Campus Equity Week is Growing Bigger: But is Bigger Better?
by Chris Cumo
Forget the top-down hierarchy. Talk to anyone in the thick of things and you get the same answer: Campus Equity Week (CEW) is a grassroots movement, one with a protean nature that defies easy summation. CEW began in October 2001 (CEW
1) in the U.S. and Canada and will spread this October to Mexico. However, even these geographical gains may not be enough. Empire finds its raison d’etre in expansion.
In the early second century, Trajan marched Rome’s legions into Persia. Today, Richard Moser, the National Field Representative at the American Association of University Professors (AAUP), is working to develop contacts in Europe and Australia. Armando Vazques-Ramos, a CEW activist in California, sees Mexico as a conduit to South American, an expansion that would make CEW an intercontinental labor movement.
It remains to be seen if CEW leaders like Moser and Vazques-Ramos can use these gains to leverage better working conditions for contingent faculty, a group as heterogeneous as the movement.
In Canada, equity has become part of the political, says Maria Peluso, President of Concordia University Part-Time Faculty Association (CUPFA) in Montreal, Quebec.
On one level, the emphasis on networking makes sense. CEW is an attempt to focus faculty, students, taxpayers and policymakers on the poor pay, working conditions and absence of medical coverage that makes part-time teaching an economic cross to bear for some.
“I’m tired of cutting back,” said Donald Zimmerman, a 25-year part-time instructor at Olympic College in Bremerton, Washington, in a speech during CEW 1. “I’ve cancelled all my newspapers and magazines. I buy rice and potatoes in bulk. I haven’t had a vacation in six years.”
Zimmerman recounted pouring over papers by the light of a single bulb, going to church festivals for free meals, and getting only four haircuts a year. He owns one pair of shoes and what money he has goes to gasoline to get him from home to campus, a 60-mile round trip. On the one hand, this frugality has a peculiarly American quality to it.
But on another level, the focus on networking, meetings, talking—on the rhetoric of equity may not be enough to revive tenure or bring universal equity.
“I fear that so long as there is a glut of Ph.D.s, the law of supply and demand will continue to make it possible to take advantage of people,” says Anna Sher, a postdoctoral fellow at the University of California at Davis.
Sher understates the problem. Not only are graduate schools in Canada and the United States promiscuous in replicating Ph.D.s, but also in procreating graduates at all levels and in virtually every discipline. The result is a systemic crisis in which 300 applicants vie for a single tenure-track position. The Darwinian lottery crowns one winner, leaving the rest to pick grapes in the academic vineyard.
Now insert CEW into this pathological system. If the movement is to succeed, it must first find the grape pickers, organize them and, finally, better their lives in some tangible way; otherwise temporary faculty may simply shrug their shoulders and resign themselves to an eternity of temporary teaching.
Mexico may provide a classic test case for CEW organizers. Of the faculty at Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Mexico in Mexico City, Mexico’s oldest and largest university, 72 percent teach part-time or on term appointments.
“They have no job security, no career ladder,” explains CEW activist Armando Vazques-Ramos.
Yet, he forecasts CEW events at only six campuses in Mexico. Conversely, in Canada and the United States, CEW leaders and organizers expect a slew of events to take. This October, both CUPFA President Maria Peluso and AAUP National Field Representative Richard Moser hope to double the number of campuses on which part-time faculty will organize CEW events. In Canada, they hope to involve adjuncts at 80 campuses, and in the United States, to have CEW events on 400 campuses. However, at least in the U.S., the majority of these campuses are concentrated in the Northeast and along the Pacific coast.
“We need to build a movement that encompasses more than just California and New York,” says Ann Larson, Writing Across the Curriculum Coordinator at Long Island University in Brooklyn. “That’s one of our biggest challenges.”
Joe Berry, a CEW activist in Chicago, Illinois, sees opportunity in this challenge and eyes the South as a region of growth.
But the South, as demonstrated by the decided dearth of unionized college faculty, clings stubbornly to its work-for-hire laws. Robert E. Hurst, adjunct professor of biochemistry and molecular biology, physiology, and occupational and environmental health at the University of Oklahoma Health Sciences Center in Oklahoma City, has never heard of CEW. One look at his curriculum vitae reveals why: he has been too busy churning out articles to engage in activism.
“I don’t much worry about things beyond my control,” says Hurst.
He is not alone. AAUP E-Bulletin #3 announces that CEW activists at Suffolk University, in Boston, where Anatoliy Efroimskiy teaches physics part-time, are phoning part-time faculty, distributing leaflets and holding meetings. The CEW Web page at http://www.cewaction.org lists as a participating organization the University of Pennsylvania, where Robert A. Copeland is adjunct professor of biochemistry and biophysics. Neither Efroimskiy nor Copeland has heard of CEW. Nor is everyone on board at the Maricopa Community College District Adjunct Faculty Association (AFA) in Tempe, Arizona, a center of activism during CEW 1, and a participating organization this October.
“I liken [CEW] to the Chinese water torture. We must keep dripping away at everyone, everywhere…to get what we want,” says Paula Garner, a past AFA President. “CEW is another of the drips that is necessary to make an impact.”
Paula Garner’s drips and drops have missed Richard Langill. Despite having served on the AFA Board in 2002, he has never heard of CEW and wonders why no one ever mentioned it.
His plight typifies the hurdles CEW must overcome to engage contingent faculty.
CEW activists argue that whether or not Langill (or anyone else, for that matter) knows about CEW should not, ultimately, serve as a gauge of the movement’s effectiveness over the past five years.
“Of course there are people at some institutions who have never heard of CEW, just as there are some American citizens who cannot name the current U.S. Attorney General,” says Jack Longmate, CEW activist and adjunct English instructor at Olympic College.
California Faculty Association Regional Representative John Hess agrees.
“It is always possible to discredit social movements of the marginalized by finding a few people, even lots of them, who [have] never heard of them,” he says. “The measure has to be the one that Marcia Newfield suggests: how things have changed where they have changed.”
Newfield, Vice President of the Professional Staff Congress, the union for faculty, both regular and contingent, and staff at the City University of New York, intends to use CEW to press the New York State Legislature to grant contingent faculty unemployment benefits when they are between stints.
Chris Storer, CEW Central Coordinator and Legislative Analyst for the California Part-Time Faculty Association, also sees CEW as a legislative tool, one that may prod the California Legislature to require community colleges to classify part-time faculty as employees who can expect reappointment after a year or two of service.
“Our goal is to limit the use of temporary assignments to truly temporary needs,” says Storer.
Other legislative initiatives in California will focus on sick leave, medical benefits, retirement, unemployment benefits and office hours.
Ultimately, CEW activists can press home their agenda only by coaxing state legislatures, and perhaps, even Congress to guarantee part-time college faculty pro-rated pay and benefits. In October 2002, the Association of University Teachers (AUT) in the United Kingdom succeeded in having just such a law passed. In the United Kingdom, 50 percent of college faculty work on temporary/short-term contracts, and all 50,000 of them enjoy pro-rata pay and benefits.
Michelle Malinowski, Assistant Director of Member Services at the AAUP chapter of Central Connecticut State University in New Britain sees in CEW an opportunity to highlight the absence of pro-rated pay and medical benefits. For years, the AAUP chapter has introduced in to the Connecticut Legislature a bill to grant part-time faculty both pro-rated pay and benefits. The bill has quietly died in committee every year.
“We can measure the success of CEW specifically by the number of goals that we can achieve and by how widespread their achievement is and more generally by the improvement in the working conditions of contingent faculty,” says Steve Wilson, CEW activist at Sonoma State University in Rohnert Park, California.
From this pragmatism flows an impatience for results.
“There are many of us in this movement who sometimes feel the movement isn’t moving fast enough,” says Mary Ellen Goodwin, California Part-Time Faculty Association Executive Council Chair. “However, when one steps out of the trenches long enough to list the advancements that have been made over the past few years it is clear that while we still have a long road ahead of us, we have indeed come a long way.”
Despite criticisms and, at some campuses, lagging part-time faculty involvement, CEW, and the movement of which it is a part, keeps rolling. CEW serves as a mouthpiece for the oppressed, locked in a zero-sum war with the oppressors. This zero-sum war is real, as state legislatures continue to cut higher education funding.
CEW may be at a crossroads. The movement has spread throughout the United States, Canada and now Mexico. What remains to be seen is whether or not CEW activists and leaders, like the AAUP’s Richard Moser and Washington’s Jack Longmate will be able to consolidate their gains. If so, perhaps not only part-time, but full-time faculty might follow, as well.
First things first, though. Paul J. Watson, a research assistant professor of behavioral ecology and evolutionary psychology at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque, thinks CEW is a good idea and wishes he had more information about it.
Will Paul Watson get his wish?
That remains to be seen. What is clear though is this: every successful grassroots movement in the world has blossomed or shriveled in exactly the same way—one person at a time.
