Theme: Part-time issues

Coalitions clamor to change conditions

If it were a weather report, it would be a storm warning: A unified front is on the way. Repercussions from the overuse of part-timers at colleges and universities have become so pressing that two separate coalitions have been set up in different parts of the state, both clamoring to change conditions.

In the Albany area, the Association of Academic Contingent Teachers (AACT) was formed. Faculty in the Buffalo area have banded together as the Western New York Coalition of Contingent Academic Labor (COCAL). Part-timers are tired of working at different colleges to piece together a meager income. Even a Ph.D. does not protect them from racing across campuses, commonly earning less than $12,000 a year teaching three courses a semester. They often go without benefits, usually work without an office or a phone, and rarely have assurance of job continuity. Now they are taking action, as are their colleagues across the country.

“Part-timers are becoming aware of their ability to organize,” said UUP Vice President for Academics Phillip Smith, noting that awareness is due, in part, to the efforts of UUP, as well as the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) and NYSUT, which have entered into an agreement to organize higher education in New York. Smith has attended one of COCAL’s national meetings on the part-time issue and many of the meetings in Buffalo and the Capital District.

The movement to organize part-timers, which has become international, has inspired a video called “Degrees of Shame, Part-time Faculty: Migrant Workers of the Information Economy.” This 30-minute documentary, produced and directed by Barbara Wolf of Cincinnati, examines adjunct faculty teaching in America’s institutions of higher education.

UUPer Jill Hanifan taught part-time at SUNY Albany since 1983, until she got a term appointment this semester as a full-time lecturer and director of the campus Writing Center. She said she got involved with the movement because she is so visible as a long-time part-timer. Many part-timers are invisible.

“It’s so hard to organize adjuncts,” she said.

Like most academic and professional faculty, Hanifan believes it is appropriate to hire adjuncts, for example, to fill vacancies or for experts in a field. The problem arises when their jobs become a replacement for a tenure-track line.

But Hanifan feels the wind shifting direction. Colleges are having to take a hard look at their practices.

“Their pool of exploited labor is drying up,” she said, noting the glut of Ph.D.s. “Teaching college has become unattractive.” People will not relocate for adjunct jobs, she said, and fewer students enrolling in Ph.D. programs means fewer graduate teaching assistants.

Besides, Hanifan added, reputations of some colleges are suffering from overuse of part-time faculty, and unions and other professional organizations “are getting cranky about it and are starting to get noisy about it.”

Some gains have been made on the Albany campus due to UUP’s specifications that campuses develop guidelines for adjuncts regarding how they should be treated, retention and establishing longer appointment contracts. More needs to be done, and many other campuses are getting involved.

The Capital Region AACT has produced a set of guidelines seeking basic requirements for part-timers: office space, a telephone, access to benefits and a minimum salary per course. These guidelines will be emphasized during Campus Equity Week.

The Western New York group formed a year and a half ago, with an initial meeting of 120 people. UUP President William Scheuerman was one of the speakers.

People from 20 different surrounding colleges — ranging from the two SUNY Buffalo colleges and Fredonia to Jamestown Community College and Niagara University — have been invited to join COCAL. A formal charter was created and officers were elected in September. The charter calls for the advancement of the material and professional status of contingent academics at private and public colleges and universities in Western New York. Committees will gather demographics and financial data, provide guidance and recruit members.

“We have many people teaching at three and four colleges simultaneously,” said David Landrey, a UUP retired faculty member from Buffalo State. Key to the coalition was how to form a group to tackle overall issues and, yet, keep the separate identities of the different colleges.

“The ultimate agenda is to restore the credibility of the university by means of more full-time lines,” Landrey said. “The first thing you have to do is take care of the people who are there.”

Asked why he got involved with the coalition — when he is not only retired, but was a full-time faculty member — Landrey offers up a confession of sorts.

“In my last 10 years, I taught all my favorite courses, but part-timers were teaching all the composition courses,” he said. “I realized, ‘I’m doing this at the expense of part-timers.’”

Because the nature of their scheduling and lack of office space makes part-timers elusive, Landrey said, “If full-timers don’t participate (with this movement), we won’t get anywhere.”

Full-timers, he added, do not vote or hold office in the coalition.

Part of the process of refining and defining the major issues for Western New York COCAL involved a telephone poll, conducted by the NYSUT Polling Center.

UUPer Jack Morganti, another retired Buffalo State faculty member, got involved in efforts to stymie the overuse of part-timers when he saw a dramatic drop in the number of full-time faculty on campus. Full-time student enrollment was 12,000 in 1975, he said, with 578 full-time faculty. By 1995, enrollment dropped by 20 percent, while full-time faculty dropped an astounding 40 percent, he added.

Morganti put together a survey last year; 54 people, or 22.5 percent of the adjuncts who taught during the spring semester at Buffalo State, responded.

Almost half the respondents were part-timers, but wanted to work full-time, Morganti said. The rate of pay per course ranged from $1,800 (earned by 42 percent of the faculty) to $5,000. The average pay was $2,091. The three most important concerns expressed by the part-timers were: low rate of pay; lack of integration, involvement and support; and, tied for third, the unavailability or inadequacy of benefits and the lack of support provided by the college (including the unpredictability of employment, lack of job security, access to facilities and lack of office space).

Part-timers taught, on the average, for 6.6 years.

— Liza Frenette