuncts — but not miracles.

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Inside Higher Ed: Alternative Approach for Adjuncts

Robert Zemsky is, as he himself puts it, “one hell of a dinosaur throwback.” He attended one college, went right to grad school, got a Ph.D. and spent a lifetime working for one and only one university. Forty years later, professors like Zemsky — full time, tenured — are on their way to extinction, making up only 30 percent of all college instructors.

Like many of the faculty members, union organizers and others who attended the annual meeting of the National Center for the Study of Collective Bargaining in Higher Education and the Professions, held at City University of New York’s Baruch College this week, Zemsky, an education professor at the University of Pennsylvania who is widely recognized as one of the country’s best thinkers about higher education, doesn’t like that trend line. While academic unions are increasingly trying to rally part-time instructors to organize, partly for better part-time benefits but almost always with the goal of restoring more full-time faculty lines — seeking a “revolution,” as Zemsky termed it in the keynote speech he gave Tuesday — that horse has left the barn, he argued.

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The Chronicle: Faculty Federation Pushes Legislative Campaign to Increase Share of Full-Time, Tenure-Track Professors

An ambitious legislative campaign was on people’s minds at the annual higher-education meeting of the American Federation of Teachers in Portland, Ore., this past weekend. The union is asking state legislators to commit money toward the creation of more full-time faculty jobs at public universities.

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Inside Higher Ed: Inexorable March to a Part-Time Faculty

New data from the U.S. Education Department confirm what faculty leaders increasingly bemoan: The full-time, tenure-track faculty member is becoming an endangered species in American higher education.

A new report from the National Center for Education Statistics shows that of the 1,314,506 faculty members at colleges that award federal financial aid in fall 2005, 624,753, or 47.5 percent, were in part-time positions. That represents an increase in number and proportion from 2003, the last full survey of institutions, when 543,137 of the 1,173,556 professors (or 46.3 percent) at degree-granting institutions were part timers. (The statistics may not be directly comparable because the department reported part-time/full-time figures only for degree-granting institutions in 2003, and for all Title IV institutions in 2005.)

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Inside Higher Ed: A New Campaign on Adjuncts

The National Education Association is getting ready to join the other two national faculty unions – the American Association of University Professors and the American Federation of Teachers – in offering a plan to deal with the growth of adjunct faculty positions.

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The Chronicle News Blog:

Labor Groups Protest 2004 Ruling Against Graduate Students

Two labor organizations have gone international with their arguments against the National Labor Relations Board’s 2004 ruling that teaching assistants at private universities are students and not employees, and therefore are not covered by federal labor law.

On Monday the AFL-CIO and the United Auto Workers submitted a complaint against the ruling to the International Labor Organization, a part of the United Nations. The unions argue that the American labor board’s decision to deny teaching assistants collective-bargaining rights violates international labor standards.

Whatever the International Labor Organization decides about the complaint, it does not have the power to overturn U.S. law.

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Oronte Churm, who has been writing Dispatches From Adjunct Faculty at a Large State University for McSweeney’s Internet Tendency the past year or so, is now blogging at Inside Higher Ed.

Check out The Education of Oronte Churm.

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McSweeney’s: Dispatch #14 From Adjunct Faculty at a Large State University

D I S P A T C H 14
On Apophasis.
By Oronte Churm

– – – –

I would handily commit 3,300 acts of artistic capitulation to keep my dog in Purina.

—Tom McGuane

– – – –

In quiet moments, alone, we take our seats in the theaters of the mind and stage our fondest wishes. “Gee, this isn’t like I imagined it would be in the bathtub,” said Dianne Wiest in her acceptance speech at the Oscars. Exactly right. You can bet Sally Field whispered to a bar of soap, “I can’t deny the fact that you like me, right now, you like me!” long before the sentiment slipped out to millions.

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Contra Costa Times: Ivory towers crumbling for tenured professors

Colleges and universities nationwide increasingly are replacing tenure-track faculty with temporary and part-time instructors, according to a study released today.

The report by the American Association of University Professors concludes that relying on adjunct professors and other nontenured faculty could harm the quality of higher education. Heavy teaching loads often prevent temporary professors from keeping up with developments in their field, researchers wrote.

“In addition to constraints on academic freedom, nontenure-track faculty are limited in their career progression while holding such appointments,” John Curtis and Monica Jacobe wrote.

The academic group found that the proportion of full-time tenured positions fell from 37 percent in 1975 to 24 percent in 2003. While the total number of faculty positions increased during that time, the number of full-time tenured professors fell by more than 2,000 between 1995 and 2003.

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Inside Higher Ed: Conversion Experience

When groups of professors issue reports or launch campaigns to shift more part-time faculty jobs to full-time positions, as several organizations have done recently, many in academe are skeptical. Sure, they say, that should happen, but is any university going to do that these days, when part-timers cost so much less and can be added or removed with such ease? The Harvards and Stanfords of the world can go on faculty hiring sprees at will, but can the kinds of institutions that employ most professors — public institutions without billions in their endowments — convert part-time positions to full-time jobs?

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Inside Higher Ed: The Job Security Rankings

More than 62 percent of all faculty members are off the tenure track, including nearly 30 percent of those with full-time positions, according to an analysis released today by the American Association of University Professors.

The study — based on federal data — comes with institution-specific numbers on 2,600 colleges, revealing the exact breakdowns on full- and part-time professors, on and off the tenure track. AAUP leaders hope that the data will spur discussions on campuses nationwide about the use of part-timers and the need to create more full-time, tenure-track positions.

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Inside Higher Ed: Appeals Court Backs Adjunct Union

A federal appeals court on Wednesday upheld the legitimacy of a vote by adjuncts at George Washington University to unionize.

In a brief ruling, a three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia unanimously rejected the university’s attempt to raise questions about who was permitted and not permitted to vote in the election. The court found that the university did not raise these issues earlier in the legal process, when they could have been considered, and that the university could not do so now.

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Inside Higher Ed: New Push for Full-Time Faculty Jobs

The steady growth of professorial jobs off the tenure track has posed a dilemma for faculty unions. Adjuncts have in some ways been ideal candidates for organizing drives because they generally feel that their pay, benefits and job security are all lacking. But to the extent that faculty unions want the tenure track to be the norm, institutionalizing the adjunct career path hasn’t always made sense to full-time professors. Unions have responded by increasingly organizing part timers — with a lot of discussion about how reliance on adjuncts has eroded the clout of all professors.

The American Federation of Teachers is in the coming months planning to start a major state-by-state legislative effort to create more full-time faculty positions — while also striving to improve the work life of adjuncts and helping more of them win full-time jobs. While the campaign will not be formally announced until next year, efforts have already started in California, Oregon and Washington State. The legislation is expected to vary from state to state, with general principles that bills would require public colleges to:

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The Chronicle: Study Links Proportion of Part-Time Instructors With Graduation Rates at 2-Year Colleges

A new study to be published in a forthcoming issue of The Journal of Higher Education shows that community colleges with the largest proportion of part-time instructors have the worst student-graduation rates.

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