The AAUP Organizes Part-Time Faculty

An experiment in community responsibility suggests that part- and full-time faculty can enrich one another’s professional lives.

 By Richard Moser

The project began in late 1998, when the executive committee of the AAUP’s Collective Bargaining Congress, the Association’s Committee on Part-Time and Non-Tenure-Track Appointments, and the Massachusetts conference of the AAUP endorsed a proposal to address the working conditions of adjunct faculty in the Boston area. Members and staff reasoned that Boston’s standing as a premier college town would lend national significance to the Association’s efforts.

The project’s first initiative was a comprehensive survey of contract faculty. The survey found that these faculty members earned an average of $2,200 a course. Only a few enjoyed health benefits, and almost none had a role in college or university governance.

At the same time that the survey was under way, the AAUP began to build a relationship with the Coalition of Contingent Academic Labor (COCAL), a grassroots group of faculty and others struggling to organize around part-time issues. COCAL was founded by seasoned activists from the University of Massachusetts, Boston. As members of the university’s Faculty Staff Union, an affiliate of the National Education Association, they had waged a victorious campaign for health benefits and decent wages for part-time faculty.

In the months before COCAL’s third annual conference, members of COCAL met often with AAUP staff and members. The Association provided important financial support for the conference and joined the group’s organizing efforts.

At first glance, the regional scope of the Boston project and its reliance on coalition building may seem to diverge from the Association’s typical approach to organizing faculty. But on closer inspection, it becomes clear that the project actually draws on the AAUP’s three decades of experience in collective bargaining and on the traditional Association model of academic citizenship. That model sees faculty as guardians of institutions of higher education and duty bound to act in the public good. In Boston the AAUP’s aim is both to organize faculty to improve conditions for adjuncts and to educate the public about the importance of preserving quality higher education for future generations.

Group Effort

The AAUP and COCAL set out to create a new kind of multicampus community by bringing together in COCAL activists from among the ranks of adjuncts, full-time faculty, graduate students, undergraduates, and community members scattered throughout the city. In doing so, COCAL builds a critical mass of people to focus on specific targets and goals. Just as important, the citywide approach minimizes the risk to faculty participants by allowing them to be activists on neighboring campuses rather than on their own.

Bringing scattered constituencies together is a pivotal part of the Boston experiment. The Supreme Court’s 1980 decision in National Labor Relations Board v. Yeshiva University rendered collective bargaining out of the question for professors at most private colleges and universities. And the absence of legislation enabling collective bargaining in twenty-four states means that professors at public institutions of higher education in those states cannot form unions. These burdens on the bargaining rights of full-time faculty weaken the most important potential ally of part-time faculty, and make it all the more important to create innovative forms of community.

In its approach to organizing, COCAL borrows a page from early U.S. labor history and from the social movements of our own time. In the early twentieth century, when most jobs were contingent and the right to organize was rarely respected, Americans often organized municipal movements to build solidarity among all members of a community. In seeking to build a broad-based coalition of all faculty and campus employees, COCAL models itself on these movements. In its appreciation for the value of "consciousness raising," and in its belief that important advances can be made even without the legal protections of collective bargaining, COCAL relies on lessons from modern social movements. The civil rights, women’s, and peace movements all made historic gains by using tactics grounded in grassroots education and outreach.

As business models increasingly shape higher education, corporate principles replace academic values, and making a profit elbows out the public good as the primary goal of colleges and universities. Tenured faculty would seem to be well situated to question this "corporatization" and to articulate alternatives to it, but they find their power compromised as the ranks of tenured professors dwindle. The ascendancy of the corporate view and the weakening of the full-time faculty have hinged on the replacement of tenured faculty positions with part-time and contract faculty who, administrators swear, will never see the light of tenure. These contingent professors now make up approximately 60 percent of all faculty in the United States; their proportion relative to tenured faculty has grown by about 1 percent a year since the early 1970s.

As tenured faculty become an increasingly slender minority, academic values, including academic freedom and the right to share in university government, are undermined. The faculty are not alone in this loss; members of every other university constituency, save the administration, find their jobs more and more at risk, their work degraded, and their connection to the campus attenuated.

Although adjuncts account for most of COCAL’s membership, the group seeks to emphasize the common interests of full- and part-time faculty and graduate assistants. It does so by linking together demands for better compensation and conditions for adjuncts with the need for quality education for students, the restoration of the academic job market, and the defense of the academic profession. It is the AAUP’s goal to make explicit the connection between the growing reliance on contingent faculty and the corporatization of higher education. In this way, the Association hopes to connect self-interest with high ideals and make the fight for adjunct rights commensurate with the struggle being fought over the soul of the university.

Coalition Building

Over the past several years, efforts by COCAL and the AAUP have succeeded in stimulating activities on campuses. Faculty at Suffolk University, for example, revived their AAUP chapter and showed how tenured and part-time faculty can cooperate to win pay raises and governance rights for part-time faculty.

As the 1999-2000 academic year began, faculty activists seemed to be everywhere. COCAL organized demonstrations at Emerson College, Northeastern University, and Massachusetts Bay Community College. The demonstrations caught the attention of thousands of students and faculty, and newspapers and radio stations covered the events and interviewed faculty leaders. In addition, COCAL held packed meetings on other Boston campuses and distributed thousands of copies of its newsletter.

With the educational campaign in full swing, AAUP and COCAL organizers looked for new allies. They contacted two Boston-area labor groups with reputations for activism and no-nonsense coalition building: the Campaign on Contingent Work and Jobs With Justice. Representatives from the four groups agreed to call for a new coalition that would target the university as a site for organizing.

The coalition that resulted--the University Organizing Project (UOP)--took shape as an umbrella organization of campus unions, student groups, faculty associations, and individuals. The UOP drafted a "campus charter" that establishes standards for fair employment for all campus workers. With its vision of an inclusive campus community, the UOP promises to provide solidarity for university workers seeking economic justice and a voice in their working lives.

Among the most successful UOP activities so far has been the commemoration this past April of the 1979 general strike at Boston University. Representatives of the AAUP, COCAL, the Service Employees International Union Local 925, and the United Auto Workers Local 2324, organized the commemoration as a way to educate the public about the buried history of cross-sector campus activism. They especially wanted to link the 1979 strike to current efforts to organize cafeteria and clerical workers, graduate students, and adjunct faculty, and they highlighted as well the strike’s tie to ongoing student activism, especially Students Against Sweatshops.

The hundred and thirty union members and activists who attended the event listened to songs sung on the 1979 picket lines and heard the bittersweet stories of faculty and staff strikers. People left the commemoration with a renewed sense that it is possible to fight and win, and that cross-sectoral activism is an effective means for achieving long-term goals.

A solid foundation has been created, but the true test lies ahead. Six union drives are now under way on Boston campuses, and faculty at several schools are reviving AAUP chapters. Will COCAL, the UOP, and the AAUP rally to support one another? Thus far the signs are promising at the AAUP. Last spring, the Association’s Assembly of State Conferences and its Collective Bargaining Congress held a regional training workshop in Boston. In addition, the executive committee of the AAUP Council continues to voice support for the multicampus organizing project; the national office has dedicated significant resources to the effort; and the Association has joined other labor and community groups to form the National Alliance for Fair Employment, a network to coordinate activities related to part-time employment across the economy.

Academic labor issues have continued to attract the spotlight this fall. In Boston activists in the community used the occasion of the October 3 presidential debates at the University of Massachusetts, Boston, as a focus for continued coalition building and public education. On November 16 an open hearing in New York City, sponsored by Scholars, Artists, and Writers for Social Justice, brought national attention to a campaign to establish fair labor practices for campus employees. And the California Part-Time Faculty Association promises the most dynamic national conference ever on academic labor issues next January in San Jose. In addition, plans are afoot to designate a week next spring as "National Equity Week."

Although these developments are encouraging, AAUP staff still need to search for ways to reach the thousands of adjunct faculty in the difficult-to-organize private sector. If the movement continues to grow, and if an AAUP-sponsored health benefits program can be developed, the Association sees a real possibility for effective organizing outside traditional collective bargaining. The Association’s Massachusetts conference has established the Council of Contract Faculty as a framework for just such an eventuality. The council has tentative plans to establish a clearinghouse or referral service that posts wage rates and disseminates information on the job market. (As a first step toward this initiative, the AAUP has posted on its Web site information on salaries and working conditions in the Boston area.) This approach lays the groundwork for the eventual development of a system that would allow adjuncts to exercise real control over the terms and conditions of their employment.

As faculty, our first concern is with education. The overuse and abuse of adjunct faculty teaches us all by example that ideas and learning are not highly valued. We are all tarred by that brush. The AAUP and its allies are setting a different example and teaching a different lesson. Good academic citizenship demands that we become the custodians of our institutions and act in the public good. Intellectual innovation and the free exchange of ideas cannot thrive in an atmosphere chilled by insecurity and the risk of dismissal.

The public interest in quality education is best served by stemming the tide of contingent employment and improving the conditions of all university workers, because students learn best in a setting characterized by continuity and coherence. By acting in unison with other campus constituencies and advancing the conditions under which academic freedom, due process, and shared governance can flourish, we set the example of community and citizenship so strikingly absent from the corporate agenda for higher education.

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