July Higher Ed Labor Summit Vision Platform Claims Adjuncts “Present A Threat” to Student Retention and Success

by P.D. Lesko

For two days in early July, around 300 representatives from 75 higher education labor groups came together virtually to hammer out a Vision Plan that addresses challenges that face “the U.S. Higher Education System.” The Vision Plan states that the goal of the group’s work is “building a movement that transforms higher education.” The Vision Platform is unsigned, but according to a summit participant, “the 300+ academic workers in attendance–including student workers, postdocs, staff, and adjunct, contingent, and tenure faculty–joined together to create a bold, unified vision for higher education that prioritizes people and the common good over profit and prestige.”

The participants’ vision for the future of higher education is broad and far-reaching. From the Vision Platform:

• “We envision a U.S. higher education system that works for and is led by workers, students, and the communities it serves.”
• “We envision a system that secures our nation’s democratic future and serves as a vehicle for addressing inequities.”
• “We envision public and nonprofit private institutions of higher education that prioritize people and the common good over profit and prestige.”
• “We envision institutions that redress systemic oppression and pursue equity along lines of race, gender, class, sexuality, nationality, indigeneity, age, (dis)ability, and immigration status for students and higher ed workers across all job categories.”
• “We envision institutions that honor the right of all workers to organize a union and collectively bargain, and commit to the fair working conditions crucial to achieving our educational mission.”
• “We envision a higher education labor movement that connects workers across job categories, ranks, systems, states, and sectors. We envision a movement that forms coalitions of and builds democratic power for all workers.”

The Vision Platform defines and addresses adjunct faculty exploitation directly: “The majority of faculty (at least 70%) are in adjunct or contingent appointments.” The Platform goes on to claim that the use of adjunct faculty “presents a threat to educational engagement with students, [and] long-term student outcomes.”

Claims such as these have been used by the national higher education union leaders to justify legislative funding asks such as the current New Deal which seeks to rid unions of their own part-time faculty members, as opposed to bargaining equal pay, equal benefits and equal working conditions for those faculty members.

After claiming adjunct faculty adversely impact student success and student retention, later in the Vision Platform, the group argues that the U.S. government should, “Enact legislation and rules to regularize and stabilize higher education employment on a national scale, and to ensure fair terms and safe work conditions, living wages and steady careers for all faculty, staff, and undergraduate and graduate student workers.” Then, under the Platform’s section “Nationwide Action to Realign Our Campuses,” the participants write that university leaders must, “Improve the immediate working conditions for all contingent faculty and staff via employment standards that include job security, pay equity, healthcare and retirement benefits.”

These are changes the faculty unions themselves have largely failed to bargain for the adjunct faculty whom they represent.

Over the past year, for example, adjunct faculty union leaders have protested the layoffs of their members. Among the July Summit’s participants were representatives of the Rutgers AAUP-AFT, a decades-old union representing adjunct faculty in the Rutgers system. In September 2020, Karen Thompson, the union’s long-time president, and a 40-year adjunct faculty member, saw her own job cut.

Amy Higer, a political scientist and current president of the union representing around 1,000 of the college’s 1,600 adjuncts said of Thompson’s job loss, “It was like a lightning bolt. It’s so demoralizing.”

In total, 25 percent of the 2,100 adjuncts employed by Rutgers in 2019 lost their jobs in September 2020 after being represented by the Rutgers AAUP-AFT affiliate for decades.

The Vision Platform, to which Rutgers’s Amy Higer signed her name, also purports that, “caps on course loads” for adjunct faculty would “improve the immediate working conditions for all contingent faculty and staff.” Capping the course loads of adjunct faculty caps their ability to generate income. Adjunct activists have long argued against such caps.

The Vision Platform ends with a push to support the College For All Act, introduced in the U.S. Congress by U.S. Representative Pramila Jayapal (WA-07) and U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) in April 2021. The Vision Platform urges readers to “Organize to win the College for All Act, including provisions for a pipeline to tenure-track and full-time jobs for current contingent faculty and staff.”

The pipeline to tenure-track and full-time jobs for contingent faculty is not a part of the current legislation. As a result, adjunct activists have argued that the College For All Act would be a disaster for adjunct faculty and result in wide-spread loss of employment.