What’s to be Done About the Adjuncts in Florida?
by Chris Cumo
ROME BUILT AN empire of roads, baths and aqueducts. Some
1,500 years after the empire disintegrated, Florida is building
a vast network of community colleges. Its 28, many with multiple
campuses, teemed with 753,255 students, according to the Florida
Community College System Web page, in the 1998-1999 academic
year, giving the system one of the largest enrollments among
state systems of community colleges in the United States.
Suppose the average student took 10 credits that year–well
below a full-time load–at $100 per credit. These figures
would have grossed the system $753,255,000. If Florida’s community
colleges could issue stock, they might challenge Microsoft,
Intel, and other corporate heavyweights.
Despite assurances from Ronald Reagan that money trickles
down from the affluent to the indigent, adjuncts share little
of the wealth that overflows the coffers of Florida’s community
colleges. No statewide average of pay per course has been
tabulated, but anecdotal evidence suggests it is not lavish.
Abel Bartley, now an associate professor of history at The
University of Akron, made $1,800 a course at Tallahassee Community
College. In six years as an adjunct at Palm Beach Community
College, Mike Shreffler has earned a maximum of $1,440 a course.
Bill Panapacker, an assistant professor of English at Hope
College in Michigan, taught one summer at Dade County Community
College for $1,400 per course. None of the three received
medical insurance where they taught. If any group of adjuncts
should be militantly pro-union it should be those in Florida.
Yet there are few stirrings of a union movement in the Sunshine
State.
The lack of activism begins to make sense when one realizes
that these part-timers are virtually invisible. No one seems
sure of how many adjuncts teach at Florida’s community colleges.
They teach 35 percent of courses, according to the Florida
Association of Community Colleges, whereas The Palm Beach
Post has estimated the percentage at 50. Emma Brombin, president
of the Community College Faculty Leaders’ Coalition of Florida,
the closest entity to a grassroots faculty organization in
Florida, confesses she does not know the percentage of courses
taught by adjuncts.
This problem is compounded by the absence of an organization
through which they can voice concerns. The Coalition caters
to full-time instructors, and adjuncts are not trendy enough
to have their own organization. The problem, I suspect, is
that they identify themselves as professionals who share little
in common with the proletariat that has been the backbone
of unions throughout American history. Panapacker is proud
of growing up in a working-class neighborhood in Philadelphia,
though his Harvard Ph.D. has elevated him above the huddled
masses. Bartley has a brother with an M.D. from the medical
college at Yale University. Shreffler is an assistant principal
at a public school in Lake Worth with a salary above $50,000.
They all regard community-college teaching as preparation
for more lucrative careers. If they can pull themselves up
by their bootstraps, so can everyone else. Who needs a union,
when America remains a meritocracy?
A union would need to do more than shed its proletarian skin
to attract adjuncts. It would need to attract them in a state
that shares with the rest of the South a nonunion tradition.
Congress was able to override Harry Truman’s veto of the Taft-Hartley
Act, which banned the closed shop, in 1947, because southern
democrats voted en masse for it. The lack of a tradition of
union activism in Florida has conditioned even highly educated
Southerners from thinking about forming a union. Sandi Ayaz,
manager of college survival at Houghton Mifflin, admits she
never thought about a union while she was an adjunct at Edison
Community College.
Indeed, who has time to think about a union? Shreffler teaches
composition at the Eissey and Glades campuses of Palm Beach
Community College and grades hundreds of essays each semester.
He balances this work with a full-time job as an assistant
principal and is more concerned with getting a night’s sleep
than joining a union. If you do the job right, Cary Nelson
remarks in Manifesto of a Tenured Radical, teaching
requires 60 hours a week. Adjuncts who hold second jobs struggle
merely to stay afloat. At Palm Beach Community College, Shreffler
works in an English department with three full-time professors
and twenty adjuncts, all of whom work another job or raise
children and care for a home.
The fact that many adjuncts work a second job weakens unionism
in another way. Those that Shreffler knows teach full-time
in public schools, where they reap a decent salary and have
medical insurance and a pension Other adjuncts have spouses
who work. They don’t stake their livelihood on teaching and
have little to gain from joining a union, Shreffler believes.
“I’ve taught at both [The University of] Akron and Palm Beach
[Community College],” he says. “The big difference is that
the adjuncts at Akron wanted full-time work. Here they don’t,
because they have a full-time job somewhere else.”
Shreffler admits the difficulty of balancing full-time work
with college teaching. Perhaps this is why adjuncts don’t
last long. Every semester he sees new ones on campus, and
he estimates that the average part-timer lasts two or three
years. Even he has had enough, and decided in the 2000-2001
academic year that he would not teach at Palm Beach Community
College. Instead he picked up a course at Florida Atlantic
University, which pays more than the community college. Adjuncts
come and go so quickly that they have no time to foster solidarity,
a prerequisite for union activism.
The example of Florida puts tough questions to those who
envision a union as their salvation. How can one organize
a group whose number and composition change every semester?
What can a union offer adjuncts who are content with their
full-time jobs, and whose allegiance is to their full-time
jobs? What can unions do to attract people who identify themselves
as professionals rather than members of the working class?
Can unions succeed among adjuncts when they appear to be in
retreat everywhere, particularly in the South? How can unions
make inroads into the already frenetic lives of adjuncts?
Unions, I fear, make sense only in the abstract. In reality,
as in Florida, adjuncts may have neither time nor passion
for them.
