"Efforts grow to unionize part-time faculty at colleges" by Peter Schworm | Globe Staff, October 23, 2013
Part-time faculty at several Boston-area colleges, frustrated by low pay and emboldened by their growing ranks, are taking steps to unionize amid an emerging national movement to give adjunct professors the chance to negotiate better working conditions and benefits.
The broad campaign, spearheaded locally by the Service Employees International Union, successfully unionized adjunct faculty at Tufts University last month, and on Tuesday a vote to unionize at Bentley University lost by just two votes. Organizers have also reached out to part-time faculty at Northeastern and Lesley universities, among other schools.
Why isn't a teacher's union doing it?
The push to organize part-time faculty has broad implications for the universities, economic engines for the region that have come to depend on the low cost and flexibility of adjunct faculty as tenure-track positions become scarcer.
Meaning colleges are being run like corporations, and the executive pay confirms it.
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“It’s a method of outsourcing,” said Malini Cadambi Daniel, campaign director for higher education for the SEIU, one of the nation’s largest labor groups.
With no work visa needed?
At individual schools, the reliance on part-time faculty varies but is often striking.
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Adjunct faculty members typically earn only a few thousand dollars per course, unlike better-paid tenured professors, and often cobble together a living by teaching at several schools. Most work on contracts from term to term, and a decided minority receives health coverage....
I knew one and that is exactly as she described it. She was unhappy with the situation (also with the student loans) and who could blame her?
“The pay is poverty-level,” said Gary Rhoades, who directs the Center for the Study of Higher Education at the University of Arizona.“They are the working poor of academia.”
Shoulda become a banker.
The organizing effort is unusual in its focus on private colleges and universities and reflects fundamental changes in college faculties and part-time instructors’ rising discontent.
While common at public colleges, faculty unions traditionally have faced an uphill climb on private campuses unaccustomed to union representation. But the effort has gained momentum as colleges have become increasingly reliant on part-time instructors.
“It’s hard to mobilize mobile labor,” said David Kociemba, president of the adjunct faculty union at Emerson College, which voted to unionize in 2001. “We’re sort of the migrant workers of the Ivory Tower.”
While hesitant to discuss the union push openly, colleges are clearly watching the campaign closely and warily.
Northeastern officials created a website to provide information about the organizing effort, which includes a letter from university provost Stephen Director voicing reservations about the campaign.
“We are concerned about the impact that ceding your rights to do so to an outside organization, which is unfamiliar with our culture, will have on our community,” he wrote.
You would think colleges would take care of their people, but not in AmeriKa!
Officials at Bentley University in Waltham, which says 40 percent of its faculty works part time, said the school does not believe it is necessary for adjunct faculty to take such a step because they are represented on the Faculty Senate....
Pfft!
Nationally, the growth in part-time faculty has set the stage for the organizing effort....
As does my new$paper that reflects the best of corporate liberalism.
The death of an adjunct professor who had taught for 25 years at Duquesne University in Pittsburgh has served as a rallying point for the campaign. Margaret Mary Vojtko, who died last month at 83 after battling cancer, had no health insurance and was nearly penniless.
She was never offered a job?
Colleges point out that part-time faculty members are not expected to do research, serve on university committees, or have other responsibilities outside the classroom. Many teach just a course or two a year outside their primary career.
Part-time instructors at the state’s public colleges and universities are already unionized. At Massachusetts community colleges, two-thirds of all courses are taught by part-time faculty members. But while wages have risen, part-time instructors do not receive health insurance.
Adjunct faculty members at private colleges are also bracing for a battle over health insurance, saying they fear that colleges will undercut the requirement by limiting their hours, either by capping the number of courses they are allowed to teach or crediting them with fewer hours per course.
Thank you, Obamacare!
That fails to count the many hours instructors spend preparing for class, grading papers, and meeting with students, adjunct instructors say.
William Shimer, a faculty member at Northeastern University, is teaching five business and writing classes at the school this semester, yet is considered part time and does not receive benefits. He said he often does not learn whether he will be teaching until days before classes begin.
“I’ve been told Friday I was teaching a course Monday,” he said.
Deborah Schwartz, a long-time adjunct professor before taking a full-time job at UMass Boston, said part-time faculty members often have to teach so many classes to make ends meet that they cannot give the students as much time as they would like.
Do I even need to say it?
Now assistant director of the Adult Literacy Resource Institute at UMass Boston, Schwartz, 50, appreciates the steady paycheck and health insurance. But there is one downside to her new role that she says helps to explain why so many adjunct instructors tolerate the low pay and lack of benefits.
“Boy, do I miss teaching,” she said.
Not only is that so condescending, it illuminates the sorry state of AmeriKan ejewkhazion these days (not that they are teaching much more than politically correct dogma): The teachers have no time to teach (not that the kids would learn anything anyway).
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