Category Archives: Lecturers

Lecturers, Unionization

Organize Together with Contingent Faculty

Libi Sundermann

We’ve heard a lot over the past few years about the plight of the blue-collar American worker—coal miners have served as a symbol of the decline in American industry—as working-class Americans deride political leaders for allowing them to be set adrift in the pursuit of their American dream. Like coal mining jobs, tenure-track jobs in higher education have also eroded over the past four decades, and the result is that today groups including the AAUP and New Faculty Majority report that over 70 percent of college faculty are contingent and ineligible for tenure.

While comparing out-of-work coal miners to under-employed academics might seem like comparing apples to oranges, job security, pay, and benefits for many adjuncts (like that of West Virginia’s un- and underemployed coal miners) are often dire. Despite years of specialized training, tenure-track professorships are increasingly hard to find, so many would-be professors turn to adjunct positions to pay off their years of student loans (and PhD program debt has recently been uncovered as a “dirty secret”), despite the low pay, lack of regular health insurance, and job instability. While adjunct salaries vary widely and can be hard to track, the AAUP salary survey for 2016-2017 reports part-time faculty averaged $20,508 in compensation across all surveyed higher education institutions By comparison, a newly-hired assistant professor earns $ 65,372. The University of Washington, “one of the world’s preeminent public universities,” employs growing numbers of adjunct faculty, for whom not just tenure, but equitable pay and benefits are out of reach, according to UW faculty governance reports.

The 2016 UW Faculty Forward’s survey report “Uncertainty and Insecurity: The Life of Lecturers at the University of Washington,” quotes one respondent: “As an adjunct, I teach in Seattle, in Tacoma, and in Bellingham—each quarter I patch together part-time teaching to try to teach full time. I have a mortgage and bills to pay with no comfort or security in future classes to teach.” What does this mean for students? Their professors are tired, short on time, and constantly stressed. This is a raw deal for students who, in the UW system, pay just over $10,000 annually in tuition and fees.

Increases in adjunct faculty leads to less research, less academic freedom, and less support for students who may establish a relationship with a professor one term, only to find that the professor has been let go (or moved on) the next. New Faculty Majority (NFM), a national organization that advocates for adjunct faculty, points out to parents of college students that, “just as you might object to buying college apparel that is produced by exploited workers, so [should] you object to paying college tuition that does not go to ensuring professional working and learning conditions.” Because, as NFM argues, “Faculty working conditions are student learning conditions.” Tenure appears to be in an irreversible down-ward spiral as well—just this year, two more states, Missouri and Iowa, presented legislation to gut tenure, following the lead of Wisconsin.

Outside academia many ask, why should professors get tenure—or a “job for life” anyway? That’s a fair question in today’s growing freelance economy. The AAUP argues that tenure serves not just individual professors, but the public interest: “The principal purpose of tenure is to safeguard academic freedom, which is necessary for all who teach and conduct research in higher education.  When faculty members can lose their positions because of their speech or publications research findings, they cannot properly fulfill their core responsibilities to advance and transmit knowledge.” If tenure, like coal mining, disappears, how can we support all faculty, and through their work, students and the public good?

One way is to acknowledge that a tipping has been reached so that tenure no longer protects most American faculty, seriously undermining academic freedom, and the public good higher education provides. To reverse this trend, faculty, all faculty—tenured and adjunct—will need to embrace the movement toward faculty unions. Their mission, like that of UW’s Faculty Forward voluntary union, is to secure “fair pay, job security and a career ladder for all faculty” to preserve the excellence of our preeminent public university system.

Under Washington state law, a union would represent all UW faculty, of all ranks, and from all three campuses. To succeed, UW faculty from all ranks and disciplines, and from Bothell, Tacoma, and Seattle must get behind the union. Until then, UW Faculty Forward continues as a voluntary union that advocates for Washington state higher education excellence, but without the legal clout needed to offer real protection to its most vulnerable faculty.

Some UW faculty fear that a formal union will erode UW’s excellence because, “No premier research-intensive university in the U.S. – no true peer of the University of Washington, and no institution of a quality to which we aspire – has a unionized tenure-track faculty.” Yet this attitude runs counter to UW’s mission statement: The “preservation, advancement, and dissemination of knowledge,” will not be served by a lingering academic nostalgia that disregards the new reality that the vast majority of professors are no longer tenured elites within an ivory tower, but rather, are ivory-collar workers within a new gig economy. This nostalgia also runs counter to current trends. In Washington state, Western, Eastern, and Central Washington, Evergreen, Antioch, and Cornish are unionized. Nationwide, Rutgers, Cal State, and University of Oregon, among others, are unionized. An internationally preeminent public university shouldn’t be afraid to be among the first to embrace methods to protect its workers—it should be on the frontlines to build new infrastructure to protect its core value—academic freedom.

_________________________

Libi Sundermann, PhD, is a senior lecturer in history at the University of Washington, Tacoma. She was the founding chair of UWT Lecturer Affairs Committee, and currently serves on the UW AAUP Executive Board and UW Faculty Forward’s Steering Committee. Opinions expressed here do not necessarily represent those of these committees. In 2013, UW AAUP awarded her “Outstanding contribution: extraordinary leadership and advocacy to advance the conditions of Lecturers at the University of Washington: Courage in Pursuit of Excellence in Washington State Higher Education.”

 

 

Lecturers, Part-time faculty

Time to Think Clearly About Lecturers

by Dan Jacoby, UW AAUP President

Now, five years after the UW AAUP publicly advocated for measures to improve UW lecturer job security and working conditions, its time to renew university discussions. Much work has been done since that time but several of the thorniest issues still remain, especially concerns involving those who are referred to as part-time non-competitively recruited lecturers  Over the last three years the Provost’s Office has published several guidelines relating to the hire and renewal of lecturers. These guidelines have received little faculty notice and even less discussion. One essential prerequisite to public discussion requires the administration to fulfill the Provost’s Tri-Campus Committee on Lecturer 2014 Recommendation that it “gather and report recruitment, appointment, and reappointment data on full- and part-time lecturers in each appointing unit, for the next five years at least.”   If such data has been gathered, we urge that it be made publicly available for discussion. Without such data we cannot know whether current guidelines and policies are being adhered to, and if they are, whether this has occurred through the creation of more benefit ineligible part-time lecturers who work under conditions of extreme insecurity.

Background: In 2012 UW AAUP called attention to the rising numbers of lecturers who had been hired into little understood non-competitively recruited positions. Data provided to the 2013-14 Tri-Campus Task Force on Lecturers shows that appointments under these job classifications had increased from 108 faculty in fall of 2007 to a peak of 598 in the fall of 2013. UW AAUP pointed to the UW Faculty Council on Women in Academe [FCWA] 2010 survey report demonstrating, the biggest problem facing “non-ladder faculty” involved job insecurity. Non-competitively hired lecturers are ineligible for anything greater than one-year contracts and more frequently are hired quarter by quarter. This might have been less of a problem if people hired in this way thought of themselves as short term employees, but as the FCWA report reveals, the majority of part and full time lecturers responding to their survey had been employed at UW for more than 3 years and 40% had been with the UW for more than 7 years.   Similar findings were obtained using a more comprehensive dataset provided to the 2013-14 Provost Committee.

In the immediate aftermath of our 2012-13 efforts then Provost Cauce appointed a committee to make recommendations. Subsequently the Provost’s office issued several hiring guidelines requiring that renewal for non-competitively searched lecturers required competitive search within three. Those guidelines have since been extended to include part-time faculty working 50% annually.   While AAUP has always argued that the repeated renewal of long serving lecturers should serve as an alternative to competitive searches, we understood that this was not a position that the Senate was willing to take on. In addition, we recognized that some pathway to security and recognition was better than none. The larger unsettled problem in the new policy, is that it leaves open the possibility of systematic abuse of part-time lecturers who may be renewed in perpetuity under very short-term contracts beyond which they can have no job rights to security, promotion or procedural review.   It has always been part-time lecturers that have formed the largest component of non-competitive hires. The importance of this fact is underscored by the recognition that in some colleges and campuses, individuals with less than 50% FTE teach as many as 4 courses a year. In other words, part-time lecturers may teach as much or more than full-time tenure track faculty.

Earlier this year the administration released data showing that there had been a reduction in full-time competitive lecturers hired non-competitively, alongside a corresponding upward tick in competitively hired FT lecturers. However, there has been no public sharing of data on part-time lecturers. Without the type of report recommended by the Provost’s Committee in 2014, we cannot know whether the institution is moving forward or backward. In short, we can’t know whether lecturers will be pushed off 50% or greater lines and into unprotected non-benefit earning lines at less than 50% FTE.

The issue of non-ladder faculty surfaced as a confluence of two streams of events. On one hand, AAUP and the Senate have both been concerned an accelerating decline in the percentage of tenure track faculty that according to data given to the Senate, had fallen to 50% or less across all three campuses. While that fraction improves if one omits the Medicine school where substantial numbers of faculty are on clinical appointments, faculty composition is notably more problematic at the Bothell and Tacoma campuses.   A second set of concerns focused on the difficulty of achieving meaningful diversity its faculty in any meaningful way. Many faculty are rightly concerned that faculty searches be inclusive so as to provide as wide a set of opportunities as possible for all communities.

These two concerns collided in ways that prevented the solution negotiated at many other campuses across the nation. Including among these are the recently unionized campuses of Tufts University, the University of Oregon, University of Denver, as well as the University of California system where collective bargaining establishes security and advancement rights without triggering additional search requirement. Those campuses recognize that longevity creates some entitlement to job security and, in meritorious cases, to promotion.   While many of us believe our requirement for competitive search is unnecessary for lecturers whose abilities have been proven over a long periods of 5, 6 or more years is counterproductive, we do recognize the importance of ensuring open doors for underrepresented groups. We agree completely that when faculty are hired without open and competitive search under pressure of short term needs they should be expected to go through a more rigorous process at the soonest possible moment.   Thus, we agree with the impetus for rules requiring new lecturers to undergo search within 3 years, and many of us prefer to see that event triggered even sooner.   As noted earlier, we recognize that the Senate has little if any appetite for this battle and the President and Provost are committed to their approach. Moreover, when it comes to full-time lecturers, the early implementation of the search requirement means that there are now few truly long serving lecturer still on non-competitively hired lines.   This transition has occurred with considerable pain, anxiety and expense.   One may simply ask the faculty who have had to go through post hoc searches, the faculty who decided to leave the university instead, and the faculty who have had to conduct the searches for their positions.

As noted earlier, unfortunately, the full-time lecturers are only a small portion—probably 20 to 25 per cent) of all non-competitively hired lecturers.

We are currently in phase two of the policy changes with regard to search: These newly include faculty at 50% annual FTE or more.   As any good economist would point out, under the guidelines currently in effect cash strained Deans and Department Chairs, who has a choice between awarding a 40% contract that can be renewed in perpetuity without the expense of benefits or the formalities of search, has a strong economic incentive to reduce the FTE percentage of those whose contracts are currently at or above 50% FTE have an economic incentive to do so. These kinds of tradeoffs would have been unthinkable 20 or 30 years ago. They should be unthinkable today, but unfortunately the fact is that they unless we maintain pressure on these issues, they are only unthinkable because we choose not to think about them.