CHICAGO
Tallying up hundreds of union ballots here at the National Labor Regulations Board seemed like the dullest sort of business. The ballots were light green, the walls and carpet light beige, and the counting long and monotonous.
Yet as the board official droned on, calling out each vote, emotions ran high in the N.L.R.B. hearing room. “This is very exciting,” whispered Jack Behrend, a part-time instructor in the film department at Columbia College of Chicago, as a dozen other eager part-timers and anxious administrators held their breath, waiting to find out if the union vote would change their lives.
“There are very few things you work on for four years and then, bang, there it is,” said Mr. Behrend.
Around the country, other part-time instructors -- desperate for better wages, benefits, and respect -- have decided that unionization is the solution to their problems.
More than 1,000 adjuncts at the University of Alaska formed a union in November. Nine months earlier, nearly 2,000 part-timers in New Jersey’s state colleges voted to unionize.
Meanwhile, on campuses where the whole faculty is organized in one bargaining unit, part-timers are demanding greater recognition of their concerns. This month, a group called CUNY Adjuncts Unite bypassed the Professional Staff Congress, an affiliate of the American Federation of Teachers that represents all faculty members at the City University of New York. The adjuncts staged a protest at CUNY’s central offices. And last week, part-time and full-time professors in the State of Washington’s community and technical colleges rallied at the capitol. They were demanding better pay for adjuncts, after two legislative bills to accomplish that died in committee. The Washington Federation of Teachers, the rally’s sponsor, parked a car on the capitol steps with a sign that read: “Typical Part-Time Faculty Office.” Strangely enough, the car was a Saab.
Tales of “freeway fliers” -- part-timers who shuttle from campus to campus -- are commonplace, even if not all adjuncts fit that category, and not all adjuncts feel exploited. Plenty at Columbia and elsewhere say they work part time because they want to.
But, happy with their situation or not, part-timers now account for more than 40 per cent of faculty members nationwide -- about double the proportion two decades ago. And they are ripe for organizing.
“The A.A.U.P., the N.E.A., the A.F.T. are all starting to notice,” said Richard Hurd, a professor of labor studies at Cornell University. “They’ve come to the conclusion that the use of adjunct faculty is a phenomenon threatening the full-time, tenured faculty.”
Although the trend has been gradual, Dr. Hurd said, “the current focus on that phenomenon by unions indicates a level of interest in the adjunct faculty that hasn’t been there in the past.” He expects to see much more organizing. Whether that translates into more local unions will depend on the part-timers, their administrations, and state laws.
In 1996, about 80 institutions had separate bargaining units for some or all of their part-time professors, according to the latest directory of the National Center for the Study of Collective Bargaining in Higher Education and the Professions, at CUNY’s Baruch College. Of those, about 30 units had been formed since 1990. About three dozen of the institutions with separate unions for part-timers are four-year colleges.
Separate units for adjuncts represent about 18,000 part-timers, the directory indicates. Many more are represented by bargaining units that also include full-time professors. About 225 institutions around the country have unions that jointly represent full-and part-time faculty members, according to the directory.
Typically, unions have found it easier to organize part-timers together with full-timers. The unions have argued that the two groups share similar interests, and that greater numbers equal greater strength. Moreover, part-timers are tough to organize alone -- they’re transient, they don’t have much money to pay dues, and they are more vulnerable to firing.
Still, some of the latest union elections -- of the Illinois Education Association, at Columbia College; the American Association of University Professors and the American Federation of Teachers, jointly, in Alaska; and the A.F.T., in New Jersey, have involved part-timers going it alone.
Acknowledging the trend, the teachers federation plans to pay the way for part-timers to its annual meeting. Its Illinois affiliate was to hold a meeting last week for “Roads Scholars” in Chicago. And the A.A.U.P. has produced a packet that explains to adjuncts how to get started and what to do after they’re organized. Many adjuncts, in fact, argue that going solo has advantages: Their concerns don’t play second fiddle to those of full-timers in the union.
Adding up the recent elections, Perry M. Robinson, deputy director of the higher-education department at the teachers federation, concluded that the past six months have shown “a big surge” in part-timers’ organizing.
Adjuncts at Columbia in Chicago are part of the groundswell. The Part-Time Faculty at Columbia won its vote 299 to 80.
Columbia employs about 900 part-timers a year (although negotiations between the union and the college allowed only 478 of them to vote), compared with 200 full-timers. The adjuncts earn, on average, $1,509 per course. Nationally, part-timers earn $1,000 to $3,000 per course.
At Columbia, the part-time instructors wanted more money ($3,000 minimum per course), benefits, and a bigger voice in governing the institution. As much as anything, they wanted to be heard. After four years, it had become clear that administrators “weren’t going to sit down and talk to us. They were going to brush us off,” said John Stevenson, a part-time instructor in philosophy and the union’s spokesman. “It seemed to us the only way we were going to get anywhere was to unionize.”
As it turned out, the administration didn’t wage war to stop the union. Private colleges have been successful in preventing full-time professors from unionizing by invoking a 1980 U.S. Supreme Court decision, National Labor Relations Board v. Yeshiva University, in which the Court ruled that the professors had enough influence over university governance to be considered managerial employees, and so were ineligible to bargain under the National Labor Relations Act. But administrators would be hard-pressed to apply that case to adjuncts.
“It’s very difficult for an administration to win an election that includes only part-time faculty,” said John B. Duff, Columbia’s president. “They’re clearly not managers. They have an advantage there.”
He and other administrators said the part-timers had rushed to unionize rather than work through the governance channels that the college had put in place a few years ago. Part-timers at Columbia, the officials noted, have a faculty handbook and a seat on the university-wide College Council. “It’s still a mystery to me why they didn’t go that route,” said Caroline Dodge Latta, the academic dean. “They leaped from a couple of conversations to unionization -- from A to Z.”
Before making the leap, part-timers made what college officials considered unreasonable demands: They wanted to see the college’s financial records, and they wanted to form a committee that reported directly to the Board of Trustees, bypassing the administration.
What has most disturbed administrators is that, in their view, the situation at Columbia has been misunderstood. Regardless of how the employment of throngs of part-timers may look, Columbia is not the kind of place that should have drawn a union vote, officials said. “Our situation is not analogous to what’s going on in the country at all,” said Bert Gall, provost and executive vice-president.
Columbia offers degrees in the fine and performing arts and in communications. The liberal arts play a supporting role. In some ways, so do full-time professors -- they got tenure rights and their own governing body only a few years ago. What the college has traditionally -- and proudly -- relied on is the expertise of part-time professors who are professional artists, dancers, and journalists.
In fact, when the college established its current mission, in 1962, it started with 25 part-time faculty members -- and no full-timers. Some of the administrators, like Dr. Latta, along with about one-third of the current full-time professors, were promoted to their current jobs after starting out as adjuncts -- a practice that is unusual on most other campuses. A few part-timers even hold supervisory posts -- one is an acting department chairman. And unlike colleges that have been replacing full-time faculty lines with part-timers, Columbia has been adding to its full-time faculty ranks. This year, it hired eight.
“There are campuses that are opting to replace full-timers with part-timers for purely economic reasons,” said Mr. Gall. “That was never our purpose.”
Administrators and part-time professors here agree that more than half of the current adjuncts work as professionals outside the classroom. Most are not wannabe academics who earned their Ph.D.'s with hopes of teaching full time.
Those statistics don’t surprise some labor experts, who think that the numbers of unhappy adjuncts have been overstated. “One thing coming out of all these stories is that there’s a huge number of exploited and very angry part-timers on American campuses. I think that’s really untrue,” said Daniel J. Julius, vice-president for academic affairs at the University of San Francisco. “I think it’s a very tiny minority.”
Even so, many professionals who happily work part time at colleges around the country might nonetheless support a unionizing effort. At Columbia, many part-timers said they voted for the union out of self-interest, but many others voted Yes out of sympathy for their colleagues who are frustrated academics.
“I’m a professional, but that doesn’t mean I want to be paid cheap,” said Joseph Laiacona, a part-time instructor who teaches academic computing and also works as a computer programmer. He is chairman of the new union’s negotiating committee. “I have one goal: to make part-time employees as expensive as full-time employees.”
Pete Insley, a retired schoolteacher and part-time instructor in Columbia’s science-and-math department, finds his pay “insulting” but said his concerns went beyond economic self-interest. “A lot of these people are suffering and trying to make a living off this. I didn’t care about the money -- it was the injustice of it.”
Plenty of full-time professors at Columbia were also sympathetic to the plight of such part-timers. More than a dozen full-time members of the art and photography departments signed a letter supporting the union. Jean Petrolle, an English professor, circulated a memo to members of her department decrying the “exploitation” of adjuncts and urging support for their organization.
But other full-timers opposed the union. They and administrators worry that it will force the college to change its highest priorities: low tuition and open admissions.
Columbia enrolls more than 8,000 students. Undergraduates pay about $8,500 to attend classes, which are held in 11 gritty buildings in Chicago’s South Loop district. Most art schools charge a lot more.
If administrators were to sit at the bargaining table and agree to the current salary demands by the part-timers’ union, officials say the college would need to double the $6-million it now spends on those salaries. “We couldn’t do that without a certain amount of pain,” said Mr. Gall, the provost.
Speaking of the union vote, but thinking beyond Columbia, he said: “It will be interesting to see if this has any contagious effects.”
On other campuses, where the union movement spread earlier, part-timers are the ones feeling the pain of bargaining collectively with full-timers.
At CUNY, members of Adjuncts Unite were rallying to demand payment for the hours spent advising students. “This wouldn’t be necessary if we felt we had a real role within the union,” said Alex S. Vitale, a leader of the group and a Ph.D. student.
For various reasons, he said, the Professional Staff Congress has not encouraged the system’s 7,000 teaching adjuncts to join its ranks. If they did, part-timers would have a voice equal to or greater than that of full-time professors, Mr. Vitale noted. The union, for its part, is in the midst of renegotiating its contract, and its leaders could not be reached. CUNY officials would not comment.
Susan J. Levy, president of the Washington Federation of Teachers, acknowledged that there, too, part-timers in the two-year colleges would outnumber full-timers if they all joined the union. Adjuncts outnumber full-timers in the classroom by at least three to one.
But Ms. Levy, an economics professor on leave from Shoreline Community College, argued that full-timers are upset about the treatment of adjuncts not just because it forces professors to carry the total burden of student advising, curricular planning, and hiring, but also because it exploits part-timers.
She said many full-time professors turned out for the union-sponsored rally at the capitol, which drew about 300 people, including Governor Gary Locke, a Democrat.
Keith Hoeller, a part-timer in the Washington State community colleges, was also scheduled to speak at last week’s rally, although he thinks there are “serious conflicts of interest” in having the two groups represented by one bargaining unit. He noted that full-time professors often supervise and hire -- or decide not to hire -- part-timers.
“I would no more want the full-timers to represent part-timers than I would want the British to represent the American colonies.”
After the union victory at Columbia, part-timers there acted as if they had whipped the British at Bunker Hill. They gathered at a Chicago bar to down beers and boiled shrimp. They slapped backs, shared war stories, and geared up for the next table they’ll find themselves sitting around: the bargaining table.
