What's to be Done About the Adjuncts in Florida?

by Chris Cumo ROME BUILT AN empire of roads, baths and aqueducts. Some 1,500 years after the empire disintegrated, Florida is building a vast network of community colleges. Its 28, many with multiple campuses, teemed with 753,255 students, according to the Florida Community College System Web page, in the 1998-1999 academic year, giving the system one of the largest enrollments among state systems of community colleges in the United States. Suppose the average student took 10 credits that year--well below a full-time load--at $100 per credit. These figures would have grossed the system $753,255,000. If Florida's community colleges could issue stock, they might challenge Microsoft, Intel, and other corporate heavyweights. Despite assurances from Ronald Reagan that money trickles down from the affluent to the indigent, adjuncts share little of the wealth that overflows the coffers of Florida's community colleges. No statewide average of pay per course has been tabulated, but anecdotal evidence suggests it is not lavish. Abel Bartley, now an associate professor of history at The University of Akron, made $1,800 a course at Tallahassee Community College. In six years as an adjunct at Palm Beach Community College, Mike Shreffler has earned a maximum of $1,440 a course. Bill Panapacker, an assistant professor of English at Hope College in Michigan, taught one summer at Dade County Community College for $1,400 per course. None of the three received medical insurance where they taught. If any group of adjuncts should be militantly pro-union it should be those in Florida. Yet there are few stirrings of a union movement in the Sunshine State. The lack of activism begins to make sense when one realizes that these part-timers are virtually invisible. No one seems sure of how many adjuncts teach at Florida's community colleges. They teach 35 percent of courses, according to the Florida Association of Community Colleges, whereas The Palm Beach Post has estimated the percentage at 50. Emma Brombin, president of the Community College Faculty Leaders' Coalition of Florida, the closest entity to a grassroots faculty organization in Florida, confesses she does not know the percentage of courses taught by adjuncts. This problem is compounded by the absence of an organization through which they can voice concerns. The Coalition caters to full-time instructors, and adjuncts are not trendy enough to have their own organization. The problem, I suspect, is that they identify themselves as professionals who share little in common with the proletariat that has been the backbone of unions throughout American history. Panapacker is proud of growing up in a working-class neighborhood in Philadelphia, though his Harvard Ph.D. has elevated him above the huddled masses. Bartley has a brother with an M.D. from the medical college at Yale University. Shreffler is an assistant principal at a public school in Lake Worth with a salary above $50,000. They all regard community-college teaching as preparation for more lucrative careers. If they can pull themselves up by their bootstraps, so can everyone else. Who needs a union, when America remains a meritocracy? A union would need to do more than shed its proletarian skin to attract adjuncts. It would need to attract them in a state that shares with the rest of the South a nonunion tradition. Congress was able to override Harry Truman's veto of the Taft-Hartley Act, which banned the closed shop, in 1947, because southern democrats voted en masse for it. The lack of a tradition of union activism in Florida has conditioned even highly educated Southerners from thinking about forming a union. Sandi Ayaz, manager of college survival at Houghton Mifflin, admits she never thought about a union while she was an adjunct at Edison Community College. Indeed, who has time to think about a union? Shreffler teaches composition at the Eissey and Glades campuses of Palm Beach Community College and grades hundreds of essays each semester. He balances this work with a full-time job as an assistant principal and is more concerned with getting a night's sleep than joining a union. If you do the job right, Cary Nelson remarks in Manifesto of a Tenured Radical, teaching requires 60 hours a week. Adjuncts who hold second jobs struggle merely to stay afloat. At Palm Beach Community College, Shreffler works in an English department with three full-time professors and twenty adjuncts, all of whom work another job or raise children and care for a home. The fact that many adjuncts work a second job weakens unionism in another way. Those that Shreffler knows teach full-time in public schools, where they reap a decent salary and have medical insurance and a pension Other adjuncts have spouses who work. They don't stake their livelihood on teaching and have little to gain from joining a union, Shreffler believes. "I've taught at both [The University of] Akron and Palm Beach [Community College]," he says. "The big difference is that the adjuncts at Akron wanted full-time work. Here they don't, because they have a full-time job somewhere else." Shreffler admits the difficulty of balancing full-time work with college teaching. Perhaps this is why adjuncts don't last long. Every semester he sees new ones on campus, and he estimates that the average part-timer lasts two or three years. Even he has had enough, and decided in the 2000-2001 academic year that he would not teach at Palm Beach Community College. Instead he picked up a course at Florida Atlantic University, which pays more than the community college. Adjuncts come and go so quickly that they have no time to foster solidarity, a prerequisite for union activism. The example of Florida puts tough questions to those who envision a union as their salvation. How can one organize a group whose number and composition change every semester? What can a union offer adjuncts who are content with their full-time jobs, and whose allegiance is to their full-time jobs? What can unions do to attract people who identify themselves as professionals rather than members of the working class? Can unions succeed among adjuncts when they appear to be in retreat everywhere, particularly in the South? How can unions make inroads into the already frenetic lives of adjuncts? Unions, I fear, make sense only in the abstract. In reality, as in Florida, adjuncts may have neither time nor passion for them.