Phoenix Rising
by Chris Cumo
The glossy cover of the brochure invites readers to “Teach at the leading university for working professionals.” Inside the brochure, the
University of Phoenix promises potential faculty that they can tuck
teaching into their busy careers while gaining greater expertise
through their interaction with students. This interaction gives classes
“the feel of a professional retreat,” promises the brochure.
Twelve thousand faculty have answered the call. All but 250 of them teach part-time, says Craig Swenson, the University’s Provost and Senior Vice President of Academic Affairs. Among the University’s part-time faculty is Anthony Trippe, who has more than 30 years work experience at chemical and pharmaceutical companies, as well as experience as a senior manager of technology firms in California. Now an assistant professor of computer engineering at Rochester Institute of Technology in Rochester, New York, he moonlights at Phoenix Online, where he teaches operating systems and other computer courses. The job keeps him sharp in a field where technology advances at an exponential rate, and where his students, all of whom are at least 23 and work full-time, pay for the most current knowledge. Forget theory. They want to apply what they learn on the job, and Trippe delivers. He takes pride in bringing “a real-world element to the classroom.” Trippe believes “U of P faculty provide lessons on how to survive in the American business environment.”
These lessons have brought 141,300 students and their tuition to the university according to a December 31, 2001 report from T.D. Waterhouse, an on-line brokerage firm. Phoenix “makes one hell of a lot of money,” says Director of Academic Affairs Jonathan Edelman of the Western Michigan campus in Grand Rapids, Michigan. The Apollo Group, which owns the for-profit university, earned $1.1 billion in 2002, according to T.D. Waterhouse. During that same year, its stock rose 6.71 percent to $43.58 per share at year’s end. The Apollo Group expects to earn between $1.31 billion and $1.315 billion in 2003, and projects earnings between $510 million and $515 million for the University of Phoenix.
It appears that little of this money trickles down to adjuncts. Pay for the U of P’s part-timers ranges from $50 to $80 an hour, says Provost and Senior Vice President Craig Swenson. The hourly rate does not include time for preparation and grading. Swenson’s hourly rate yield an average pay per course between $1,000 and $1,920. Rochester Institute of Technology computer engineer Anthony Trippe pegs starting per course pay at $900. Furthermore, he spends 15 hours a week on a course, more hours whenever he teaches a new course. Thus, his per hour pay hovers around $12 an hour, significantly less than the $50 to $80 an hour Craig Swenson quotes.
In addition, every prospective adjunct must complete four weeks of unpaid training, which business adjunct Shayne Gilbert calls the most rigorous she has experienced. Those who do not make the cut never see a dime from Phoenix. Even people who excel in training have no guarantee of teaching a course. Candidates with Ph.D.s and teaching experience chafe under the requirement that they undergo unpaid training, admits Craig Swenson, but there are no exceptions.
“If you want to teach for the University of Phoenix, you go through the process,” he says.
Richard Moser, National Field Representative at the American Association of University Professors (AAUP), sees nothing new in Phoenix’s stinginess with its thousands of part-time faculty. At the turn of the 20th century, American women began to work in large numbers. Business owners justified paying them low wages because, at the time, a woman’s income was seen as superfluous. Their husbands were the real wage earners. Phoenix uses the same logic, believes Moser, in paying part-time faculty little and denying them medical coverage. The Phoenix model assumes that the adjuncts earn most of their money and all of their benefits from their full-time employers.
“Of course I’d like to be paid more, and I think I am worth more,” says Rochester Institute of Technology computer engineer Anthony Trippe.
When he was new to Phoenix, Trippe asked an administrator whether the university would pay him for training. The reply was “No, but we don’t charge you a course fee either.”
Provost Craig Swenson defends the training program, whose length and rigor make Phoenix unique in academe. Faculty who emerge from the program, are subsequently mentored by a veteran instructor. The training and mentoring program is Phoenix’s investment in part-time faculty, an investment that few other colleges and universities make, believes Swenson. From his perspective, it is sound business to train and retain good people.
Swenson is proud of Phoenix’s retention rates. Forty of the original 60 part-time faculty are still at the Portland, Oregon campus five years after its founding, he says. Some 150 adjuncts at the Salt Lake City, Utah campus have taught there at least ten years.
Psychology adjunct Grant Hays suspects at the Southern Arizona campus with branches in Tucson and Sierra Vista that adjuncts usually stop teaching only when their full-time job conflicts with course times. Craig Swenson claims that the low turnover indicates that part-time faculty enjoy teaching at Phoenix. The National Education Association conducted a study in the mid-1990s which looked at adjunct faculty retention rates. According to the results of that study, the average adjunct teaches at her/his institution for seven years. This is true for adjuncts who are treated well, and for those who are not.
Kathy Sole, who teaches English on the Seattle, Washington campus is happy at Phoenix. Everywhere else she taught, Sole felt like an “outsider.” As an adjunct she was at the bottom of the hierarchy, far below administrators and tenured faculty. Professors would hold parties without thinking of inviting adjuncts, or convene meetings without seeking the advice of their part-time colleagues. Sole always felt “her status as an adjunct to be inferior to that of the full-time faculty.” But Phoenix is different. Nearly everyone teaches part-time. No one has tenure, and, aside from a few administrators, no one has rank. The result, Sole believes, is an egalitarian university where “all faculty members have equal status.”
The status part-time faculty enjoy has led Phoenix to promote its best adjuncts to senior managers. In 1986 Craig Swenson and Elizabeth Tice began teaching part-time at the Salt Lake City, Utah campus. Today, Swenson is Provost and Senior Vice President of Academic Affairs, and Tice is Associate Vice President of Academic Affairs and Dean of the College of General and Professional Studies at the university’s main campus in Phoenix, Arizona. Traditional colleges and universities seldom promote adjunct to senior administrative positions, believes Swenson. This upward mobility reinforces the conviction of Randy Sheets, Director of Academic Affairs at the Milwaukee, Wisconsin campus, that Phoenix values its part-time faculty more highly than do traditional academic institutions.
Scott West owns his own publishing firm in Elk Grove, California and does not have to teach, certainly not for the money. He teaches courses in information technology, business, and health and nutrition at the Sacramento Valley, California campus, as well as on-line. He admits to having more fun teaching than he could have imagined. Phoenix gives him the opportunity to rub shoulders as a peer with Intel software engineers and other tech-savvy people, an experience he would not have teaching elsewhere, West believes.
Rochester Institute of Technology’s Anthony Trippe believes teaching at Phoenix gives him an immediate and tangible sense of helping students. In fact, he invites students to treat him to dinner if they get a raise or promotion thanks to what they’ve learned in his course. Every year he receives several offers.
With rising enrollment and profits, Phoenix has found success by employing part-time faculty who work full-time, usually in business. AAUP National Field Representative Richard Moser concedes that this model beats the traditional use of part-time faculty who have no secure income, no medical coverage, and no pension, though he does not see the use of full-time professionals as a solution to the adjunct crisis.The fact that full-time professionals might not need much supplemental income or any medical benefits does not absolve colleges and universities of their responsibilities to part-time faculty, believes Moser.
Full-time professionals cannot be exploited as can itinerant labor, says Larry Simon, Director of Graduate Studies in the Department of History at Western Michigan University in Kalamazoo, Michigan. For this reason, he believes colleges and universities should hire, whenever possible, only full-time professionals as adjuncts. Simon hopes that colleges and universities would not use such faculty as an excuse for expanding the number of temporary faculty. Furthermore, Simon does not believe that there are enough qualified full-time professionals to replace the nation’s underemployed adjuncts.
James Perley, Dean of Arts and Sciences at Millikin University in Decatur, Illinois and a past AAUP President, expects the Phoenix model to sweep higher education, not because the model benefits adjuncts, but because it gives colleges and universities faculty who invest themselves in their full-time employer. Another benefit would certainly be that full-time professionals have no interest in organizing or in otherwise seeking better pay and perks. Such people are the most docile labor that college and university administrators can hope to find, believes Perley. Such faculty are “easier to subject to managerial control,” says AAUP National Field Representative Richard Moser.
Former Boston University part-time English faculty member Mark Johnson is the Senior Human Factors Specialist at Intuit in San Diego, California. He has the technology background that would appeal to Phoenix, and he is less pessimistic than Perley and Moser. In fact, Johnson agrees with Western Michigan University historian Larry Simon that the use of full-time professionals as adjuncts is inherently less exploitive than the use of itinerant labor. Johnson posits that colleges and universities could potentially more toward a “hybrid solution” in which they retain a cadre of full-time faculty, a group of full-time professionals as adjuncts in accounting and other vocational fields, and a group of adjuncts who do not work full-time. This third group would be numerous in philosophy and history, disciplines that do not have counterparts in the corporate world. Under the best circumstances, full-time faculty would groom those in the third group to be the next generation of professors.
At the moment, it is unclear whether the full-time professional as adjunct will become a fixture throughout higher education. James G. Ryan, an associate professor of history and political science at Texas A & M University, Galveston fears this model would ruin higher education. Rochester Institute of Technology computer engineer and University of Phoenix part-timer Anthony Trippe believes Phoenix adjuncts are as capable as faculty who teach at traditional universities. Thomas Payne, Vice Chancellor for Agriculture and Dean of the College of Agriculture, Food and Natural Resources at the University of Missouri, Columbia, and Director of the Missouri Agricultural Experiment Station, wants good part-time faculty and does not care whether they work full-time elsewhere. The issue is irrelevant so long as they demonstrate superior teaching skills in the classroom.
One thing is certain, however, as the University of Phoenix grows, and its total number of adjuncts doubles and then triples, administrators within the nonprofit sector of higher education will be watching closely. After all, printing up glossy faculty recruitment brochures which compare the teaching of one’s course to a professional retreat is much cheaper than paying health care and retirement benefits.
