Very Encouraging

via:

WASHINGTON – Hoping to reach an estimated 1 million adjunct professors nationwide, Service Employees International Union on Monday officially launched its new Adjunct Action Network website. The union marked the occasion with a “national town hall” event for adjuncts at Georgetown University here. ... 

Mary Kay Henry, president of SEIU, called the website a “new way to organize in a changing world,” and to eschew some of the traditional problems adjuncts have had with organizing, such as lack of office space and a kind of commuter status. By connecting with adjuncts on their campuses and in other states through the new online forum, she said, there’s potential for adjuncts to “light up the entire country.” 

Of the Adjunct Action organizing campaign itself, Henry said it reflects at once the brokenness of “America's promise” – that is, that education is one’s path to a better life – and the “inability” of adjuncts to accept that brokenness. 

eForum on Contingent Faculty

eForum on the Working Conditions of Contingent Faculty in Higher Education

The House Committee on Education and the Workforce Democrats are interested in learning more about the working conditions of the over one million contingent faculty and instructors at U.S. institutions of higher education, including part-time adjunct professors and graduate teaching assistants, and how those working conditions may impact students’ education.

Tell Congress your story.

Fight For Your Long Day

Via.

Duffleman (or "Duffy," as he is called) is the creation of Alex Kudera, a longtime Philadelphia adjunct whose novel, Fight for Your Long Day, is about to be released by Atticus Press. Duffy's narrative on this long day catalogs a list of the kinds of insults that are part of an adjunct's daily existence -- and documents, too, his continuing sense of obligation to his students.

Valuing Academic Labor-Power

A very brief exchange over on Bardiac about the problem of low adjunct pay has been bothering me this week. Since it also touches on material from Marx I have been teaching this week, I decided to write a bit more on the topic.

In Marx's terms, the issue revolves around the difference between "labor" and "labor-power" and the way the wage tends to obscure this difference. I find this a difficult point to explain to my students. I find it an impossible point to explain to my colleagues. Here's why:

In the original post, Bardiac recounts baiting one of her lefty colleagues with the following provocation:

I was having a conversation the other day with Super Rad, one of my colleagues who's just too radical and cool for school, if you know what I mean. Super Rad talks a lot about interventions and commitment to revolutionary action. Standing in the hallway, leaning on the door jamb, Super Rad was complaining about how poorly the adjuncts are paid.

So I said that we could go a long ways towards solving the problem if everyone with tenure in our department (including both of us) agreed to take a 20% paycut and redistributed the money to the adjuncts. You should have seen the look of abject horror that passed his face. It was worth it.

Fine. Super Rad should be able to handle a little idle hallway banter, and the idea of spreading the wealth around is currently much in vogue. However, Bardiac then goes on to try to explain her own higher salary as compared to adjuncts in her department and concludes:

I think I bring significant skills and qualities to my work that our adjuncts don't bring. And so I think I'm worth my salary.

This bothers me. Beyond the fact that it seems to imply that adjuncts may be worth their miserable salaries too -- which is a very harsh judgment to pass on any fellow human being -- this remark also reflects a very commonly held misperception that one's wage correlates with one's labor. The more and better work you do, the higher your wage. In Marx's terms, this would mean you are paid for your "labor" -- for the actual work done. The form our wages take and the way our raises and promotions are structured encourages this view at every turn, but it is always wrong.

Instead, Marx demonstrates that what the wage actually pays for is our "labor-power" -- our capacity to do work. The wage pays a value equal to our means of subsistence -- our house, car, food, clothes, cable-tv, health care, and kids -- so that we can continue to come to work. This means that there is always a difference between the value of the wage paid and the value of the actual work done. The greater this difference, the better it is for the employer. This means that the difference in wages between tenure-track and adjunct faculty is not really about the amount or quality of work done, it is just about how well they eat.

Anastasia adds this eloquent comment to the original post:

Honestly, the original post says "I think I bring significant skills and qualities to my work that our adjuncts don't have" not "I do work that adjuncts aren't paid to do." Obviously, I know t-t faculty have responsibilities I don't have. But am I less qualified? Less skilled? Less worthy and that's why I'm paid $3,000/semester and I feed my kids government funded cheese?

No. Fucking hell.

Worst Pay Ever

From IHE:

The Tennessee Board of Regents has a very simple policy that allows its constituent institutions to decide in which of four categories to place adjuncts. Colleges can devise systems based on educational experience, market differentials and so forth. But the policy is strict on one thing: It sets maximum levels of pay per credit hour. Because the colleges typically avoid classifying people as being in the most “lucrative” pay category ($700 per credit hour), most earn much less, and a college would be correct in saying that $1,800 is the maximum allowable pay for a three credit course of someone in the second level of adjunct classifications. Paying more would violate state rules.

The LumpenProf worked for a semester at a Tennessee school as an adjunct about ten years ago. It was my worst pay ever. Today I read that the rates for adjuncts at Tennessee schools is unchanged after 11 years and that:

After two years of encouraging meetings organized by AAUP leaders in Tennessee, the board — through its presidents council — decided this month that the current policy works just fine, and that there will be no increases in pay maximums.

I am unsurprised. However, I was chagrined to learn that I was paid about a third less than the maximum allowed rate for even the very bottom tier of adjuncts. Fuck.

Starbucks Morality

Here's a nice article from Inside Higher Ed about adjuncts at Marquette University:

... there was something wrong — morally — with tenured professors not speaking out about the conditions facing adjuncts who make their research possible by covering so many classes.

He said that a majority of introductory theology courses are taught by adjuncts — typically Ph.D.’s who have been unable to find a tenure track job. They are paid about $3,200 a course, he said, but receive no health insurance. Because they must scramble to find enough courses to teach — at Marquette and elsewhere — they have no job security and thus no academic freedom, Maguire said.

In addition to citing Biblical teaching on obligations to the less fortunate, Maguire cited the practices of well known corporations. “Even corporations like Starbucks (not the expected moral prophets or beacons of justice in our society) provide health care benefits for their full-time as well as their part-time workers,” he wrote in his memo to his colleagues. “Here is the question for this university with its avowed religious commitments: Can we rise to the moral standards of Starbucks?"

I don't hold out much hope of moral arguments winning the day on this issue. I think it will take an organized faculty taking collective action on many fronts, including, wages, hours, benefits, accreditation, and unionizing.

But at a Jesuit school, a good moral argument shouldn't hurt.

A Cog's Eye View

Academic Cog has a very interesting post on contingent academic labor from the vantage point of a TA working under an adjunct lecturer. Academic Cog writes:

... huge numbers of classes are being taught by people who know they are here only temporarily and who already have an eye on the future and one foot out the door, frantically scrambling to grab a permanent position. Because the adjunct positions are there permanently, only with different individuals cycled in and out of them, what the university ends up with is instructors who are permanently job seeking and distracted. If you put 30 hours a week on an intensive and draining job search, how much time are you going to put in additionally to a job that pays you crap wages? How will that time break down per student given the class sizes?

In short, why invest any more time or effort or collegiality or service into a university that is investing practically nothing in you?

This is yet another face of the current reliance on contingent faculty to teach an ever increasing share of college classes. There are very good reasons to limit the number of years a university can exploit a particular adjunct at starvation wages (and to my mind the fewer years the better -- zero would be ideal). But as Academic Cog notes, the adjunct positions themselves are there permanently. This means that there is revolving door of new faces occupying these underpaid and overworked positions. The result of this is that the institution is buying faculty who cannot afford to invest the time and effort into their teaching that everyone involved -- students, administrators, TA's, other faculty, and not least the adjunct faculty member him or herself -- wishes to be able to devote to teaching.

This is why the question of adjuncts and accreditation begins to loom so large. Adjunct use creates structural limitations on the quality of instruction -- through no fault of the hard working adjunct faculty themselves. Unlike Confessions of a Community College Dean (CCCD), I think linking university accreditation with limits on the use of contingent labor is exactly the right place to apply pressure. Universities cannot be expected to resist the lure of cheap contingent faculty labor without some equally powerful disincentive. Accreditation provides universities with a materially relevant reason to limit their use of adjunct faculty. Moral arguments alone against this exploitation are always doomed to fail when confronted with the realities of a limited budget.

CCCD is rightly concerned, though, that externally imposed limits on the number of adjuncts allowed will simply encourage institutions to game the system and may even force some institutions to increase their use of adjuncts up to the legal limit. This is why I think it will still be necessary to eliminate the existing wage differentials between contingent and tenure-track faculty. As long as adjuncts can be hired on the cheap and without benefits, institutions will continue to exploit them. In fact, the fiduciary responsibilities of an institution's administrators will virtually demand it. Therefore, a twin-pronged strategy focusing on linking accreditation with minimizing adjunct use, coupled with raising adjunct salaries seems necessary.

As to CCCD's other concern about the relevance of limiting adjunct use to the goals of accreditation itself, there is Marc Bousquet's recent article in Inside Higher Ed. CCCD writes:

More to the point, what is the point of accreditation? I've always understood it as a way of assuring prospective students that the institution is what it says it is, rather than some fly-by-night operation. To the extent that it's really about the students, I'm not entirely sure what a magic cutoff number for adjuncts has to do with it.

As Marc Bousquet writes:

First-year students are more likely to persist to their sophomore year when high-stakes “gate-keeper” courses are taught by permanent faculty, and campus unions generate significantly greater undergraduate experience of tenure-stream faculty, observe two studies just released at the annual convention of the American Education Research Association.

This can be coupled with other findings that show that:

A national analysis of graduation and program completion rates at community colleges has found that institutions with higher percentages of full-time faculty members have higher completion rates.

And student retention and persistence to graduation are certainly legitimate and appropriate concerns for accreditation.

Or you can simply look again at the situation faced by Academic Cog who, as the TA for an overworked and underpaid adjunct, sees firsthand the ways students get short-changed by these working conditions:

You know what they call the TA who makes up for this situation by putting in extra time and effort to actually teach the students something about writing and critical thinking and writes lots of insightful, constructive comments on drafts and essays?

Sucker.

Survivor Issues

“I feel fortunate,” he said, of his position, “and I have survivor issues.” -- Marc Bousquet, author of How the University Works from Inside Higher Ed's Call to Arms for Academic Labor, by Scott Jaschik.

Survivor Issues. That could easily be the title of my entire blog. I resemble too closely the people described by Bousquet and in the various online posts provoked by his recent book (in particular, a headsup from Ortho and posts from Professor Zero and The Little Professor.)



Inside Higher Ed quotes Bousquet:

“Degree holders frequently serve as university teachers for 8 or 10 years before earning their doctorate.... Many degree holders have served as adjunct lecturers at other campuses, sometimes teaching master’s degree students and advising their theses en route to their own degrees. Some will have taught 30 to 40 sections.... During this time, they received frequent mentoring and regular evaluation.... A large fraction will have published essays and book reviews and authored their departmental Web pages. Yet at precisely the junction that this ‘preparation’ should end and regular employment begin — the acquisition of the Ph.D. — the system embarrasses itself and discloses a systematic truth that every recent degree holder knows and few administrators wish to acknowledge: in many disciplines, for the majority of graduates, the Ph.D. indicates the logical conclusion of an academic career.”

This describes me. The one very important difference is that, miraculously, my career didn't end with the Ph.D. and I ended up with tenure after another decade-long soujourn through the adjunct wilderness. And like Bousquet, "I feel fortunate, and I have survivor issues."

You can find more interviews with Marc Bousquet on YouTube.

Adjunct Freedom

Excellent! Here's an article from Inside Higher Ed on the American Federation of Teachers, academic freedom, and the use and abuse of adjunct faculty.

... the AFT is acknowledging that relying on the tenure system to protect professors’ academic freedom doesn’t work when more and more faculty members don’t have, and may never have, tenure.

“The greatest threat to academic freedom today is the subtle removal of many faculty positions from the tenure track and from engagement with institutional power through shared governance structures like faculty senates,” says a background paper the AFT produced to explain the idea of drafting a new statement of principles on academic freedom. “The mechanisms of tenure (or similar protections against arbitrary treatment), peer review and shared governance are vital to the maintenance of academic freedom.”

I posted recently on another Inside Higher Ed article about the increasing use of adjunct faculty as an attack on tenure and, having spent many years as an adjunct myself, I am in complete agreement with the argument that this constitutes "the greatest threat to academic freedom today." In addition to seeking to curb this alarming trend and increase the number of tenured and tenure-track faculty positions, the AFT is also seeking to increase the faculty governance role of adjunct faculty as well.

As is also the case with untenured Assistant Professors, though, simply including adjunct faculty on university committees does not necessarily translate into institutional power. It is a mistake to think that one can engage robustly in arguing for changes in personnel or curriculum policy when one's own job next semester depends on the continuing good will of the other faculty and administrators also serving on that committee. The problem is not simply the lack of adjunct faculty representation on university committees. The problem is that their status as adjunct faculty makes them too vulnerable for the task. Along with this, adjunct salaries are already so poor that adding yet more time consuming duties on top of their already overworked and underpaid positions is not the most progressive stance to take.

Faculty governance depends on tenure. There is no substitute for it. Adjunct faculty do not, and cannot, have the same academic freedoms and the same roles in shared governance as tenured faculty. This is not because they don't do committee work, but because they are not tenured. The only way to fix this fundamental inequality is to stop using adjunct faculty. I'm convinced that the best way to do this is to raise adjunct salaries dramatically. If there are no cost savings to the institution, there will be much less incentive to hire off the tenure-track.

The End of Tenure

Forget all the debates over whether or not the tenure system ought to be abolished. When tenure actually does come to an end, it won't be because of some faculty senate resolution. It will simply be because the majority of us are part-time workers. This is the real attack on tenure. Inside Higher Ed writes:

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.

The new report, “Employees in Postsecondary Institutions, Fall 2005, and Salaries of Full-Time Instructional Faculty, 2005-06,” also finds the proportion of all professors who are tenured or on the tenure track to be shrinking. Of the 675,624 full-time faculty members at degree-granting colleges and universities in 2005, 414,574, or 61.4 percent, were either tenured or on the tenure track. That is down from the 411,031 of 630,419 (or 65.2 percent) of professors at degree-granting institutions who were tenured or tenure track in 2003.