 Part-time faculty members demand equal rights at the CUNY Board of Trustees. New York City, January 2005. Photo: ? 2005 Lisa Quiñones |
Today’s academic wage-laborers in the colleges and universities are the “adjunct” instructors. These part-time instructors, with lower pay rates and much less job security than full-time faculty, are teaching an ever-growing segment of courses at many large institutions.
Public colleges and university systems were originally established to make higher education more accessible to working people. Over the last 20 years, many have been ravaged by budget cuts. The burden is being placed on the back of an increasingly exploited academic workforce, and felt most harshly by students.
The creation of temporary, part-time, and adjunct instructor positions was originally meant to cover courses when a full-time professor took a sabbatical or leave of absence, or to offer specialized courses not within the expertise of full-time, permanent faculty.
But the systematic underfunding of public colleges and universities by state and city governments has pressed administrators to rely more and more on adjuncts to keep departments and programs running. According to the U.S. Department of Education, in 2001 (the most recent year for which their data are available), 44.5 percent of faculty appointments in the U.S. were part-time.
The trend of over-reliance on adjuncts has in some university systems reached the point where close to three-quarters of all courses are taught by adjuncts. What used to be a stable, dignified, full-time profession of public service and scholarship has for many turned into an often tenuous and hectic patchwork of multiple part-time course appointments.
Take the City University of New York, one of the largest public urban institutions of higher education in the country. Public funding for CUNY dropped by over 30 percent in the 1990s, according to March 9, 2001, testimony to the New York State Assembly Committee on Higher Education by the CUNY faculty and staff’s union, the Professional Staff Congress. At the same time, the number of full-time faculty dropped by nearly half—from 11,268 in 1975 to 5,594 in 2001.
Today, nearly 60 percent of all courses at CUNY are taught by part-time faculty.
Given this steep rise in the proportion of classes taught by adjuncts, it doesn’t require a doctorate in mathematics to identify the dominant feature of the trend: permanent, full-time, benefit-earning, fairly compensated positions are being systematically replaced by part-time, low-paying positions with few benefits and little (if any) job security.
Students, full-time faculty, and staff suffer
The role of a full-time professor is one that often extends far beyond the classroom. Full-time faculty carry out and mentor research projects, run departments and programs, and serve on committees that oversee aspects of institutional development. They are often responsible for facilitating students’ extra-curricular activities and hands-on fieldwork, as well as fostering connections between the campus community and the community at large. Therefore, it is in the student’s best interests to have a core of full-time faculty available as opposed to a series of overworked adjunct professors, running from place to place just to make ends meet.
Under these conditions of scarcity, many full-time and part-time faculty members struggle to meet the educational needs of their students. Some especially devoted full-time faculty members try to pick up the slack left by the loss of their full-time colleagues. Adjuncts, meanwhile, often address the needs of their students outside of class—and without pay.
Under these conditions, a new workforce has emerged. With more courses than can be taught by shrinking numbers of full-time faculty, a segment of adjunct instructors has emerged that is totally dependent on these courses. An adjunct in this category typically has to teach three or more courses per semester at two or more colleges, piecing together an annual income of less than $30,000 for what is essentially “full-time” adjunct work. What was once “extra” faculty is now a permanent feature of the educational economy.
This dependence on a part-time instructor pool with lower wages also affects full-time faculty working conditions. The lower pay and job security provides an economic disincentive to hire full-time faculty beyond the bare minimum.
New strategies emerging
Adjuncts are more and more providing important energy and vigor in academic labor battles. Groups like the Coalition of Contingent Academic Labor and the California Part-Time Faculty Association have grown up specifically to advocate and organize adjuncts. Adjuncts at the New School and New York University have organized unions to advance their interests.
At CUNY, adjuncts have mobilized within the PSC—which represents both full-time and part-time faculty and staff—to make sure their interests are heard. The current leadership of the PSC, which has been in office since 2000, ran on a platform of solidarity between full- and part-time faculty and staff.
Over the years, adjuncts at the State University of New York campus in New Paltz, New York, have won some much-needed benefits. As members of United University Professions, the union of faculty and staff in New York State’s public university system, adjuncts have won health insurance for adjuncts teaching more than one course per semester, as well as eligibility for pension benefits after six consecutive semesters of service.
Such benefits are short-term victories. They do not address the deepening trend of over-reliance on adjuncts. In fact, they actually solidify the institutionalization of adjuncts as “core,” rather than “extra,” faculty. Adjunct teaching becomes more and more like a “career.”
In order to stop the wholesale replacement of full-time, tenure-track positions with career adjuncts doing the same work for less money, many adjunct activists and unions are trying to advance campaigns for parity—equal pay for equal teaching loads. Of course, university administrations virulently oppose parity for part-timers. The vast dependence on part-time instructors has been built into the budgets of many public colleges.
Adjuncts at SUNY New Paltz are stepping up their campaigns. Adjuncts here are increasingly dissatisfied with a legislative approach, relying on proposing legislative budget issues in the State Capitol. We’ve seen the annual budget cycles go by, and we’ve heard the same conclusion again and again: “There’s not enough money.” Without rallies, press coverage, public visibility, and constant pressure on the local administration, the trend will continue. A recent surge of activism and a determination among adjuncts to wage a dynamic campaign demanding pay equity—equal pay for equal work—has already sped up progress in union negotiations with the local administration. Adjuncts won a 20 percent pay increase this spring, thanks to hard organizing and solidarity between part-timers and full-timers.
As the number of adjuncts grows, so does their potential power. As an academic underclass in a culture of professional status gradations inherited from the feudal era—adjunct, lecturer, assistant professor, associate professor, full professor—it’s no surprise that adjuncts are bringing new energy, new creativity and new militancy to the university labor movements. They are among the most exploited, and often the most motivated to take bold action to take their struggle to the streets.
The adjuncts’ struggle for more rights and better working conditions can’t be separated from the larger fight for public higher education. Public colleges and universities are on the slippery slope toward privatization. Rising tuition is putting college education out of reach for more and more people. At the same time, campuses continue to be centers for anti-war organizing.
When Marx and Engels described the stripping away of the prestige of the skilled professions, they were not only pointing to the brutal reality of capitalist social relations. They were pointing to the revolutionary potential of the modern working class. More and more, the common features of class exploitation would lay the basis for workers of all professions and nationalities uniting against their common exploiters.
Adjuncts’ struggles for equity and dignity on the job have already injected new energy into the academic labor movement. By merging with the struggles for access to education, free tuition and against the war, they can help make the colleges and universities centers for worker and student power.
Ed Felton is an adjunct instructor at SUNY New Paltz. He serves as a UUP Delegate, and chairs the New Paltz Chapter’s Part-time Concerns Committee.
