December 31st 2007

Full-Time Faculty Folly

In Israel, as I wrote earlier this month, tenured and tenure-line faculty have been on strike since the first day of classes. The strike, now in its eighth week, isn't producing quite the effect the faculty union intended. A quick look at this piece from the student newspaper at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem will illustrate exactly why an eight week strike by all of the country's senior college faculty has not paralyzed higher education in the country.

While the senior faculty lobby for higher pay and irk the Israeli public, who don't understand why the profs. just don't go back to work already, the adjunct faculty, who teach 40 percent of the classes at Israel's five universities, and whom the faculty union chose to not represent, are still teaching.

There are so many adjunct faculty teaching at Israel's universities, the unionized faculty strike can't stop their employers from offering courses. Excluding the adjuncts from the union was, one must conclude, a very stupid move on the part of some very smart people. Perhaps when the strike is settled, union leaders will organize the part-time faculty, as well, and then all faculty can strike in support of higher pay and benefits for Israel's adjuncts.

Yeah. Yeah. I'm holding my breath, too.

Posted By Part-Time T. at 10:00 AM

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December 27th 2007

Delusions of Grandeur in New York

I read today in a piece published in the New York Sun that New York state officials are recommending that, "New York's public universities mine their ranks of adjunct faculty for the 2000 new full-time faculty the universities are seeking to hire by 2013." The reaction from tenured faculty? In a word: resistance.

Can we do some basic math? There are 87 campuses where the 2000 new full-time faculty will be hired. That's 23, count 'em, TWENTY-THREE, new faculty per campus. That not even one new faculty member per department per campus. According to the New York Sun article, tenured faculty want to conduct national searches. Again, from the article, "Many full-time faculty at City University of New York and State University of New York schools said giving preference to the adjunct faculty in their departments would restrict who they could hire and would not necessarily strengthen their departments."

Back to Math 101. We are talking about hiring a single part-time faculty member in a single department. To imply that a single full-time faculty member in a department of, say, 350 faculty members could significantly impact the overall quality of an entire department is a huge load of unsharpened #2 pencils.

The real question is not whether New York's Public universities should mine their own ranks, and promote prepared and qualified part-time faculty into the tenure-line slots, but how there can be so many tenured and tenure-line faculty suffering from delusions of grandeur employed in the same state. Once more from the article: "Many faculty members said their departments would have no problem recruiting top talent from across the globe." What?!? Across the globe?!?

There aren't 2000 faculty superstars total across the globe much less faculty superstars just chomping at the bit to leave, say, the Sorbonne to teach at SUNY Buffalo, or other research campuses, where officials indicate the majority of the new hires would go.

Posted By Part-Time T. at 12:50 AM

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December 24th 2007

NLRB Restricts Email Use

According to an article published in The New York Times, the National Labor Relations Board has ruled that employers have the right to keep workers from using company email to send out union-related messages.

The ruling has been called "a major setback to the nation's labor unions." Today, according to the articles in The Times unions represent just 12 percent of the nation's workers. This is down from 35 percent in the 1950s.

Posted By Part-Time T. at 6:05 PM

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December 14th 2007

Where in Canada is Waldo teaching?

I was reading the other day about the recent Canadian Council on Learning's report on post-secondary education in the Toronto Globe and Mail. It was almost too perfect that at the very end of the Globe and Mail story there was this paragraph:
In the area of better collection of information, the report notes that since 1999 there has been very little data available on the community college system, including graduation numbers and faculty. It notes there also is little known about the use of part-time faculty at universities.

Let me digress for a moment, and say that I am sometimes, and not-so-secretly, irked, irritated and annoyed at the AFT, NEA and AAUP for their somewhat anemic efforts on behalf of their part-time faculty members. However, all three education unions have commissioned major studies about the use of part-time faculty in higher education.

So, when I read that the Canadian Council's study concludes that "little is known about the use of part-time faculty at universities, I surfed over to the websites of both of the labor unions on Canada that represent thousands and thousands of part-time faculty. Over at CAUT (Canadian Associaiton of University Teachers), I downloaded the CAUT Almanac of Post-Secondary Education 2007, and paid particular attention to the section titled "Academic Staff." Not a single mention of part-time faculty. Nothing, nada, zip, zilch, not a blessed thing.

Never one to give up easily, I looked at the union's list of "Issues and Campaigns." CAUT is for women, civil liberties, better funding, international human rights and solidarity. CAUT is for "equity," too. Before you get all excited, it's not that kind of equity, as in equal pay for part-time faculty. By this time I was muttering: "Where in the H.E. Double Hockey Sticks" does CAUT stand on the issue of part-time faculty?"

There was not a single shred of research on CAUT's webpage about part-time faculty. So, it was adieu CAUT. I surfed over to CUPE (Canadian Union of Public Employees). Surely the good trade unionists at CUPE had some facts and figures about the use of the part-time and sessional college faculty whom the union represents. The "topics" page was a nice little resource that had plenty of headings that would have lended themselves to the inclusion of part-time faculty data. I zeroed in on the heading.

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December 13th 2007

Yada Yada Yada

I adore the blog RateYourStudents.com. It's cheeky, and yet the writers never take themselves or their subject matter too seriously. A browse through their recent posts brought me face-to-face with a list of the top four complaints from their readers. My favorite (and their number ONE complaint):
What is this, AdjunctNation or something? I'm sick of hearing an adjunct's view of the academy. I know they're working hard, driving the miles, yada yada yada. It seems sometimes that these people teaching 6-12 classes a term - not to mention all their driving around - have far more time on their hands than you'd imagine. Their experience teaching certainly has validity, but this site should focus on the work of traditional faculty.

Yada. Yada. Yada. Indeed. Someone is feeling unheard and out-numbered, and I am sitting here laughing like a jackal.

Excellent observation, though: it would appear that those people teaching 6-12 classes a term and driving 120000 miles a term have way more time on their hands than you'd imagine. It's obviously all about the proliferation of WiFi.

Pull into the drive through window at Starbuck's to get your morning coffee, boot up the laptop, login to their WiFi, surf over to RateMyStudents and shoot off a quick posting. One hour later, refill your Starbuck's Imperial gallon coffee cup at the on campus branch (free with an initial purchase, of course....clever, yes?), flip open the laptop, jump on the Starbuck's network, surf over to RateMyStudents.com, comment on the first posting you shot off earlier that morning.

Pick up lunch at the local Soup Kitchen, crack open the old laptop and, low and behold, an open network labelled "MadameMamiesLingerie" pops up in your list of available networks. Thank the Good Lord that Madame Mamie pays more attention to lacey knickers than WEP passwords for her router. Surf over to RateMyStudents.com and see who has responded to your first two posts. Not enough response. You post again.

It's not that adjuncts have more time on their hands. Hell, I bet there is someone out there who has graded papers while driving between schools. Everyone knows that part-timers are really good at multi-tasking. Yada. Yada. Yada.

Posted By Part-Time T. at 8:00 AM

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December 10th 2007

Baruch Prez Plays Little League....

According to an article in The Ticker, Dr. Kathleen Waldron scored a $10,735 raise to bring her annual salary to $249,285.

Nice.

Of course, compared to University of Michigan President Dr. Mary Sue Coleman's salary of $743,151, Waldron's salary is, well, Little League. Then again, so is Dr. Waldron's decision to reduce the pay of her part-time faculty by 1/3rd during finals week.

Ticker writer Rob Reale writes:
Baruch's position is that a final exam lasts two hours, so instead of paying for a standard week of three credit hours, the salary is reduced by 1/3 to represent the "actual" number of hours the adjunct professor works. For the first fourteen weeks of the semester, adjuncts are paid for three hours per week per class, but in the 15th week, they are paid for two.

Nice.

Kathleen Waldron is playing hardball over a whopping $40,000, which is the amount a Baruch employee estimates it would cost her to pay all of the college's adjuncts for the one extra hour. She needs to get her head in the game, and keep her eye on the ball. Then, maybe, she can move up to the big leagues, and her institution's part-time faculty can stop feeling "nickel and dimed."

Posted By Part-Time T. at 9:00 AM

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December 7th 2007

Jaysus H.

I often wonder how leaders of religious colleges and universities justify employing and underpaying part-time and adjunct faculty. At Catholic colleges, maybe it's all those freebies, you know, monks, priests and nuns who teach courses in return for a drafty cell, three squares a day, and for senior faculty, a subscription to the L'Osservatore Romano, the Vatican rag.

According to a piece in the Los Angeles Loyolan, the student newspaper of Loyola Marymount University of Los Angeles, two part-time faculty recently got the proverbial professional excommunication. The two professors, Dr. Jeanne and Dr. Christopher Curry, are a married couple.

Not a shock, of course. Adjuncts get booted every semester at some colleges. However, this was the real deal. They were sacked for real. According to the article, "Dr. Jeffrey L. Wilson, acting chair of the philosophy department, isolated poor evaluations as the primary reason for the decision." Ok. A couple of duds tossed out of the Garden of Eden that is Loyola Marymount University's Department of Philosophy.

Just one little, tiny, teeny, weenie problem. BOTH had been teaching for 21 years at the college without a hitch. That's 21 years, yes. Two DECADES plus a year. It gets better: Dr. Jeanne Curry has cancer. The good Catholics at Marymount Loyola fired an employee with cancer who'd taught there for two decades after she got poor teaching evals. once.

Did the Drs. Curry forget to drop their donation envelopes into the basket at Noon Mass? The Jesuits are a notoriously tough bunch, and who says the Baptists over at Liberty University or the Methodists at SMU in Dallas are doing any better?

We're talking a vengeful God here, sisters and brothers, and some good Catholic college administrators who'd better be buried in light-weight frocks and mitres, baby, because where they're going when they die it's hot, hot, hot.

Posted By Part-Time T. at 8:00 AM

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December 3rd 2007

Tradition! "Junior Faculty" Keep Higher Ed. in Israel Afloat

According to an editorial in the paper Haaretz, a nationwide strike by 4500 senior faculty has entered its seventh week. As faculty are wont to do, the senior lecturers want salaries that keep up with the cost of living and inflation. The paper lambasts the striking faculty, calling their strike a result of "obtuseness and irresponsibility."

Meanwhile, Israeli higher education is being kept afloat by so-called "junior faculty." The paper describes them as "...people, who account for 47 percent of all lecturers in institutions of higher learning, [and who] are employed as subcontractors and have no rights. They will not enjoy the fruits of the strike, even if it is a rousing success." Sound familiar?

It is the final paragraph of the editorial that is most damning:
It may be assumed that the strike will not end that way, but rather with a compromise on the proposed 5 percent increase. The senior staff, now making excuses for what they say was the bad agreement they signed in 2001, by citing inflationary and security pressures, will not be able to blame anyone but themselves: for not using their status to wage an uncompromising struggle against the decline in higher education; for allowing the institutions to be managed by outmoded methods; for not protesting when hiring was frozen; for the shameful exploitation of underlings; and - most of all - for going out on an inexplicable strike that seem to be about concerns over their own individual situation.

Posted By Part-Time T. at 3:35 PM

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