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Contingent Faculty Win Legal Victory in Washington
In February, Washington State settled a class-action lawsuit with part-time community college instructors. Under the agreement, the state will pay the instructors $11 million for having failed to provide them with health insurance during the summer. The agreement, which will benefit more than 1,500 adjunct faculty members in the state, followed a June 2003 state supreme court ruling that instructors who work at least half time are eligible for summer health insurance. After that decision, the state paid $1.5 million to cover part-time instructors' insurance for summer 2003.
Two community college instructors, Eva Mader and Theresa Knudsen, filed the lawsuit in 1999. At the time, Mader had taught half time for twenty-one years at North Seattle Community College, and Knudsen had been an instructor at Spokane Community College for ten years. "We were left with no choice," says Knudsen. "After two or three years of teaching full-time hours for adjunct wages, and with no full-time tenure-track positions in sight, I began asking sympathetic full timers what we could do."
She ultimately co-founded the Washington Part-Time Faculty Association with Keith Hoeller, a longtime faculty member in the state's community college system (and a member of AAUP's Committee on Contingent Faculty and the Profession). Soon afterward, Hoeller and Knudsen began considering the lawsuit. "Keith Hoeller did all the legwork searching for attorneys," says Knudsen, "and after a year or so he found a Seattle firm that was willing to take the case." The firm successfully argued two cases, the summer health benefits case and a second case involving retirement benefits for adjunct faculty.
According to Knudsen, the group made the right choice in pursuing the matter through legal channels. "I have nothing but praise for taking these issues, and others like them, to court," she says. "I have heard people say that suing is lowdown, and that we should have worked with our unions and administrators to achieve these gains. My reply is that the discriminatory treatment of adjunct faculty is lowdown, and we had no choice other than to sue the state."
Although Knudsen is satisfied with the outcome of the case, she admits that the battle is not yet over. "The clock is ticking for adjuncts," she says. "We see our careers and time passing us by. We are still being given wages that place us at the federal poverty level. We still have no true job security, and thus have no true academic freedom, freedom of speech, or rights to due process and equal protection under the law. We are daily belittled by being termed 'part time.' These are all areas that might have to be settled in court."
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