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.
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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.”