The Chronicle News Blog: Marquette U. Faculty Calls on University to Focus on Adjunct Equity
Marquette University’s Faculty Council has issued a report urging the university to focus on its use of adjuncts, which the report says “risks engendering an institutional dependency on the exploitation of adjunct labor.”
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Posted in Contingent labor
Tagged adjuncts, Contingent labor, Equity, Marquette U
Inside Higher Ed: New Idea on Grad Students, Unions
New York University has been the site of a historic breakthrough for the push to unionize graduate teaching assistants — and a bitter strike to preserve the union, which ended in failure, without collective bargaining. NYU administrators are now floating an idea that would give graduate students the right to join the university’s adjunct union.
The idea is linked to improvements NYU is considering in doctoral students’ funding packages. Currently, students receive five years of support, but some of the support is linked to teaching for two or four semesters. The NYU plan would end the teaching requirement. Graduate students would still be encouraged to teach, but any teaching assignments would be paid on top of their fellowships. For those assignments, they would be treated as adjuncts, and covered by NYU’s adjunct union.
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Posted in Organizing
Tagged adjuncts, Collective bargaining, Contingent labor, NYU, Organizing, TAs, Unions
Inside Higher Ed: The Part-Time Satisfaction Gap
SAN DIEGO — If community colleges want to make an impact on the job satisfaction of adjuncts, it’s time to focus on benefits. That was one conclusion of a study of the job satisfaction of part-time faculty members at two-year institutions, presented Wednesday at the annual meeting of the American Educational Research Association.
The study — by Paul D. Umbach of North Carolina State University and Ryan Wells of the University of Massachusetts at Amherst — was based on a national database of the attitudes of more than 5,700 community college faculty members at nearly 300 institutions. Umbach said it was important to examine adjunct job satisfaction because so many community colleges depend on part timers to teach a large share of courses, and because adjuncts are so diverse. With some part timers not relying on their teaching jobs economically, but others totally relying on colleges as employers, colleges need a better sense of just what adjuncts think about their jobs, Umbach said.
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Posted in Working conditions
Tagged adjuncts, community colleges, Contingent labor, job satisfaction, part-time faculty
Inside Higher Ed: ‘Leave-Proofing’ the Faculty
Tenure-track jobs are harder than ever to find, with the economic mess prompting many colleges to grow even more cautious about hiring anyone on the tenure track. Tenure-track openings are being put on hold. Searches are being called off every day. Many who worry that higher education has created a faculty of two tiers — the privileged tenured class and the overused and abused adjuncts — have been told that this year is simply not the year in which to promote change.
In this environment, Denison University might seem an unlikely institution to bolster the ranks of its tenure-track faculty. A liberal arts college in Ohio, Denison has never abandoned the centrality of tenure-track lines — and typically uses adjuncts only to replace those professors who are on leave. But now Denison is embarking a plan that will replace many of those adjunct hires with permanent, tenure-track lines, and as a result will soon be conducting searches for 12 tenure-track jobs in liberal arts disciplines — hiring that will lead to real faculty growth beyond the 200 tenure-track and tenured faculty members at the university today.
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Posted in Tenure & Promotion
Tagged adjuncts, Contingent labor, Denison University, job security, Tenure & Promotion
CTV Toronto: Profs fret that quality of Ont. education falling
TORONTO — Students at Ontario’s universities are getting short-changed when it comes to their education as their schools struggle with larger class sizes, outdated facilities and less full-time hiring, according to a new report.
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Posted in Working conditions
Tagged adjuncts, class size, Contingent labor, Infrastructure
The Chronicle News Blog: New Adjunct-Faculty Union Gets a Name
The nascent national voice for contingent faculty members now has a name: The New Faculty Majority.
Adjuncts have been trying to form a national union and met in a teleconference at the end of February to hash out preliminary details. This past Sunday, during another call, the 18 members of the organizing committee picked “The New Faculty Majority” as their calling card, with a subtitle: The National Coalition for Adjunct and Contingent Equity. Nearly 70 percent of professors at the nation’s colleges and universities work off the tenure track.
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Posted in Unions
Tagged Contingent labor, Unions
The Chronicle Review: No Tenure? No Problem.
How to make $100,000 a year as an adjunct English instructor
By DOUGLAS W. TEXTER
I recently defended my dissertation in English at a land-grant institution in the Midwest. Our department’s national reputation plunges every year as the new hires get weirder and their expertise more esoteric. Ph.D. degrees from our department, unless you’re female or a minority, don’t provide much value in the marketplace. Even if you do fit into one of those desirable categories, you’re probably screwed and headed to a $40,000-a-year job — much less if you get one of those stunningly low-paid, visiting-professor gigs.
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Posted in Contingent labor
Tagged adjuncts, Contingent labor, Salary/Economic Benefits, Tenure & Promotion
Inside Higher Ed: Creating a National Voice for Adjuncts
February 20, 2009
Some of the leading activists on behalf of adjuncts are planning Sunday to formally create an organization that would speak solely on behalf of those off the tenure track.
The new group — currently with the working name of the National Coalition for Adjunct Equity — would seek to perform a role that its organizers feel existing groups do not. In recent years, all three national faculty unions as well as some disciplinary associations have focused increased attention on those off the tenure track. But these organizations also represent full-time faculty members, and many adjuncts feel that full-time perspectives dominate. And while there is a Coalition of Contingent Academic Labor, known as COCAL, that group has largely focused on periodic national and regional meetings, not day-to-day advocacy on behalf of adjuncts.
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Posted in Contingent labor
Tagged Contingent labor, Organizing
World University News: US: Hiring temporary academics on the rise
Writer: John Richard Schrock*
Date: 15 February 2009
Universities across America are resorting to hiring freezes in the face of budget reductions. But a dangerous attitude is developing among higher education officials nationwide who see this is as an opportunity to change the way universities permanently operate by hiring more temporary faculty to teach a course and then leave.
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Posted in Contingent labor
Tagged adjuncts, Contingent labor
The Chronicle: An NLRB Victory for Grad Employees
cross-posted from howtheuniversityworks.com
Last week’s appointment of Wilma Liebman to chair the NLRB is extremely welcome news to graduate employees and other academic workers.
The author of a scathing dissent to the Bush mob’s truculent Brown decision, Liebman adds serious credibility to hopeful interpretations of the Cabinet-level nomination of Hilda Solis.
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Posted in Contingent labor, Unions
Tagged Contingent labor, NLRB, Students, Unions
Soldiers of the Fields:The Bracero Program
Gilbert G. Gonzalez and Vivian Price, Co-Directors, Adrian Salinas, Editor, Xochitl Gonzalez, Assistant Editor
Hidden within the historical accounts of minorities, workers and immigrants in American society is the story of the millions of Mexico’s men and women who experienced the temporary contract worker program known as the Bracero Program. Established to replace an alleged wartime labor shortage, the Program was in fact intended to undermine farmworker unionization. Soldiers shows how several million men, in one of the largest state managed migrations in history, were imported from 1942 to 1964 to work as cheap, controlled and disposable workers. The documentary features the men speaking of their experiences, some even moved to tears when discussing their painful exploitation, and addresses what to expect from a new temporary contract worker program
“They’d get us up at four in the morning…then a truck arrived to take us to the fields. They’d put a bucket of water at each end of the field trench and we couldn’t drink water until we finished hoeing the trench. And you couldn’t rest, if you did they’d get after you. And that was everyday.” Alfredo Gutierrez Castaneda, El Modena, California
Soldiers also centers the voices of wives and families who were left behind as an untold number of villages were virtually emptied of men. Villages were forced to adjust as they supplied workers for the largest US agricultural corporations. As the villages emptied of men who left to be contracted (successfully or not), wives and families, not knowing if or when they would return or where they were going to work, were deeply distressed. Family separation became an ongoing periodic experience for many villages, and for many the separation became permanent. Many speak of wives/mothers crying at night, while attempting to hide their loneliness and sadness from their children. In contrast to the dramatic economic improvement the program promised, over the 22 years of the Bracero Program the economy and living standards of the villages remained virtually unchanged
“We stayed with our families alone, with the animals, with the little that we had to work the fields instead of the men in order to survive. Well, we felt very sad and alone… we suffered a lot.” Hilaria Garcia G., Ciudad Juarez, Mexico
The trailer can be viewed at http://vimeo.com/2904353 . Your contribution will help provide the needed funds to complete the editing of the documentary. All contributions should be made out in checks payable to:
Fund for Labor Culture and History, I.D. No. 94 3371542 (501 ( c ) 3)
Send to:
Fund for Labor Culture and History
224 Caselli Avenue,
San Francisco, CA 94114
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