Organizing to Resist the Corporatization of Higher Education
By Malini Cadambi Daniel
New Labor Forum, Sunday, January 24, 2016
http://www.truth-out.org/opinion/item/34531-organizing-to-resist-the-corporatization-of-higher-education?tmpl=component&print=1
On May 29, 2014, Seattle University students protested their
administration's decision to appeal the contingent faculty's right to have a
union vote.
The once hallowed and secure work life of American university faculty has
for the past quarter century been in turmoil. Being a professor was once a
respected, stable profession, but is now increasingly characterized by low
pay, minimal benefits, and no job security. An expectation of tenure - the
permanent status that was once a hallmark of the profession - is replaced by
the reality of contingency, which means that college instructors must
reapply to teach courses every year, or even every semester. This new
contingency is not a temporary employment arrangement, nor is it confined to
a sector of higher education such as community colleges. According to the
Coalition of the Academic Workforce's 2014 report, contingent faculty now
comprise more than 75 percent of the instructional faculty in the United
States. Faculty contingency is now the norm.
However, contingent faculty are confronting these changes to their
profession by organizing and forming unions, the likes of which have not
been seen since the graduate student organizing of the 1990s. In the past
two years alone, nearly ten thousand faculty, mostly in the private sector,
have joined the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), adding more
energy to an already vibrant adjunct-faculty activist community.[1] Even so,
this phenomenal organizing has directly touched only a fragment of the
faculty in higher education. According to the 2012 report by the National
Center for the Study of Collective Bargaining in Higher Education and the
Professions (NCSCBHEP), of the 1.2 million tenured, tenure track, and
non-tenure track faculty in the United States, 27 percent of all faculty,
both full- and part-time, are organized, and 21 percent of part-time faculty
are organized. To break it down further, 42 percent of faculty at public
two-year colleges have collectively bargained agreements, while 25 percent
have done so in public four-year colleges, and just 7 percent in four-year,
private non-profit colleges.[2]
If we take only the faculty recently organized into the SEIU, that
represents just under 1 percent of all faculty newly organized in the United
States in the past two years. Although this is not an insignificant addition
to the universe of unionized faculty, the degradation of the professoriate
has happened to such an extent that it will take decades of organizing to
restore the profession to anywhere near its former self, and a much more
comprehensive movement to transform higher education broadly. Furthermore,
large swaths of faculty, specifically tenured faculty in the private
sector - who are considered managers per a 1980 Supreme Court decision - and
both tenured and non-tenured faculty in right-to-work states, are excluded
from union representation.[3] According to the aforementioned report by the
NCSCBHEP, nearly half of the organized faculty are concentrated in just two
states - New York and California - and nearly two-thirds of organized
faculty are in just five states (New York, California, New Jersey, Illinois,
and Michigan).
Undaunted, however, contingent faculty are organizing in states across the
country, both within organized labor and outside of traditional union
structures. One of the most dynamic examples is Faculty Forward Network, a
national nonprofit organization that unites the professoriate through local
organizing focused on national solutions to problems in higher education.
How Did Things Get So Bad?
Faculty at colleges and universities can be tenured, tenure track, full-time
non-tenure track, part-time non-tenure track, graduate assistants, and
postdoctoral fellows. Contingent or adjunct, faculty are non-tenure track,
largely hired each semester, although some have full-time contracts of
varying lengths (e.g., one-year appointments). Graduate assistants teaching
outside of their program are considered adjuncts. Postdocs are, perhaps, the
newest class of contingent academic laborers as adjunct faculty increasingly
find themselves jumping from one fellowship to the next with decreasing hope
of landing permanent positions. Each of these classifications of faculty can
be found in greater or lesser numbers depending on the type of educational
institution and whether it is public or private. According to Department of
Education post-secondary school data for fall 2013, 64 percent of faculty at
public four-year research institutions are contingent compared with 80
percent at public two-year colleges and 100 percent at for-profit
colleges.[4]
This shift from a majority tenured academic labor model to one that is
largely non-tenured has happened steadily over the past forty years. In
1975, there were 623,000 faculty in the United States (excluding graduate
students), 29 percent of them tenured, and another 16 percent on the tenure
track. In 2011, there were just under 1.5 million faculty (excluding
graduate students), just over 16.7 percent of them tenured, and 7.4 percent
on track for tenure, according to a 2013 AAUP report.[5]
Non-tenured adjunct faculty have been used for decades to bring "real world"
experience into the classroom. Professionals such as accountants and nurses
who held full-time jobs in their professions could teach a course to support
students joining their profession or make extra money. Over time, college
administrators have come to over-rely on this hiring model as a way to
maintain flexibility in course offerings and hiring. Hiring contingent
faculty sidesteps the need to offer benefits, pay a full-time salary, or
provide a path to tenure. The unraveling of tenure was quietly being done on
campuses public and private, rich and poor, well before Wisconsin Governor
Scott Walker wrote tenure out of the state law for faculty in the University
of Wisconsin system this summer.
Contingent faculty generally have no mandated responsibility or support to
conduct research or publish, serve on committees, or even be available to
students. Increasingly, instructional positions are being unbundled, with
syllabi and course content developed by one person, instruction or student
supervision conducted by another, and grading done by still someone else.
So, although contingent faculty themselves are often highly educated, their
jobs, formerly characterized by high degrees of responsibility, autonomy,
and prestige, are being whittled down to fragments of a career, limited to
instruction in the narrowest possible sense - literally the hours spent in
front of the classroom with little acknowledgment or compensation for the
time spent preparing for classes, holding office hours, or keeping abreast
in the field of instruction. Contingent faculty have lost mid-dle-class
careers to support an academic business model more Fordist than Ivory Tower.
No one benefits from the outsourcing of college instruction except perhaps
non-faculty college administrators who retain a flexible, poorly compensated
workforce. Universities are receiving a similar quality product
(instruction) for a cheaper rate, yet students - consumers in the neoliberal
model - are not paying less for the product they are receiving, even with
significant labor cost savings. Tuition continues to climb ever higher. The
reality is the disproportionate use of contingent faculty means fewer
members to write recommendations, serve on thesis and dissertation
committees, share in administrative and committee duties, act as mentors,
and retain institutional knowledge. The loss of institutional knowledge,
although rarely discussed, may be one of the most detrimental effects to any
college or university because policies, curricula, and academic trends will
be known by a shrinking few. Students looking for guidance on their own
scholarship, career direction, or institutional concerns, academic or
otherwise, may have great difficulty finding it.
What Have Faculty Lost?
The profession of college professor has experienced losses ranging from job
security and compensation to status and autonomy. Wages for faculty vary
widely from full professor to adjunct teacher. The Bureau of Labor
Statistics lists the median salary for a post-secondary teacher as just
under $69,000 per year. This can vary depending on professor rank,
department, and university. Generally, adjunct-faculty compensation is low:
median pay per three-credit course is $2,700, according to the Coalition of
the Academic Workforce, with fully one in four families of part-time adjunct
faculty accessing public assistance programs as reported by the April 2015
study released by the Center for Labor Research and Education at University
of California, Berkeley.
Academic freedom and, closely related, tenure ensure the ability to teach,
research, and publish ideas, be they unorthodox or contentious, without fear
of censure or reprisal, and has been a perquisite of being a professor for a
century. However, as Ellen Schrecker, a scholar of free speech suppression
who has monitored the changes in higher education, argues, academic freedom
as a right is increasingly under jeopardy, from politicians and culture
warriors on one side and the corporatized university on the other.[6]
Contingent faculty almost singularly focus on instruction in every
department and have little to no formal requirement or obligation toward
research and publishing, unlike tenured and tenure track faculty. Because
publishing is usually not a requirement for contingent faculty, professional
development (attending conferences, sabbaticals, or providing research) is
often not supported by college administrations. Yet, many contingent
faculty, whether supported or not, continue to research and write because of
professional obligations (and pressure). Where support for professional
development is provided, it is often through collectively bargained
agreements by faculty unions. Even instruction, which represents the lion's
share of the work that contingent faculty do, is very often equally
unsupported, as evidenced by the lack of training, orientation, and resource
support they receive. In the brave new digitized classroom and with the
increase in different learning populations, some with learning needs or
limited language skills, this lack of support for instruction demands
immediate attention.
A New Workers' Movement
The SEIU has been organizing contingent faculty nationally for more than two
years and in that time, thousands have joined the union. Many organized
faculty have won standard-raising contract provisions such as employer
contributions for contingent faculty benefits along with intellectual
property and academic freedom protections. Adjunct contracts show marked pay
increases. As part of their collective bargaining agreement, Tufts'
adjunct-faculty compensation will have a floor of $7,300 per course next
year, truly impressive given the $2,700 median. Benefits and conditions have
also seen gains; adjunct faculty on two-year appointments at Lesley
University in Boston won employer contributions for retirement plans, a
victory for contingent workers in any industry. The SEIU adjuncts in the
Maine Community College System cannot have their course assignments reduced
to evade employer responsibility under the Affordable Care Act. The SEIU
adjuncts at multiple colleges are entitled to a robust evaluation process
beyond student evaluations, can access professional development funds, have
protections for intellectual property, and compensation for course design,
and enjoy contractual protections for academic freedom. For faculty -
adjunct or otherwise - who have organized through an election process and
successfully negotiated a contract with their university, the process can be
transformative, both emotionally and materially.
However, for far too many faculty members, the barriers to achieving a
collective bargaining agreement on their campus may be formidable. Higher
education is a disaggregated and disparate industry; colleges can vary
widely in size, financial health, campus culture, and student demographics
even within a close geographic area. States with laws hostile to unions and
collective bargaining make unionizing challenging, even for full-time
faculty, although non-tenure track faculty at Duke University are undeterred
by North Carolina's so-called right-to-work law and are exercising their
right to participate in a free and fair election process. Colleges in rural
or isolated areas also present a challenge to organizing as contingent
faculty may feel particular pressure not to risk even a bad job for no job.
Those who teach largely online, many at for-profit colleges, may never meet
another faculty member in their institution, thus suffering a particular
form of alienation and isolation that can make organizing daunting. Private
sector tenured and tenure track faculty deemed managerial and graduate
students adjudged pupils not employees have legal roadblocks to cross if
they want to unionize. Yet, in many of these cases, all faculty - full time,
tenured, and contingent - are in no less need of better compensation,
benefits, and security, are subject to no less intimidation, harassment, or
vagaries, and are no less desirous of improving their profession, personal
teaching capacities, and finding community than their counterparts in
Boston, San Francisco, or Washington, D.C. who have enviable contracts. Even
for tenured faculty who may be well compensated and have job security, pay
disparity by gender and race, promotions, discrimination, and academic
freedom may still be issues. Where legal, many public-sector tenured faculty
have supported unionizing even with the protections they already enjoy.
In spring 2015, two thousand faculty and adjunct-faculty activists,
including the SEIU members, joined fast-food workers in Fight for $15 to
build toward large scale mobilizations on April 15. These alliances were
unparalleled, as workers representing multiple industries and unions - from
teachers to health care workers to building trades workers and many, many
more - participated. Actions took place on campuses across the country,
including University of Southern California, Seattle University, University
of Chicago, and University of California, Berkeley among hundreds of others
with students joining their professors to demand living wages, proclaiming
low wage workers need to earn at least $15 an hour, plus have the ability to
join a union. Two years ago, this demand seemed impossible; no city would
consider it, no employer would voluntarily pay it, workers would not fight
for it. But pressure exerted by low wage workers - most not in unions -
through strikes and other actions have resulted in fast-food, hotel,
municipal, and airport workers, as well as home health aides, achieving a
$15 per hour minimum wage. In all, nearly eleven million workers in this
country will see wage increases through minimum wage legislation. These
victories speak volumes about the power of sustained and vibrant
movement-building. Even in a state with no minimum wage law, the Birmingham,
Alabama city council recently approved a minimum wage of $10.10 an hour by
2017 with raises tied to inflation in subsequent years. The Fight for $15
movement has transformed labor by transforming labor organizing.
Just as $15 an hour was decried as "absolutely outrageous" (by Dunkin'
Brands CEO, Nigel Travis, whose total compensation in 2014 was $10 million)
but now is the standard, adjunct faculty in the SEIU set out their own
audacious demand for $15,000 per course (comprehensive of wages and
benefits), hoping to set a new standard. By early Fall 2015, faculty had
written more than one hundred opinion editorials and letters to the editor
calling for $15,000 a course minimums. Although that may seem impossible to
some, it is not so crazy to think that any faculty member, adjunct or
otherwise, should teach five to six courses per year and stay current in
their field through research or learning new skills, rather than teach ten
classes per year or work multiple non-teaching jobs, as some contingent
faculty are forced to do. What would a living wage, stability, health care,
and retirement benefits do for the thousands of contingent faculty that live
in poverty and near poverty? What would this do for the quality of education
for a college student seeking recommendations, mentorship, or simply office
hours with their professor who is not racing to the next academic gig?
Finally, while the SEIU has put out the bold demand for $15,000 per course,
it is incumbent upon college administrators, deans, students, and parents
paying tuition to answer the question, "What are faculty worth? How should
the people so central to fulfilling the mission of the university be
compensated?"
The movement-style organizing of Fight for $15 has inspired adjunct faculty
to engage in broad campus organizing. Because of the April 15 mobilizations
and National Adjunct Walkout Day on February 25, thousands of adjunct
faculty reached out to and became active in the SEIU. National Adjunct
Walkout Day was started by an adjunct-faculty member in California to draw
attention to the situation of adjuncts nationally. Her call brought
thousands of faculty, most adjuncts and many full-time supporters, onto
campus lawns and city streets to protest administrative exploitation of and
callousness toward instructional faculty. This day of action also helped
shatter the image of the tweedy, aloof professor and forced contingent and
tenured faculty to admit to their students that the educational debt they
were acquiring was doing little to alleviate adjunct-faculty poverty. Most
undergraduate college students are unable to distinguish who is an adjunct
versus tenured or tenure track faculty member; pulling back the veil on
faculty disparity is often shocking for students. And faculty did not stop
there, taking to the quads and the streets again on April 15 with other low
wage workers. Seattle University faculty and students along with low wage
workers and community allies - twenty-one in all - were arrested while
demanding $15 per hour minimum wage and protesting the Seattle University
administration's refusal to count adjunct-faculty ballots in a union
election held the previous year.
Some of the greatest participation by faculty was in the South, in places
with minimal to no faculty unionization. Elite research institutions such as
Duke, public systems such as Georgia State and University of North Carolina,
as well as historically black colleges and universities such as Clark
Atlanta University and Fort Valley State University, found common cause in
fighting for more resources, both in instruction and the classroom,
demanding more transparency by administrators and trustees in budget and
governance processes, and refocusing their institutions toward their mission
of providing a public service. If higher education is to be transformed, it
will require hundreds of thousands of faculty and students demanding change
both on their campuses and nationally.
Faculty Forward Network
Faculty Forward Network is a national 501(c)(3) set up as such to undertake
activities to improve working conditions for adjunct faculty outside of
traditional collective bargaining. This organization is an activist vehicle
for any faculty member (full- or part-time, tenured, tenure track, or
non-tenure), student or ally who is committed to transforming the academic
profession to one that pays livable wages, supports instruction and research
in equal measure, and puts an end to academic contingency. With more than
forty thousand members on campuses and individually, Faculty Forward Network
is poised to bring about these improvements and re-establish faculty's role
as stewards of higher education. Its mission is to demand investment in
instruction and higher standards for faculty and students. Faculty Forward
Network members are now learning from experience that uniting in a broad
national movement facilitates profound changes.
As one example, faculty at Jesuit colleges and universities throughout the
country have delivered Just Employment petitions to their administrators,
held rolling one-day fasts, written editorials, and participated in
teach-ins and forums to demand increased investment in instruction and open
a dialogue with administrators about collective organizing. The majority of
those participating in these actions are contingent faculty, with support
from their full-time tenured colleagues. Although these actions could have
taken place on each individual campus unconnected to the other Jesuit
colleges, by joining together nationally, faculty are experiencing the power
of solidarity. The Jesuit colleges are bound together by a spiritual mission
as well as a common association. Many faculty at the Jesuit colleges are now
members of Faculty Forward Network and act as if they belong to a union.
These actions under Section 7 of the National Labor Relations Act may be
protected as they have "the right to self-organization" and "the right to
engage in concerted activities for the purposes of collective bargaining or
other mutual aid or protection."
Most successful models for alternative labor organizations, such as the
National Taxi Workers Alliance and Restaurant Opportunities Center (ROC),
start locally, in a neighborhood or in a city, then expand to other areas.
ROC, first formed in New York City, is now a national organization with
locals throughout the country. Faculty Forward Network flipped this model.
As an outgrowth of the organizing by the SEIU faculty, faculty nationwide
know that they are able to effect change nationally and push for change in
communities outside their own for the benefit of all. Senator Dick Durbin of
Illinois with the SEIU's support has sponsored the Adjunct Loan Fairness Act
so that all faculty at not-for-profit schools may access the federal Public
Service Loan Forgiveness program, which would erase student loan balances
after ten years of payments. The SEIU faculty are engaged in local and
federal legislative efforts to stop online instruction de-regulation, curb
bad colleges - most notoriously in the for-profit sector - from taking
advantage of students, and challenging the accepted practice of poorly paid,
outsourced academic labor.
Challenging the Fair Labor Standards Act
The catalogue of issues many faculty face, itemized above, is compounded by
the lack of protection at the federal level. The Fair Labor Standards Act
(FLSA) has an exemption for "Learned Professionals" that leaves faculty
unprotected in matters of wages. This exemption presumes that all faculty
are salaried, a dated premise now proved inaccurate by the percentages of
adjunct faculty. The Department of Labor is hearing stories of contingent
faculty and lack of compensation for preparation time, student office hours,
department meetings, and more - what most other industries would call "wage
theft." To amend the FLSA to include faculty would be an achievement for
all, but this requires national action from faculty everywhere, not just at
unionized campuses. That is precisely the reason why Faculty Forward Network
exists - to improve the lives of all faculty members and the classroom
experience for students.
The rampant utilization of under-paid contingent academic workers is
detrimental to faculty and their families and undermines the profession.
However, this new normal also conveys to students that being a college
professor is not a viable profession, especially when large student debt
loads await upon the completion of education. One can only hope that this
predicament does not undo the decades of progress to diversify the academy,
research, and scholarship.
Notes
1. The National Education Association (NEA), American Federation of Teachers
(AFT), United Steelworkers (USW), American Association of University
Professors (AAUP), and the Service Employees International Union (the SEIU)
are among the national unions that have seen victories for faculty
unionization. Other advocacy organizations, such as New Faculty Majority or
Coalition of Contingent Academic Labor (COCAL), have made a huge impact in
promoting public awareness of the reality and scale of the use of contingent
faculty.
2. Berry, Joe, and Michelle Savarese, Directory of U.S. Faculty Contracts
and Bargaining Agents in Institutions of Higher Education, series ed.
Richard Boris, September, 2012.
3. The 1980 Supreme Court case, National Labor Relations Board v. Yeshiva,
held that tenured and tenure track faculty were responsible for significant
decision-making on campuses, including faculty supervision. Because tenured
and tenure track faculty were now deemed managers, they were precluded from
organizing under the National Labor Relations Act.
4. Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System, available at
https://nces.ed.gov/ipeds/.
5. American Association of University Professors. Trends in Instructional
Staff Employment Status, 1975-2011. April 2013, available at
http://www.aaup.org/sites/default/files/files/ ;
AAUP_Report_InstrStaff-75-11_apr2013.pdf.
6. Ellen Schrecker, The Lost Soul of Higher Education (New York: The New
Press, 2010), 4.
Malini Cadambi Daniel is the director for Higher Education at the Service
Employees International Union (SEIU). She lives in New York City, where she
is also a commissioner for the city's Equal Employment Practices Commission.
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