commissioner.org
| Source | Louis Proyect |
| Date | 08/10/14/18:36 |
| The Chronicle of Higher Education
University Official Offers Harsh Critique of Policies Toward Adjuncts By JEFFREY J. SELINGO ST. LOUIS--Wal-Mart, the nation’s largest private employer, long criticized for its workplace policies, is a “more-honest employer” of part-time workers than colleges that employ thousands of adjunct faculty members. That was the harsh message delivered to a group of college human-resources officials here on Monday by one of their own: Angelo-Gene Monaco, associate vice president for human resources and employee relations at the University of Akron. Mr. Monaco's presentation was a rare airing of such a controversial topic at an annual meeting of a higher-education association. Such meetings are typically plain-vanilla affairs that closely follow a script. In this case, the meeting was of the College and University Professional Association for Human Resources, and Mr. Monaco didn’t hold back in his critique of how poorly most colleges treat adjunct professors. He filled his presentation with examples drawn from surveys he has conducted, and his own experience as both an administrator and a consultant. “We helped create a highly educated part of the working poor, and it’s starting to get attention from outsiders,” he said, noting that unions are trying to organize part-timers, and lawmakers in nearly a dozen states are examining the issue. After pointing out that more than 20,000 part-time faculty members were added to college payrolls each year between 2003 and 2007, Mr. Monaco aimed his criticism at several groups, including: * Hiring managers. Sloppy hiring practices at times give adjuncts hope that they could eventually fill a full-time slot. Only 5 percent of 60 department chairs he recently surveyed at colleges in the Midwest, for instance, said they were willing to consider long-term part-timers for full-time jobs, even for non-tenure-track positions. * Community colleges. Two-year colleges, he said, run a system of employing part-timers that "crosses the line in many places.” Since 1993 as many as 75 percent of the credit hours taught in community colleges have been taught by part-timers. * Accrediting agencies. The organizations “are run by and for the benefit of present or former tenured faculty” members whose job it is to protect tenure, Mr. Monaco said. “The only way to defend the highly paid tenure track is declare lower-paid nontenure folks less competent,” he added. But concerns about adjunct quality—supported by data that suggest that students taught by adjuncts take longer to graduate or drop out of college at higher rates than students taught by permanent faculty members—fails to account for the fact that temporary professors are often hired when institutions enroll record numbers of students, some of whom are not qualified to be admitted in the first place. * Faculty associations and unions. The American Association of University Professors, the American Federation of Teachers, and the National Education Association all claim to represent the interests of nontenured faculty members, he said, at the same time they push colleges to decrease their reliance on that group of employees. The message clearly resonated with the group of some 50 human-resources managers. At the end of the presentation, when a reporter asked if Mr. Monaco's views reflected reality on their campuses, nearly everyone raised a hand. But given that human-resources officials rarely have much say in how the academic side of the work force is managed, would the message have been more effective if delivered to, say, a meeting of college presidents? “No,” Mr. Monaco said later. “This is the group that has to argue for better hiring practices and benefits.” Some institutions, he said, have built their financial structure in such a way that they cannot survive without temporary faculty members, whether they are part time or full time. Even the term “temporary faculty” is in many ways a misnomer, Mr. Monaco said. Some 35 percent of part-time faculty members have been supporting themselves for four years or more as part-timers. Some 50 percent are “road scholars,” meaning they teach at multiple institutions. He told one story, based on interviews he has conducted with adjuncts, of an instructor from the St. Louis area who is teaching eight freshman composition classes this fall at several institutions for an average of $2,000 a course. “That’s all an effort to cobble together a salary of $36,000 for the year,” he said. “We rely on them for a very important function, and we assume that they will continue to accept mistreatment in return.” At some point, part-timers may simply say enough is enough, he said. He predicted that that time could come within the next five years at many colleges, particularly public institutions, where conditions are the worst for this group. “What stops someone from walking out of a class in the middle of a semester for a better offer?” he asked. Mr. Monaco suggested several ways colleges could improve their treatment of temporary faculty members: * Be more creative in hiring. Use existing professional-staff members to teach courses; provide full-time employment in other areas of the institution to part-time faculty members; and combine some part-time positions into full time nontenure positions. * Take on tenured, permanent faculty members. Increase their course loads. Demand a return on the investments associated with sabbaticals, which now increase a college's reliance on part-time professors. Keep full-time permanent faculty members from dumping work on temporary faculty members. * Treat adjuncts like professionals. Give them office or storage space. Invite them to holiday parties. Allow them to sign up to teach summer classes before permanent faculty members. If colleges don't improve conditions for part-time instructors, they risk increased unionization efforts, and not just from the groups that have traditionally organized professors, said Mr. Monaco. He mentioned the United Auto Workers and Teamsters as potential organizers of adjuncts. "I'm worried about them. They don't care about the full-time faculty," he said. |
Copyright (c) 1998, Joongpil Cho