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Social Stigma Hurts Part-Timers
Kenneth H. Ryesky
To the Editor:
The basic observation by the anonymous staff member who wrote the article “Class Issues Outside the Classroom” in the September–October 2006 issue of Academe boils down to the fact that, like any other large organization, the university is no less a social system than an educational system, and that for better or worse, the social interactions of its members materially impact the system’s function.
This being so, the AAUP’s proposed “recommended institutional regulation” regarding part-time faculty appointments, on pages 93–94 of the same issue of Academe, is quite necessary and appropriate. Part-time faculty members who serve without due process rights against the whims of department chairs, administrators, and other powers-that-be cannot optimally interact with their fellow faculty members (nor, for that matter, with the support staff) and, accordingly, cannot deliver a learning experience to the students.
But merely affording due process rights to part-time faculty will not fully integrate them into the university social system. It is an unofficial and informal, but no less potent, convention of higher education that one must not serve too long as a part-timer, lest one be viewed as professionally suspect and inferior by college administrators and by full-time faculty members. Accordingly, the AAUP’s recommended regulation must go further by prohibiting service as a part-timer from being weighed negatively in the evaluation of a part-timer who applies for a fulltime position.
Kenneth H. Ryesky,Esq.
(Accounting and Information Systems), Adjunct
Queens College, City University of New York
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