Local Union Is Not Treating Part- and Full-Timers Equally, Adjunct Complains to NEA

An adjunct professor of English at Washington State’s Olympic College, who says his faculty union has consistently neglected its duty to represent part-time and full-time faculty members equally, has written a sharply worded letter to the president of the National Education Association asking him to intervene and to confront the broad conflicts of interest in unions that represent both groups of professors in the same collective-bargaining unit.

The 15-page letter painstakingly details and documents what the adjunct, Jack Longmate, sees as the shortcomings of the Olympic College Association for Higher Education and the Washington Education Association. Mr. Longmate says full-time tenured faculty members are allowed to teach courseloads that surpass what is allowed in the union’s contract and that cut into the classes available for part-time professors. He also says, among other things, that adjuncts are not routinely invited to the table during discussions about issues that affect them and that his union has violated various policies outlined by the national association, with which the Olympic College union is affiliated.

Mr. Longmate says he hopes his formal complaint to the association’s president, Dennis Van Roekel, will begin the process of changing what he says in his letter were “the serious and unmitigated conflicts of interest between the part-timers, who lack any job security, and the full-timers, who have tenure and serve as their de-facto supervisors.”

Mr. Longmate, who is also employed outside of academe as a full-time technical writer, says that “I would hope that we could help reform the NEA to make it a union to do what it’s really supposed to be doing, and that’s representing all of its members.”

The NEA’s national office has not responded to several requests for comment since the middle of last week.

Mr. Longmate says he wants the national office to allow a third party to formally investigate the violations he detailed to Mr. Van Roekel.

Mr. Longmate’s letter also highlights a recent incident that illustrated the tensions between the two groups of faculty members in his union and elsewhere. In February, Mr. Longmate testified in the Washington Legislature against a bill backed by his union that he says did not benefit adjuncts. Fellow union members, angry that he had appeared to be speaking on behalf of the union at the time although Mr. Longmate said he was not, asked him to resign from his post as secretary of the union and later censured him. Mr. Longmate says that he is still criticized for the stance he took and that he fears retribution.