ARCHIVE: January 2008
January 30th 2008
Hiring Like You Mean It
Craig Smith over at the AFT published a blog entry recently that talked about making the process for hiring part-time faculty as rigorous as that used when conducting searches for tenure line faculty. Before you scream, hear me out. Right now, part-time faculty are perceived and treated as completely dispensable. Why? Partially, because it's a buyer's market. There are way too many people with graduate degrees out there who have visions of sugar plums and who think they are different, and eventually they'll find a full-time job. You know who you are. Admit it. No one's looking. One of the most dangerous aspects of having above average intelligence, is thinking you're smarter than other people. That's a blog entry for another day.
The other reason part-timers are treated like so many plastic forks is that, like plastic forks, an adjunct is easy to acquire. Talk to people who have lost a piece of fine silver or china sometime. They're fanatical. They won't rest until they've found the perfect replacement. Fine silver and china are costly, special, and dare I say it, cherished beyond their monetary value. Departments value some (not all, of course) full-time faculty like this. Finding those faculty was a time-consuming, exhaustive and expensive process that involved not only faculty on the hiring committee, but the dean of the college. Lots of people make an investment of time when searching out a full-time faculty colleague.
What if hiring part-timers were handled similarly? What if not only the hiring committee members, but the dean invested time and effort in choosing the part-time faculty candidates? Part-timers would be vetted by their colleagues-to-be, and seen as superior candidates. Such candidates would be valued as colleagues, if only by the hiring committee members who selected them, as well as the dean who oked their appointments. Right now, part-timers are hired like the teenagers who work at McDonald's. Not so shockingly, they are paid like burger flippers, and treated like fast-food intellectuals.
Me? I want to be seen by my colleagues as the filet mignon of the part-timers in my department. I am sick to death of being seen as just another piece of rump roast.
Posted By Part-Time T. at 8:00 AM
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January 28th 2008
What's Good for the Goose, is Good for the Junior Lecturer
I have written several times about the senior lecturers' strike in Israel. It ended after 90 days. According to this article in the Jerusalem Post The lecturers didn't get the 25 percent pay raise they demanded, but did land a healthy 15.3 percent raise effective immediately, as well as a "future wage erosion mechanism of 1.5% per year from 2007-2015," according to the newspaper.
As for the "junior faculty" (the temporary faculty who make up 40 percent of the Israeli professorate) who taught during the strike, the new agreement didn't include them. This is the second time that the senior lecturers have left their colleagues twisting in the wind. In 1994, evidently, after another lengthy strike, they signed an agreement which excluded their junior faculty colleagues.
I'll be watching this situation closely, of course. According to this piece in the Jerusalem Post, junior lecturers in Israel are demanding "equal rights," and have threatened to strike if their demands concerning pay and job security are not dealt with by the Ministry of Education.
Posted By Part-Time T. at 8:00 PM
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January 24th 2008
UUP Yours––Some Part-timers Unhappy with Tentative Union Contract
New York's United University Professions (UUP) recently reached a tentative agreement on behalf of its members. UUP is affiliated with the New York State United Teachers and the American Federation of Teachers, AFL-CIO. Evidently, leaders mailed this FAQ sheet about the tentative contract to its membership of some 34,000 (8,000 part-timers).
Some of the UUP's part-time faculty are unhappy with the tentative pact. The current contract guarantees minimum salaries to all of the UUP's members except the part-time faculty. Part-time faculty UUP members are left to negotiate for themselves on a campus-by-campus basis. This doesn't change under the proposed agreement.
A further look at the UUP FAQ shows that so-called "location stipends"--extra money to faculty who live and teach in areas of the state where the cost-of-living is higher--go to full-time faculty only. For someone living in Queens, for instance, the location stipend will boost her/his pay by an extra $3,026.
Finally, according to the FAQ, union leaders negotiated the same percentage salary increases for part-timers as they did for full-timers (13.6 percent over the life of the multi-year agreement). The problem with doing this, of course, is that part-time salaries are a fraction of those guaranteed in the proposed contract as minimums payable to the union's full-time faculty members. In essence, UUP leaders negotiated a salary increase in dollars for full-time faculty that amounts to ten times what a part-time faculty member will receive. In order for the salary increases to have been truly equal, UUP officials would have negotiated part-time faculty a much larger percentage increase. Negotiating an equal percentage guarantees that UUP's part-time members will never reach salary parity with the union's full-time faculty members. This is a common trick union leaders pull on their part-time members. If the percentages negotiated are the same, well then, who can complain?
This was done by union officials regardless of the fact that, in 2006, part-time faculty within the UUP formed the Coalition for Contingent Faculty (CCF). The CCF's webpage contains this bit of info:"Among the specific proposals that CCF has put forward are... proposals that were unanimously endorsed on September 30, 2006, by the UUP’s statewide Part-Time Concerns Committee and by the union’s full Delegate Assembly. The first of those proposals approved by UUP members was:
'Be it resolved, that the Part-Time Concerns Committee recommends the following to the Negotiations Committee for inclusion in the package of demands for the next Agreement between UUP and the State of New York:
1. Include a system of statewide salary minima for all part-time employees based on the negotiated minima for full-time employees....'"
So, UUP leaders not only ignored the will of the Delegate Assembly, and did not negotiate minimum salaries for their 8000 part-time members, they negotiated a significantly smaller raise for the part-timers.
Part-timers should tell UUP leaders loudly and clearly that their 8,000 colleagues represented by UUP deserve better than this. Join me and send an email to UUP Acting Vice President for Academics, Dr. Kenneth D. Kallio, and tell him UUP's part-time faculty don't deserve raises that are a fraction of those negotiated for full-timers. UUP's Acting President, Dr. Frederick Floss is an economist. Go figure, Fred.
Posted By Part-Time T. at 8:00 PM
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January 21st 2008
Contingently Yours
I read a blog posting by a snappish prof. who said he hated the term "contingent" faculty. So, I went to the dictionary to see what I could see. Here is the definition for "contingent":
con·tin·gent (kn-tnjnt)
adjective
1. Liable to occur but not with certainty; possible: "All salaries are reckoned on contingent as well as on actual services" Ralph Waldo Emerson.
2. Dependent on conditions or occurrences not yet established; conditional: arms sales contingent on the approval of Congress. See Synonyms at dependent.
3. Happening by chance or accident; fortuitous. See Synonyms at accidental.
4. Logic True only under certain conditions; not necessarily or universally true: a contingent proposition.
noun
1. An event or condition that is likely but not inevitable.
2. A share or quota, as of troops, contributed to a general effort.
3. A representative group forming part of an assemblage.
Here is the definition of "adjunct":
ad·junct (jngkt)
noun
1. Something attached to another in a dependent or subordinate position. See Synonyms at appendage.
2. A person associated with another in a subordinate or auxiliary capacity.
3. Grammar A clause or phrase added to a sentence that, while not essential to the sentence's structure, amplifies its meaning, such as for several hours in We waited for several hours.
4. Logic A nonessential attribute of a thing.
adjective
1. Added or connected in a subordinate or auxiliary capacity: an adjunct clause.
2. Attached to a faculty or staff in a temporary or auxiliary capacity: an adjunct professor of history.
I have to agree and say that I find "contingent" actually worse than "adjunct." What about "sessional" and "casual" as terms to describe faculty who are not on the tenure-track? Junior lecturers? Associate faculty? Readers? Minor league faculty? The "Apprentice faculty" (who are always getting fired, of course....). Oh, and what about "Survivor faculty?" There's a poll on the AdjunctNation website that asks part-time faculty if they hide their status from their students, and a shocking number of people said they did.
Are people hiding their status because of the lack of a cracklin' good job title? The truth is, of course, that there is no good term yet to describe what the work of the part-time faculty member has evolved into. Perhaps, when higher education comes to terms with the fact that there is a two-tier faculty, those within higher education will come up with a better term to describe who those faculty are and what they do.
Posted By Part-Time T. at 8:00 AM
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January 17th 2008
What's Up With Pace and NYSUT? WTF?!?
Call me naive, but I just don't understand how university officials can be such, well, jerks. I suppose it's my general faith in the goodness of humans that gets me into this spot every time. I had the same reaction when the president and his posse over at George Washington University did everything except claim insanity to keep from having to bargain a contract with the union formed by the 1,200 part-time faculty at the university affiliated with the SEIU union. Officials at GW protested, sued, appealed, stalled and generally acted like no one on campus understood labor law, much less taught the subject. And they did it for years. Yes, years.
Am I the only one who reads that, rolls my eyes, and mutters "WTF?" I think not.
So, here I am, once again, rolling my eyes and muttering "WTF!!" At Pace University, in New York, for the past three years, university officials have refused to bargain a first contract with the union, affiliated with NYSUT, and which represents about 1,000 part-time faculty members. I had this crazy idea that we all could help lend a bit of support to the Pace adjuncts. Let's send our questions and messages of support right to the people in charge at Pace. Keep the messages clean, please; profanity is the mark of a limited vocabulary and stunted intelligence. But heck! Why not help out Pace's part-timers by putting a little pressure on the right people?
A quick trip to the Pace website was very instructive. I popped into the "Pace in the News" page. As far as the dispute between administration and the part-timers union goes, evidently no news is good news. Maybe some of you could drop an email to Pace's Executive Director of Public Relations, Chris Cory, and ask why there's nothing about the union's problems getting administrators to the bargaining table on the page. Nothing on the "Press Release" page either. Hmm....
While we're at it, why not send along encouragement to Pace President Dr. Stephen J. Friedman urging him to get the right people to the bargaining table with the authority to really negotiate a first contract with the part-timer's union?
I also think the state union with which the Pace adjuncts are affiliated is responsible for the fact that their members at Pace are being treated like dirt by their employer. NYSUT has 585,000 members, and the best leaders could do was to have Santa go to Pace to urge university officials to "show some respect" for the college's unionists. NYSUT president Richard C. Iannuzzi needs to get serious. NYSUT is affiliated with both the American Federation of Teachers, as well as the National Education Association. That's a powerhouse combination of over 3 million unionized teachers, folks.
According to NYSUT's website: "Iannuzzi is a vice president of the American Federation of Teachers and vice president of the New York State AFL-CIO. He also serves as an AFT delegate to the national AFL-CIO and as co-chair of the New York State Labor-Religion Coalition. As NYSUT president, Iannuzzi heads the largest state federation in the AFT." And the best Iannuzzi and NYSUT can do for its 1000 members at Pace is to send a guy in a Santa suit? Interestingly, there is absolutely no contact information for Iannuzzi on NYSUT's website. Otherwise, I'd suggest sending him an email, as well. Evidently, that's not how NYSUT works. There is no contact information for any of the NYSUT leaders.
WTF?!?
Posted By Part-Time T. at 4:25 PM
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January 16th 2008
Israeli Lecturers Dodge a Bullet (For Now)
I have been writing about the lecturers' strike in Israel over the course of the past few weeks. The strike, now in its 84th day, is approaching a critical point. On January 14th, an Israeli judge, according to an article in the Jerusalem Post refused to issue a back-to-work order for the striking lecturers. The court was petitioned to issue the order by Bar-Ilan University President Professor Moshe Kaveh, head of the Council of University Presidents (CUP). After the petition was denied, Kaveh called for university heads to meet on January 14th to decide whether or not to cancel the remainder of the Fall 2008 semester.
On January 21st, the court will reconsider CUP's petition and may, indeed, order the striking senior lecturers to go back to the classroom. Head of the Senior Lecturers Union, Professor Zvi Hacohen, head of the Senior Lecturers Union, told reporters after closing arguments were completed that if the court ordered them back to work, "as law abiding citizens, we would obey." Some professors might choose to resign, of course, rather than be ordered back to the classroom.
About 40 percent of the college faculty teaching at Israel's universities are, so-called, "junior faculty," or temporary profs. They have been teaching since the first day of the strike called by the Senior Lecturers Union, which represents only full-time faculty.
I had two thoughts:
This is from a January 14, 2008 editorial in Haaretz:
...[S]erious problems are developing with respect to higher education and its future. Among these are the reduction in positions at the universities, the declining focus on humanities and research, the closure of departments that are not considered profitable, and failed management that has brought about a worrisome erosion in the level of the institutions in question. One of the most disquieting problems of all involves the employment of "external" staff - junior-level lecturers to whom the universities do not have positions to offer, who work for low pay and under conditions that do not allow them to develop professionally.
Obviously, by choosing to strike long-term over their own salary rates, the senior lecturers have burned through quite a bit of their credibility and public support. I am not saying faculty shouldn't be well compensated. I am saying that, like Wall Street, the Average Joe who pays taxes, owns a house, and sends his kids to university, can bear Bears and Bulls, but not Pigs. One thing is certain, long-term strikes that are focused primarily on salary issues for people who already earn above average wages, is very very risky business. So, for that matter, is dodging bullets, and not seeming to notice or care that the "junior faculty" whom your work with are terribly underpaid and have no job security.
Posted By Part-Time T. at 11:27 AM
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January 15th 2008
Lecturers in Israel Dodge a Bullet (For Now)
Israeli lecturers just dodged a bullet. Yesterday, according to an article in the Jerusalem Post, the head of the Council of University Presidents (CUP) asked a court to issue a injunction to force the country's lecturers to go back to work, and end their 84 day strike. The judge refused the motion made by the head of the CUP, Bar-Ilan University President Professor Moshe Kaveh, but said he would reconsider the motion on January 21st.
If the full-time lecturers do not return to their classrooms soon, university presidents may decide to cancel the first semester of the 2008 academic year. As I have written in earlier blog entries, 40 percent of the faculty at Israeli universities are part-time temporary. These "junior lecturers," as they are referred to, are not represented by the striking Senior Lecturers Union, and have been holding classes since the first day of the Fall semester.
The head of the Senior Lecturers Union, Professor Zvi Hacohen, said that if the court ordered them back into the classroom, the lecturers would respect the court's decision though, of course, some lecturers might resign rather than return to teaching.
Two thoughts:
This is from a January 14th editorial, from the newspaper Haaretz:
...[S]erious problems are developing with respect to higher education and its future. Among these are the reduction in positions at the universities, the declining focus on humanities and research, the closure of departments that are not considered profitable, and failed management that has brought about a worrisome erosion in the level of the institutions in question. One of the most disquieting problems of all involves the employment of "external" staff - junior-level lecturers to whom the universities do not have positions to offer, who work for low pay and under conditions that do not allow them to develop professionally.
The striking senior lecturers, however, have not focused their strike on any issue other than their own salaries, making them appear self-involved and short-sighted. In doing so, they've damaged their own credibility, and quite possibly, alienated the Israeli public. To be sure, demanding higher pay for only themselves, while "junior lecturers" struggle under the inequity that is temporary employment in higher education is just plain dumb.
Posted By Part-Time T. at 8:00 AM
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January 14th 2008
Beevis and Calvin O. Butts (head) III
Can the Stupidity Police please visit Calvin Butts and put him under the hot lights for a bit?!? Calvin O. Butts III, president of SUNY Old Westbury, was quoted in an article in Newsday as saying,
"If you have adjuncts, you never know if you will get the same adjuncts from year to year."
Oh, really? And I wonder why that is, Cal. Reading your comment, one would think adjuncts are just a bunch of flakes who have no desire for job security. Yeah, some part-timers are flakey. They get hired because hiring processes for adjuncts at some schools are just ridiculously lax.
However, as president of SUNY Old Westbury, Butts could practically guarantee he'd have the same adjuncts from semester-to-semester. What would it take? Why, multi-year contracts, that's what! SUNY Old Westbury employs a small number of "visiting instructors" who, according to the president of their college, can't really be trusted to be reliable. (Yes. You should be rolling your eyes and making that pfffffff sound!)
Life as a college president just stinks sometimes, but not because it's impossible to know whether adjunct faculty will return from year-to-year. That problem, I'm afraid, is one that has a simple and easy solution.
And to all of you adjuncts reading this: can you please try to be less unreliable so that the president of your college can sleep soundly knowing which of you are going to teach from year-to-year?
Posted By Part-Time T. at 8:00 AM
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January 11th 2008
The Similarities Grow...
Is it me, or are The Chronicle of Higher Education and InsideHigherEd.com looking more and more alike and covering more and more of the same news? A quick check today found zero stories about part-time faculty on either webpage. Ok. For CHE, this is nothing new. When IHE started, there were definitely more pieces about part-time faculty issues. Today, both have stories about the big NCAA conference, as well as state appropriations. On IHE's site, the state appropriations header and teaser text are:
State Appropriations Are Up ... for Now Jan. 11
Spending on colleges grew 7.5% for 2008, the largest percentage hike in a decade, but deficits in many states suggest tighter years are ahead. New California budget plan worries educators.
On CHE's webpage, the the state appropriations header and teaser text are:
State Appropriations for Higher Education See Biggest Jump in Decades
Total appropriations from state tax revenue climbed 7.5 percent in the 2007-8 fiscal year, to $77.5-billion.
There are blogs on both sites, and we know that bloggers often cover the same materials, and today both IHE and CHE have pieces about letters of recommendation. No cartoon on CHE's webpage (yet). Adjunct Advocate cartoonist Matt Hall's work appears on IHE's webpage, but not his adjunct-centered cartoons.
Here's what IHE has to say about their website:
Inside Higher Ed is the online source for news, opinion and jobs for all of higher education. Whether you’re an adjunct or a vice president, a grad student or an eminence grise, we’ve got what you need to thrive in your job or find a better one: breaking news and feature stories, provocative daily commentary, areas for comment on every article, practical career columns, and a powerful suite of tools to help higher education professionals get jobs and colleges identify and hire employees.
So adjuncts can find what they need, huh? Hmm....On January 11th, obviously, what they didn't need was any news.
Maybe it's just that there's nothing newsworthy going on with adjuncts right now? Right...what with part-time faculty lockouts at universities in both eastern and western Canada, part-time faculty layoffs at Eastern Oregon University, (that was just one Google news search) that seems unlikely.
So what's the scoop at IHE? Are the trio of ex-CHE staffers who founded the website turning an editorial blind eye? A search of IHE's site going back two years came up with 51 news pieces using the term "part-time." Going back two years, I came up with about the same number of pieces in CHE. Know what? CHE editors don't consider adjuncts a significant part of their readership.
Bottom line is that I am sad to see IHE not more aggressively covering the life and times of 70 percent of the professorate. No big surprise, unfortunately. As it is frequently in higher education news coverage, dog bites man.
Posted By Part-Time T. at 8:00 AM
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January 10th 2008
Adjunct Advice
People are always ready to give advice. The truth is that giving advice is never as easy as it seems. I am willing to bet that somewhere in the mapping of the human DNA is the "advice gene." People who give bad advice have, maybe, a small nick in their advice gene. People who give great advice have inherited the ability from their ancestors. Greg Zobel falls into the latter category. His blog, sponsored by Bedford St. Martin's, is choc-a-block full of good advice.
So, take my advice and check out Zobel's very well done "Adjunct Advice" blog.
Posted By Part-Time T. at 8:00 PM
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January 8th 2008
The Single Biggest Threat...Bill Scheuerman's Own Members...
Call me nosy, but since there has been all this fuss over New York State's Higher Education Commission Preliminary Report, I thought I'd read it. Well, to be truthful, I entered the search term "part-time faculty" and jumped from entry to entry. I got a dozen matches for the search term, only three of which were related to part-time faculty.
Here's what the Commission had to say about the part-time faculty who teach on the 80+ campuses throughout the state (the bolding is mine, not the Commission's):
The Report is 74 pages long. Not once do any of the Chancellor's, college presidents, Commissioners of Education and union officials serving on the Commission conclude in their findings that a single dollar needs to be spent on increasing part-time faculty compensation, or implementing comprehensive faculty professional development programs. Why not? If the state legislature should allocate millions more to hire 2000 full-time faculty over five years, why not money for part-time faculty professional development?
A National Vice President of the American Federation of Teachers, and President of the United University Professions, a faculty union which represents thousands of part-time faculty, Mr. William Scheuerman, sat on the Commission.
Shortly before the Commission on which Mr. Scheuerman sat released its report, which concludes that the single biggest threat to higher education in New York is the employment of the part-time faculty represented by Mr. Scheuerman's UUP, the UUP released this little gem:
Seeking justice for often exploited part-time faculty is the goal of Campus Equity Week. United University Professions (UUP) is leading efforts on SUNY campuses to press the need for better pay and better recognition for adjunct faculty during Campus Equity Week that takes place between Oct. 29 and Nov. 2. UUP’s activities are part of a nationwide effort by UUP’s international affiliate, the American Federation of Teachers (AFT), happening at public and private campuses across the country.
“Our part-timers do a great job but receive much less pay for doing much of the same work performed by full-timers,” said UUP President and AFT Vice President William E. Scheuerman. “We call many of them roads scholars, since they often travel to work on several campuses just to cobble together a decent living. Part-timers deserve adequate compensation, and equal pay for equal work.”
Did the UUP sell out it's own part-time membership?
Posted By Part-Time T. at 8:00 AM
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January 6th 2008
Bucking the Trends
One frequently reads in the newspaper and magazine articles published about part-time faculty these days (many of which are authored by tenured or tenure-line faculty) that a major problem with the use of part-time faculty is their lack of commitment to the institutions at which they work. Well, ladies and gentlemen of the tenured professorate, let me introduce you to Michael Olds. Next April, his school is planning to honor him as the college’s Part-Time Faculty Member of the Year. He has taught at his college since 1983. Congratulations to Professor Olds.
This study, "Part-Time Faculty At Community Colleges: A National Profile," published in 1999, was conducted by the National Education Association. It it, author James Palmer writes,
Many part-time faculty members are longterm employees, despite their limited roles outside of the classroom. In Fall 1992, 20.1 percent and 22.9 percent of part-time faculty members at community colleges held their teaching assignments for 10 years or more and for five to nine years, respectively.
Any of you out there reading my blog long-time adjuncts? Care to blow your own horns? Go right ahead! I'd love to hear from you.
Posted By Part-Time T. at 4:02 PM
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Blog Archives
• What's Good for the Goose, is Good for the Junior Lecturer
• UUP Yours––Some Part-timers Unhappy with Tentative Union Contract
• What's Up With Pace and NYSUT? WTF?!?
• Israeli Lecturers Dodge a Bullet (For Now)
• Lecturers in Israel Dodge a Bullet (For Now)
• Beevis and Calvin O. Butts (head) III
• The Single Biggest Threat...Bill Scheuerman's Own Members...
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