Keith Hoeller is an adjunct professor. He teaches philosophy for a living at Green River Community College, just outside Seattle. He has also spent much of the last two decades ruminating about the bigger picture for those at his level of the professorial pecking order.
Why can colleges and universities pay part-time faculty members so much less money than full-time professors for the same course load? On what basis are adjuncts largely denied benefits? How can academic freedom exist for those who lack job security? And what impact will the explosion in the use of part-time lecturers, paid by the course, have on higher education as a whole?
But Mr. Hoeller, 59, does not merely think big thoughts about adjuncts. He has put his ideas into action as an activist on behalf of about 10,000 part-time lecturers in Washington State’s community colleges. He is also a voice for adjuncts on the national level, where nearly 70 percent of professors at colleges and universities hold positions off the tenure track.
Over the years, Mr. Hoeller has lobbied relentlessly for adjunct-friendly legislation in his home state — with a focus on “equal pay for equal work” — and helped initiate lawsuits that ultimately made health and retirement benefits accessible to more adjuncts there.
That combination of deep thinking and forthright advocacy has given Mr. Hoeller a reputation as a gadfly, as have the nearly two dozen op-ed essays he has written for publications like The Seattle Times and The Chronicle Review. His columns give an insider’s view of life as an adjunct, as well as sharply provocative opinions on part-time lecturers’ relationship with unions.
“We adjuncts,” Mr. Hoeller wrote for The Chronicle Review in 2006, “have not yet achieved equity even within our own unions.”
Mr. Hoeller believes that adjuncts need separate bargaining units, or even separate unions, for their interests to truly be represented. But leaders of existing academic labor unions have pushed back. They argue that Mr. Hoeller’s assertions actually hinder work being done by unions to better the lives of adjuncts.
“Unfortunately, the damage is done,” says a posting on a popular American Federation of Teachers blog by Craig P. Smith, deputy director of the federation’s higher-education division. “The good efforts of the unions have been tarnished and to no benefit of part-time faculty.”
The Road to Activism
Mr. Hoeller’s voice still carries a slight tinge of disbelief when he talks about an academic career that he has pieced together in almost 18 years as a part-time lecturer of philosophy and psychology in the Washington community-college system.
As he applied for jobs after receiving his doctoral degree in philosophy in 1982 from Pennsylvania State University, Mr. Hoeller recalls getting “form letters back that said, ‘Thank you for your interest in our position, we had 500 applicants for the job.’” Mr. Hoeller, who also holds master’s degrees in psychology and philosophy, had at the time already contributed to 10 academic publications and was on the advisory board of a well-known journal in his field.
“The market was horrible,” he says.
He landed a one-year visiting assistant professorship to teach philosophy and psychology at Seattle University. He stayed on in the Pacific Northwest, and eventually took a job in 1991 as a lecturer teaching psychology courses in the Seattle Community College system.
“I thought when I took the job that I’d be teaching part time, but it never occurred to me that I would be getting paid at a lower rate, there’d be no benefits, no job security, and that ultimately there would be little chance of me moving up to a full-time job,” Mr. Hoeller says. “I was trained to be a graduate research professor at a research university. I never saw myself teaching part time this long, and I never saw myself taking up any cause.”
In 1992 Mr. Hoeller had his eureka moment. When he applied for unemployment one summer, his employer refused his request by citing a “reasonable assurance” that he would be rehired. It was an event that pushed him into activism. “Somebody needed to call the public’s attention to what was happening in the colleges,” he says.
So Mr. Hoeller got busy. He lobbied legislators about the lack of equal pay, benefits, and job security for adjuncts and created a now-defunct group of adjuncts called the Washington Association of Part-Time Faculty to push his agenda. He also found a public forum for his views on the opinion pages of The Seattle Times, where he wrote an essay that spared few details about the state’s reliance on “gypsy scholars” who commute from community college to community college to eke out a living as part-time lecturers.
That 1996 article, “The Case of the Missing College Professors,” helped jump-start the adjunct-faculty movement in Washington, where the ratio of part-timers to full-time faculty members at community colleges is about 3 to 1. Mr. Hoeller says part-timers around the state made copies of the article to pass around and post on faculty lounge walls.
“When you have someone who can articulate the realities of the situation, that’s inspiring,” says Jack Longmate, who has taught part time at Olympic College, in Bremerton, Wash., for 15 years and says he felt empowered by Mr. Hoeller’s arguments.
Mr. Hoeller co-founded a second group, the Washington Part-Time Faculty Association, in 1997, and his efforts with that group have reaped tangible rewards for adjuncts in his state, especially in the Legislature, where he has drafted about two dozen bills for consideration. Mr. Hoeller worked on the original draft of a bill that was signed into law in 2000, granting prorated sick leave to adjuncts in community colleges.
Changing things on a statewide level rather than campus by campus “seemed to be the best bet” because adjuncts don’t have the job security that full-time faculty members enjoy, Mr. Hoeller says. “We felt we’d be safer going to talk to legislators.”
Mr. Hoeller and his association (which is now part of an American Association of University Professors statewide adjunct-faculty committee) have also sought redress in the courts. They filed two class-action lawsuits that resulted in monetary rewards to adjuncts who had been denied retirement and health-care benefits. The lawsuits also made it possible for more part-timers to qualify for both.
The Trouble With Unions
Mr. Hoeller credits part of his success to identifying early on which levers of power to pull.
“It seemed to me the following groups had the power to change things: the college presidents, the union leaders, the legislators, and the accreditors,” says Mr. Hoeller, who now teaches between eight and 10 courses a year and takes home about $35,000 before taxes. “I have tried to persuade all of them to do more for adjuncts.”
Faculty unions, however, have yet to embrace his message. In part, that may be because of the messenger. Mr. Hoeller has been acerbic in questioning how well adjuncts are represented in the American Federation of Teachers, the National Education Association, and the AAUP.
In the case of the American Federation of Teachers, Mr. Hoeller’s critique of its much-touted plan to curb the use of adjuncts on campus has been sharp and direct.
As part of its continuing Faculty and College Excellence Campaign, the federation has called for the introduction of legislation in every state to create more full-time, tenure-track positions. The organization’s goal is that 75 percent of undergraduate classes be taught by full-time, tenured, or tenure-track professors — without the loss of jobs to current part-timers, who would have the opportunity to get promoted. The model legislation also calls for equal pay for adjuncts who do the same work as tenured or tenure-track faculty members.
Mr. Hoeller, however, argues that the legislation will indeed jeopardize the jobs of some current adjuncts, largely because of what is left out of it. He says the new jobs are not earmarked for current adjuncts, who may lose out if the new full-time positions are opened up to national searches. He also believes that the AFT’s campaign doesn’t solve other key problems facing adjuncts.
“Before we start spending millions of dollars on hiring new full-time tenure track faculty, I think we should be raising the salaries of adjuncts, we ought to be giving them real meaningful job security, we ought to be giving them annual raises the way most full-time faculty have,” Mr. Hoeller says. “I think that’s the priority.”
Phil Jack, president of the Green River Community College United Faculty, says he has struggled to find common ground with the man who may be his union’s best-known member.
“I think we agree on the problems; I don’t think we agree on the solutions,” says Mr. Jack, a 17-year adjunct who teaches writing courses and is the first part-timer to lead a local union in Washington.
Mr. Jack says his union, jointly affiliated with the AFT and the NEA, is often “fighting the battles on two fronts” — making a case for its legislative plan and responding to Mr. Hoeller’s critiques.
He says that the union’s efforts to bring adjuncts’ working conditions in line with those of full-timers “is not going to happen overnight.” He points to legislation that has increased the pay for part-timers teaching a full-time load at community colleges to 60 percent of a full-time faculty member’s salary, up from 40 percent a decade ago. “We’re not satisfied with that, but we’re making progress,” Mr. Jack says.
The battle has played out on blogs, e-mail lists, and pointed letters to the editor. In one posting almost three months ago on a blog hosted by the AFT’s national office, an AFT staff member picked apart, point by point, an editorial written by Mr. Hoeller in February.
His critiques have earned Mr. Hoeller the label “antiunion,” a moniker he finds laughable, since he belongs to the local union affiliated with the AFT and the NEA, and is also a member of the American Association of University Professors.
“To criticize a union is not to be antiunion,” says Mr. Hoeller, who characterizes the AAUP as “more open” to adjuncts. “It’s being in favor of the union doing more for certain groups that have been left out.”
Patricia D. Lesko, editor of the popular Adjunct Advocate magazine, agrees.
“It’s a way to shut people up,” says Ms. Lesko of the antiunion tag. “But facts are stubborn things. You put the stubbornness of the facts with the tenacity of Keith Hoeller.”
Seeking Support
Mr. Hoeller’s critics also question whether he has broad-based support from fellow adjuncts. But he says plenty of other part-timers have labored for the cause along with him, even though fear of retribution has kept some of them safely behind the scenes.
“People keep acting like I’m a lone renegade,” Mr. Hoeller says. “I’ve worked with a lot of different adjuncts who have seen things like I do and have been willing to go to the mat for them.”
Some, like Doug Collins, a 15-year adjunct in the Seattle Community College system, back him up publicly. Mr. Collins says that Mr. Hoeller is “widely respected among part-timers. I think it’s just that what he says makes a lot of sense.”
Elizabeth Hoffman, a longtime adjunct in the California State University system and the California Faculty Association’s associate vice president for lecturers, says Mr. Hoeller is “the kind of constructive critic that society needs. Keith is very courageous, and he’s taken a lot of heat for that.”
With being an adjunct such an integral part of his activist identity now, is applying for a full-time job out of the question for Mr. Hoeller? Not quite. When full-time jobs come open, he still casts his lot, so far to no avail. He is probably pigeonholed as an adjunct after all these years, he says, and “the added issue of my notoriety” doesn’t help.
Some adjuncts believe that Mr. Hoeller has already crafted a legacy for himself. “His work in the Legislature and his ability to present the case and be a real citizens’ lobbyist is exceedingly important,” says Robert Fitch, an adjunct political-science professor at Long Island University and author of Solidarity for Sale, a book that details corruption in the U.S. labor movement. “He has built a movement that has something to show for it strictly out of his tenacity and willingness to learn strange subjects.”
Mr. Hoeller will need that tenacity to accomplish his latest legislative project in Washington: a bill that grants annual renewable contracts to adjuncts who have taught at least 50 percent of a full-time course load for three years.
Similar measures have been introduced without success for the last four years. This year the bill died in committee.
“I think we still have an uphill battle,” says Mr. Hoeller of the bill, which he wants to see reintroduced next year.
The issue of job security for adjuncts “is even more important in some ways than salary — although salary is important,” Mr. Hoeller says. “Without job security, adjuncts are afraid to do almost anything — both on campus and also in their union. I think unions need to go to bat on the issue of job security.”
In the meantime, Mr. Hoeller says, adjuncts cannot allow fear to stand in the way of pursuing changes in their condition: “I think ultimately this is the dilemma that all adjuncts have: Are we going to be afraid and not do stuff out of fear? Or knowing that we have fears — realistic fears at that — are we still going to try to change things? I’ve decided to do the latter.”
http://chronicle.com Section: The Faculty Volume 54, Issue 37, Page A1