Jan 04 2010

What is to be Done in 2010?

Category: News,University Finance — Bob Hanke @ 1:08 am

The President’s “Report to the Community 2009” mentions the 2008-09 CUPE strike once but neglects to consider how the “economic downturn” (aka recession) is giving impetus to the growth of contract faculty (aka adjunct or contingent faculty).  Hidden contract faculty at York, both unionized and nonunionized, look forward to the new year and the President’s Task Force on Faculty Life, Learning and Convergence, and its  recommendations for transforming precarious into sustainable academic livelihoods.  For starters, the Task Force could study and report on an Affirmative Action Convergence Program that would unite YUFA full-time tenure track and tenured faculty and librarians with contract faculty. For qualified contract faculty, the Task Force could recommend that Academic Employee Relations start to define seven years of intensive ”part-time’ teaching as probationary towards tenure. Finally, how about implementing a quota that would limit the percentage of  ‘part time’ hires, starting with the Faculty of Liberal Arts & Professional Studies (FLA&PS), in order to address the casualization of academic labour and the disappearance of tenure track employment?

While we wait for this Task Force to be struck and redefine the possible, the good news is that there is no shortage of money at York. According to Shoukri’s report, “Despite challenging economic times, the campaign has raised more than $190 million towards its $200 million goal.”

While CUPE Unit 2 members may look forward to initiatives that address the sustainable livelihoods issue, we can read the news that is fit to print in the Education Life section of the The New York Times:

The Case of the Vanishing Full-Time Professor
By Samantha Stainburn (excerpted from The New York Times, December 30, 2009)

THE REALITY
If you’ve written a few five-figure tuition checks or taken on 10 years’ of debt, you probably think you’re paying to be taught by full-time professors. But it’s entirely possible that most of your teachers are freelancers.

In 1960, 75 percent of college instructors were full-time tenured or tenure-track professors; today only 27 percent are. The rest are graduate students or adjunct and contingent faculty — instructors employed on a per-course or yearly contract basis, usually without benefits and earning a third or less of what their tenured colleagues make. The recession means their numbers are growing.

“When a tenure-track position is empty,” says Gwendolyn Bradley, director of communications at the American Association of University Professors, “institutions are choosing to hire three part-timers to save money.”

THE PROBLEM
While many adjuncts are talented teachers with the same degrees as tenured professors, they’re treated as second-class citizens on most campuses, and that affects students.

It’s sometimes harder to track down adjuncts outside of class, because they rarely have offices or even their own departmental mailboxes.

Many patch together jobs at different colleges to make ends meet, and with commuting, there’s less time to confer with students or prepare for class. It’s not unusual for adjuncts to be hired at the last minute to teach courses they’ve never taught. And with no job security, they may consider it advantageous to tailor classes for student approval.

HOW TO
Colleges tend to play down the increasingly central role of adjuncts. This fall, the American Federation of Teachers complained that some top-ranked universities exaggerated the percentage of full-time faculty to U.S. News & World Report for its rankings. U.S. News declined to investigate.

Another source is the “Compare Higher Education Institutions” search tool at A.F.T.’s Higher Education Data Center. These are the stats that colleges report to the federal government.

Ask admissions officers point-blank: what percentage of classes and discussion sections are taught by part-timers and graduate assistants, and are they required to hold office hours?

For entry-level classes — the ones tenured faculty famously don’t want to teach — the squeaky wheel often gets a full-time professor, says Harlan Cohen, author of “The Naked Roommate: And 107 Other Issues You Might Run Into in College.” “If you’re not thrilled with your adjunct professor,” he says, “go to the head of the department and see what options are available. They may put you in a different section.”

CAVEATS
If you take a strict anti-adjunct stance, you may miss out on some star instructors — Barack Obama taught a seminar on racism and the law at the University of Chicago Law School as an adjunct. Professoring part-time is a hobby for overachieving architects, graphic designers, lawyers and entrepreneurs, all of whom can share insights from real-world experiences that full-time academics haven’t had.

“Before making assumptions that an adjunct is bad, Google them,” Mr. Cohen says. “You may find that real estate teacher is one step removed from Donald Trump, and these are the types of people you want to meet.”

Tags: , ,

Jul 10 2009

The Silence of Contingent Faculty

Category: Discussion — Bob Hanke @ 3:46 pm

The Silence of the Grads
Academe has its own version of ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’ when it comes to adjunct faculty members

by Steve Street (excerpted from the The Chronicle of Higher Education, July 9, 2009)

I wore red to class on April 30, in honor of the first New Faculty Majority Day called by the National Coalition for Adjunct and Contingent Equity. I had on my red T-shirt from a previous union rally over a checkered oxford — obviously a statement not of the fashion kind. But I didn’t explain the red shirt, and no students asked, and in a way, that was good for education: My classes were about my classes.

But in another way, that silence illustrated something about the presence of so many contingent faculty members in academe — something less quantifiable about their effect than the graduation rates or other criteria that have been used to assess quality. Education is ultimately an inner experience, but schools are its communal interface, and when they create more silence than talk, less education is going on.

Not that I would have introduced my own working conditions into the classroom (although telling one’s students about contingency is not really like involving children in a dispute between parents, as a colleague’s false analogy put it, because the parents are equal partners). Faculty working conditions are indeed student learning conditions. But the economy, the culture, and life itself already provide too many distractions in the classroom; the last thing students need is another passion getting between them and what they are supposed to be learning.

One colleague, however, likens a teacher’s decision not to mention his or her adjunct status to the military’s “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy on homosexuality. Of course that policy is no real solution to anything, whether it be gay rights or any of the issues arising from the two-tiered faculty system. So contingent faculty members who want to consider their teaching jobs a career or a livelihood, albeit one at a quarter of the salary of their tenure-track colleagues, can’t. They must either constantly protest their inadequate working conditions or be tacitly complicit in the very system that exploits them.

To read the rest of this column, click here.

Tags:

« Previous Page