August 6, 2013 | By mquinn |
Adjunct Action has partnered with StudentDebtCrisis.org to encourage people to share their student debt stories. We’d love to have adjuncts participate. Click below or visit http://studentdebtcrisis.org/
July 19, 2013 | By mquinn |
Earlier this week Tufts adjuncts filed a petition with the National Labor Relations Board to hold a union election. The election, a mail ballot, is set for September.
“It is thrilling to be moving from isolation to collaboration in which our individuality is treasured even as we discover how we benefit from working together. We are part of a world we didn’t know was there,” said Rebecca K. Gibson, a lecturer at Tufts University and a member of the organizing committee. Read More
July 18, 2013 | By mquinn |
Adjunct Action is hosting a workshop on unemployment insurance benefits for adjunct professors. The workshop will be led by Monica Halas, Lead Attorney for Greater Boston Legal Services and Maryann Parker, Chief Counsel for the Public Division of SEIU. Watch it below starting on Friday, July 19th at noon.
Check below for the documents referenced in the talk.
If the video below is jumpy visit http://www.ustream.tv/channel/adjunct-action for a better version. Read More
July 1, 2013 | By mquinn |
In a recent interview with WMBR 88.1 in Cambridge, Joan Atlas, an adjunct professor in the English and Media Studies, offered an in-depth perspective of what it’s like to be a contingent faculty member, and why she’s become involved with the unionization effort.
Touching on topics ranging from healthcare to adjunct pay, Atlas discussed her role as the adjunct representative to the faculty senate. “I am one voice, representing about 149 adjuncts…one voice is not enough,” she said. Read More
June 13, 2013 | By mquinn |
Some good news for the start of the summer: adjunct organizing has taken significant steps forward in Boston, DC, and Washington state.
Here in Boston, contingent faculty from Bentley University filed for an election to form a union with Adjunct Action and SEIU. In the broader adjunct world, contingent faculty at American University in DC ratified their first union contract, and in Washington state, adjuncts at Pacific Lutheran University won the right to hold their election for a union. Read More
June 11, 2013 | By mquinn |
Good news from Washington state. In a precedent-setting ruling, the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) rejected Pacific Lutheran University’s objections to allowing contingent faculty a vote on forming a union with SEIU Local 925. PLU administration had blocked the efforts of contingent faculty for an election run by the NLRB, on the grounds that the religious affiliation placed it outside the labor board’s jurisdiction. Read More
May 9, 2013 | By mquinn |
Following a union symposium last month that included over 100 contingent faculty from 20 Boston-area colleges and universities, today 150 Bentley University adjunct faculty were the first to file for their union election to join Adjunct Action, a project of the Service Employees International Union (SEIU).
“It is very exciting to be a pioneer in the effort to organize adjuncts in the Boston area,” said Doug Kierdorf, an adjunct professor in the History Department at Bentley University. “The problem for me and a lot of adjuncts is you never know if you’re going to have work. I think if most students knew the terms of our employment they would be appalled.” Read More
April 29, 2013 | By mquinn |
By Robert Hannigan
Having worked as an adjunct at several colleges and universities in this region over the past thirty years, and meeting dozens of other people doing the same, I feel that I can venture two broad generalizations. One is that institutions of higher learning in greater Boston have been extremely fortunate. Virtually all of the adjuncts I have met are highly educated people and extremely devoted teachers. The only thing that really separates them from the rest of the faculty is the fact that, in a very difficult market, they have not been able to find a ‘regular’ job. Read More
April 17, 2013 | By mquinn |
“We said yes.”
That was the consensus of a group of over 100 adjunct professors after a day of panels and discussions about organizing contingent faculty in the Boston metro area to raise standards for their profession. The event was held at the John F. Kennedy Library in Boston on Saturday, and served as the public kickoff for the Adjunct Action campaign to unionize contingent faculty across the Boston metro area.
The day, a mixture of presentations and free-flowing discussions, started with a panel entitled “Adjunctified: The Casual Academic Workforce.” Professor Gary Rhodes talked about the “ferment and hunger for representation and voice” amongst adjunct faculty, whom he described as “isolated, attenuated, and alienated.”
“Recognize these?” wrote one adjunct who tweeted Rhodes’ comments, as Rhodes told the story of one adjunct who said he “carried my office to work in a briefcase every day.”
During the same panel Maria Maisto, an adjunct professor and a founder of the New Faculty Majority, an organization that works to advance professional equity for contingent faculty, argued that student learning outcomes are inextricably linked to the conditions their professors work under. “Faculty working conditions are student learning conditions,” she said. If faculty working conditions continue to decline, both they and students suffer, she said.
The symposium, sponsored by Service Employees International Union, received significant press attention in advance of the event, including coverage on NPR’s All Things Considered, on Boston.com, in the Chronicle of Higher Education, and on CBS Boston. SEIU represents 15,000 adjunct faculty nationally.
Attendees and panelist linked the problems facing contingent faculty, including low pay, lack of job security and little or no access to benefits, to the “corporatization” of higher education. There is an “increasing corporate mentality of educational institutions,” said one attendee. “The whole community is affected if we can not bring core education values back.”
Nationally, approximately 70% of instructional faculty are off the tenure track, with the number of part-time faculty increasing at three times the rate of full-time faculty members over the last 15 years. The average contingent faculty member makes approximately $2900 per course, according to the Adjunct Project, a crowdsourcing site founded by Joshua Boldt and the Chronicle of Higher Education. Most part-time professors do not have access health insurance through the educational institutions that employ them.
Statistics regarding part-time faculty are startling. In 2009 at American University (AU) in Washington, DC adjuncts made up about 50 percent of the faculty, yet their total salaries represented about 4% of the budget for instruction. Contingent faculty at AU voted to unionize with SEIU Local 500 in 2011 and are in the process of negotiating their first contract.
At the symposium Anne McLeer, director of strategy and research at SEIU Local 500 and a former adjunct professor at George Washington (GW), explained how the “metro” strategy worked in DC. Adjuncts from AU, GW, and Montgomery College have unionized into Local 500, and Georgetown part-time faculty are currently in the process of joining Local 500. With a metro strategy, citywide organizing will allow adjunct faculty to build the strength necessary to pressure universities to raise standards marketwide and avoid losing talent.
At George Washington University, the birthplace of the DC metro campaign, the contingent faculty now represented by SEIU Local 500 have negotiated three contracts, securing regular raises, greater job security, and access to professional development funds. Full details of that contract can be found here.
At GW, McLeer said, the movement started with some “crazy folks” in the English Department who worked to overcome institutional intransigence.
“The adjunct faculty struggle is a struggle to fight for the values of equality, security, and justice for all on our campuses,” Joseph Ramsey, a contingent lecturer at UMass Lowell told the crowd gathered at the symposium, urging them to come together to fight collectively.
Students from Tufts, Northeastern and Emerson attended the event in a show of support for hardworking adjunct faculty, who told stories of staying late and working well beyond the three course hours for which they are paid to write recommendations and provide guidance on papers and coursework.
Todd Ricker, the organizing director for the Adjunct Action, posed a question to the gathered adjuncts as they prepared to engage in discussions about the reasons to organize on their respective campuses. “Do you want things to change or do you want things to remain the same?” he asked. “Forming a union is easy,” he added, “but it’s not simple,” requiring patience, dedication and a willingness to face institutional resistance.
At the close of the symposium as adjuncts summed up their positions on organizing a union, the willingness was there. “Unite,” said one table. “Fight for respect,” said another. “We said yes,” said a third.
“The SEIU symposium is powerful,” tweeted one adjunct at the closing. “Contingent faculty of the world, unite.”
April 11, 2013 | By mquinn |
By Dr. Jack Dempsey
I’m Dr. Jack Dempsey and, while I’m “only” part-time college faculty, like you I have more than a full-time dedication to educating and empowering the students with whom I’m fortunate to work. Through 20 years of teaching on this basis, I’m still always wondering why my university administrators just don’t get it—that if I had what academe calls a real job, I’d be there on the weekends with my own hammer and nails building what they call value into the school.
Instead through all these years, administrators have increased tuition and fees on students, increased class sizes, upgraded infrastructure, and spent more on Spring Day’s campus flowers than they pay me in a year, for giving raw and attention-starved students the very tools by which they benefit from being there. They said my “Best Adjunct Professor” award was prestigious, and gave the year’s best full-timer twice the honorarium. They held an annual dinner to thank us adjuncts for all we do, but we had to pay $5 to get in.
Beyond the part-time classroom, I meet and dialogue constantly with students who want special focus or need intensive care. To and from the classroom, where the world lights up as always, I wear a salt cloak of anger at the adjunct’s hapless function as a profit mule. And I think I’m ready to do something about it—because in fact we have the power and the leverage to do so.
I’m done with toothless resolutions and paper demands. I watched my graduate school simultaneously embellish and fortify itself while I descended into distinguished bankruptcy. But where is the power here? As always, it’s with the people who do the work. Administrators are not the school. We are the school and the value of what it delivers. Administration is what allows us to do that. But teachers are why students come into the classrooms.
For me, the time is come for college adjuncts to play the same level of hard-ball that’s been played against them for too long, with too much damage to a whole generation of dedicated teachers. The power is with the people who do the core-value work. And it’s time to demonstrate the proposition.
What would happen if all of us—the current 50%-and-more of all college faculty—one day truly realized that we have to be the first to stand, bodily, by it?
This is the only level of action that moved American schools, for example, to dis-invest in tyrannous regimes and unethical businesses.
If it can do those things, it will work as well for college adjuncts. We try harder. We enrich our schools in every way, and have earned the right and power to help ourselves.
So I want to see what Adjunct Action means. Until we first respect ourselves for real, and act upon it, the schools that are grinding us into profitable powder will not.
Love your students, and fight injustice.
The symposium will be held at the JFK Library in Boston from 9 a.m. to 3 p.m. this Saturday, April 13th. RSVP here: http://action.seiu.org/page/s/Symposium. Hope to see you there.
Professor Jack Dempsey is an Assistant Professor of English and Media Studies at Bentley University in Boston.
Across the country a nationwide movement of adjunct faculty are joining together to improve higher education by working to create better working conditions for themselves and better learning conditions for their students.
