FACE Talk

Conference Wrap-up

The NEA-AFT Joint Higher Education Conference wrapped-up yesterday.  It was an exhausting 3 day conference, but one that was well worth the time and effort.  Over 750 union activists, including colleagues from Canada, came together to talk about a wide range of issues, but two clear themes emerged.  How do we address the challenges we face with academic staffing including providing better pay and job security for contingent faculty, and how do we promote better faculty diversity.  But seeing as I am still tired from the whole affair, here are a few stories from around the nets on the conference to give you a sense of the discussions.

The Chronicle of Higher Education has a really nice overview of the whole conference.

Inside Higher Ed covered two different sessions in their issue today:  one on collective bargaining contracts for full-time, nontenure track faculty and another on an AFT Workload Study on classified staff in higher education.

Diverse reported on a particular workshop that addressed the challenges we face in the area of faculty diversity.

There were also a variety of academic bloggers there, but we will have to wait to see if they have any thoughts on the conference.

Wayne State University Doesn’t Get It

More than 900 part-time faculty at Wayne State University voted to form a union last year and have been bargaining for a first contract since November 2007. The Union of Part-Time Faculty (UPTF) is negotiating for a minimum standard of treatment: job security, a living wage, benefits, timely assignment of courses, regular salary increases and recognition and respect for their contributions to the university. No surprises there.

But what is surprising is that a university in the heart of Michigan labor land can’t get its mind around that minimum concept of job security. WSU’s response is to offer “first consideration.”

At an institution where faculty have been teaching for decades—some as long as 35 years—ill-defined promises of “first consideration” show a lack consideration for the dedicated professionalism of a large portion of the university’s teaching force. The UPTF wants the university to recognize longevity as a contractual basis for future employment.

If long-term employees can’t rely upon continued employment, can’t plan for ongoing instructional assignments, can’t invest in mentoring relationships with their students, can’t plan their teaching schedules until short weeks before a semester begins, what does that say about the learning environment at Wayne State? Providing job security for the large teaching force means a more stable learning experience for students, too.

UPTF has reached a critical juncture in its negotiations this week and asks for support from colleagues around the nation. Write to WSU president Irvin D. Reid and tell him that you support the fundamental right of job security for UPTF members. You can e-mail him at President@wayne.edu (and please cc: the union at uptf@aftmichigan.org).

Or mail your letter to:

Office of the President
Wayne State University
4200 Faculty/Administration Building
Detroit, MI 48202

For more on the Wayne State part-timers, go to www.uptf.org.

Spring Break?

Only of a sort.  FACE Talk will be taking a break this week as most of our contributors will be busy attending the AFT-NEA National Higher Education Conference in Washington, D.C.  We will be back with regularly scheduled blogging next week.

Protect Part-time Faculty Jobs

Congratulations to Washington State AFT on getting the Senate’s budget to include $500,000 for conversion efforts at community colleges.  As we lay the groundwork in PA to get our bill passed in the next year, it is encouraging to see some success.  I was disappointed, though not terribly surprised, to see that the Washington legislators had dropped the directive for priority to be given to part-time instructors when these jobs are filled.  There is always reluctance to control local decisions from above. 

I can see this priority directive being a problem in other state legislatures too.  This priority is something that AFT will continue to fight for. What better candidate for a position than someone who has already proven their committment to the college? 

However, there is something else AFT's model FACE legislation includes, something that each state's FACE bill needs to include, job protection for the part-time faculty.  Looking to the future, as the ratio of full-time faculty inches towards its 75% goal, the fear expressed from most part-time faculty is job loss.  Some part-time teachers do not want full-time positions; however, they all want to keep their jobs.

Tenure or Not Tenure; That is the Question

I have to admit that I don’t understand the controversy “raging” in academia over whether tenure is “vital to the protection of academic freedom” and beneficial to our educational system, or whether it is “an outmoded concept” that “promotes a two-tiered system” of those who have tenure and those who don’t. Attacks from administrators are easy to understand: tenure interferes with their ability to fire and hire faculty, euphemistically referred to as “flexibility.” I can even understand those who work outside of the educational systems and believe that tenure protects “terrible teachers” and prevents “good teachers” from being hired: anecdotal evidence abounds in the media and on the internet of teachers who are tried and found guilty of being “bad.”

It’s much more difficult to understand how those who are protected by tenure can object to it. I associate tenure with “job security,” which has been one of my primary goals for several years. In fact, according to most of the surveys conducted among contingent faculty, achieving job security is tops the list of priorities. I suppose some of us who don’t enjoy the benefits of tenure might resent others having it, but I think most of us would rather find a way to achieve it than try to take it away from those who have. It becomes even more important when you’ve lost a job or two without knowing what went wrong. While I’ve never been fired from a teaching position, there have been a couple of occasions when I was simply not offered another contract.

When no reason has to be given for not continuing your employment, it is difficult to understand what happened. We look for clues in the attitudes and behaviors of those we work with and for. On one occasion, I was called into the dean’s office because a few of my students objected to the required reading for the course. They considered I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou and The World According to Garp pornographic, and the dean asked why I felt it was necessary to use “this type of literature” in a college writing class.

On another occasion, I had been observed by a new program director who had come from the K-12 system. She sat in on one of my more successful classes – the students worked in small groups before participating in a class discussion on the essays we had read – and then wrote a three page evaluation criticizing me for “not having control of the classroom.” She complained that my style was “too casual” and that the students did most of the talking. When I met with her to go over my evaluation, I explained that my goal was to encourage independent thought and creativity. Apparently, she felt there was no place in the system for teachers like me, and my contract was not renewed.

So, I have to admit to having a personal bias when I read discussions about tenure. I like the idea of having to have “cause” to fire someone – at least then you would know why you were losing your job. It makes sense to me for  there to be a system where a person is observed, advised, and evaluated before winning this security, in fact such a system not only assures quality in education, but it provides guidance and opportunities to improve for those who are going through it. It’s unfortunate that not everyone who goes for tenure is able to achieve it, but as long as the process is fair and just, this is going to happen.

Contingent Staff Strike for Job Security

You can't convince most Canadians that Spring has officially arrived. Most of the country is still trapped tightly in the cold grip of winter.  But that's not stopping contingent faculty at Wilfred Laurier University in Kitchener, Ontario from braving the cold, snow and slush. They're on the picket lines today to press for a better deal on pay and job security.

The contingent faculty unit of the Wilfred Laurier Faculty Association voted 89% in favor of a strike after bargaining hit an impasse. One key stumbling block is job security. At Wilfred Laurier, seniority for contingent faculty is calculated on per course basis -- essentially, you're awarded different seniority points for different courses taught. Not surprisingly, contingent faculty say the system is a mess. It's overly complex and arbitrary, and as a result the administration's seniority records are often incomplete and inaccurate.

The union is proposing that the point system be simplified so that seniority is calculated based on the total of all courses taught, and not on a per course basis. The goal is to create a seniority system that better recognizes the experience and qualifications of staff.

The union is also proposing that members that have 15 or more seniority points have the right of first refusal on courses provided they have the appropriate academic qualifications. Maybe, if the strike is successful, this could give real meaning to job security for contingent faculty. 

Already Down The Slippery Slope

So there is this little conference coming up that is keeping me distracted from the conversation that The Constructivist and I started a couple weeks back related to tenure and the whole staffing structure, but TC has been good enough to provide us with some more food for thought based on a recent post from Tenured Radical.

Now I was hoping that either TC of TR would take up the question of how to improve the tenure system while maintaining the basic (and important) protections it provides, but clearly TR is in no mood—and given the set of events she is writing out of, it is easy to understand why (and really who am I to argue with someone who says what they really want is a union?!).

On the other hand, as TC and others in the comment threads point out, many still see value in the protections of tenure, even if they have critiques of the process, and rightly point out that institutional type, location, and mission all play into how they perceive tenure. But what struck me in the conversation was one comment about the what if there was no tenure.  The commenter noted:

I'm generally suspicious of slippery slope arguments, but if tenure were abolished, I wonder how long it would be until administrators drove us back to the one-year contracts that characterized American universities in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the abuse of which led to the present tenure system.

With all due respect, this is no slippery slope argument; it is, in fact, where we are. We have already arrived at the point where contingent faculty greatly outnumber full-time, tenure eligible faculty and the fastest growing group of faculty are full-time faculty off the tenure track—all of whom have considerably less (typically no) job security or real academic freedom protections.  And, well, do I really need to rehash how horribly compensated most contingent faculty are? My point (and the whole reason that TC and I started this conversation I think) is that you can’t talk about the institution of tenure without talking about how we are staffing our colleges and universities as a whole.  We are in the middle of a much larger debate about higher education and what we need to be fighting for in a very real, big picture sense.

Part-Time Collegiality

The full-time faculty in our division know each other very well. While they may not always get along, they at least understand one another’s perspectives and are able to work together. They have had opportunities to get to know each other as they have worked together, not only in the classrooms, but also on committees and within the division.

Part-time faculty simply don’t have the same opportunities to build professional relationships. Besides having fluctuating schedules and not knowing from one quarter to the next if we will even be teaching, we don’t often have the opportunities to attend division meetings and serve on committees. However, after we teach for a few quarters on the same campus, we begin to recognize one another. Sometimes we are actually able to build friendships.

Part-Timer collegiality has its own peculiar twists and features. For example, one college heard us when we talked about the importance of having offices, and they gave us a large room (twelve work stations) that sixty-three of us shared. Of course, we weren’t all there at the same time, but we were seldom alone in the office. The first quarter, we would quietly sneak to our assigned workstation, lay claim to a drawer in a file cabinet and a shelf in the bookcase, sign up for time on one of the computers, do our work and leave.

Eventually, we actually began talking to one another. One of my colleagues referred to what eventually happened as a form of Stockholm syndrome – instead of developing an attachment to our “captors,” we build friendships with our fellow “captives.” We began to share our ideas about teaching as well as our frustration with the system. I remember one friend weeping because she had accepted too many classes (six classes spread over three campuses) and didn’t know how she was going to survive the quarter, and weeping again the following spring when she was down to three classes on two campuses and she didn’t know how she was going to pay her bills.

Talking About Contingency at Western Oregon U: Part Two

Earlier this week, we reported on a forum at Western Oregon University and shared the comments of contingent faculty member, Jeremy Tanzer.  For Part Two, we offer you the comments of contingent faculty member Staci Simmelink-Johnson.

______________________________________________________________

I’d like to preface this statement by telling you that I love teaching.  I have found no other outlet professionally where I feel so energized and enthusiastic, and I do not doubt my vocation or professional choice.  Teaching college students is exactly what I want to be doing, and I am willing to deal with a few years of “working my way up” to get to a permanent job.

With that said, however, it is NOT an easy process.  I have a Ph.D. in my field, and get paid less than the salaries advertised for receptionists.

Currently, I am only teaching at two schools, and both are on the same schedule system. 

I drive up to an hour to each workplace, and sometimes spend more time on the road than I do in class, only to drive back to another college to teach there. 

At one point, I was teaching in quarter-system and semester-system schools simultaneously, which greatly impacted vacation time and family scheduling.  Nothing coincided! 

At any given time, I have up to four email addresses (not to mention Banner accounts, WebCT and Blackboard accounts, voice mail accounts and so forth) for which I must remember a variety of logins and passwords.  Of course, each has different requirements, so I cannot just use a “one size fits all” combination. 

Over the past four years, I have been on three different insurance plans…but changed insurances 4-5 times depending on which employer was primary, or whether insurance from my jobs was even offered.  I am lucky that my spouse does have an insurance plan through his work, but it is not GOOD insurance, so when my employment offers it, we need to switch.  I have been lucky that two of my employers    offer insurance.  I know several adjuncts who have no insurance through work at all.

Perhaps the worst aspect of being Non Tenure Track is the uncertainty…and dare I mention the begging?  Every 10 weeks, I am left to wonder if I will have a paycheck for the next term.  If I lose just one class due to low enrollment, I will lose my insurance.  If there is low enrollment in a specialized or upper division class that a tenure-track faculty member is assigned to teach, my classes are taken to give to them to ensure a full load for tenure track faculty.  I spend much of my time calling and emailing the scheduling coordinator at one college where I work, because one term, due to a staffing change, they LOST my name and forgot to offer me any classes.   

Again, I want to emphasize that I know there are steps to climb and challenges to face as one enters any profession…but seven years of school beyond college really should prepare us for a career that is somewhat stable.  Having this uncertainty about paying the mortgage, feeding my children and paying for childcare, as well as the basic monthly expenses that a family has creates an incredible and unnecessary amount of stress.

I love teaching, but this term I have put out feelers to the nonacademic world.  It seems wrong that people who are well trained, passionate about their jobs, and the recipients of feedback from students and other faculty indicating that we are doing our jobs well, should think of leaving academia.  However, in reality, given the circumstances, it may be inevitable.

The Joy of Finals

This quarter, I’m teaching on three campuses for two different colleges. Somehow, both colleges managed to plan their finals for the same week, so the usual juggling of schedules is a lot less complicated than it has been in the past.

After being a part-timer for almost twenty years, I’m still surprised by how popular I get at this time of the quarter. Students I haven’t heard from in weeks are sending e-mail and leaving phone messages. Most are asking the same types of questions: What can I do to get a good grade (or pass) the class? Many of the conversations include the accusations that begin with, “You never said . . . ,” and I sometimes can’t stop myself from suggesting that perhaps I did deliver some useful information during one of the numerous classes they missed.

In recent years, more students are assertive enough to complain to my supervisors about their grades, which inevitably lead to more “conversations” about pedagogy and student responsibility. Fortunately, I have taught long enough at both colleges, and have made an extra effort to get to know my supervisors as both colleagues and friends, to no longer feel threatened when they call to let me know that we need to talk. At Green River Community College, I actually have some security because of a seniority system, placement in the “Adjunct In-File,” that is set up there. Because the system includes peer observations and “post-file reviews,” my division chair is familiar with the work I do in the classroom and I don’t feel as threatened when she calls.

There have been a couple of strange things happening in the state that are contributing to the pressure to “work with the students and be more understanding.”