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The Centrality of Contingent Faculty to Academe’s Future
The issues surrounding contingent faculty are at the heart of what the academy is about and where it is headed.
By Gary Rhoades
The future of the academic profession is connected to the working conditions of contingent faculty. So is the academy’s future. And the future of both is connected to the activities of faculty organizations at the national and state levels, the work of local bargaining units and chapters, and the actions of individual contingent faculty members. Contingent faculty members—particularly part-timers, who make up the largest proportion of contingent professors—have been a key part of the academic labor movement’s resurgence. The AAUP, the American Federation of Teachers (AFT), and the National Education Association (NEA) have come to recognize their significance in relation to tenure-track faculty and as a focal point for organizing.
At first, the three major faculty organizations focused their attention mainly on the issues of part-time faculty—only later was the more inclusive term “contingent” adopted. The participation and expertise of contingent faculty have invigorated the AAUP, the AFT, and the NEA. Basic issues of unjust treatment of employees and underinvestment in higher education—dramatized by the working conditions of contingent, and particularly part-time, faculty members—have strengthened the organizations’campaigns.
The Web sites of the AAUP, the AFT, and the NEA highlight contingent faculty. The AAUP’s site identifies contingency as a key issue in higher education. The AFT’s Higher Education Program refers to the exploitation of contingent faculty as a major feature of the political attack on public higher education, and it has a “hot topic” link to the “academic staffing crisis.” The NEA’s Higher Education Program features its report on contingent faculty.
In addition, each organization has issued reports relevant to contingent faculty members. The AFT published Standards of Good Practice in the Employment of Part-Time/Adjunct Faculty in 2002 and Standards of Good Practice in the Employment of Full-Time Non-Tenure-Track Faculty in 2005. The NEA produced The NEA and Contingent Academic Workers in Higher Education in 2007, which follows up on a 2002 policy statement, NEA Higher Education Policy on Part-Time and Temporary Faculty. In 2003, the AAUP adopted a policy statement titled Contingent Appointments and the Academic Profession; in 2006, the Association adopted a new regulation on part-time appointments as part of its Recommended Institutional Regulations on Academic Freedom and Tenure and issued the Contingent Faculty Index 2006. In 2008, it published a report on accreditation standards and part-time faculty.
All three faculty groups are involved in national and statewide campaigns to ensure the rights of contingent faculty and encourage investment in more tenure-track positions. For all three, the challenge is to avoid pitting faculty members against one another—tenure-track and tenured faculty against contingent professors, part-time faculty against full-time contingent faculty, or graduate student employees against contingent or tenure-track and tenured professors. And all three have called for limits on the numbers of contingent faculty, seeing academe’s future as dependent on a growing tenure-eligible workforce.
The challenge in establishing those limits is to obtain provisions enabling the positions of qualified contingent faculty members to be converted into tenure-eligible appointments (and part-time positions into full time). Such provisions are difficult to negotiate; good examples of conversion language appear in the collective bargaining agreements of two of the largest locals in the country—the Professional Staff Congress (joint AFT/AAUP) at the City University of New York and the California Faculty Association (joint NEA/AAUP) in the California State University system.
New Ways to Grow Stronger
There should not be a cumulative disadvantage to being employed in a contingent position, which permits academics to gain experience and demonstrate competence. At the individual level, such a disadvantage is unfair. At the collective level, it is also socially unjust. It compromises opportunities for women, who hold disproportionate numbers of contingent, particularly part-time, positions, and for Hispanic and African American faculty, who hold slightly more part-time than full-time positions.
So we must imagine new ways to strengthen the academic profession that validate the work, expertise, and qualifications of colleagues in contingent positions. Otherwise we devalue academic work, particularly in the core activity of teaching, and accede to the prevailing policy perspective that suggests we cannot afford a full-time, tenure-track, autonomous faculty.
An important source of creativity is contingent faculty members themselves, who have increasingly organized at the local level and developed significant networks of their own. A prominent example is the Coalition of Contingent Academic Labor (COCAL), established within the past decade. Described on its Web site as “a loose network of activists involved in contingent faculty issues,” COCAL organizes a biennial national conference, the eighth of which took place in 2008. Other networks exist on the state (California and Oregon, for example) and metropolitan (Boston, Chicago) levels.
Contingent faculty activists have identified new strategies for negotiating employees’ rights. One strategy has involved organizing across several institutions, because individual contingent faculty members often work at more than one college or university; some contingent activists have promoted organizing throughout an entire metropolitan area. Another strategy has been to secure unemployment benefits for contingent faculty (see the article by Beverly Stewart elsewhere in this issue).
A June 2008 decision of the Indiana Supreme Court affirmed the potential of such an approach. The court ruled in favor of William LaFief, a contingent faculty member who filed a claim for unemployment benefits. The court held that although LaFief was employed on a one-year contract, his unemployment was not voluntary, and he therefore had a right to unemployment benefits. If state law does not support such a claim, faculty can work to change that. In a related vein, contingent faculty activists in the community colleges of Washington worked successfully through the state courts to get increased equity in benefits.
Part of a Larger Whole
The issues surrounding contingent, and particularly part-time,faculty are central to understanding the postindustrial, knowledge-based economy. The circumstances of contingent faculty match the working conditions of many other employees. The prevailing neoliberal public policy agenda holds that job security is a thing of the past, health and retirement benefits are increasingly unaffordable perks, and the need to be “responsive” to “the market” requires managerial “flexibility.” Indeed, the working conditions of contingent faculty highlight the steady erosion of key rights obtained for employees a century ago by a national labor movement and employment legislation. The situation of contingent faculty thus provides an opportunity for all faculty groups to connect better with other employees in and outside the academy.
A central lesson to be learned from the efforts of contingent faculty members is that collective bargaining is not the only tactic that can enhance working conditions. Contingent professors have also become influential in disciplinary associations as well as nonunionized bodies, such as the advocacy chapters of the AAUP, which are particularly important at independent colleges and universities.
The Coalition on the Academic Workforce, established in 1997, reflects the importance of disciplinary associations. It is made up of seventeen disciplinary associations in the social sciences, humanities, and arts, as well as the AAUP and the Association of American Colleges and Universities. It supports better working conditions for contingent faculty, evaluates the short- and long-term consequences for society and the public good of changes in the academic workforce, and promotes ways to solve the problems created by inappropriate use of contingent appointments.
The centrality of contingent faculty goes beyond their rising numbers (most faculty members are now contingent). They have increasingly become an object of study—numerous scholarly books by higher education researchers have addressed issues of contingency over the past ten years, including Roger G. Baldwin and Jay L. Chronister’s Teaching Without Tenure; Martin J. Finkelstein, Robert K. Seal, and Jack H. Schuster’s The New Academic Generation; Finkelstein and Schuster’s The American Faculty; and my own Managed Professionals. And contingent faculty members have increasingly developed and contributed to scholarly outlets. They are becoming central to the conversation about academe.
Their centrality is reflected in the broad cross-section of institutional types in which they work and have been organized. Part-time faculty are found in significant numbers in all types of institutions, although their numbers are greatest in the community college sector, where they make up roughly two-thirds of faculty. Contingent, and particularly part-time, faculty have been significant to the growth in faculty unionization. They have provided important gains in sectors, such as private institutions and elite research universities, that have historically been difficult to organize. Examples include the Part-Time Faculty Association (NEA) at Columbia College, a private institution in Chicago, and the Lecturers’ Employee Organization (AFT) at the University of Michigan, Dearborn, a branch campus of an elite research university.
Mostly, however, contingent faculty are critically important to academe because the issues surrounding them are at the heart of what the academy is about and where it is headed. As I explain below, these issues afford faculty associations an opportunity to challenge the public discourse and the managerial patterns that are shaping the academy in ways that could help to advance academic freedom and put faculty at the center of decision making about education, quality, standards, and the academy’s future.
Threat to Academic Freedom
In the May–June 2008 issue of Academe, the AAUP’s Committee A on Academic Freedom and Tenure reported on the case of a contingent faculty member, which led the AAUP to put the University of New Haven administration on its censure list. The faculty member was dismissed after eight years as a full-time, non-tenure-track lecturer at the university. She had previously been a part-time instructor there for six years. Apart from the vitally important issues of lack of academic due process, which Committee A and the AAUP addressed thoughtfully, the case also clarifies and challenges two narratives that have been used to criticize faculty members.
Public discourse about accountability has repeatedly called, first, for faculty members to focus more on the quality of undergraduate education and, second, to be more responsive to “the market.” The case of the University of New Haven lecturer offers the possibility of inverting these narratives in ways that call academic managers and institutions into account for practices that subordinate quality standards to market considerations.
The lecturer’s case involved a series of student complaints over the course of several years. Most of them had to do with her insistence on standards of student behavior (class attendance), commitment (completion of readings), and ethics (avoidance of plagiarism). Not only did university administrators fail to follow the AAUP’s and their own institution’s procedures in handling these complaints, they also adopted the view that student complaints were evidence of a problem with the faculty member, not with the students. They asserted that she should have been more understanding of and responsive to students’ behaviors and needs.
In the context of a discourse about students being customers who should be better served, the New Haven administrators seem to have adopted the stance that the customer needs to be accommodated. At least in some cases, quality seems to be reduced to the lowest common denominator of mollifying students, even those not attending class, not doing thereadings, and plagiarizing others’ work.
Such a stance makes some sense if one looks at the student primarily as a customer paying a high tuition and as a potential donor. It makes sense if one views students principally in terms of their economic relationships with institutions, giving a particular cast to the term “student centered.” And in a time of “academic capitalism and the new economy,” as my colleague Sheila Slaughter and I argue, in our 2004 book by that name, that is how many academic administrators are regarding students (and corporate employers). That stance is a threat to quality. And it suggests that we need to be concerned about a different conception of accountability, one in which we hold institutions, academic managers, and ourselves accountable for engaging in activities mainly for their educational benefits to students and social benefits to society rather than for their economic benefits to the institution.
The New Haven lecturer’s perspective, different from that of the administrators, was that of a teacher who believes that students do not simply need to have information delivered to them in “learner-centered” ways that would win their favor, but that they should be educated, socialized, and taught. She acted as a teacher who believes that students have to be accountable for their behaviors. And in maintaining ethical and academic standards that she presumably felt she had the academic freedom to employ, she risked (and lost) her faculty position. Her case addresses the perniciousness of an academy driven by the logic of the market. And it calls for a different level of accountability from that being discussed by university managers or in the legislative and commission reports of national and state policy makers.
For faculty associations, one of the most important goals is to secure for contingent faculty improved safeguards of academic due process. But it is also worth questioning the discursive logic that influences the academy’s direction and the working conditions and lives of contingent faculty. And it is worth challenging our current directions in ways that speak to a larger vision of professors and of higher education and its role in our society. Contingent faculty members are central to academe’s future because prevailing logics of the market can confuse accountability with accession to any and all “customer” demands; faculty organizations can instead take the opportunity to hold academic managers and institutions accountable according to educational and professional logics of faculty that speak to quality. Contingent faculty, like their tenure-track and tenured colleagues, constitute and create vitally important intellectual, cultural, and social resources and capital for our country. If our profession, the academy, and society are to realize more fully the benefits of this workforce, we must invest in them, and we must support and protect their academic freedom to conduct their work creatively.
Gary Rhoades is professor of higher education and director of the Center for the Study of Higher Education at the University of Arizona. In January 2009, he will take office as general secretary of the AAUP. His e-mail address is grhoades@email.arizona.edu.
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