For Release: 6/12/02
For more information, please contact Robin Burns
Washington, D.C. — Keith Hoeller, an AAUP member from Green River and Tacoma Community Colleges in Washington State received the AAUP’s 2002 Georgina Smith Award at the Association’s Eighty-Eighth Annual Meeting in Washington, D.C. on June 8, 2002.
The Georgina Smith Award recognizes a person who has provided exceptional leadership in the past year in improving the status of academic women or in advancing academic collective bargaining and who, through that work, has improved the profession in general. Hoeller, whose work has focused on part-time faculty, particularly at community colleges, is a co-founder of the Washington Part-Time Faculty Association, which is dedicated to "equal pay for equal work" for part-time faculty.
He has been a tireless advocate for part-time faculty in the Washington State legislature. Senators Jeanne Kohl-Welles, chair of the Senate Higher Education Committee; Ken Jacobsen, who was for many years the chair of the House Higher Education Committee; and Phyllis Kenney, current chair of the House Higher Education Committee have been important allies in the struggle to increase appropriations by more than $25 million in the past six years to increase part-time faculty salaries. The legislature also approved retirement benefits and sick leave for many part-time instructors.
Prior to the legislature’s actions, Hoeller helped lead the effort to bring two class-action lawsuits to require the state to provide retirement benefits to part-time faculty, and to extend health-care insurance to part-time faculty in the summer quarter.
In 1996 the Seattle Times published Hoeller’s opinion article, "The Case of the Missing College Professors," which launched the part-time faculty movement in the Washington State community colleges. Three out of four faculty members in these institutions work part time, and three out of five are women. He has since published nearly a dozen opinion pieces and has been cited in many news articles throughout Washington State and the nation. He was featured in the Chronicle of Higher Education on several occasions for his work on behalf of part-time faculty.
He has lived in Seattle, Washington, since 1981 and has taught philosophy and psychology at several colleges and universities. In 1991 Dr. Hoeller started teaching part time in the Washington State community college system.
Mary Gibson, chair of the Association’s Committee on the Status of Women in the Academic Profession, presented the award on Saturday at a celebratory banquet during the Association’s annual meeting sessions. Congratulating Hoeller and commenting on the significance of his work, Gibson said, "If we tenured and tenure-track faculty fail to recognize and act upon our community of interests with our part-time and other non-tenure-track colleagues, it is we who will be the endangered species."
The American Association of University Professors is a nonprofit charitable and educational organization that promotes academic freedom by supporting tenure, academic due process, and standards of quality in higher education. The AAUP has more than 45,000 members at colleges and universities throughout the United States.