A review of Reclaiming the Ivory Tower
reviewed by Silvia Foti
For those who are skeptical of any one book’s ability to help adjuncts organize to improve their working conditions in higher education, Reclaiming the Ivory Tower may provide hope. While author Joe Berry doesn’t promise an easy path, he provides a reliable map and points out obstacles that adjuncts might meet when confronting administration. All adjuncts should read Reclaiming the Ivory Tower, not just so they can link with the cause (if they are lucky enough to be working at a college that already has a union for adjuncts), but also so they can be mentally ready to join such a movement, should one be formed nearby.
According to the back cover, “Reclaiming the Ivory Tower is the first organizing handbook for contingent faculty—the thousands of non-tenure track college teachers who love their work but hate their jobs. It examines the situation of adjunct professors in U.S. higher education and puts forward an agenda around which they can mobilize to transform their jobs and their institutions.” The contents of the book deliver on this promise by offering case studies of the Chicago experience, lessons learned in adjunct unionization, and concrete strategies for how to form a union.
The book is organized into five chapters: “Contingent Faculty Today: Who We Are”; “Contingent Faculty Organizing”; “The Chicago Experience”; “A Metro Organizing Strategy”; and “Getting Down to Work: An Organizer’s Toolbox.” Those new to activism or the adjunct life would benefit from reading it cover to cover. Those with years of experience, and who are eager for a roadmap to starting an adjunct movement, could jump to the last two chapters for a solid framework on how to proceed.
At only 147 pages, Reclaiming the Ivory Tower is, despite its brevity, packed with well-researched information and strategies for forming and joining adjunct unions. Berry writes with a wealth of personal experience as a frontline insider in the adjunct-union movement. His authority on the subject comes from hard-won lessons as an activist for part-timers since 1980, when he first began teaching at the City College of San Francisco. There, he helped reactivate the Part-timers Committee, a union for adjuncts. He soon became the California Federation of Teachers/Community College Council Committee Part-time Faculty Coordinator. He started Reclaiming the Ivory Tower as a Ph.D. dissertation-equivalent project for the Union Institute and University, now based in Cincinnati, and moved to Chicago in 1999, when he helped give birth to Campus Equity Week in Chicago and the Chicago Coalition of Contingent Academic Labor (COCAL). He was among the founders of the Chicago City Colleges Contingent Labor Organization Committee, which eventually succeeded in winning bargaining rights for many part-time teachers of credit classes. Although Berry lost his job in the City Colleges—for reasons he does not specify, but that might or might not have to do with his activism—he did not lose faith. Today, Berry teaches labor education and history at the University of Illinois and Roosevelt University in Chicago, and is the chair of COCAL.
Having been an adjunct for three years and struggled to make ends meet on a meager adjunct salary, I’m sensitized to the issues Berry discusses and agree with his core message that adjuncts should organize against their working conditions. On the other hand, Berry barely acknowledges the opposing point of view held by long-time adjuncts who oppose unions on the grounds that they promote and reward mediocrity. Nor does he delineate the administration’s position of hiring adjuncts for logical fiscal reasons, or address those adjuncts who are habituated to their pay and believe that their mission in life is to educate students, no matter what the working conditions. These omissions may have been intentional, however. The book’s purpose is to help adjuncts organize, and those who are against unionization will find it one-sided.
Reclaiming the Ivory Tower is addressed to “the contingent majority faculty, the new majority faculty, who every day carry their multiple bulging briefcases, backpacks, and other carryalls into tens of thousands of classrooms—classrooms that are filled with students who have no idea that their ‘professor’ standing before them, doing all the visible work that they expect, is likely working for less per hour than many of those paying tuition and working part-time somewhere else.” According to Berry, more than half of the nearly million teaching faculty in the United States are working as the academic equivalent of day labor.
Contingent faculty activism has been around for more than thirty years, and it may be on the verge of expanding because of the increasing numbers of adjuncts in relation to full-timers. According to Berry, from 1917 to 1986, the number of part-timers increased 133 percent, while the number of full-timers increased only 22 percent. Currently, there are more than 1.2 million instructional faculty and staff. Nearly half (44 percent) of college teachers are part-time, and nearly all of these (95 percent) are non-tenure track. 37 percent of full-time faculty are represented by unions, compared to 29 percent of part-time faculty. Although these numbers seem low, Berry concedes that “compared with most contingent workers in the United States, contingent faculty are among the most unionized.”
After reading Berry’s book, a reader is left to assume that the author wishes the percentage of part-timers in a union would rise so that working conditions for adjuncts would improve. Berry writes, “The collective knowledge of these decades of activity has seldom been put together in a form that is accessible, readable, and pointed in the direction of improving our situation. This book is my attempt to do that. The many phone calls and emails and letters I have received over my own twenty-plus years as a non-tenure track teacher and activist suggest to me that thousands of faculty out there are ready to act if only they (we) had some guidance and encouragement.” Berry’s book may be a groundbreaker in the movement; the only regret is that it was not written sooner.
Berry argues that adjuncts and full-time tenure-track (FTTT) faculty have plenty of reasons to align, as both groups witness the erosion of their working conditions. At first glance, this surprised me, as I assumed that conflicts of interest would preclude the two groups from working together. I’m still not convinced that an alignment of FTTT and part-time faculty could work at all institutions, but it is an option that has worked at some schools, particularly at Roosevelt University in Chicago. If an alignment with FTTT faculty is not possible, adjuncts should move independently. Any movement is better than no movement toward job security and equal pay. This, in fact, is Berry’s mantra throughout—it’s better to do something than nothing.
The chapter entitled, “Chicago Experience,” offers interviews with contingent faculty organizers who describe what they learned. The research is thoroughly biased from the contingent faculty’s point of view, and the chapter could have been more interesting if it had included the perspectives of administrators and full-timers, thus providing a panorama of the inherent conflict that exists at any college. Nevertheless, the case study should prove useful for others trying to organize an adjunct union. While the chapter contains facts, figures, statistics, quotes from organizers, and strategies that worked, it will be dry reading for those looking forward to a feature-quality rendition of how Roosevelt University and Columbia College launched successful campaigns for their adjuncts. The main ingredient for both schools was a long interval without pay raises. One organizer described the movement as “the French Resistance in the Second World War,” particularly as it related to an awareness of political timing and appropriate levels of security and secrecy. When it came to contract negotiations, one big surprise was that administrators were honestly ignorant of the working conditions of contingent faculty; as a result, much time was spent educating them. Typically, administrators made substantial concessions on pay, less on health benefits, and very little on issues regarding power, flexibility, and job security. Generally, the more public the negotiations became, the better the new union fared.
The last two chapters offer solid suggestions on organizing a campaign, creating a committee, recruiting “below the radar,” building a web site, finding a physical office, generating publicity, and getting involved in COCAL conferences and Campus Equity Week. Berry proposes that groups take a stand on issues such as pay cuts, no raises in a decade, and the potentially fatal consequences of not having health insurance.
Organizing adjuncts may be a formidable task, but remaining immobilized and fragmented will only lead to less pay and a further diminution of respect. For adjuncts who agree that the time has come to do something, Reclaiming the Ivory Tower may be just the key to ignite the passions and trigger the organization of hundreds of thousands of now-isolated part-timers. If you want to unite adjuncts at your institution, step number one should be distributing copies of Reclaiming the Ivory Tower to your colleagues and administration.
