Keith Hoeller: The Fine Art of Tilting at Windmills
by Greg Beatty
Any adjunct faculty member knows how hard the adjunct life is. Besides the challenge of living on an income that starts low then fluctuates according to each semester’s enrollment, there’s the anxiety of not knowing if you have a position at all, even if you’ve taught at the school for years. Since adjuncts often have to teach at more than one school to make enough to survive, it’s probably all you can do to make it through the semester.
Now imagine that you’re not just scrambling to make enough money to get by, or plugging away in hopes of landing one of those rare full-time positions. Imagine you’re also publishing your own work, editing an academic journal—and working to change not just your own situation, but that of all adjuncts in your state, and eventually, academia. Now add one more impossible thing before breakfast: imagine that you are, however slowly, winning.
That last sounds just too impossible, but if you’re Keith Hoeller, you wouldn’t have to imagine it. You’d be doing it. Keith Hoeller has been working to improve adjunct conditions for more than twelve years. He’s written dozens of letters and op-ed pieces, nudged journalists to write stories, exposed unfair working conditions and contract violations, helped start organizations (he’s co-founder of Washington State Part-Time Faculty Association), and worked with state legislators to change the system. I sat down with Hoeller and his fellow activist Doug Collins over lunch to determine the answer to one question: What keeps him going? Along the way, I learned the answers to other questions, some of which I didn’t even ask.
This started early in the interview when Hoeller told the story of Terry Knudsen, a Washington state adjunct faculty member who lost her position of seventeen years after speaking out about adjunct conditions. “She’s not the first activist to lose her job,” Hoeller pointed out.
We work, Hoeller said, in a system where “colleges control both supply and demand” of faculty members—in which graduate programs produce too many Ph.D.s and enroll too many undergraduates for the number of faculty they are willing to hire. Dating the crisis in American higher education from the mid-1970s, Hoeller argued that the crisis is maintained through college systems addressing rising enrollments through refusing to hire full time faculty, and instead filling their teaching rosters with “part -time” faculty who sometimes teach full-time, often teaching the same course load and even the same classes as “full-time” faculty members in the next classroom. “For lack of a better term it’s a caste system. All adjuncts are members of the lowest caste.” Looking tired but determined, Hoeller said, “Our goal is simple: we want to abolish the system of faculty apartheid.”
While some might find the term “apartheid” extreme for a system participants could leave at any time, I couldn’t mistake the sincerity in Hoeller’s voice. Likewise, Hoeller’s skill at turning an invitation to talk about himself to an opportunity to engage me in a discussion on the larger system and thereby educate me on a deeper level indicated that his fundamental commitment to activism was an integral part of an over-arching dedication to education. Finally, I could not miss what his choice to foreground Knudsen’s lost job—and the way he returned to it periodically throughout our talk— told me about him.
Regardless of what he said directly about his motivations, this was a man motivated by friendship, and by an overriding commitment to fairness and individual rights, particularly the rights of those forgotten by the system. This commitment emerges in Hoeller’s other area of activism as well. He’s involved with The International Center for the Study of Psychiatry and Psychology, an organization that examines the impact mental health and illness theories have on personal liberties, and with MindFreedom, an organization of psychiatric survivors fighting for human rights in the mental health field.
I’m not the first to make such an observation. In 2002 Hoeller received the Thomas Szasz Award for Outstanding Contributions to the Cause of Civil Liberties (professional category). That same year, the American Association of University Professors gave Hoeller the Georgina Smith Award. The Smith is given for educational leadership in the cause of promoting women’s rights. Hoeller shook his head more than once when discussing these two awards, clearly still actively honored by being selected, and said he thought he was the first part-time faculty member to win the Smith award. He then shook his head again, this time more emphatically, and told a sad story. When he traveled to receive one of these awards—he couldn’t remember which one—Hoeller had informed his employer that he’d won this award, which they were happy to publicize in official announcements. He’d informed the department head that he was going to travel to receive the award, and had arranged for someone to cover his classes in his absence. When he returned from receiving this national award, Hoeller found that his pay had been docked for the missed classes. “That is the sort of thing we go through all the time,” he said.
This may be the most overt sign of a system that doesn’t respect adjuncts, but it isn’t the only one. Full-time faculty “often look down on adjuncts with disdain,” Hoeller noted, and “feel they’re upholding standards” by opening national job searches instead of hiring the part timers who have taught beside them successfully for years.
Docked pay, no insurance, no job security or opportunity, no offices… the longer we talked, the longer the list got. Not only did it seem hopeless, it seemed like nothing had changed. Isn’t that depressing? You seem to have to repeat the same message year after year; do you feel like you’re getting anywhere at all? And do any full-time faculty ever change their minds?
“Yes, you do have to keep repeating the same message,” Hoeller acknowledged, “But eventually it gets through. It has its effect. And yes, some full time faculty members do change their minds.”
Hoeller mentioned that the unions haven’t always been supportive of the efforts of part-time faculty—that they’ve essentially chosen to fight for the rights of full-time faculty—but some union members and full-time faculty members do come around. They show their commitment by giving emotional support, writing letters, even contacting legislators.
And his message is getting heard. Hoeller noted that the Washington state legislature was “very aware of the problem,” and wanted to address it. The main obstacle in the way of really sparking action is that no single legislator has really stepped up to make it his or her issue.
Hoeller argued that educating the public was key to producing this sort of change, underscoring how intensely Americans want a good education for their kids. The only reason they put up with the current situation is that they don’t really understand it, or even know about it, and so repeating the adjunct message was even more important, so that the parents could learn about the needed changes. “Most of the public still isn’t aware of the situation.” They don’t know about the different career tracks people follow in academia, and they don’t know about the working conditions, Hoeller argued. When they understand it, they’d demand change.
Hoeller also argued that when people justify using adjuncts by saying they need to cut costs, they aren’t looking at the whole picture. Given the low pay and lack of benefits, what will the costs be down the road? Will a host of aged adjuncts end up on Welfare? What about the students? What does this treatment of faculty do to their graduation rate, and to the quality of education they receive—the return on investment? As we discussed these issues, another set of Hoeller’s motivations emerged. He’s genuinely seeking answers to these questions, and is trying to at once research a thorny question and to educate an audience who find themselves, all unaware, on different sides of a Kuhnian paradigm shift in both labor and education.
And on the practical level, there are definite signs of a shift. When Hoeller began his campaign, part-time faculty were earning “38 percent of what full-time faculty earned. Now they earn 57 percent. That’s a 50 percent increase.”
“When we started, part-timers were earning about $1500 per class. Now it’s around $3000 per course.” (Hoeller’s colleague Doug Collins added that some campuses pay even more per course.) When those numbers are added up, some $30 million in raises have been awarded—and, Hoeller added, those raises are compounded. Once base pay rates are raised, they continue to go up year after year.
Our talk ranged on for hours, covering everything from academic freedom and how academia’s treatment of adjuncts imperiled it to what tactics had been tried (and why others weren’t) to what kept Hoeller sane while dealing with Seattle traffic (talk radio mostly), and some upcoming legislation for which Hoeller had great hopes. All was richly educational, and all kept foregrounding the importance of the issue itself.
As we came close to the end of our interview, I pressed Hoeller to answer my question directly: What keeps you going? He looked at me and stated flatly, “I do this because this treatment of adjuncts is just wrong.” After a moment he added, “And for the students.” He explained: “If I were paid for my time and I could devote all my time to my students, rather than commuting from campus to campus, they’d be better off.”
Hoeller noted that what he remembered from his undergraduate years at the University of Florida was not the time spent in classes, but the time spent hanging out with his professors outside the classroom, talking about ideas that had fired both their minds. Hoeller indicated that this is what the system is denying students through relying so heavily on adjuncts: not quality of instruction or dedication, but time for that human contact that nurtures the individual mind.
“And,” he said grinning as he returned to the question of why he is an adjunct activist, “it’s also a heck of a lot of fun.” I’m not sure I’d enjoy spending so many extra hours fighting the good fight, but given the patience and pleasure with which Hoeller greeted my questions, I believe that he does, and I’m glad Keith Hoeller is there fighting it for us. And while I’m glad he’s winning— to the tune of $30 million thus far— my hours spent talking with Hoeller gave me a sense that he was a man who kept going because of a simple desire to do what is right, regardless of how long it takes or what it costs, a curiously conservative conclusion to reach regarding an academic radical.
