Old School Tactics At The New School
by Melissa Doak
Decent minimum salary levels. Fair rules governing the assignment of courses. Clear evaluation and observation policies. Compensation for office hours, academic advising, and committee work. Affordable health insurance. An end to limits on the number of courses an adjunct can teach each semester. Sound like an impossible wish list? Part-time faculty at New School University in New York City are preparing to negotiate toward these goals, thanks to a hard-fought campaign to win recognition for their union, affiliated with the UAW.
The stakes are high at the New School, where union officials estimate 95 percent of the teaching staff are adjuncts, and New School officials peg the percentage somewhat lower, though still hefty, at 86 percent. Part-timers there tell of the classic union-busting campaign that the administration ran. Throughout the unionization process, officials filed numerous motions and appeals; for instance, lawyers for the administration argued that more than half of the part-time faculty were “managers,” and thus ineligible to vote. As a result of the stalling tactics, administrators succeeded in delaying the union election for close to a year.
A casual observer might not be shocked at the campaign waged by the school’s administration. After all, the stories within higher education of administrations fighting union drives are legion. For instance, during the early 90s, part-time lecturers at Eastern Michigan University, in Ypsilanti, formed the Eastern Michigan University Lecturers’ Organizing Committee. It took the group seven years and almost as many National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) hearings to finally hold elections.
However, the New School was founded in 1919 by progressive thinkers like Charles Beard, Thorstein Veblen and John Dewey, the first member of the American Federation of Teachers. The institution was established to encourage dissent, debate and intellectual inquiry.
“Here was someone [Dewey] who helped found the New School, and who was an advocate of teachers unionizing, and the very same school seemed to take a different view on it… a terrible irony,” said Joel Schlemowitz, a part-time faculty member who has taught film production at the New School for eight years.
Today, the New School still rests on John Dewey’s progressive laurels. The university’s Web site waxes rhapsodically: “[here] education is seen as a tool to produce positive changes in society…. The University excels at providing transformative ideas and skills to its students….[Here] education and research…are guided by a linkage of theory and practice, and members of the University community are committed to working toward a more equitable, peaceful world.”
While talking the talk of peace and equality, the college’s new President, Robert Kerrey, a one-time Democratic United States Senator from Nebraska, elected to fight the adjunct’s unionization efforts.
Follow the Yellow Brick Road
The move to unionize began in the fall of 2002 after part-timers had attempted, for years, to effect change through informal negotiation. Adjuncts at the New School had recognized the need to collectively bargain to improve the conditions of their work even earlier. In 1982, a group of faculty at Parson’s School of Design, the college at New School University with the largest group of faculty (including about 800 part-timers) won the right to hold a union election. The union won that election. However, after a challenge by the New School administration and a year of deliberation by the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), the organizing committee was ordered to hold a new election. As Barbara Siegel, a part-time faculty member active in that early organizing effort, recalls, that order spelled the end of successful organizing at Parsons.
“We frankly just didn’t have the energy to do the right kind of organizing the second time around and so then, we lost,” Siegel said.
Peter M. Rutkoff, co-author of New School: A History of the New School for Social Research (New York: The Free Press, 1986), identifies a “changing of the guard” that resulted in a new, more conservative approach to administering the university by the time the Parsons School began to organize.
“The passing of the first leadership generation [in the late 1950s and early 1960s] signaled the erosion of the original, [progressive] commitments,” he explains. As the New School grappled with funding issues in the early 1980s, “the administration turned the New School into an American University in most regards, from curriculum to grades to degrees to politics,” he says.
After the failed effort at Parsons, adjuncts came together informally to discuss working conditions, and to try to negotiate for change. For example, part-timers pushed for the administration to change their pay from “piece-work”–-pay for each course taught–-to a salary. The part-timers suggested that the salary include a range of work activities like teaching, office hours, and committee work. Receiving a salary, as full-time faculty did, the part-timers argued, would underscore the adjuncts’ professionalism and reflect the range of work done by part-timers at the New School.
New School officials rebuffed the request.
Jan Clausen, a writing instructor at Eugene Lang College, recalled that she and many of her colleagues eventually realized that their efforts had produced few results and were unlikely to produce real change. Around that time, part-time faculty in different divisions began speaking with both the American Federation of Teachers and the United Auto Workers about unionizing. Why? As Clausen reveals, she was motivated by the realization that she truly was not casual labor.
“I was essentially being used in lieu of full-time faculty,” she says. “A lot of what I was doing was really very much what full-time faculty was doing, only less of it, and yet the salary differential and the job security differential and the rest of it was just enormous.”
Clausen was not alone in her consciousness of the inequities at the New School and her resolve to do something about it. She emphasizes that the unionization drive forced many people to rethink the nature of adjunct work.
“There have been a number of people… who really have had to recognize that this fiction that adjunct work is just a sideline to peo-ple’s real lives and a sideline to the university’s real functioning with real normal faculty… is all just an ideological screen,” she says.
Academics Come Together
The formal and informal meetings and discussions among the part-time faculty culminated in March 2003, when a group of adjuncts formed Academics Come Together, affiliated with the United Auto Workers, and filed a petition for a union election with the NLRB. The University might have opted to work with ACT-UAW toward a union election. Kerrey need only have looked west, to fellow university president Dr. Mary Sue Coleman, in Michigan, for an example of how to do it. The same year that the New School’s 1,600 part-timers began their union drive, the University of Michigan’s 1,400 temporary lecturers formed the Lecturers’ Organizing Committee (LEO) and began a drive to organize, as well. Michigan’s lecturers organized relatively unhindered by their institution’s administration.
Had Robert Kerrey followed Dr. Coleman’s example, it would have been in keeping with the ideals which had led to the founding of the New School. In 1928, Dewey wrote of his membership in the American Federation of Teachers: “There is a need for a working, aggressive organization that represents all of the interests that teachers have in common, and which, in representing them, represents also the protection of the children and the youth in the schools against all of the outside interests, economic and political, and others, that would exploit the schools for their own ends, and in doing so reduce the teaching body to a condition of intellectual vassalage.”
However, things had changed dramatically at the New School since its founder had penned those words.
New School administration officials declined to comment on the adjunct’s organizing drive. However, President Kerrey made his opposition to the drive clear on the school’s Web page. He writes, “Internal communication and working conditions can be best improved without the intervention of a third party like the UAW, which does not have extensive experience in higher education.”
In 2002, the administration began a campaign against the part-time faculty union that would last over 18 months. First, administrators tried to minimize the size of the bargaining unit. Officials argued to the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) that many part-time faculty were managerial employees and should be excluded from any union election. In December 2003, the NLRB found that nearly all exclusions of employees from the bargaining unit sought by the New School were invalid. And while the Board did impose a formula to determine eligibility to vote in a union election, it adopted a much looser one than the New School officials had proposed.
After more delays caused by university objections to voting procedures, union elections were held in February 2004. According to the union, of approximately 1600 eligible voters, 530 voted yes to unionization. 466 voted no.
The New School’s leader dug in again. Kerrey immediately challenged the results of the election on fourteen grounds. His most substantial objection rested on the 65 percent voter turnout—he argued it was too low to be representative of the part-time faculty’s wishes.
Of course, in a battle troop numbers often depend upon who’s doing the reporting. Not surprisingly, then, in March 2004 New School Provost Arjun Appadurai wrote this in a memo to the University community: “Of those eligible to vote (1702) [author’s emphasis], leaving aside contested ballots, just 58 percent (996) voted, a very low proportion for an election of this kind. Though the 530 who voted for the union represented a very slim majority of those who voted, those voting ‘yes’ constituted less than a third (31 percent) of those eligible. Should a group this small determine your professional future? I cannot treat these numbers as representing your real wishes.”
Judge Raymond P. Green dismissed all objections concerning the validity of the election on May 14, 2004. Again, New School officials mounted delays and immediately appealed. On September 27, 2004, the NLRB rejected the New School’s appeal to overturn the election and certified the union: ACT-UAW was now the collective bargaining agent for the New School part-time faculty.
There remained one final hurtle. Would New School officials recognize the union? As it turned out, not without a fight and more delays. Only when the ACT-UAW ran a successful speakers’ boycott of the college did the New School administration recognize the union on October 15, 2004. The instructors received widespread support from writers, artists, and politicians scheduled to speak at the New School in the fall of 2004. Among those who honored the part-time faculty’s call for a boycott were Barbara Kingsolver, John Sayles, Ron Blackwell, Joan Scott, Grace Paley, and many others. Union activists credit the administration’s recognition of ACT-UAW to that boycott.
“I think it was an embarrassment and [the administration] finally realized they just had to bargain with us,” says Siegel.
Joel Schlemowitz emphasized an unintended effect of the boycott. “[The boycott was] something that for a lot of the faculty… was quite inspiring, to see people from the outside world cared about our situation, and cared about what is happening to part-time faculty.”
The fight against the union undertaken by the New School officials flew in the face of the progressive tradition of the school, and shocked many union activists.
“I didn’t understand that [the anti-union campaign] would involve identifying… in every department, in every program, in every nook and cranny of the university… what people were afraid of, what they hoped for, and playing on those fears in really manipulative ways,” says Jan Clausen.
Julie Kushner, a sub regional director for UAW Region 9A, also did not expect such a prolonged and vicious fight from the New School administration. While the UAW had encountered similar tactics from New York University and Columbia University when graduate student instructors at those institutions had organized, Kushner expected that the New School, in light of its history of progressive politics, would adopt a different approach. Kushner also had faith in Robert Kerrey. While in the Senate, the Nebraska Democrat had counted industrial unions among his financial supporters. Between 1993 and 1998, he received campaign funding from the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers, as well as the Air Line Pilots Association.
“I expected a leader in the Democratic Party to welcome the idea of unionization of part-time faculty,” says Kushner. She emphasizes that the fight has made the UAW even more committed to organizing adjuncts at campuses around the country in order to achieve fundamental and basic rights, like fair treatment and job security. “We’re not going away,” she says. “We’re getting stronger.”
The adjuncts will need to hold on to that feeling. The victory isn’t complete. The university still refuses to bargain over the Mannes School of Music, arguing that part-time faculty there should not be eligible for representation by the union, despite contrary findings by the NLRB. And the union is only beginning the bargaining process. The bargaining committee, including Clausen, Siegel, and Schlemowitz, has put forward several non-economic proposals, including standardization of evaluation procedures, implementation of formal affirmative action procedures, development of a fair system for assigning courses, putting in place a dispute resolution procedure, and a union shop. Part-timers seem to be holding their collective breath through the negotiations.
“The proof will really be in the pudding of the contract we get!” says Barbara Siegel.
Given the administration’s proclivity for playing hardball, the union could be looking at contract negotiations that may go extra innings—perhaps longer than the 18 months it took to organize. What remains to be seen is how New School officials will respond to the adjuncts’ proposals when they two groups begin contract negotiations in earnest.
