Events Draw Attention to Contingent Faculty Issues
AAUP members across the country organized events during Campus Equity Week last October. The purpose of the week is to bring attention to the poor working conditions of many contingent faculty members and to the threats to higher education posed by an increasing reliance on part- and full-time non-tenure-track appointments.
While the message of the week’s activities was consistent, events varied from campus to campus, with faculty and other participants planning events that addressed the local situation. “The Campus Equity Web site offers resources for individuals and campus communities, supporting autonomy and flexibility and facilitating local actions,” says Flo Hatcher, the chair of the AAUP’s Committee on Contingent Faculty and the Profession and a member of the Campus Equity Week national steering committee.
Teach-ins were held on several campuses. At Syracuse University, faculty and students held a “teach-out” featuring speakers and skits to dramatize the working conditions of part-time faculty and to support fair pay and treatment for all part-time workers on campus. The event caught the attention of reporters and helped prompt a substantial feature article on contingent faculty in a local newspaper.
The Rutgers University full- and part-time AAUP chapters held a conference focusing on the academic free-dom of those without tenure—assistant professors, teaching assistants, and part-time lecturers. Featured speakers included Joan Wallach Scott, the chair of the Association’s Committee A on Academic Freedom and Tenure, and Robert O’Neil, a professor of constitutional law at the University of Virginia School of Law. Their presentations were followed by a question-and-answer session conducted by teleconference across Rutgers’s New Brunswick and Newark campuses.
In Connecticut, the AAUP state conference distributed fact sheets, buttons, and highlights from the AAUP’s new policy statement Contingent Appointments and the Academic Profession. In addition, the conference hosted screenings of two videotapes relating to contingent faculty issues and sent a delegation to Boston to support area faculty and students at a rally to demand a fair contract for part-time faculty at Emerson College. The Emerson part-time faculty voted in 2001 to be represented for collective bargaining by their local AAUP chapter and were engaged in difficult contract negotiations until a settlement was reached in March.
Other AAUP members and leaders marked Campus Equity Week by submitting editorials or letters to the editors of local papers. Keith Hoeller, an adjunct professor of philosophy at Green River Community College and a member of the Association’s Committee on Contingent Faculty and the Profession, published an opinion piece in the Chronicle of Higher Education that focused on the growing divide between adjunct and tenure-track faculty and argued in favor of equal pay for equal work.
During Campus Equity Week, U.S. Representative Dale Kildee of Michigan introduced federal legislation supporting “solutions which provide fair and equitable treatment for contingent employees in higher education and promote the return to a significant and stable corps of full-time, tenure-track faculty in United States institutions of higher education.”
In California, faculty from all three of the state’s systems of public higher education held joint regional events and gathered signatures on a petition to support legislative language protecting instruction, student services, and libraries in the California State University system. At one such event, held at CSU–Dominguez Hills, a panel of academic leaders and state legislators heard testimony about contingent faculty appointments from faculty and students in the CSU, University of California, and community college systems.
“Campus Equity Week attested to the growing organization and power of contingent faculty and marked a historic turning point for contingent faculty in California,” says Craig Flanery, a lecturer in political science at CSU–Los Angeles and a member of the board of directors of the California Faculty Association, an AAUP affiliate. “Our events earned California’s Coalition on Contingent Academic Labor invitations to the state conventions of both the Democratic and Republican parties.”
Hatcher agrees: “Campus Equity Week continues to increase its base of support among first-time participants, empowering the local constituency and the international contingent labor movement—all inextricably linked to the most important issue facing higher education today.”
Campus Equity Week occurs periodically and is organized by a coalition that includes AAUP staff and leaders as well as representatives of other organizations and individual activists. The previous Campus Equity Week was in 2001. For more information about the week, visit www.cewaction.org.
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