About 200 non-tenure-track professors, adjunct activists, and union leaders will gather in Québec City this week to share their strategies for improving the workplace for the largest segment of faculty members today, those who are neither tenured nor on the road to that status.
The biennial conference of the Coalition of Contingent Academic Labor, commonly known as Cocal, expects to draw people from the United States, Canada, and Mexico. The three-day gathering will feature workshops and panels (offered in English, Spanish, and French) on topics such as access to unemployment benefits when courses dry up, collective bargaining, and graduate students’ rights.
The Cocal meeting also serves as a place where part-time faculty members feel a sense of community hard to find at other conferences.
“You don’t have to keep explaining what being contingent means,” says Jeanette Jeneault, a writing instructor at Syracuse University who is president of that institution’s part-time-faculty union. “Everyone there is like you. It’s very comforting.”
Adjuncts preparing to attend the conference agree that a confluence of factors—chief among them a battered economy that has put their jobs more at risk than usual—has made pushing for equity more important than ever.
“One of the things we all hold in common is our vulnerability,” says Maria Peluso, president of the Concordia University Part-Time Faculty Association, in Montreal. “I think that many of the people who are involved in the Cocal movement would like to see some social justice on behalf of the people who are contingent faculty.”
Job security, higher pay, and health benefits, among other things, are still out of reach for many adjuncts. One key topic at the meeting will be the best way to attain them. Some members of the coalition, whose union ties are strongly reflected among the event’s sponsors and speakers, hold up collective bargaining as the most effective way to bring about change. Other part-timers see legislative pressure as a better alternative.
New Faculty Majority, an adjunct advocacy group, will talk about its new 20-year plan to reverse the trend that has made professors working off the tenure track the largest swath of the professoriate. The plan, whose details have been tightly held, will be unveiled at the conference.
“People come to learn from others what they’ve done and what strategies are working,” says Marie Blais, a lecturer in urban studies at University of Quebec at Montreal who is a key organizer of this year’s conference. “We must expose the practices that are really good.”
A Moving Meeting
The Coalition of Contingent Academic Labor began in 1996 as a gathering of part-timers and graduate students tacked onto the Modern Language Association’s annual meeting. Since then, the loose network of individual activists, union members, and professional associations has met seven times, in locales that include New York, Boston, Vancouver, Montreal, and, most recently, in San Diego in 2008. Adjuncts have also formed statewide and regional chapters of the coalition, such as the ones in Chicago, Boston, and California.
“This movement has really come a long way,” says Ms. Peluso, a political-science lecturer who has been to five coalition meetings. This year she will be a part of a panel where she’ll detail the “travails of online education” for part-timers.
Some adjuncts, like Margaret Vaughan, are newer to the conference. The San Diego meeting was her first, and she said panelists there conveyed a “sense of urgency” about fixing the academic workplace. This time around, she is encouraged by how her union for part-timers at Madison Area Technical College has stood up to administrators during protracted negotiations.
“We’ve sailed through some impossible situations with success,” says Ms. Vaughan, referring to the union’s new contract, whose key feature is annual longevity raises for professors.
One continuing struggle for the conferences is that, no matter where they are, attending on adjunct pay can be very hard. Adjuncts have written to e-mail lists and commented on blogs that the Québec City conference’s price tag—the registration fee is now $250, plus travel, food, and lodging—has shut out the very people who would benefit most from going to the meeting.
Organizers put the meeting in Québec City in keeping with attempts to rotate the event between the countries from which attendees come. Plans to hold the meeting in Mexico City this year didn’t pan out.
Ms. Blais says attendees from Mexico and graduate students were among the few who received financial assistance. Organizers also point those looking for low-cost lodging to the residence halls at Laval University where the conference takes place. “In the end, no matter where Cocal is held, people must travel,” says Ms. Blais, vice president of the National Federation of Teachers of Quebec.
Adjuncts who are union members look to their unions to pick up the tab—or at least part of it. “I don’t think I would be able to go without some kind of support,” says Ms. Jeneault, whose union is affiliated with the American Federation of Teachers.
Ms. Jeneault plans to try to get conference attendees to submit articles for a book tentatively titled, “We’re Taking It Back: Contingent Faculty Researching Contingent Faculty.” The point, in part, is to put research by adjuncts in the spotlight. “I want people to see what real contingent faculty say about contingent faculty,” Ms. Jeneault says.
