Throwing Darts at Adjunct Activists

Untitled Documentby Keith Hoeller

For nearly twenty years, I have devoted my life to achieving equality for adjunct faculty throughout the nation. I have published twenty opinion articles in newspapers around the country; I have been quoted in scores of newspaper articles; I have drafted two dozen bills for the Washington state legislature, including one which gave all adjuncts in our community colleges pro-rated sick leave for the very first time; I have initiated two successful class action lawsuits, which resulted in $25 million in payments to thousands of adjuncts and helped thousands more qualify for health and retirement benefits for the very first time; I have organized three different adjunct organizations; I have served on the AAUP’s national Committee on Contingent Faculty and the Profession; and I was the first adjunct to ever win the AAUP’s Georgina M. Smith Award “in recognition of Exceptional Leadership in Improving the Status of Women and in Advancing Academic Collective Bargaining.”

Given my accomplishments, you would think that union leaders–who all claim to share my goals of adjunct equality–would be supportive of my activism, eager to hear my views, and willing to work with me to dismantle our nation’s separate but unequal academic labor system. Unfortunately, the leaders of the American Federation of Teachers Washington, and the Washington Education Association, who represent adjuncts in the community colleges where I teach, long ago declared me to be “Public Enemy No. 1.”

Falsely labeling me and my writing as “anti-union,” leaders have practiced a divide-and-conquer strategy by disputing my editorials and refusing to support my legislative efforts. As my success has increased, so has the hostility from the union leaders.

In recent months, the American Federation of Teachers officials have used their in-house web site as a forum to criticize my efforts. Craig Smith, Associate Director of Field Services and Communications for AFT’s Higher Education Division, in a blog entry in February, claims to be “setting the record straight” about the situation in Washington. Union loyalists have also taken to a national adjunct listserv to bash me.

The AFT attacks appear to be a well-orchestrated campaign to dismiss its adjunct critics rather than to deal with the inadequacy of its so-called Faculty and College Excellence (FACE) legislative plan, which has met with little success in legislatures around the country. When its FACE legislation failed in Washington last year, the Seattle Community College AFT filled its campus e-mail listserv with messages blaming me for the legislation’s failure. Yet legislators told WFT officials the FACE legislation was fatally flawed, and had no realistic chance of passing.

As its FACE legislation appeared to fail again this year, I published an article called “Legislators Can Help Adjunct Professors” (http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/opinion/350878_adjunct12.html) in an attempt to build support for Senate Bill 6888 (http://apps.leg.wa.gov/billinfo/summary.aspx?bill=6888), which would have provided annual, renewable contracts for adjunct professors who have taught for three or more years. The bill would have given senior adjuncts the right to appeal their dismissal and allowed them to work up to full-time–without taking any courses away from other adjuncts.
While AFT and NEA leaders knew about this bill, most union members have never heard of it. After union leaders testified in support of their FACE bill in the Senate Higher Education Committee, they left the room and did not testify on SB 6888. This is the fourth year in a row the unions have failed to throw their support behind similar job security bills that we adjuncts have supported.

In the last fifty years, the AFT and the NEA have failed to bargain the kind of meaningful job security for adjuncts that SB 6888 would provide, yet they refuse to support our legislation to create job security.

The centerpiece of the AFT FACE plan is to return the minority of full-time faculty to the majority once again. The AFT’s path to “college excellence” is to staff 75 percent of college courses with full-time, tenure-stream faculty. Their method for accomplishing this is to create tens of thousands of new full-time positions, which simply cannot be achieved solely through full-time attrition. The only way to create these new positions is to take courses away from current part-timers.

While a few adjuncts, particularly young ones who have not taught part-time for long, may win national searches for the full-time jobs created, many will undoubtedly lose their jobs, despite the public relations language the AFT has added to their recent FACE bills. In addition, other adjuncts may lose their jobs too, since the new full-timers will have the right to teach overload courses, thereby taking work away from other adjuncts.

The FACE legislation does not call for truly equal pay (sometimes called 100 percent pro-rata pay) for adjunct faculty. The model FACE legislation states that contingent faculty “shall receive pay that is equal, on a pro-rata basis, with that of tenured or tenure-track faculty of comparable qualifications doing comparable work.” For years, college administrators and union leaders in Washington have claimed that an adjunct who teaches a full-time load should receive only 76 percent of a full-time salary, since adjuncts do not engage in the same non-teaching duties as their full-time counterparts.

The FACE legislation does not call for equal raises for adjunct faculty. In Washington, the unions have bargained substantial incremental raises for all full-time faculty, but not for most part-time faculty; and the dollar disparity between full- and part-time salaries has continued to widen. Though for years we have run bills to give equal raises to adjunct faculty, the unions, having failed to bargain them, have repeatedly failed to support legislation to achieve this goal. (See also my “Equal Pay Means Equal Raises, Too.) http://chronicle.com/jobs/news/2005/08/2005081601c/careers.html

The problem has been and remains that the AFT is not trying to dismantle the two-tiered system. Instead, the organization seeks to strengthen it by bargaining small incremental changes for adjuncts while protecting the hegemony of the full-time faculty who dominate the AFT state-wide union leadership.

The FACE legislation is great for the AFT. If successful, it will bring in thousands of new dues-paying full-time members. These new tenure-track faculty are likely to be favorably disposed to the union because the union has bargained substantial salaries, benefits, and working conditions for them, including tenure. Such faculty are unlikely to complain about the union leadership the way that adjuncts are likely to do.

The FACE legislation is also good for full-time faculty as well. More full-time faculty will help spread the burden of non-teaching duties, including supervising and evaluating adjunct faculty. It will also help the unions make a better case for higher pay for full-time faculty.

But the FACE legislation is terrible for adjunct faculty. It jeopardizes our jobs; it does not attempt to achieve equal pay or raises; it does not legislate anything for adjuncts. It only sets a goal to spend six years attempting to collectively bargain its very minimal aims for adjuncts.

Not only will this result in different results from campus-to- campus, it may result in nothing at all–after six years. After all, the unions have still not figured out how to deal with recalcitrant administrations, as evidenced by AFT’s inability to secure a contract, after four years, for its 1000-member affiliate at PACE University.

In addition to looking for someone to blame for the repeated failures of their FACE legislation, the AFT has attacked me for raising the issue of the lack of union democracy. In mixed unions, full-time faculty often represent part-time faculty at the bargaining table.

In “Legislators Can Help Adjunct Professors,” I charged the AFT and the NEA with failing to provide “fair representation” to adjunct faculty in Washington. I believe this charge is self-evident; it is well-documented in each and every contract in our community colleges, where the interests of full-timers are favored over those of part-timers. The faculty unions have not been innocent bystanders in the creation of a two-tiered labor system within higher education; they have bargained—and re-bargained—these unequal contracts for decades.

Lack of job security keeps adjuncts dependent on their tenured colleagues, and unable and unwilling to speak out for fear of losing their jobs. Many adjuncts have witnessed what happens to other adjuncts who complain about the situation. With an unblemished teaching record of seventeen years, my colleague Terry Knudsen lost her adjunct position soon after publishing an op-ed in the Spokane newspaper called “Colleges Exploiting Part-Time Professors.”

Or take the case of Doug Collins, another courageous adjunct in Washington state. In 2003, Doug was the elected Secretary of the Seattle AFT local at a time when the union supported legislation to fund the current system of incremental raises – a system which leaves out thousands of part-timers. Instead, Doug chose to support a bill that would have given the unions everything they wanted, but contained an extra section extending increments to all part-time faculty. He was promptly subjected to a recall vote, and removed from his post within the union.

If state and national union leaders really wanted adjuncts to become involved in their unions, they would not bash those who become active and critical of the behavior of leaders who oppose equality. What Kenneth Ryesky said of administrators applies to union leaders as well: “Moreover, administrators, and Department chairs who condone adjunct-bashing (let alone participate in it) cannot then expect enthusiastic cooperation in any initiative or effort, IT or otherwise, from the adjuncts in their charge” (“Bringing Adjunct Faculty into the Fold of Information and Instructional Technology,” Gypsy Scholars, Migrant Teachers, and the Global Academic Proletariat, ed. Rudolphus Treeuwen and Steffen Handtke, 2007, p. 112).

But perhaps union leaders who engage in adjunct-bashing do not really want true adjunct activists in leadership positions after all. Perhaps the goal is precisely to make a negative example of activists who criticize the unions, so that others, who have no job security, will be fearful of doing so, as well. The result has been the undermining of real adjunct activists who are fighting for real equality—both on campus and within their unions.