Part-Time Thoughts

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.

There are a mere 40,800 college faculty in Canada, and 50-60 percent of them work off the tenure-track. According to a piece published in the Calgary Herald, the overuse of scads of perma-temp faculty in Canada is “coming to a boil.” Why? The rapid expansion of public employee unions and the fact that “these professors are asking for a bigger piece of the pie.”

The piece quotes the AFT-Washington funded study by Dr. Dan Jacoby in which he concludes that higher numbers of part-time faculty lead to lower graduation rates. Jacoby was then trotted out in front of the Washington State legislature to convince the politicians to give AFT-Washington money for the union’s FACE program. Jacoby testified that, “This should not be taken to mean that part-time faculty offer less quality, but it would be absurd to believe that working under the deplorable conditions they work under does not have an impact on the system.” 

Check out the article in the Herald. Part-timers at York University struck for 11 weeks to get a bigger slice of the pie. The unionized part-timers were forced back to work by provincial politicians who caved under pressure from unhappy constituents.

I am thinking about sending a letter to President Obama. In it, I will apply to run any bank of his choosing for $400,000 per year. Since adjuncts are used to having more than one job, I thought I might even apply to head two—maybe even three— banks. If I worked at three banks, that would mean a salary of $1.2 million per year. I’ll tell Mr. Obama to skip the driver and car for me, and that I can fly steerage class to just about anywhere on earth. As I see it, taxpayers will save hundreds of thousands of dollars every year by having me run a few banks. After all, it’s all about getting the right people into the right offices, right? 

On February 6th, American Federation of Teachers FACE Man Craig Smith wrote in his FACE Talk blog that, “AFT Oregon has worked with legislators in the Oregon House to file a wide-ranging piece of legislation pursuing the goals set forth in our FACE Campaign. House Bill 2557 directs institutions to establish plans for improving their ratios of full-time to part-time faculty at the institutional level ….” Smith goes on to mention that, “Leading the charge is former AFT member, Representative Michael Dembrow, who is now Vice Chair of the Oregon House Education Committee.” Dembrow is able to lead the charge, because last year, he ran for an open seat on the Oregon State Legislature. Before that, he was the president of the Portland Community College faculty union.

Was Michael Dembrow a friend to Oregon’s part-timers, I wondered? A quick trip over to the Portland Community College faculty union web site and contract answered my questions. After almost four decades of representation (the past 16 of them under Dembrow’s leadership), in 2008, the Portland Community College union negotiated health insurance coverage for the 1,200 part-time faculty (there are 600 full-timers). Well, for those part-timers who average a half-time load over three years. There’s a part-time salary “scale,” as well; ascending the scale resembles a game of Donkey Kong (for those who remember this diabolically difficult video game). To get from level 1 to level 7 entails working 2,000 contact hours (500 classes, or 125 years, at 4 courses per year), and earns that faculty member an eventual raise of about $170 per credit hour taught.

To move up a step on the full-time faculty schedule, a member must work three years. The full-timer who tops out on the salary schedule can expect to earn an additional $30,000 per year. Is there job security for part-timers, maybe, after three decades of representation? Dream on, Teen Queen. From PCC’s contract: “A temporary appointment may be terminated at the discretion of Management without review under the terms of this Agreement.” There’s not even equality in death: full-time faculty get five days of bereavement leave and part-timers get three days.

The PCC contract is Michael Dembrow’s legacy and it’s a legacy that oozes inequitable representation. Michael Dembrow, in short, did nothing extraordinary for the 1,200 part-time faculty whom he served all those years. I wish I could tell you how much he paid himself as President of the PCC local, but he never saw to it that his union filed the requisite financial disclosure forms with the U.S. Department of Labor.

Prior to running for office, in March 2007, Michael Dembrow testified in front of the Oregon Legislature in support of FACE and told the legislators this:

“Part-timers are generally not paid to be on campus other than to teach their courses, and in many cases they are off running to another job at another college or university (their combined annual teaching load often exceeds those of full-timers)….This practice has consequences. There is a growing body of literature that points to the harmful effects of over-using part-timers in your FACE packet you can find an annotated bibliography of some of them.”

Then we have the money trail. Michael Dembrow raised $167,748 to run for the open seat he was elected to. The average open seat candidate in Oregon raises $61,876 for a candidacy. So was Michael Dembrow, first-time political candidate, a fundraising savant? Not really. About 75 percent of Dembrow’s money came from just three donors: 

In 2008, Oregon Federation of Teachers donated $77,941 total to political candiates. ($38,441 to Dembrow, was the single largest contribution the union group made in 2008.) They contributed 22.92 percent of his money.

In 2008, the Oregon Education Association donated $227,605 total to political candiates. The Oregon Education Associaiton was the 3rd largest overall political contributor in the state. ($27,707 to Dembrow was the third largest contribution the union group made in 2008.) They contributed 16.22 percent of his money.

In 2008, SEIU Employees Local 503 donated $493,228  total to political candiates, making the organization the single largest political contributor in the entire state of Oregon. (SEIU donated $15,902 to Dembrow. It was the fourth largest contribution the union group made in 2008.)

Dembrow even scored a donation from his own union. In 2008, Portland Community College Faculty Federation gave $11,000 to political candidates. (The $10,000 to Dembrow was the single largest contribution union group made in 2008). They contributed 5.96 percent of his money.

It’s no small wonder Michael Dembrow decided to “lead the charge” for FACE in Oregon. The Oregon House Education Committee which Dembrow co-chairs, and which sponsored the current FACE legislation, is populated by six members of the House who received over $151,000 in campaign donations from faculty union groups in Oregon during 2008. 

Call me crazy, but wouldn’t it be a more effective use of $1,000,000 to just, well, spend it on professional development for part-time faculty in Oregon? Then again, once you get used to throwing around large sums of money here, there and everywhere, it’s probably pretty tough to stop.

Some people I know are under the impression that pay “parity” and pay “equity” mean the same thing. They’re wrong, of course. Those two words are not synonyms.
Here’s the definition of pay “parity”:
par·i·ty 1 (pr-t)
n. pl. par·i·ties

1. Equality, as in amount, status, or value.
[Latin parere, to give birth, bring forth; see per-1 in Indo-European roots + -ity.]
Put simply, it’s a system under which there is absolute equality. If you earn $100,000 for teaching four courses, and I teach one course, I get $25,000. No ifs, and or buts. We have pay parity. Pay “equity?” Now there’s a slippery slope. Equity is about “fairness,” and fairness, well, that leaves loads of room for interpretation. I can define fair to mean whatever I want so long as we both agree it’s fair. Think I’m crazy? Well, in California, when the labor unions got the state to dole out $57 million is equity pay to the state’s 38,000 part-timers, individual local leaders negotiated “equity.” You’d think they’d just negotiate equity at 100 percent, right? Wrong. At one California community college, equity for the purposes of distributing the state money, was defined as 58 percent of what a full-time faculty member earned.

Here’s the definition of pay “equity”:
n. eq·ui·ty 1
1. a: justice according to natural law or right ; specifically : freedom from bias or favoritism b:something that is equitable
[Middle English equite, from Anglo-French equité, from Latin aequitat-, aequitas, fromaequus equal, fair]

Now, answer me one question: Do you want pay parity, or do you want someone to negotiate pay equity on your behalf? And no, I’m not trying to irritate you with silly questions.
Equal pay for equal work: That is the definition of pay parity.

I predicted earlier in the month that the AFT’s FACE boondoggle would fade away in 2009. (If you don’t know about FACE, I’ve written about it here and here.) A few days later, AFT’s FACE man Craig Smith wrote about “The Future of FACE.” Smith writes: “So, for anyone who thinks that the FACE campaign is going to fade into the fiscal crisis sunset—they are dead wrong. We need a vigorous campaign now more than ever.” He also wrote, “[W]e need to continue to put forward legislation to address these issues as a vehicle for educating legislators, whether this is a full FACE bill or alternatives. The “alternatives” to the FACE prototype legislation provide some very interesting reading for part-timers. Here’s what AFT national leaders are suggesting to their state and local leaders: “The definition of pay equity for contingent instructors could be altered to reflect your perspective of what is feasible and the best definition of equity in your particular circumstances. (The full FACE bill leaves the definition of equity up to the institution.)”

Translation: FACE provides a license for union local leaders, and college administrators to negotiate pay equity for part-time faculty at 50 percent of what a full-timer earns and call it “equity.” It happened to those 1,400 part-timers in California. There are those reading this who will think that equity set at 50 percent is better than earning 40 percent of what a full-timer takes home for teaching the same course. Except that it’s not, really. It’s the twisted idea of some well fed, well paid, well pensioned unionist in Washington, DC that 50 percent is better than 40 percent. Getting paid half of what someone else does to do the exact same work is criminal any way you slice it. Having your union leaders suggest pay equity is a gain is an insult to the intelligence of those part-timers whom they “represent.”

That’s why FACE is all wrong for part-timers. The legislation has, all along, pushed pay equity over pay parity for the part-timers represented by union.

“Hell’s bells!” you say. “Why in the name of Albert Shanker aren’t the AFT’s higher education leaders pushing pay parity for part-time members?” As we are all fond of saying, “That’s an excellent question! Anyone? Anyone care to venture a guess?”

Here’s my guess: There are people in power within the education unions on both the national and state levels who believe firmly that part-time faculty are a danger to higher education and, as a result, ought to earn less than full-time, tenure-line faculty. In short, there are people within the union who want to, as Scrooge suggested, “reduce the surplus population” of part-timers. It’s that simple, because if AFT officials in Washington and at the state levels truly believed in parity, the term papers would really hit the fan, and maybe, just maybe, the 60,000 of part-time faculty represented by AFT would have a snowball’s chance in hell of earning equal pay for equal work.

The sad truth is that FACE, the precedents it sets, the testimony given by unionists (and part-time faculty) in favor of it, make it increasingly difficult for part-time faculty everywhere to argue in favor of pay parity for themselves. FACE supporters, after all, proudly testify to state legislators and the press that pay equity will do splendidly for part-timers, thanks very much.

Thanks, but no thanks. I want equal pay for equal work. Doesn’t everyone?

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.

Ever been struck by lightning? Ever won $1,000,000 bucks in the lottery? Ever had a tenure-track job handed to you? Hell’s Bells, then, you’re never standing in the wrong place; you’re never picking the sweet numbers; you don’t know the right people; and you didn’t come in second in the search for a tenure-line faculty job in the English Department at Green River Community College in Washington State.

In Washington State, there are 10,000 part-time faculty. As of March of 2008, AFT-Washington represented exactly 945 part-time faculty, and 519 quarter-time faculty. As of that same date, the union represented 1,783 tenure-line and tenured faculty members, members whom the union classifies at earning over $40K per year.

Adjunct Advocate bloggers have written about the American Federation of Teacher’s FACE initiative in Washington State here and here. Read up on it if you haven’t.

AFT blogger Phil Ray Jack writes about the drive to win FACE funding in his state in early-2008 here. To paraphrase, Phil Ray Jack told AFT blog readers that AFT Washington had won $500,000 “provided solely to convert classes taught by faculty employed in part-time positions to classes taught by faculty employed in full-time positions. Particular emphasis shall be placed upon increasing the number of full-time faculty….” Jack also writes in that same blog posting, “While we were able to get funding in at least the Senate budget, we lost most of the language that was intended to protect part-time faculty. There is a little good news, though. The budget language does specify that “the state board shall determine the distribution of these funds among the colleges in consultation with representatives of faculty unions.” Hopefully, we will be able to include ‘priority consideration of part-time faculty’ as a condition for receiving the funds.”

Let me translate that last part: AFT Washington union leaders helped decide to which of the state’s 34 community colleges the $500,000 would go. Seems fair, right? After all, the union fought for the money. Except, well, I’m somewhat naive where playing by the rules is concerned. I have this insane idea that fair is fair.

Our story continues….

The part-time faculty “priority hiring” language was never included in the legislation. According to Washington State officials from the Community College Council, union leaders were consulted, and the $500,000 was allocated to fund 20 positions on 20 campuses. Union leadership in Washington State consists of president, Sandra Schroeder, of whom we have written here and here.

Here’s the bunch in my bloomers about all of this. A memo from a VP on the Green River Community College campus went out to faculty saying that the FACE funded position would go to ESL, not English, Jack’s department. Further, there was no notification sent to the union’s other members teaching in the English department concerning the FACE-funded opening at Green River Community College. Finally, hiring Miss Idaho (second runner up) in a national search for a previously advertised full-time position for a suddenly-funded full-time position is something that the college has never done before. There is no language in the contract between the college and the faculty union that covers such situations. In fact, AFT-Washington officials have been quoted as seeing a need to address this issue through collective bargaining.

Phil Ray Jack is one of three part-time faculty members who sit on the 15-member AFT-Washington Executive Committee. He is the Vice President of the AFT-Washington’s COPE program, which oversees fund raising from union members for political purposes. Phil Ray Jack helped raise money for the campaign donations AFT Washington gave to the legislators who introduced the FACE legislation in 2007 and 2008. In February of 2008, Phil Ray Jack testified in favor of FACE before the Washington Senate Higher Education Committee. Finally, Jack is the president of the Green River Community College Faculty Union, a unified local.

In essence, the single AFT Washington FACE funded full-time tenure-track job awarded to Green River Community College was handed without a national search to the president of the faculty union, a union that only 10 percent of the school’s 300 part-time faculty have joined. What were the odds?

Well, to begin, the money was distributed to 58 percent of the community college campuses in the state. There was, then, roughly a 1 in 2 chance that Green River Community College would have received no FACE funding at all. Then, we had the 1 in 77 chance that the money would go to the English Department, where Jack teaches, as opposed to one of the other 76 departments at the college, or the ESOL Department where college leaders told faculty it would go. What about the part-timers in Jack’s own department. Would 6 out of the 25 who are employed by the English Department have applied for the FACE-funded job? He would have had a 1 in 6 chance of winning the post if only any of the part-time faculty whom he represents had been allowed to apply. How many hundreds of applications from among the part-timers state-wide/country-wide would have the English Department have received had it conducted a national search? In the end, Jack could have found himself competing with 150-200 applicants.

AFT Washington officials should come forward immediately with incontrovertible proof that Phil Ray Jack’s new tenure-track job wasn’t handed out under the table thanks to his seat on the AFT Washington Executive Council, his connections to union officials who decided to which campuses money would be allocated, and his public support of FACE in front of Washington legislature. What are the odds Sandra Schroeder and Green River Community College officials will do this?

The odds are much much better we’ll see AFT use Phil Ray Jack as the FACE Poster Boy around the country. After all, he is living proof that any and all part-time faculty represented by AFT can beat the odds and get a tenure-track teaching job thanks to FACE.

What are the odds? I just recently re-read Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley’s story about what happens when one breathes life into an artificial and corrupt creation.

Today, at InsideHigherEd.com, and on the AFT Face Talk blog, we have the makings of a bona fide tizzy. Ms. Margaret West lost her job as a part-time faculty member after 21 years of employment at Edmonds Community College in Washington State. Take a deep breath, and let’s unbunch our collective bloomers for a moment.

First of all, why did AFT leaders choose to be outraged about Margaret West? Was it because she is a union member with AFT Washington? AFT Washington represents about 1,500 faculty who hold part-time and quarter-time appointments. Many of them lost their jobs at the end of the semester. So why the outrage on behalf of Margaret West, and not on behalf of all of her fellow colleagues at Edmonds Community College who were let go, or for that matter, all of the other part-time faculty in Washington State who were let go?

Let me tell you a bit about Margaret West. She serves on the AFT Washington Committee on Contingent Faculty as a representative from her college. She taught English courses part-time, and was one of the lucky part-time faculty at Edmonds Community College who worked under “assurance of employment.” Under the terms of the union’s contract, the college was obligated to offer this kind of employment to only ten of the 320 part-time faculty employed by the college in a single year. Margaret West was one of those ten. The other 310 part-time faculty at Edmonds Community College were employed on a part-time quarterly basis; they were at will employees.

Last Fall, Keith Hoeller and his colleagues worked with a Washington State legislator to craft a piece of legislation that would have guaranteed all 10,000 part-time faculty in Washington State multi-semester contracts, such as the one Margaret West had for many years. Not a single member of the AFT Washington Committee on Contingent Faculty, including Margaret West, testified on behalf of Hoeller’s bill.

The outrage the AFT national Higher Education Group, through the Face Talk blog, is trying to whip up on behalf of Margaret West’s “plight” is disingenuous, at best. Here’s why. Her employer was able to dismiss her because her employer has a contract bargained by the AFT Edmonds union leaders that did not protect the jobs of the part-time faculty members in the local. After decades, at Edmonds Community College, the majority of the 320 part-time faculty are still contractually disposable. AFT Washington’s Committee on Contingent Faculty, not to mention the state leadership, walked away from an opportunity to support legislation which would have protected Margaret West’s job, as well as the jobs of 10,000 other part-time faculty. Finally, in 2001, AFT Washington worked to have a law passed that meant part-time faculty could collect unemployment insurance between semesters, but which also made the following language law:

“In the case of community and technical colleges assigned the standard industrial classification code 8222 or the North American industry classification system code 611210*, for services performed in a principal administrative, research, or instructional capacity, a person is presumed not to have reasonable assurance under an offer that is conditioned on enrollment, funding, or program changes.” In other words, unless included in the language of a union local’s contract, every part-time faculty member in Washington State on that day in 2001 lost any hope of having reasonable assurance of continued employment.

Margaret West will be able to collect unemployment thanks to her union, but in the 20 years it has represented her, her union never negotiated to protect her job so that she wouldn’t have to rely on unemployment! Now, the AFT national office wants to assign all of the blame to the employer for Margaret West’s lost teaching position. Worse still, we are supposed to jump to the conclusion that she was let go, because she was running for the office of union president. Again, thanks to West’s own weak union contract, as it applies to the part-time faculty, her employer does not have to explain or justify the reasons for refusing to renew her yearly appointment.

To be sure, losing one’s job is traumatic, and no one deserves to be treated disrespectfully by one’s employer. However, had Margaret West read her contract she would have understood that every clause which made it easy to dismiss a part-time faculty member—even the ten like her whom university officials were obligated to offer assurances of employment—were not being represented with equal vigor by the union that took their money for 20 years, and never bargained to protect their jobs.

If anything, Margaret West’s story is a morality tale.

The average part-time faculty member earns $2,500 per course. Alright, before we all start crying into our beer, wine or other appropriate cocktail, let’s make clear that 60 percent of part-time faculty want to work part-time, according to research by Dr. David Leslie of the University of Florida. So, those 40 percent who are trying desperately to put together a living from part-time teaching (we’ll talk about the mental health risks involved in doing this another time), as well as those full-time temporary faculty hanging on in the hopes of landing a tenure-line spot, read on and, well, weep, laugh, or whatever reaction you have to numbers being crunched and conclusions being drawn. Hell, get a drink now and read slowly.

So, I am curious. I’ll admit it. Shamelessly curious. I don’t spy on my neighbors or anything; they’re way too boring, anyway. I am the person who, when appointed to a Board of Directors, always volunteers to serve on the Finance Committee. I always want to know where the money goes. And where it comes from. I think people who can’t read income and expense statements are missing one of life’s greatest pleasures. A budget will tell you more about an organization than a 500 pound pile of press releases. Get three consecutive years of an organization’s budgets and compare them and, my, my, my, you have the makings of a fun evening.

While researching how much state community college systems pay their full-time versus part-time faculty, I hit Florida. The Florida Department of Education has a wealth of information, including detailed income and expense reports. I looked at 2004-2007. In each of those years, the system spent $190 million plus on full-time faculty salaries and only about $10 million on part-time faculty salaries, for 17,000 part-timers. Well, it’s the United Faculty of Florida that represents full-timers in FL, and Florida is one of the states where AFT persuaded legislators to introduce its FACE legislation. This led me to AFT. What would it look like to AFT’s bottom line if there were 6000 more full-time faculty for the union to represent in Florida? The jump in dues revenue would be about $1 million dollars per year, I discovered.

This led me right to the AFT financial reports. I managed to get the complete reports for the last three years. Reading the financial documents made me understand what Edgar Allen Poe meant when he coined the term “Imp of the Perverse.” According to the AFT’s website “AFT is the leading organizer of part-time/adjunct faculty in the United States. AFT represents approximately 60,000 part-time/adjunct faculty, more than any other union.” The union represents about 160,000 higher education faculty, or 12 percent of its 1.3 million members.

First question: If AFT is serious about organizing part-timers, how much money is the group spending on organizing them as a percentage of the group’s total budget. Put another way, is AFT putting its money where its mouth is? To answer that question took a bit of research. According to this article on Inside Higher Ed., AFT officials have organized 22 part-time faculty affiliates in the last three years. So, how much does it cost to organize an affiliate? Jon Curtiss is an AFT organizer, and on a listserv for adjunct faculty, he suggested that $50K per organizer sent to a campus is a modest guess. Let’s say $70K, including benefits.

Let’s say it takes three years to get the job done. That would mean $210K spent on staff to help the part-timers organize their affiliates. Let’s bump up the total cost to $300-$350K per affiliate, to take into account things like printing, postage, and consults by AFT’s legal staff, etc… This means, over the past three years AFT has spent in the range of $6.6-$7 million dollars organizing part-time faculty on 22 campuses, or about $2.2-$2.3 million dollars per year on organizing part-time faculty (1.5 percent of the organization’s total operating budget). Each of those part-timers sends $13.95 to the mother ship in the form of per capita taxes. Thus, the 60,000 part-time faculty represented by AFT generate $10.04 million dollars in gross per capita dues revenue each year.

AFT grossed about $150 million dollars in 2007 on revenue from dues, investments, loans and rents. AFT spent $2.82 million dollars to count and keep track of its money (I can hear all you part-timers who teach accounting out there: “Oh, Hells Bells! I’d do it for $1.82 million.”). Among some of the other interesting line items from the 2007 budget: