Part-Time Thoughts

• Having So Many Contingent Faculty Diminishes the Overall Quality of Teaching and Learning

  3 Comments
  26 Dec 2009 /  AAUP, AFT, FACE, NEA, academic associations, part-time faculty, politics, research
  Before you huff and puff at me, I want to say that it the title of this piece comes from the Executive Director of the Modern Language Association, Rosemary Feal, and not me. She said it to a reporter from the New York Times who wrote a piece on December 18th about the outlook for graduates in the humanities. To paraphrase the article, perhaps those with graduate degrees in foreign languages, literatures, humanities and English would have a better chance of supporting themselves by turning to lives of crime rather than expecting to find a tenure-line job in higher education. Just please remember the old addage: “If you can’t do the time, don’t do the crime.” That being said, identity theft, pick pocketing and taking candy from babies which can later be sold for a profit on eBay should be fields that could interest future Master’s and Ph.D. holders.

  This is from the New York Times piece:

  To make matters worse, the share of tenure-track jobs available has been shrinking. Tenure-track positions for assistant professors made up 53 percent of the English jobs advertised and 48.5 percent of those in foreign languages. From 1997 until recently, the group said, 55 percent to 65 percent of the advertised positions were tenure-track jobs. And since part-time adjunct positions are less likely than those for tenure-track jobs to be listed with the language association, the overall share of faculty members being hired for tenure-track jobs is probably smaller than the survey indicates.

  Ms. Feal said the trend toward hiring adjunct faculty members rather than permanent tenure-track professors had been going for about three decades, but was more pronounced than ever, as a growing number of struggling colleges and universities hired by the course or by the semester — usually paying little, and providing no benefits.

  “Having so many contingent faculty diminishes the overall quality of teaching and learning,” she said. “The individual course might be great, but you can’t expect temporary hires to do the kind of curricular planning it takes to maintain a successful department.” 

  I have just one word for Ms. Rosemary Feal: bollocks. Of course you can expect temporary hires to do curricular planning. Why? Because first of all temporary hires already do course planning. If, in fact, departments don’t require temporary hires to do curricular planning, it’s the administrators in the department, and not the temps in the department who are then responsible for any and all issues with respect to the quality of teaching and learning in said departments. 

  However, here’s the real issue. No study to date has linked the “quality” of teaching and learning to the extensive use of adjunct faculty. Hell, no one can really agree completely on what “quality” teaching is for the heaven’s sake. The AFT started the propaganda campaign when their leaders had to think of something to say to various state legislators to pry loose the millions and millions of dollars the AFT wants to fund its boondoogle FACE. So, starting with Dr. William Scheuerman when he was still the UUP union leader, he went before the New York State legislature and started the rumor that J. Edgar Hoover was a cross-dresser, and part-time faculty were lovely people whose existence within higher education was systematically destroying undergraduate education. 

  If the New Faculty Majority group does not work to dispel this bold-faced lie, it will be a miscarriage of justice of epic proportions. However, as more and more union members move into “advisory” and leadership positions within the New Faculty Majority, such unsubstantiated and damning statements will, most likely, be printed over and over again in newspapers across the United States. The New Faculty Majority will not answer the lies, alas, with the truth about who non-tenured faculty really are.

  The good news is that, really, no one cares that contingent faculty “diminish” the overall quality of teaching and learning, because of the financial benefits associated with the exploitation of temporary faculty. There are just as many administrators quoted in just as many newspapers touting the competency of their respective colleges’ contingent faculty. The AFT, NEA, AAUP and Rosemary Feal can all shout from the highest mountain top, but colleges and universities all over this country will continue to employ large numbers of temporary faculty.

  The job market for graduates in the humanities is in the crapper. Shouldn’t Rosemary Feal be pushing for reductions in the  number of graduate students accepted into Ph.D. programs? Shouldn’t she be pushing for mandatory retirement for tenure-line faculty at age 65? There are so many reasons that the humanities job market is a disaster. For Feal to zero in on the high number of non-tenured faculty as one of the main reasons shows her biases and that the MLA’s leadership has bought into the flawed notion that overall student retention and graduation rates have fallen because of the increased reliance on non-tenured faculty. Student retention is impacted by student preparation more than anything else. 

  Rosemary Feal has had a big glass of the Kool-aid mixed up by AFT leaders to differentiate between tenured and non-tenured faculty. (Tenured faculty are good for student retention and success. Non-tenured faculty are bad for student retention and success.) It’s the plot of a cheap dime store novel. It’s not a plot I would expect the Executive Director of the Modern Language Association to play a part in, much less quote as literary brilliance.

  Tags: AAUP, AFT, Dr. William Scheuerman, FACE, Modern Language Association, NEA, New York Times, Rosemary Feal, UUP

• AAUP Calls for Placing Adjuncts On Tenure-Track

  1 Comment
  07 Dec 2009 /  AAUP, part-time faculty, research, tenure
  Did pigs just fly overhead? Is hell freezing over? Check out this post from the Law Librarian blog:

  AAUP Calls for Placing Adjunct Faculty on Tenure Track

  In Conversion of Appointments to the Tenure Track (2009), the AAUP calls for placing adjunct faculty on tenure track. From the Report:

  With respect to faculty tenure, the Association holds to the following tenets:

  • With the exception of brief special appointments, all full-time faculty appointments should be either probationary or tenured.
  • The probationary period should not exceed seven years.
  • Tenure can be granted at any professional rank (or without rank). The AAUP does not equate tenure with a particular faculty rank or status.
  • Tenure-line positions can be either part or full time.
  • Faculty appointments, including part-time appointments in most cases, should incorporate all aspects of university life and the full range of faculty responsibilities.
  • Termination or nonrenewal of an appointment requires affordance of requisite academic due process.
  • Faculty should enjoy economic security and, in the case of part-time faculty, equitable compensation.

  What’s the odds of this happening? See Jim Levy’s post on Adjunct Law Prof Blog for details. Levy writes, “I’m pretty skeptical myself that any significant change in job security for adjuncts is on the way in the near term.  On the other hand, as a legal writing professor, I’ve seen incredibly improvements in working conditions within our field in the past 10 years.  So there’s already a template for contingent faculty to follow.”

  You can read the AAUP report here.

  Tags: AAUP, Add new tag, Jim Levy, Law Librarian blog, Part-Time Thoughts, tenure

• Research Built on a House of Cards

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  09 Nov 2009 /  research
  John C. Cross and Edie Goldenberg have a new book out about adjuncts. Their book is titled The Ominous Rise of Adjuncts, and the authors have thrown a monkey into the wrench that is the debate concerning both the rise in the number of adjunct faculty, and much of the recent “research” trumpeted by the education unions that “document” the impacts of this “ominous rise.” Put simply, Cross and Goldenberg suggest that there are scads of adjuncts in higher education, because the left hand in higher education hasn’t a clue about what the right hand is doing. Furthermore, it wouldn’t be prudent to use any word other than “scads” to describe the number of adjuncts, because colleges and universities aren’t actually tracking the numbers of faculty off the tenure-track. It’s a hypothesis that gives rise to some chilling thoughts. You see, if we believe Cross and Goldenberg, administrators routinely invent data about the number of non-tenured faculty employed at their institutions, and then send the data dutifully along to the Department of Education. This revelation makes Bernie Madoff’s decades-long little deception look, well, benign.

  Enter the AFT, NEA and AAUP stage right.

  If Cross and Goldeberg are right, for the past decade the education unions have been using that same invented data from the Department of Education to “educate” America about the “ominous rise” in the number of non-tenured faculty. Education unions have used the invented data to devise organizing drives, political campaigns, political strategies, PR spin, and as a justification for greasing untold numbers of political palms with tens of millions in campaign donations and gifts to convince legislators in states like California, Oregon, Washington, Rhode Island, Vermont, West Virginia and Connecticut that higher education needs legislation to appropriate hundreds of millions of tax dollars so that 75 percent of undergraduate classes are taught by tenure-track faculty.

  I don’t know whether to laugh or to cry.

  The Cross-Goldenberg book, you see, casts doubt on most everything that has been published about adjuncts over the past decades—papers, theses, dissertations, books and studies that have been based on, or included faculty employment data compiled by, the Department of Education. This includes official statements by academic professional associations. AAUP’s raison d’etre these days is the salvation of tenure through the vilification of  “fast food faculty” based, in no small part, on the “documented” growth-in-numbers tracked by Department of Education faculty surveys. Cross and Goldenberg conclude that political strategies, such as the AAUP’s, are based on the “fictitious precision” of the data used to document increases in the number of non-tenured faculty.

  Lies. Damn lies. And statistics. Mark Twain was right all along. 

  Another observation made by the authors is that when college administrators actually do get a handle on how many non-tenured faculty teach at their institutions, perhaps the iconic “poor, exploited” adjunct may end up an endangered species. Cross and Goldenberg, over the course of their research, found that adjuncts at the schools they visited did have offices, benefits and a “reasonable degree of job security,” as the authors write. There’s one important catch, naturally (isn’t there always?). Over the course of researching their book, Cross and Goldenberg flitted among the campuses of a dozen “elite” universities, including Duke and Northwestern. Thus, basing conclusions about the treatment of non-tenured faculty by studying non-tenured faculty on campuses of “elite” institutions is much like about extrapolating facts about overall student-preparedness by studying the undergraduates accepted at Harvard and Yale.

  Here’s the bottom line, and it’s a tragic and pathetic indictment of the multi-trillion dollar industry that is American higher education. Cross and Goldenberg write that no one can hope to even begin to address the issues surrounding the employment of oodles of non-tenured faculty until administrators study what non-tenured faculty are doing on their campuses.

  The Department of Education posed a simple question: How many non-tenured faculty teach on your campus?

  Instead of figuring out how to answer the question accurately and honestly, college administrators “fudged” their results. If these college administrators were our students, and we discovered a similar swindle, we’d fail them for sloppy research and for passing off invented data as accurate.

  So where do we go from here?

  For starters, once we’re those of us who’ve published writings based on the Department of Education’s suspect data can stop screaming and ripping out our hair, we need to realize that we may have been presented with a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. Thanks to Cross and Goldenberg, it’s possible that colleges all over the country will design and launch self-studies, and as a result we’ll finally discover exactly how large the adjunct faculty nation really is. In turn, adjunct activists, administrators, unions and legislators will use that data, as my younger son is fond of saying, for good and not evil—to actually benefit non-tenured faculty and the students they teach.

   

  Tags: Edie Goldenberg, John C. Cross, The Ominous Rise of Adjuncts

• Ask A Silly Question. Get A Silly Answer.

  2 Comments
  24 Jun 2009 /  part-time faculty, politics, research, teaching, tenure
  Here’s the question: Do full-time faculty members help students finish college? Kevin Carey, a Washington, DC think tank director, posed this question on the Chronicle’s Brainstorm blog. He tells the story of a panel discussion that focused on student success. At that panel, Dr. Cary Nelson, pointed out that colleges with the best student completion (aka graduation) rates are those that employ the fewest part-time faculty. Kevin Carey then points out an inconvenient truth, one which neither Nelson nor any other tenure advocate points out when spouting in public about the impact of non-tenured faculty on student retention and graduation rates.

  Carey writes: “There are some obvious correlation/causation issues to resolve here. Because full-time faculty members are more expensive than contingent faculty members, the colleges that tend to employ a lot of them tend to be wealthier than those that don’t. Wealthy colleges also tend to enroll a disproportionate number of wealthy, academically well-prepared students, who are more likely to complete college. So yes, colleges with stellar college graduation rates are more likely to hire full-time, well-credentialed, tenure-tack professors to teach. But they’re also more likely to have lots and lots of other things that also independently improve graduation rates. Resource advantages in higher education tend to be highly co-linear.”

  Well, yes. Harvard student preparedness is just slightly better than that of students accepted into, say, open enrollment programs at other four-year colleges. Furthermore, Harvard uses non-tenured faculty called preceptors. These non-tenured faculty get five years to teach at Harvard and then they’re out. No exceptions. They earn close to $50K per year, and are supported by the university in many of the same ways full-time faculty are supported. Preceptors make up about 15 percent of the faculty at Harvard, and they teach, primarily, undergraduate courses.

  Then we have another inconvenient fact, student graduation rates are falling at public four-year colleges, where the minority of faculty teach off the tenure-track. P.D. Lesko wrote about this in a blog entry.

  If we want students to graduate, we have to make sure they are prepared to do the coursework, and make sure that we staff courses with the best prepared and most fully supported faculty, whether they be full- and part-time. As I’ve written before, the problem is with the way in which part-time faculty are hired, supervised, compensated and trained—the problem is with the system, not the type of faculty appointment. We don’t need more full-time faculty to guarantee student retention and success. We need a drastic overhaul of the hiring, training, evaluation and supervision methods currently used with the hundreds of thousands of non-tenured faculty who teach tens of millions of students each semester.

  Tags: Cary Nelson, graduation rates, Kevin Carey, student retention

• Mark Bauerlein Sucker Punches Adjunctizators

  4 Comments
  19 Feb 2009 /  research, teaching
  Evidently, while adjuncts are busy being too busy to ever meet with their students after class, too undedicated to students and jobs to care about it, too busy destroying the fiber of undergraduate education, we’re also contributing to the destruction of the humanities, as well. According to Mark Bauerlein, a professor at Emory University, in his “Brainstorm” piece posted on The Chronicle of Higher Education’s web site, the “…best defense against funding cuts, ‘corporatization,’ ‘vocation-ization,’ adjunctization, and other anti-humanities measures is the undergraduate classroom, particularly the general-education classroom.”

  In essence, Bauerlein suggests humanities faculty stop gazing at their navels and realize that humanities is about teaching undergraduates to read and write. I have just one question: This is breaking news? Maybe to Bauerlein and his navel-gazing fellow Humanities professor pals. 

  Just whom does Bauerlein think has been teaching America’s undergraduates to read critically and write over the last 20 years? Whom does he think has been teaching American undergraduates all over the country? The Adjunctizators of course—we teach the majority of the country’s 18 million undergraduate students, and half of all the courses offered at the 4,000 colleges and universities currently up and running. In case you blinked and missed his book launch party, or passed right by his YouTube interviews, Bauerlein’s the author of  The Dumbest Generation, published in 2008. The Los Angeles Times review describes Bauerlein’s book as offering up an “…ultimate doomsday scenario — of a dull and self-absorbed new generation of citizens falling prey to demagoguery and brazen power grabs.”

  Hmm….dull and self-absorbed people falling prey to demagoguery and brazen power grabs? Sounds like a description of certain tenured and tenure-line people we might know and love (to see lose their jobs).

  So, this tenured professor writes a book in which he calls an entire generation of the students whom we teach ignorant, dull and self-absorbed, then turns around and suggests that the answer to what ails the Humanities is to put more people like himself in the undergraduate classrooms around town? This is a purely rhetorical question, because I think we both know that Mark Bauerlein isn’t into teaching introductory courses and undergraduates.

  If Americans can’t seem to understand what the hell tenured academics in the Humanities actually do, well, let me join them in their puzzlement and point to Bauerlein as a perfect example of the problem. Aside from writing his recent book, Bauerlein’s job, according to his college web page blurb, entails writing for “popular periodicals such as The Wall Street Journal, The Weekly Standard, The Washington Post, TLS, and Chronicle of Higher Education.” He teaches, too. His courses are not listed on his college web page blurb. There’s no evidence that navel-gazing….er….publishing in “popular periodicals” is not Mark Bauerlein’s primary job.

  So I called his department. This semester, he’s teaching a graduate-level course titled, “The Teaching of Composition.” Last semester he taught a single class, as well: “Honors Seminar in Literary Interpretation.” So, while Bauerlein suggests that more tenured and tenure-line faculty need to get back into the undergraduate classroom and teach writing, evidently, he doesn’t need to do it himself.

  Just imagine for a moment the average American who reads that Bauerlein has taught one class each semester this year. That person might not understand how Bauerlein gets a full-time salary. Hells bells! I don’t understand how he earns six figures every year. To our neighbors, we’d have to point out that Bauerlein also writes for “popular periodicals.” That’s something the average American can get behind, right? Letters to the editor! Bauerlein gets paid to sit around and write letters to the editor, maybe some short op-ed pieces, offers up advice to his blog readers on The Chronicle’s web site, and perhaps a book review or two.

  I have a radical idea: Let’s have Mark Bauerlein explain to my neighbor who works two jobs to send her kids to college why he teaches 4 hours every week and earns three times the median income for a family of four.  Frankly, I can’t explain that to anyone. Is it because he has a Ph.D.? Is it because he publishes in “popular periodicals?” Is it because he’s a snappy dresser? How can someone who writes a book titled The Dumbest Generation, and teaches a class about teaching composition write that “…humanities professors should abandon the flattering characterization of themselves as cutting-edge thinkers, creators of new knowledge, theorists of the barricade, and the like. Instead, they should assume more modest role of training 19-year-olds to read and write, and acquainting them with literary traditions.” 

  I’ve got some news for Mark Bauerlein and his ilk: The role of training 19-year-olds to read and write is taken already by 700,000 non-tenured faculty, who are doing splendidly, thanks. There is, however, an opening for someone to explain to the American people what  Humanities professors do for a living. In plain English. Here’s a tip: it’s probably not very bright to begin by calling all of them dumb.

  Tags: Emory University, Mark Bauerlein, The Dumbest Generation

• Let’s Talk Turkey (After Thanksgiving)

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  04 Dec 2008 /  AAUP, AFT, FACE, NEA, contracts, organizing, part-time faculty, research, unions
  The AFT recently came out with a new study that concludes part-time faculty are teaching a majority of the courses offered at public colleges and universities in the U.S. I suppose the surprise, then, has to do with the use of part-time faculty at 4-year institutions. We all know that community colleges have been loaded down with part-time faculty for at least two decades. Now the kicker: the AFT’s study is titled “Reversing Course: The Troubled State of Academic Staffing and a Path Forward.”

  Maybe I’m so wrong that when I re-read this a decade hence, I will look back at my own naivete and chuckle. However, AFT higher education leaders (right along with the AAUP’s president Dr. Cary Nelson) are baying at the full moon. Yes, Virginia, adjuncts teach the majority of courses in public colleges in the United States. Yes, my Sweet, temporary faculty now comprise the majority of faculty in the United States. At the moment, 52 percent of college faculty teach part-time and 70 percent of the nation’s 1.2 million college faculty teach off the tenure-track.

  The InsideHigherEd piece I read about the study quotes an AFT usual suspect, Barbara Bowen, president of PSC-CUNY. IHE founder and writer Scott Jaschik needs to consider the sources he uses. Barbara Bowen, and other PSC-CUNY leaders, recently quashed a revolt among its 8,000 part-time members with tactics that included refusing part-time members access to the union’s email list. The part-timers were up in arms over a proposed contract that included the ever-so-popular, yet clearly evil “equal percentage raise.” Oh, and when there was a chance that the AFT’s boondoggle FACE program would be funded by the New York State Assembly (pre-Spitzer’s spin with a call girl), New York State officials who suggested adjunct faculty currently teaching at CUNY be hired for the funded full-time positions, met with “resistance” on the part of PSC-CUNY union officials, as well as the union’s full-time faculty members. 

  Back to the study. So, here’s my observation: the trend of using huge numbers of part-time faculty to teach the majority of courses at public colleges and universities in the United States will never be reversed. First of all, even with the minimal institutional support, non-existent job security and poor supervision they’re afforded part-timers they do just as good a job in the classroom as their full-time colleagues. Second of all, the trillions simply don’t exist in our state and federal budgets to reverse the trend. As a result, every dollar the education unions spend on political influence, programs, staff and studies aimed at reversing the trend are being wasted in the name of chuckle-headed policy and poor leadership.

  Well, FACE and union activists might argue that higher education deserves more funding, and with more funding colleges and universities will, yes, funnel millions into hiring more full-time faculty. Sure they will.  If colleges won’t allocate money now to the hiring of more full-time, tenure-stream faculty, what evidence do we have that just giving them more money will result in a reversal of the current staffing trends? In 2006, states spent a total of $191 billion dollars to enroll a scant 5.9 percent of our country’s adult population. The majority of those people were taught by part-timers and taught very competently, thank you very much.

  With significantly more money at their disposal, there’s scant evidence to lead us to conclude that college administrators would spend it any differently than they do at the moment. This is what makes the notion of “reversing” the staffing trends in higher education wrong-headed. 

  So, where should the AFT, AAUP and NEA be plowing their tens of millions of dollars in higher education money? They ought to plow it into actually organizing temporary faculty. The education unions ought to work to legislate pro-rata pay and benefits for temporary college faculty through a national (ideally) platform. Union leaders should start tomorrow making sure that their locals leaders stop screwing their part-time faculty members by negotiating “equal percentage” raises, and by classifying full-time faculty who teach overload as part-time faculty.

  When, oh, when will the AAUP, AFT and NEA make the institutional support of part-time faculty a national priority? I predict it will happen sometime in the next decade after FACE falls flat on its rear-end.

  Tags: AAUP, AFT, FACE, NEA, staffing

• “Keep Adjuncts Away From Intro. Courses” Trumpets The National Enquirer (Chronicle) of Higher Education

  2 Comments
  02 Apr 2008 /  research, teaching
  In this week’s Chronicle of Higher Education, there is an article written by David Glenn and headlined “Keep Adjuncts Away From Intro Courses, Report Says.” The editor of The Chronicle of Higher Education, Jeffrey Selingo, obviously saw nothing wrong with the offensive title. The piece is about research by a University of North Carolina faculty member and a UCLA graduate student. The researchers found: “….an unhappy pattern: If gatekeeper courses were taught by part-time adjuncts, lecturers, or postdoctoral fellows (which occurred from 8 percent to 22 percent of the time, depending on the institution), those students were significantly less likely to return for their sophomore years. That pattern was consistent across all four universities.”

  Later in the piece, David Glenn writes, “The two scholars both emphasized that they don’t mean to criticize adjuncts. ‘We’re not blaming part-time faculty,’ Ms. Jaeger said during the panel discussion. “We’re actually putting the onus on institutions of higher education to support part-time faculty.’” So why isn’t the headline of the piece “Poor Institutional Support of Part-time Faculty and Lecturers Adversely Impacts Student Retention?”

  I suppose they did it for the same reason in the National Enquirer the headlines are often about whether ________________ (fill in the blank) is gay, two-headed babies, and aliens who spirit away men just as they are about the finally get the damn storm windows down. I am just sorry to see the National Enquirer (Chronicle) of Higher Education fall victim to sensationalist headline writing. One would think people who focus on higher education could tell the difference between the results of research and the cause of the problem. If any mainstream newspaper had printed the headline, I’d just assume ignorance of how higher education works. I can make no such assumption of the people who work at The Chronicle of Higher Education. This was a smear of part-time faculty and lecturers, as opposed to putting the spotlight where it belongs: directly on the administrators who provide little or no institutional support to the part-time faculty and lecturers who teach the freshmen at their institutions.

  One upside to the article, it quotes the researchers as suggesting that adjuncts and lecturers should be employed to teach “smaller, advanced courses, rather than to large, introductory courses populated with first-year students who might be vulnerable to dropping out.” Sooooooooo, I am looking forward to teaching the 12 student Shakespeare seminar next semester. Not to be too unkind, I am also looking forward to watching the tenured colleague, who resembles an aged John D. Rockefeller, and whose office is next to mine, drag his briefcase down the hallway. I am sure he will gladly grade the 100 essays written by the students in the Introduction to American Literature course I have taught over the past three years.

  I can ‘t decide who’s crazier, Lady MacBeth or the researchers who suggested adjuncts be assigned to teach seminar courses. Well, I’ll let you know after I get the storm windows out.

  Tags: Chronicle of Higher Education, gatekeeper courses, part-time faculty, teaching

• Better Late Than Never

  5 Comments
  28 Feb 2008 /  part-time faculty, research
  I have just started reading Dr. Mark Bousquet’s book How The University Works: Higher Education and the Low-Wage Nation. I found Cary Nelson’s introduction slightly out of touch with reality. Dr. Nelson, a self-professed “tenured radical,” and President of the AAUP, has long spoken out on behalf of part-time faculty to his credit and ours! However, I found his introduction to How The University Works contradictory and filled with myths about who teaches part-time.

  In fact, Dr. Bousquet falls into the same bad trap. His book is full of myths about who part-time faculty are and what we do. I am finding it somewhat frustrating, but I am soldiering on. The most controversial proposition Dr. Bousquet puts forth is that there is plenty of work for all of the Ph.D.s who graduate. In other words, there is not an over-production of Ph.D.s, but rather an under-production of jobs within higher education.

  I wish I could quote his research, but unfortunately I am finding many of his suppositions unsupported by research, but rather reliant on what I imagine must be his personal experience. Some of the research he does use to support his conclusions is somewhat outdated, in one instance coming from as far back as 1992.

  Anyone else out there reading his book?!?

  Tags: How The University Works: Higher Education and the Low-, Mark Bousquet

• Where in Canada is Waldo teaching?

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  14 Dec 2007 /  Canadian part-timers, adjuncts worldwide, research
  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.

  I discovered in the press releases archived that CUPE represents part-timers and contract faculty at Mount Saint Vincent University, Trent University, Saint Mary’s University (200 part-timers there), 250 sessional lecturers at the University of Saskatchewan, full-time temporary lecturers at the University of Quebec, contract lecturers at Carleton University, and contract faculty at York University. Any research on the use of part-time faculty? (Please see “Nothing, nada, zip, zilch, not a blessed thing” comment about CAUT above.)

  I know there are Canadian education union national representatives, like CUPE’s Derek Blackadder, who pay particular attention to the plight of Canada’s sessionals. However, without a major study which examines the use of part-time, sessional and contract faculty at Canadian universities, it will be impossible to identify employment trends, and how those trends have impacted, are impacting and will impact Canadian higher education.

  Where in Canada is Waldo teaching? I am sorry to have to say no one knows for sure.

  Remind me to send a thank you note the next time the AFT, NEA and/or AAUP updates their research on the use of part-time faculty in U.S. universities.

  Tags: CAUT, CUPE, part-time faculty, sessional faculty

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