News

April 3, 2013

An Adjunct’s Story: Professor Deborah Schwartz

April 3, 2013 | By mquinn |

Professor Deborah Schwartz

By Deborah Schwartz

What brings us to this place, where we must organize a union to win a strong voice so we can negotiate with the private universities that employ us? Why do we need access to professional development, publishing opportunities, and support, as our tenured colleagues do?

Simply, it is because we care about the quality of our students’ learning. And we know that the quality of our teaching, in terms of our own production over the course of our careers—both as inspired classroom teachers, and as academics and artists grounded in the intellectual discourse of our disciplines—is, in effect, based on the quality of our own working conditions.

My Story

In the summer of 1991, having completed my MFA in poetry and holding a secondary education English teaching certificate through a low-residency program that allowed me to work full-time (in this case house-cleaning and teaching writing in an adult literacy program in Boston), I borrowed a friend’s suit, rode the commuter line from North Station to Lynn, Massachusetts where I strutted into the English Department of North Shore Community College.

I felt prepared to be a great writing teacher. Come hell or high water, I was going to bring my skills and experience (having taught as a substitute teacher in the Boston Public Schools and a writing, history and social studies teacher in a myriad of adult literacy programs in communities and prisons for the past five years) to higher education.

After ten minutes of browsing through my CV and transcripts, asking me how I would manage a class of students who weren’t interested in and didn’t really have time to learn how to write well, the English Department Chair (long since retired) of the North Shore Community College pronounced that I had a job teaching two composition classes, “which for someone my age, was very, very lucky.”

In fact, during that summer, I landed three separate adjunct positions for the following fall, teaching a total of seven composition, literature and creative writing courses per semester for a total of $1,300/course, or for a total of 14 writing courses/academic year, a gross total of $18,200. My salary included nothing—no benefits, no retirement, and I always seemed to owe taxes when April approached.

However during the first five years of such adjunct work, all three of these public institutions unionized, and as a member of the collective bargaining unit, I started to see small increases in pay, cost-of-living-adjustments, and options for a pre-taxed retirement savings plan. Living on rice and beans, bringing papers to friends’ house parties on Saturday night and writing my novel long into the morning hours, seemed like a fine enough life to me. I did feel, in the words of that well-meaning, patronizing department chair, “lucky.”

I loved my work. I loved my students. I heard similarities and uniquenesses in my students’ stories, and in that moment before sleep, when I did finally get to bed, I hoped, secretly that my students were learning as much from me, as I was from them.

In 2005, I was hired for a contracted faculty position at the College of Public and Community Services (CPCS) at the University of Massachusetts Boston. Because the progressive educators who served as the college’s administrators were committed to providing livable wages with benefits for its non-tenured writing faculty, because they had the vision to recognize that many non-tenured faculty had the credentials, experience and vision to be excellent teachers and to contribute to the overall quality of the college, many of my contracted colleagues had served as members of the college’s ranks for twenty or so years.

Non-tenured faculty taught, received awards, published, made decisions in the college’s governance, conducted themselves as professionals who received the support they needed and gave back three-fold. It seemed too good to be true—both for the individuals such as myself who had never been treated as part of the faculty infrastructure, and for the students that we taught and cared about. It seemed to be too good to be true, and it was.

The following Labor Day weekend, all thirteen of the contracted faculty were given a pink slip. The university administration had decided that the competency-based educational pedagogy, and the public and community service mission of the college was not a cost-effective approach to educating the non-traditional students that the college was charged with serving. The university dismantled the administrative and faculty positions that allowed this college to deliver excellent educational services to community, and civic-minded, non-traditional students as it had been doing since the early 1970’s.

But not without a fight. Because all thirteen of us were unionized, we grieved, and though we didn’t win our jobs back, nor reinstitute the structure of this historic college within the University, we did win our lost wages for the semester. And of equal importance, the faculty union at the university has become more active and inclusive of it’s non-tenured contracted and adjunct members.

Having transversed the public higher education system, the publicly funded adult basic education system, and most recently, the private higher education system, I still feel lucky to be teaching as adjunct. I still love my students (not all of them and certainly not every day), but fundamentally, I love them. I believe in their rights to a good education based in core academic values that position critical and compassionate inquiry alongside competitive market skills. And as our students face a more desperate economy premised on notions of individual competition and Reaganomics that we are still recovering from, I believe that the work that we all do has even further reaching, long-term consequences, than we have even figured out how to measure.

But I wonder how long can I maintain two full-time positions? What are the consequences for remaining in positions that don’t value me, my labor, my time? I finally have finished my first collection of poetry and need to “shop it around.” The unpublished novel still needs a final draft, and I have a second collection of poetry that’s emerging. My life as an adjunct professor in a myriad of English department across greater Boston’s higher education institutions is untenable. Like all of us, I love what I do. We are lucky, in many, many ways. But if the institutions we work for are unwilling to value us, how can we sustain this level and quality of production? Together and organized, I believe.

Deborah Schwartz is an adjunct faculty member in the English Department at Boston College and the Assistant Director of the Graduate College of Education at the University of Massachusetts, Boston.

By mquinn

October 7, 2012

News

Sign an Interest Card

October 7, 2012 | By mquinn |

By mquinn

October 7, 2012

News

Contact Information for LA

October 7, 2012 | By mquinn |

By mquinn

October 7, 2012

News

About the LA Adjunct Action Campaign

October 7, 2012 | By mquinn |

Adjuncts are organizing in Los Angeles in an effort to broaden their voice in the future of higher education. There has been a consistent decline of tenure track positions at America’s institutions of higher education. In the Los Angeles market, 72% of employees with faculty status at private, not-for-profit colleges and universities are not on the tenure track or in the tenure system. [1]

Universities have shifted resources from instruction to administration, resulting in an over-reliance on adjuncts as teaching faculty instead of creating full-time positions with benefits.

Forty-six percent of employees with faculty status at private, not-for-profit colleges and universities in the Los Angeles market are part-time, and that percentage is as high as 98% of faculty at some universities. In fact, 29% of all non-profit colleges and universities in the Los Angeles market report 75% or more of their faculty are part time. [2]

Nationally, more than 70 percent of college instructional faculty are adjuncts. In 1969, tenured and tenure-track positions made up approximately 78.3 percent of the faculty. In 2009, tenured and tenure-track faculty had declined to only 33.5 percent. During this same period, 66.5 percent of faculty was ineligible for tenure.[3]

Unless action is taken, the trend toward a marginalized adjunct faculty will continue unabated.

Across the nation in Washington, D.C., New Hampshire, Maine, Connecticut and California adjunct faculty are uniting with SEIU to build a marketwide movement and raise their professional standards. SEIU is the nation’s fastest growing union and home to more than 15,000 unionized adjuncts across the country. By joining together in our union, we will raise the standards for faculty and students alike in the colleges and universities where we teach here in Los Angeles.

Adjunct faculty in the Los Angeles area can find out more about forming a union by calling Myra Woodson at 213-394-9486 or emailing [email protected].

[1] IPEDS Data Center, 2011 final release data set. All Title IV participating, private, not-for-profit, 4-year or above colleges and universities in the Los Angeles-Long Beach-Santa Ana Core Based Statistical Area (CBSA).

[2] IPEDS Data Center, 2011 final release data set. All Title IV participating, private, not-for-profit, 4-year or above colleges and universities in the Los Angeles-Long Beach-Santa Ana Core Based Statistical Area (CBSA).

[3] The Changing Faculty and Student Success, Pg. 1,  http://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED532269.pdf, pg.

By mquinn

October 7, 2012

News

Contact Information

October 7, 2012 | By mquinn |

By mquinn

September 19, 2012

News

We at Bentley are Voting Yes to Form Our Union with SEIU/Adjunct Action

September 19, 2012 | By mquinn |

Together we can win for our profession, for our students and for our families.

Robert Hannigan, Adjunct Assistant Professor, History, 27 years at Bentley

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.

The second is that the contributions of these people have been terribly underappreciated. Department chairs and other members of the faculty have often been supportive. But those higher up have generally been inclined simply to take financial advantage of the situation and bank on the fact that adjuncts will do good work because of their commitment. That such a policy is indefensible goes without saying. But to so undervalue the contributions of the people who are doing so much of the college teaching in the Boston area also suggests that these institutions may have priorities at odds with those they claim.

In this age of high tuition, students would be shocked to know how little of their money goes to the adjuncts who are teaching many of their classes or how much work that low pay forces those adjuncts to take on. Without adjuncts organizing, sad to say, it is a situation unlikely to change.

Bob Keefe, Adjunct Assistant Professor, English and Media Studies,

10 Years at Bentley

Bob Keefe

I am writing to encourage you to vote in favor of creating an adjunct union at Bentley.

My first concern is fairness. The fairness issue seems obvious: our salaries are in no way commensurate with the time and effort we put into our classes, nor is it fair that adjunct professors make only a fraction of what full time faculty receive for the same work. Next, I would ask you to consider the moral aspects of the adjuncts’ situation. I’ve been told that there are adjuncts who are not concerned about the pay they receive because they don’t need the extra money…or that they donate their salary to the University. Commendable as that may be, it doesn’t negate the moral responsibility to support those who desperately need the money.

An increase in salary and job security are the two main reasons I support an adjunct union at Bentley. Although I am retired with a decent income and very good medical benefits, I know many much younger adjuncts who have neither. These are often young men and women with PhD.s in their field and see teaching as a lifetime career… and yet they cannot survive on the income Bentley provides. I, personally, feel morally responsible to support these adjuncts.

I know that there are some people who feel there are reasons not to support a union
for adjuncts. First, I suspect, is the fear of reprisal, and the risks involved with letting your position be known to the administration. Once we have agreed to have a union at Bentley, the whole issue of reprisal stakes on a brand new perspective. From that point on, nothing can happen without the administration bargaining with the union… you are no longer an individual fighting the administration. You will have an insurance policy that will guarantee your rights as an employee of Bentley University.

Elaine Saunders, Adjunct Assistant Professor, Mathematical Sciences,

12 Years at Bentley

Elaine Saunders

I went to college in the 1970’s, and it was a culture shock to come back to a university setting after years in the business world. Back in those days, teaching at the college level was a highly desirable occupation, secure and well-paying, comfortably within the middle class.

While it is still a wonderful profession for some today, I see many younger fellow adjuncts struggle to get full-time employment by cobbling together part-time positions at two or more colleges, with no benefits and no job security, for very low pay. It was distressing to see that a large segment of college teaching had been downgraded into “permatemp” status.

Unfortunately, what has been happening to our jobs is reflective of today’s “winner take all” economy. Productivity is going up, but prosperity is no longer broadly shared, like it was while I was growing up in the 50’s, 60’s and 70’s.

By banding together in a union, I believe we will begin to win back what was gradually eroded from our profession over the last few decades. We deserve job security and better pay. We need health care benefits. Getting these necessary improvements would be impossible if we acted individually. But by joining with SEIU we can rely on seasoned professionals to help us achieve our goals.

Please vote “YES” on the mail-in ballot this September!

Barbara Nash, Adjunct Assistant Professor, Natural and Applied Sciences,

12 Years at Bentley

Barbara Nash

Why do I plan to vote yes for the union?

I would like to see the adjuncts have a voice, with some power (ability to negotiate) behind it.

I would like us to be paid more.

I would like us to get contributions to our retirement funds (especially Roth IRAs) and to our health care.

I would like to be reimbursed for training and expenses that I incur to enhance my teaching skills.

Thomas Johnson, Adjunct Assistant Professor, History, 4 years at Bentley

Thomas Johnson

As someone who has taught history at Bentley University since 2009, my experiences here have been consistently positive. I have very good colleagues, a fine department chair, and many friends across campus. But most workplaces benefit from unionization, and I believe that Bentley is no exception. We can negotiate for health insurance, job security and a grievance procedure as well as living wages. Through collective bargaining adjunct faculty will have more input into decision-making.

This will increase our stake in developing the university, and better reflect our commitment to educating current and future students. Rather than causing greater tension, unions minimize conflict by regularizing it, a goal that the Bentley community can support together. Perhaps best of all, we will deepen contacts and friendships by creating and sustaining our union local, our own institution. Heck, we can even put that on our resumes. What’s not to like?

Jack Dempsey, Adjunct Assistant Professor, English and Media Studies,

12 years at Bentley

Jack Dempsey

I went bankrupt in the year I earned my Ph.D. After that came 15 years of adjunct professor’s pay, with no health care, job security or rights. And yet, like my dedicated peers, my teaching and results are going strong. It’s time to stand up for our value to Bentley— time to vote Yes for an Adjuncts Union.

This is a win-win.

Doug Kierdorf, Adjunct Assistant Professor, History, 8 years at Bentley

Doug Kierdorf

We all got into teaching because we love it. We became college teachers because of our love of learning and our commitment to communicating our passion for learning to our students. It does not seem fair, however, that following that passion necessarily means that as teachers we should be condemned to penury like medieval monks. Accordingly, our first priority must be to make it possible to make a living wage as an adjunct.

For me, however, the most important issue is job security. We are all in the position of knowing that our classes can be cancelled on the very morning that they are due to start and we have no recourse or compensation for all the prep work that we have done, nor do we have an alternative source of income to rely upon, especially on short notice. This makes planning our lives impossible. Also, we receive no benefits, no health insurance and no pension. The university administration expects us to be committed to our students and to the institution, and insists that it values us, but it treats us as though we are disposable. It says that we are professionals who do not need a bargaining agent, but it does not treat us as professionals.

As adjuncts, we have little control over curriculum, over our own workplace, or over access to resources that are necessary to teach effectively. By treating adjuncts as cheap, disposable alternatives to full-time professors, the administration undermines the very teaching mission for which the university exists in the first place.

I have decided to be an active part in this organizing effort because I want to have more control over my workplace and the conditions of my employment. I want to make the classroom experience rewarding and enriching for both my students and myself. It is only through organized collective action that this can be accomplished - that means a union.

Joan Atlas, Adjunct Assistant Professor, English and Media Studies,

Adjunct Faculty Senator, 11 years at Bentley

Joan Atlas

I see the prospect of representation by a union rather than by me alone as a positive step. This will certainly benefit the adjuncts at Bentley, and will be part of a metropolitan effort that follows on the heels of a successful effort in Washington, DC. In fact, a Bentley adjunct, who also teaches at another institution where adjuncts are part of a union, told me that all of her pay increases and seniority have been due to the union.

Ted Kaplan, Adjunct Assistant Professor Mathematical Sciences,

11 years at Bentley

Ted Kaplan

Let me summarize why I have chosen to support the unionization effort here at Bentley:

•Pay. As adjunct faculty over the last decade, our pay has increased by 38.9%, while Bentley’s tuition and fees have increased by 87.9%. That is, Bentley’s tuition has increased more than twice as fast as the salary that it pays to its adjunct faculty- the ones who are delivering the courses. Why hasn’t a larger portion of that tuition increase gone to increase the remuneration of adjunct faculty and thereby more accurately reflect the value that we, as highly educated and dedicated professionals deserve?

•Benefits. As adjunct faculty,we receive no contribution toward our health insurance premiums or retirement benefits. We are employees, not independent contractors, not transient labor ….. and we expect to be treated like employees!

• Job Security. As adjunct faculty, we receive no security from semester-to-semester, no assurance that a course for which we are scheduled will actually be awarded to us. Nor is 11 there any cancellation fee offered for last-minute cancellations. As a widowed dad raising two kids alone, I have had to scramble to provide my kids with healthcare coverage and financial assistance for college, given Bentley’s low-pay- with-no-benefits. So I must also do a great deal of private tutoring to make ends meet.

Given that Bentley University prides itself on teaching students to engage in ethical business practices, how long can it maintain its reputation as a business ethics leader in higher education, if it doesn’t practice what it preaches by providing fair pay, reasonable benefits, and some degree of job security to its adjunct faculty?

Because of these inequities, I am fully supporting the effort to have Bentley adjuncts become represented by a union.