Equality for Contingent Faculty

Description

Vice President Joseph Biden has blamed tuition increases on the high salaries of college professors, seemingly unaware of the fact that there are now over one million faculty who earn poverty-level wages teaching off the tenure track. The Chronicle of Higher Education ran a story entitled "From Graduate School to Welfare: The PhD Now Comes with Food Stamps." Today three-fourths of all faculty are characterized as "contingent instructional staff," a nearly tenfold increase from 1975.

Equality for Contingent Faculty brings together eleven activists from the United States and Canada to describe the problem, share case histories, and offer concrete solutions. The book begins with three accounts of successful organizing efforts within the two-track system. The second part describes how the two-track system divides the faculty into haves and have-nots and leaves the majority without the benefit of academic freedom or the support of their institutions. The third part offers roadmaps for overcoming the deficiencies of the two-track system and providing equality for all professors, regardless of status or rank.

Sujets

• Employabilité, métiers et formations
• Industrial relations
• Education
• Economics
• Business
• Labor

Informations

• Publié par: Vanderbilt University Press
• Date de parution: 15 janvier 2014
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9780826519528
• Langue: English

Extrait

Equality for Contingent Faculty
Equality for Contingent Faculty
Overcoming the Two-Tier System
Edited by Keith Hoeller
Vanderbilt University Press | Nashville
© 2014 by Vanderbilt University Press
Nashville, Tennessee 37235
All rights reserved
First printing 2014
This book is printed on acid-free paper.
Manufactured in the United States of America
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data on file
LC control number 2013031628
LC classification number LB2334.E59 2014
Dewey class number 378.1’2—dc23
ISBN 978-0-8265-1950-4 (cloth)
ISBN 978-0-8265-1952-8 (ebook)
This book is dedicated to the millions of women and men who spent many years and tens of thousands of dollars to earn graduate degrees and then found themselves toiling like migrant workers in our nation’s academic fields.
Contents
Preface
Keith Hoeller
Part I: Case Studies of Progressive Change
1. Organizing for Equality within the Two-Tier System: The Experience of the California Faculty Association
Elizabeth Hoffman and John Hess
2. The Case for Instructor Tenure: Solving Contingency and Protecting Academic Freedom in Colorado
Don Eron
3. Online Teaching and the Deskilling of Academic Labor in Canada
Natalie Sharpe and Dougal MacDonald
Part II: The Two-Tier System in Academe
4. Organizing the New Faculty Majority: The Struggle to Achieve Equality for Contingent Faculty, Revive Our Unions, and Democratize Higher Education
Richard Moser
5. The Academic Labor System of Faculty Apartheid
Keith Hoeller
6 The Question of Academic Unions: Community (or Conflict) of Interest?
Jack Longmate
7. Do College Teachers Have to Be Scholars?
Frank Donoghue
Part III: Roadmaps for Achieving Equality
8. The New Abolition Movement
Lantz Simpson
9. The Vancouver Model of Equality for College Faculty Employment
Frank Cosco
Selected Bibliography on the Contingent Faculty Movement
Keith Hoeller
Appendix: Trends in Instructional Staff Employment Status
Acknowledgments
Contributors
Index
Preface
Keith Hoeller
It has long been assumed that a college education is just the ticket for admittance into the middle and upper classes. High school students are routinely advised to apply to several colleges, and to choose the one with the most prestige. While financial aid is important, students are told they should go to the best college they can, and to go into debt, if necessary, to make it happen. Government statistics have regularly confirmed the wisdom of this advice. College graduates earn several hundred thousands more over their lifetimes than high school dropouts, and earnings rise the higher the degree.
This advice has remained sound even though the Arab oil embargo of 1973 and the consequent recession of 1974–1975 halted the consistent economic growth that followed World War II. The mid-1970s mark the beginning of income stagnation in America, with globalization, downsizing, outsourcing, the steady decline in union membership and the middle class, and within higher education, the erosion of reliance on the tenured professor.
Yet the concomitant changes in higher education have rarely been mentioned in the mainstream press. Only since the great recession of 2007–2009 has there been any questioning of both the value and cost of a college degree. Attention has been paid to whether a degree should take so long, and whether online education will replace the traditional brick-and-mortar campus, with the traditional college professor giving lectures to large numbers of students or leading small graduate seminars. But most of this mainstream discussion has focused on students and parents, tuition, and student loans.
The major changes in the professoriate have been missing from the debate over the future of higher education in America. The public still retains the positive image of the college professor as well paid and well treated, with low teaching loads, plenty of funding, a lot of time free for research, and students devoted to learning. During the 2012 presidential campaign, Vice President Joe Biden, himself married to a community college professor, blamed high tuition on the high salaries of college professors. 1
From “Mobile Professors” to “Freeway Fliers”
Yet during the past four decades academe has gone from an overwhelming majority of professors holding tenure and tenure-track jobs in the 1960s to a minority today. In the past forty years, there has been a near reversal of the three-to-one ratio between the number of professors who teach on and off the tenure track, with part-time faculty now holding over 50 percent of all college appointments.
In “The Case of the Vanishing Full-Time Professor,” Samantha Stainburn of the New York Times says: “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.” 2 Tenure-stream professors now find themselves adrift in a small, leaky lifeboat surrounded by an ocean brimming with contingent faculty who, prevented from climbing into the tenure boat, are forced either to tread water or drown. Even the American Association of University Professors (AAUP), the National Education Association (NEA), and the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) have begun to speak of tenure in apocalyptic terms.
“Today that system [of tenure] has all but collapsed,” says the AAUP. 3 Former AAUP president Cary Nelson says, “Now the average college teacher is no longer eligible for tenure, and the good ship humanities is already partly under water.” 4
It was not always this way. In The Mobile Professors (1967), published by the American Council on Education, David Brown decried the lack of college professors to fill the ranks of the tenured:

Academic labor markets serve the tremendously important role of allocating a resource (qualified manpower) which is not only scarce but vital to the social production function . If professors are poorly placed, the quality of education will suffer. So also will the standard of living and the quality of life. Almost each individual professor is a scarce resource whose optimal placement is severely restricted and whose marginal product would be conspicuous by its absence. (italics in original) 5
The resulting shortage in the 1960s led to a system of musical chairs for “mobile professors,” who could and did move from one college to another in order to advance their careers. Colleges had trouble both finding professors to fill tenure and tenure-track positions and retaining them. In one study, nearly 80 percent of colleges predicted larger shortages in the future, with some analysts predicting they could only last for at least another decade.
The 1960s “mobile professor” turned into the 1970s “freeway flier,” tackling part-time jobs at several colleges in order to eke out the financial existence offered to fast-food workers. Contingent professors have been compared to migrant farm workers and indentured servants, and the two-track system has been compared to the Jim Crow laws of the old South and the former racial apartheid system of South Africa.
Students have graduated with MAs and PhDs, and tens of thousands of dollars in debt, only to find few tenure-track jobs in their fields. Those not lucky enough to land a scarce tenure-track job have faced a stark choice: accept a part-time job, accept a one-year appointment, or leave academe altogether. These part-time teaching jobs pay only half the rate of full-timers, have few or no benefits, have no job security, and usually do not provide offices for the teachers in question.
The Two-Tier System and “Inside-Out Sourcing”
Under economic duress, unions have sometimes agreed to two-tiered compensation systems. In 2007, the United Auto Workers agreed to a two-tier system where the new hires, doing the same work as the old-timers, are paid at half the rate, earning only $14 an hour.
But higher education has remained a growth industry and the origins of the two-tiered system were different. The statewide community college systems, expanded in the 1960s, led the change away from full-time staffing, often relying on “moonlighters”—that is, experts in the community—to teach courses. As Michael Dubson writes in Ghosts in the Classroom , “The use of adjunct faculty began innocently enough, as bad things often do. Members of the business community were initially brought in to teach highly specialized classes that academic faculty could not teach. The remuneration offered for this was minimal. The business person was successful in his/her field and didn’t need the money. Instead, the primary gain for their efforts was a certain amount of prestige. The adjunct phenomenon was born.” 6
The community colleges expanded on this two-track system, transforming it in the process, and the four-year and research universities quickly followed suit. In order to meet the growing number of students in the 1970s, colleges decided to keep costs low by minimizing the expansion of tenure-track positions. Since graduate students were cheap and were not paid benefits, research universities began to expand their use. Teaching assistants were used more often to grade papers and lead discussion groups so as to allow for the increased use of large lecture classes with hundreds of students. More graduate students were assigned to teach their own classes.
As a result, tenure-stream professors discovered they could shift the repetitive teaching of lower-level introductory courses onto their students (or former students) and the growing ranks of non-tenure-track professo