Part-timers at Emerson College Get Their First Contract

THE UNION REPRESENTING part-time professors at Emerson College and the school recently reached an agreement to raise salaries by 15 to 20 percent, and help pay for the health insurance of some long-time adjuncts.The agreement is seen as a victory by union activists, who hope it will inspire part-time professors at other colleges to organize.

“We all thought of this as a template for other colleges, and we’ve already had people contacting us with questions about various provisions,” said Barbara Gottfried, a women’s studies instructor at Boston University who advised the Emerson union on behalf of the American Association of University Professors.

Adjunct professors represent almost half of the instructors in higher education in the U.S., and their ranks grew by more than 35 percent between 1998 and 2001, according to figures from the U.S. Department of Education.

Emerson has more than 200 part-time instructors, or twice the number of its full-time or tenure-track professors, who teach just under half of the classes at the college, according to a college spokesman.

Photography instructor David Akiba credited student protests with swaying the administration to overcome its resistance to the union.

“They saw that there was a sense of goodwill, and they could deal with us in a straightforward way,” he said.

Under the new contract, which must still be ratified, base pay will be $3,300 per class, with the most experienced teachers earning $5,500 per class, Akiba said. The raises were approved last fall, but there were still differences on other contractual issues.

Emerson now will pay 50 percent of health insurance premiums to professors who have taught 16 classes at the university, and are currently teaching two classes, Akiba said. Part-timers previously got no health insurance.

The school also gave up its demand that instructors accept less pay for teaching classes with fewer than 10 students.

“We fought as much as we could, but we settled for what we could get,” Akiba said.

As part of the settlement, the part-time staff agreed not to strike in the event of a dispute between the college’s full-time staff, whose contract expires in June. The full-time professors have taken two no-confidence votes on President Jacqueline Liebergott, who has asked for the union to disband.

“We’ve overcome one major hurdle with the faculty, and we’re going to work just as hard to resolve the situation with the full-time staff,” college spokesman David Rosen said.