Campus Equity Week highlights part-timers’ lament

The plight of part-time faculty at today’s colleges and universities is so pervasive that phrases have been coined (“Road scholars”) and documentaries filmed (“Degrees of Shame, Part-time Faculty: Migrant Workers of the Information Economy”) to underscore their universal predicament.

So too was Campus Equity Week (CEW) created. An initiative of a U.S. and Canadian coalition of academic, labor and professional organizations, CEW was designed to highlight the academy’s increasing use and abuse of part-time faculty and other contingent labor. On nontenured tracks, part-timers generally earn low wages, receive no benefits and are not afforded office space.

UUP co-sponsored the CEW project through its AFT affiliation. Publicizing and striving to advance the cause of part-timers is nothing new for the union.

“We’ve been at the forefront, nationwide, of fighting for and achieving benefits for our part-time members,” said UUP Secretary Eileen Landy, who also co-chairs the union’s Part-time Concerns Committee. “They’re exploited — and paid abysmally — and UUP continues to consider improving the working conditions of SUNY’s part-timers a top priority.”

From Farmingdale to Fredonia, many UUP chapters held events during CEW, Oct. 28 to Nov. 3, with rallies, skits, music, informational meetings and screenings of “Degrees of Shame.”

At Buffalo State, for instance, UUPers passed out bags of peanuts during their protest on campus, emphasizing what elephants and part-time faculty have in common: Both “work for peanuts!”

“Our chapter members were so resourceful and brought part-timers’ issues to light in such creative ways,” said UUP Vice President for Academics Phillip Smith, who, with Landy, was co-chair of the union’s CEW initiatives. “We really appreciate their efforts.”

Those efforts also led to extensive media coverage of CEW and the lament of SUNY’s part-timers — who now comprise almost 40 percent of the University’s faculty — in far-reaching publications from USA Today to the Ithaca Journal and Press Republican in Plattsburgh.

For information about CEW events nationwide or “Marching Toward Equity,” a recent AFT report detailing the overuse of part-time faculty in higher education, visit the AFT Web site at http://www.aft.org.

— Lisa Feldman Reich