PREVIOUS: The Endangered Adjunct, Part 4
In 1969, 80% of faculty members held tenure-track positions. Today, contingent faculty accounts for 70% of all faculty in the United States — and that number is quickly rising. Entrance into the ivory tower has grown more accessible over the past century, while opportunities to rise to the tower’s top — to achieve success within the professorial career path of Academia — have stagnated.
The resulting adjunct crisis has created a ‘gig economy’ for hiring short-term university instructors at part-time prices, as well as a highly-saturated pool of doctorate-holding applicants who must compete for just a handful of tenured positions.
Could you start by telling me about your experience as an adjunct at Front Range Community College?
Sure. I started at FRCC in 1999, twenty years ago now. I have a BA in Communications, and MA degrees in Journalism and Education. I teach in the English department. The number of courses I teach changes from term to term, like all adjunct faculty members experience. I’ve sometimes taught more than a full course load in a given semester or year, but that depends on the school and state.
Is the number of courses you teach each term equivalent to that of a full-time faculty member?
In the city college setting the classes are small, so we teach the very same courses as full-time professors. Same books, same everything. We have the very same qualifications, if not more, than our full-time faculty counterparts. In many cases, we have part-time faculty who have published numerous books of poetry.
Do you receive the same pay as the full-time faculty?
Not at all. We make maybe one-third of what the full-time faculty members earn per class.
I’ve read your interview with Colleen Flaherty from InsideHigherEd, so I know you’re very involved with the American Association of University Professors. How does the AAUP work to alleviate the ongoing adjunct crisis?
As a non-profit organization, the AAUP works to advance the rights of academics in certain areas; namely academic freedom, shared governance, equitable working conditions, and equitable wages.
I started a chapter of AAUP at Front Range CC in 2013, and then served on the national Association’s Committee on Contingent Faculty and the Profession. This committee examines how contingent faculty members are undermined by the modern adjunct system — there’s clearly an over-reliance on contingent faculty in this country. The committee was made up of other AAUP members, mostly adjunct faculty, from schools from around the USA. It acts as a discussion group amongst different contingents and centers.
There are thirteen community colleges in our state. The State Board determines which of those thirteen community colleges gets the most funding and when, which affects how much adjunct faculty at those institutions earn. So the AAUP’s Committee on Contingent Faculty and the Profession meets to compare experiences, discuss solutions, and create a report on the different ways that contingent faculty members are disenfranchised at the national level.
What type of solutions does the committee discuss?
Well, what we did locally was push a bill decreeing ‘equal pay for equal work’ through Colorado’s House, both in 2014 and 2015. Those bills garnered a lot of attention, a lot of press coverage. That helped increase our membership numbers within Colorado as well — many adjunct faculty members didn’t know we existed and could be a resource to them, but got involved once the bills raised our publicity.
Did those bills pass?
No. That’s because the State Board for Community Colleges and Occupational Education used $132,000 from our budget, our higher education budget, to hire a lobbyist who ensured that we were defeated.
The house bill originally sailed through the first House committee hearing, but the second was within the Appropriations Committee. We found out from lawmakers there that they had been coached by lobby groups and various college presidents to ensure that the bills did not pass. Two key college presidents actually attended the hearing to testify against the bill, as did one school’s HR Director. Their argument was that “the entire community college system is broke”.
The system is anything but broke. Right after our bills failed — after they’d used our budget to secure those failures — they hired twenty-seven new, six-figure-earning Vice Presidents. And 1,100 more adjunct faculty professors, between whom they could divide the same work for less pay.
Enrollment at these schools continues to rise, thanks to the work of the contingent faculty members who instruct there. But whenever that new enrollment money comes through to the system, either through legislation or through tuition increases, it all goes towards building projects. Never the teaching staff. Just property.
Do contingent faculty members at community colleges in Colorado receive benefits?
No.
Have you ever had to file for unemployment while acting as an adjunct?
I have. And with the pandemic, adjunct faculty are filing at unprecedented levels. The Colorado CC System President actually just made a historic move — he announced that he would not fight our partial employment claims, because so many of us lost classes in the pandemic.
Enrollment fell massively when we moved online, and the president’s initial response was to say that we were on our own. Then the Federal CARES Act was passed in late March, which sent money to colleges like mine to help pay for unemployment. Because of the CARES act, my colleagues and I were all able to file for unemployment during the summer. Usually I teach two classes in the summer, but both of mine were cancelled. So we filed for unemployment, and then received partial employment benefits when the Fall term began. Additionally, most of us were earning so little that we qualified for what is called the Low Wages System: a federal program which paid us $300 a week for five weeks.
The partial unemployment benefits were quite unusual because most unemployment offices exist to help full-time workers get through the period between jobs. That model doesn’t fit the needs of the American higher education system, which primarily hires adjunct faculty.
73% of all faculty nationwide are part-time faculty: adjunct and contingent, associates, lecturers, artists in residence. They go by different names depending on the state, the school, the department — but it’s all gig work. All part-time.
You’ll work two, maybe three semesters in a row. Maybe at several different colleges. And you only ever know what you are currently earning, never what you will earn or where you will teach in the coming months. And then the semester, the gig, ends. And you have to start all over again.
How can administrators better aid adjunct faculty members at this time?
First of all, don’t contest your contingent employees’ unemployment claims.
Secondly, we need to build a clear pathway from adjunct to full-time faculty. If an adjunct professor has been working at the same school for seven years, well, that person should be promoted to full-time, right?
Finally, administrators must ensure that adjunct faculty members are paid equally and fairly across the board. If a full-time faculty member teaches the same course — same curriculum, same books — as an adjunct faculty member and makes $7,000 for that course, then adjunct faculty should earn the same.
We’re all faculty, we’re all valuable, we all bring different skills and experiences to the classroom and — we all should be paid the same. •
COMING SOON: The Endangered Adjunct, Part 6
Adjunct faculty member? Share your experience with me at sanna@campuswire.com, or on Twitter at @sannasharp.
