Welcome to this edition of the FACE Bulletin, the e-newsletter dedicated to the AFT's Faculty and College Excellence (FACE) campaign and other issues related to academic staffing in higher education.
Organizing, Organizing, Organizing
This year, without a doubt, has been the most perilous for the labor movement in most of our readers’ lifetimes. Politicians have been relentlessly demonizing public employees--including university faculty, staff and graduate employees--in their attempts to eliminate these workers’ voice in the workplace and in the political process. These attempts to effectively neuter unions are part and parcel of their strategy of dismantling the middle class and the social safety net in order to enrich their wealthy campaign contributors. But despite these attacks, the labor movement and the AFT continue to grow and thrive through new organizing—in fact, AFT now represents over 200,000 members in higher education thanks to that commitment to organizing.
The most dramatic attacks have occurred in Wisconsin, where the state Legislature and governor have conspired to strip public employees of their collective bargaining rights. This includes the wholesale rescission of collective bargaining rights for faculty in the University of Wisconsin system, which were gained just over a year ago. Despite--or more likely because of--these unprecedented attacks, faculty members at four different UW campuses voted to form unions with the AFT, all of these votes coming after Gov. Scott Walker proposed eliminating their rights. Joining the UW campuses in Eau Claire and Superior (which both unionized in 2010) are the UW campuses in La Crosse, Stout, River Falls and Stevens Point, where faculty all said “Union Yes!” by overwhelming margins.
Out West, lecturers for the University of Washington-Extension voted to unionize with the AFT in late March. These lecturers, who teach classes in the Educational Outreach English Language Program, faced many roadblocks on their path to representation but, in the end, chose to join a union with more than 83 percent of voters in favor.
Adjuncts at Manhattanville College in Purchase, N.Y., also won an affiliation election in early March. The contingent faculty members--making $2,100 for a three-credit course while living in the New York City metropolitan area--are now gearing up to bargain their first contract. In Riverdale, N.Y., adjunct activists at Manhattan College, who are working to unionize at that Catholic institution, were buoyed by a National Labor Relations Board ruling that dismissed the institution’s claim that their religious affiliation and mission exempted them from having to consent to an election for their workers. Contingent faculty at Manhattan College are continuing to work toward an election that they’re confident they’ll win.
We all know (and students tell us) that the key to improving student success isn’t found in trite admonishments or Band-Aid solutions. “Study harder,” “teach better” and “test more,” while certainly appealing political palliatives, do nothing to address the very real and deep-seated structural issues that can prevent students from reaching their full potential. One of the structural difficulties that must be addressed to ensure student success is how we provide instructional staffing.
As AFT Higher Education’s new report, “Student Success in Higher Education,” makes a point of demonstrating, any strategy for helping students succeed is going to rely on input and hard work from the faculty. It will require an engaged faculty to develop institutionally based accountability regimes, and it will require a great deal of student-faculty engagement to ensure that students are learning what they need to know in order to achieve their best. A staffing structure made up primarily of people with no job security and no compensation for activities outside the classroom (like developing student success guidelines or meeting students for extra support during office hours) is ill-suited to the people-intensive nature of education. University of Southern California researcher Adrianna Kezar has also been looking at these connections and was good enough to share some of her findings with us.
The Union of Teaching Faculty at Central Michigan University has continued to turn up the heat on their recalcitrant administration as they try to settle their first contract. A picket in late February let the public and administration know that the UTF would not be backing down from its demands for better job security, increased wages and a fair system for evaluating contingent faculty, among other items. All of that pressure has finally yielded results, as the union and the university agreed to a tentative agreement just this week. Congratulations, UTF!
While anti-collective bargaining measures in state legislatures have garnered the majority of attention in the press, there were other legislative or political attacks on faculty rights in Idaho, Montana and Utah. Both Montana and Utah saw legislation introduced that, if passed, would have stripped tenure away from faculty members. In Idaho, after the faculty senate of Idaho State University took a no-confidence vote on that institution’s president, the Idaho State Board of Education suspended the senate, thus stripping faculty members of their voice in shared governance.
Not all news has been bad. California continues its march forward for equity for contingent faculty members in the state’s community colleges. State Sen. Leland Yee recently introduced Senate Bill 114, which would require community college districts to create salary and benefit scales for part-time faculty that reflect those that exist for full-time faculty. The bill also would require community college districts to report part-time faculty salaries to the California State Teachers’ Retirement System and to the affected employees as a percentage of full-time salary.
Finally, the Keystone Research Center released “Reversing Course in Pennsylvania Higher Education: The Two Tiers in Faculty Pay and Benefits and a Way Forward,” adding to the growing body of research showing significant pay and benefit gaps between nonpermanent faculty and tenure or tenure-track faculty across the country. The report examined 11 of the state’s 14 community colleges and the State System of Higher Education, which comprises 14 state-funded four-year schools. Researchers also used publicly available information for four state-related institutions: Lincoln University, Pennsylvania State University, the University of Pittsburgh and Temple University. The report recommends that higher education institutions receiving state funds should be required each year to publicly report the share of courses taught by part-time/adjunct faculty, and the salaries and benefits of these faculty and their full-time counterparts.
The U.S. Department of Education is preparing to issue “gainful employment” regulations that could help curb abusive practices by for-profit colleges. These same institutions are blitzing Congress with a full-court lobbying press to prevent even more scrutiny of their unethical practices, such as those at Ashford University, a for-profit institution run by Bridgepoint Education. These practices, which often leave students deeply in debt while helping corporations reap huge profits, caused AFT president Randi Weingarten to weigh in on the matter in one of her “Where We Stand” columns, in which she discussed the heartbreaking story of a woman who used her savings and $15,000 in government loans to get credentialed as an ultrasound technician, only to find that the program at the for-profit college she attended was unaccredited. |
