Part-Time Thoughts

• I Can Help With That. Maybe.

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  17 Nov 2009 /  AFT, NEA, SEIU, organizing, part-time faculty, unions
  I participate in a city-wide politics email listserv in the town where I live. Recently, a woman posted a detailed message about what the group should do to reach a larger audience so as to stop preaching to the choir, as it were. The last three words of her email were classic: 

  “I’m not volunteering.”

  To me, her lack of leadership ability stood out for all to see.  

  At our house, when we want to tease each other about not taking responsibility for a task, we say with a chipper smile, “I can help with that.” Translation: “I ain’t gonna bust my chops by taking charge, but if you’ll take charge, then I can help with that. Maybe.” The “I can help with that,” syndrome is all too common. No one wants to lead anything, but if a leader—strong, true and charismatic—steps forward to lead the troops, well, there are lots of people who can “help with that.” Maybe.

  Does this hew and cry sound familiar? “Adjuncts need to have a nation-wide strike!!!” 

  How about this one?  “Adjuncts need a national union!!!” (Exclamation points are always included in these battle cries of the Adjunct Republic.)

  Both of these statements are true. What I can’t fathom, though, is from which corner of the world the Mahatma will arise to lead our nation’s 700,000 non-tenured faculty to independence and self-determination. AAUP’s Marc Bousquet, a full-time faculty member, frequently urges adjuncts in his blog to lead their own movement. Oddly, when the AAUP President appointed co-chairs of the union’s Committee on Part-time Faculty, he appointed Bousquet, who accepted the position. So not only must the Mahatma arise spontaneously, the Mahatma can’t even catch a break and get appointed a co-chair.

  Do you realize what it would take to launch a national union for adjunct faculty? Four IRS forms and a set of bylaws. The IRS has a web site, and you can get EIN (http://www.irs.gov/businesses/small/article/0,,id=98350,00.html) and TIN (http://www.irs.gov/businesses/small/international/article/0,,id=96696,00.html) numbers by phone. Forming and launching a national union wouldn’t be difficult. However, at the moment, there are several hundred thousand temporary faculty moaning, wringing their hands, and muttering “I can help with that.”  When one remembers that among these part-time faculty there are hundreds if not thousands with graduate degrees in labor relations, and who teach other people about advocacy and organizing, the situation begins to resemble opera buffa. I can imagine Carlo Goldoni penning the music to the comedic opera “Adjuncts Need a National Union!!!”

  Make no mistake: the Mahatma who steps up will find himself in a cat fight with the AFT, NEA and perhaps the AAUP, but when the dust settles, the adjunct union will grow, and eventually rake in the same hundreds of millions in union dues from affiliates that the NEA, SEIU and AFT bring in each year. Such a national adjunct union will change the face of higher education, as the union’s affiliates play tug o’ war with tenure-line and tenured faculty union affiliates for more equitable division of teaching duties, money, benefits and professional development funds.

  Today’s national higher education union leaders could help adjuncts within their unions break away and form a national union. Good idea, huh? It’s not mine. In Ontario, Canada, OPSEU’s President Smokey Thomas did just that for 10,500 part-timers. He and his OPSEU members formed and financed OPSEUCAT, currently led by part-timer Roger Courvette. Union leaders at NEA, AFT and even the AAUP could easily help a group of part-timers form a national union. AFT, NEA and AAUP could even allow part-time affiliates that wished to do so to migrate to the new union.  

  I had hoped the recent formation of the New Faculty Majority was the first step toward a national union for adjuncts, and then I read that the founders did not intend the group to replace existing unions, or engage in collective bargaining. The group’s initial launch, without a name, formalized agenda or clear focus, signals a long and arduous road to be traversed before any advocacy—adjunct or otherwise—may be expected.  

  Will the Mahatma arise? Yes, but I believe the person will come from outside of higher education. The Mahatma will not be any of the usual suspects, whose published essays and blog postings we read with relish and which cause us to post comments sprinkled liberally with exclamation points. When the Mahatma comes, will the hundreds of thousands of faculty who are currently under-employed in non-tenured positions “help with that?”

  Maybe.

  Tags: AAUP, AFT, Marc Bousquet, NEA, New Faculty Majority, OPSEU, Roger Courvette, SEIU, Smokey Thomas

• 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

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