November-December 2008

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Including Contingent Faculty in Governance

More effective inclusion in union and institutional governance requires more job security.

By Joe Berry and Elizabeth Hoffman

Setting out to consider models for including contingent faculty in institutional governance and daily life at unionized institutions, we rapidly discovered that we could not meaningfully discuss inclusion in the institutions in which contingent faculty work without also discussing inclusion in the unions that bargain for—or fail to organize or bargain for— contingent faculty. This is true for several reasons. The leaders of the instruments of faculty governance—faculty senates and councils, departments and programs, and various joint faculty-administration committees—are most often senior, full-time, tenure-track or tenured faculty. The faculty unions, and their various subdivisions and committees, are likewise typically led by senior, full-time, tenure-track or tenured faculty. The same people often lead these different groups, either concurrently or consecutively. In unionized institutions, the degree of inclusion of contingent faculty in the daily life of the institution and its governance is also often largely determined by the degree of influence contingent faculty have in their unions and by the priorities placed on their needs.
 
To frame the discussion, we need to remind ourselves of the key characteristics of the world of contingent faculty, which, though it overlaps considerably with the world of our tenure-track and tenured colleagues, is radically different.

  • Contingent faculty are now the majority of higher education teachers, by a ratio of about three to one.
  • The majority of us have no substantial job security to replace tenure, even where unions exist, though the degree of contingency varies from per-course assignments to multiyear full-time contracts, with many of us moving from one to another over our faculty careers. Most of us, at any given moment, are virtually “at-will” employees. This means that disagreement with our tenure-track and tenured colleagues is expressed publicly (or even privately) at great risk.
  • Most of us live in economic circumstances quite different from those of tenure-track and tenured faculty. In fact, our personal economics are likely to be more similar to those of nonfaculty higher education staff, white or blue collar. Most contingent faculty say that their academic pay is necessary to their family’s support. 
  • Contingent faculty operate in the context of near-universal second-class status, which becomes only worse as we age and gain “experience.”
  • Contingent faculty do the majority of the teaching in higher education, but our participation in the full range of faculty work is generally limited or unrecognized—a cruel waste of talent and energy for us and for the institutions.
  • This second-class treatment is internalized variously and results in fear, anger, lack of self-confidence and esteem, and general insecurity. As longtime activist John Hess has often stated, contingent faculty are never more than fifteen seconds away from total humiliation. Despite this, most contingents remain committed to higher education and report that they would accept a full-time tenure track position in their department if it were offered.
  • Finally, when given the chance, contingent faculty nearly always vote for union representation in secret ballot elections, but many do not vote and fewer participate in organizing drives or in unions once they are established.

These factors point to an overarching reality: the fact of contingency makes democratic and participatory inclusion extremely problematic. The door to inclusion is labeled “job security,” or the true reduction of contingency. Anything else runs the risk of being window dressing or worse. Given this reality, we can point to some examples where the conditions of contingency have been mitigated substantially, especially by unions that have taken it upon themselves to oppose contingency directly.

Vancouver Community College

One striking example of such a union is the Vancouver Community College Faculty Association in Canada. Its president, Frank Cosco, reports that the union has, over the years, bargained the virtual abolition of contingency for part-time and term faculty. Each department or program now uses a uniform hiring process and set of hiring criteria for all faculty. All faculty share both teaching and nonteaching duties regardless of full- or part-time status. After six months of service, most nonpermanent faculty have the right by seniority to any available work. After two years of term work, faculty at half time or more get automatic conversion to “regular” status (more or less the equivalent of tenure in the United States) and the right by seniority to accrue full-time status. Seniority is accrued at the same rate by full- and part-time regulars. While non-regulars may be laid off before regulars, all layoffs are by reverse accrued seniority, not by time status.

Along with these strict limits on contingency have come pro-rata professional development time and funding; common evaluation processes with grievance rights; and full voting rights in departments, including the right to elect and be elected as chair (in the latter case, the person is converted to full-time regular status). In the union, all faculty have an equal vote and equal rights to serve in offices.

Cosco describes these provisions, perhaps the best in all of North America, as the result of the following principles.

  • We are unionists first in our dealing with management. This means, among other things, that we never forget that the administration’s interests are not ours and that our most important job is to protect each other.
  • We practice principled militancy, a willingness to fight for our interests whenever necessary.
  • We pursue equity as our highest goal, which means especially among ourselves and in our bargaining with the employer.

The result is that contingent faculty are included in virtually all decisions in which any faculty have a part, either in the college or in the union. They do not fear retaliation and are confident that the union will defend them and enforce contractual guarantees. While not perfect, the system, Cosco says, has succeeded in fundamentally blurring the lines between regular and other faculty, since all can see a clear road to regularization that is not based on whim or favoritism. The culture of equality has been easier to sustain and build upon because of the long history of 100 percent pro-rata pay at the college.

City College of San Francisco

A second example of a union that opposed contingency directly is the American Federation of Teachers Local 2121 at the City College of San Francisco. The union has bargained seniority-based rehire rights for part-timers (who are all contingent); the right not to have one’s load reduced before a less senior part-timer’s load is reduced; and significant preference for upgrading to full-time tenure track jobs (such that most full-time tenure-track jobs go to part-timers and have for many years). Part-timers’ evaluations are performed as frequently and with much the same criteria as those of tenure-track faculty, and part-timers participate in evaluations of other part-timers. Travel grants for professional development are available equally. Part-timers serve on curriculum and personnel committees at the departmental level and are encouraged to participate in district-level committees such as those working on accreditation review and administrator searches.

A bargained, ongoing job-consolidation agreement has resulted in the creation of new full-time tenure-track jobs. The agreement was possible because near economic equity between part- and full-time faculty (now at 86 percent pro-rata pay and full benefits for part-timers at 50 percent load or more) lessens the economic advantage to the employer of hiring more part-timers. Most recently, the union gained recall rights: part-timers who are laid off are entitled to be recalled for duty at their old seniority level for up to four semesters. Local 2121 and City College have an unusual level of activity and inclusion among part-time contingents and a culture of freer speech and more academic freedom than is common in colleges today. They have sustained a collective presence, through a part-timers’ committee or caucus, continuously since the 1970s. Their presence has been both the cause of contractual gains and the result of past gains. Issues for part-time faculty that the union wants to address in the future include medical benefits after retirement, disability benefits, and 100 percent pro-rata pay. Local 2121’s accomplishments and goals are evidence of the union’s commitment to equity for all faculty at the City College of San Francisco.

California State University

A third example of a union that has directly opposed contingency is the California Faculty Association (CFA), which since the early 1980s has represented both tenure-line faculty and faculty on temporary appointments (called “lecturers”) in the California State University system. At first, progress was slow for lecturers, who had limited contract rights and were marginalized both in the university and in their union. But in the late 1990s, a former contingent faculty member was elected CFA president; California passed an agency-fee bill that meant more resources for organizing and training; and lecturers, with increasing support from tenureline faculty, increased their presence in every part of the union, including legislative activity and bargaining. They also built alliances with contingent faculty outside the CFA.

The CFA was influenced by the AAUP’s 2003 Contingent Appointments and the Academic Professions. This policy statement, written by a team of tenure-line and contingent faculty, offers guidelines for planning and implementing “gradual transitions to a higher proportion of tenurable positions” along with “intermediate, ameliorative measures by which the academic freedom and professional integration of faculty currently appointed to contingent positions can be enhanced by academic due process and assurances of continued employment.”

In a more democratic and activist CFA, much has happened. The CFA successfully pushed for legislation mandating a plan to increase the percentage of tenure-line positions in the CSU system without disadvantaging incumbent lecturers. To be put into practice, this plan requires new funding, and in the most recent contract, the CFA bargained that the CSU system must make such funding a priority in the system’s budget request to the state legislature. In the meantime, the CFA has also moved to implement the AAUP’s “intermediate, ameliorative measures” by bargaining a contract that provides lecturers with due process, preference for work that allows accrual up to a full load, automatic rolling three year appointments after six years of service, pro-rata pay, and full health benefits with two classes. (For further discussion, see “Golden State Solidarity” in the May–June 2007 issue of Academe.)

What the CFA has accomplished is not perfect. With the plan to increase tenure-line positions still unfunded, these positions stagnate while the numbers of students and lecturers increase. Although about 20 percent of newly appointed tenure-track faculty come from the ranks of incumbent lecturers, most lecturers will remain off the tenure track. Even lecturers who have worked their way up to full-time, multiyear appointments (and those numbers are increasing) are still considered “temporary” in the CSU system and can be laid off before tenure-track faculty. But however imperfect, the CFA’s progress has made a significant difference in improving the lives of individual lecturers and in building a union strong enough to protect all faculty interests. This progress was made possible by a remarkably unified faculty, which voted 94 percent in 2007 to go on strike if the CFA did not get a contract that was good for all members of the bargaining unit.

While contingency makes the democratic and participatory inclusion of faculty extremely problematic, a lessening of contingency encourages inclusion. The experience of lecturer Chris Haynes of Humboldt State University exemplifies this. Haynes received awards for his outstanding teaching but says he never truly felt part of the institution and free to speak out until the increased contractual rights were won. Now he is the elected chair of the CFA’s Contract Development and Bargaining Strategy Committee (a position never before held by a lecturer) and a newly elected member of his campus academic senate. Haynes and thousands of other contingent faculty members, through organizing and solidarity, are building a more powerful contingent movement. As two-thirds of the faculty in higher education, contingent faculty must be part of the fight against the ongoing corporatization of higher education, the erosion of academic freedom, and the increasing loss of faculty control over their profession. Joe Berry has pointed out in his book Reclaiming the Ivory Tower that we need the “broadest unity possible,” because “it is the only source of our power to change anything.” The inclusion essential to that broad unity will not come from the goodwill of management but rather through direct opposition, primarily by unions, of contingency in higher education.

Joe Berry is a visiting labor education specialist in the School of Labor and Employment Relations at the University of Illinois at Urbana- Champaign and chair of the Chicago Coalition of Contingent Academic Labor. His e-mail address is joeberry@illinois.edu. Elizabeth Hoffman, a lecturer in English at California State University, Long Beach, is a statewide officer of the California Faculty Association and a member of the AAUP’s national Council. Her e-mail address is ehoffman@csulb.edu.

Comment on this article.

Comments:

That label “problematic” at the end of the list of contextual features jumps out at me in its ambiguity.  Given the whole article, I assume the problem is that contingent faculty without job security would be too easily manipulated to participate in governance.  It’s not that I exactly disagree with this, but since I’ve been a University Senator at Rutgers for the past 5 of my 30 contingent years, I’ve been struck by the extent to which tenured (not just tenure-track) faculty kow-tow to an administrative viewpoint once presented.  Actually, let me correct that.  I’ve been struck by the extent to which tenured faculty wait for the administrative viewpoint in order to rubber stamp it.  Why is this?  It can’t be lack of job security if they’re tenured.  Can all those egotists be that anxious for approval?  Can such an elite class of independent thinkers really be waiting to be told where they stand?  My guess is that they still seek perqs that only the good graces of the administration can bring, and that happens with or without job security.  Elsewhere in the labor movement, activists haven’t waited for job security in order to speak up and most contingent faculty who form unions don’t do it by keeping silent.  There is nothing contradictory between union activism and participation in governance – many unionized institutions have activists doing both.  While we continue to struggle to improve job security for contingents, it would be great if tenured faculty would step forward more, setting the example of what can be accomplished when you speak up.  

Karen T.