The debate over a proposed California law limiting the overtime of full-time instructors at community colleges is shedding light on how commonly professors take on extra, paid classroom work, and the financial and educational costs of their doing so.
At colleges around the nation, full-time faculty members routinely sign up for “overloads"—paid teaching or service work beyond what is covered by their salaries—as a means of increasing their earnings or helping their institutions deal with instructional demands.
Although most colleges place limits on how much extra work their professors can do—in many cases making it difficult for them to teach more than an extra class or two during the traditional academic year—bans on overloads are rare.
Overloads, however, are becoming increasingly controversial, both as an educational matter—with some administrators worried about professors’ taking on more work than they can do well—and as a bread-and-butter concern dividing part-time and full-time faculty members who are competing for the same work.
In recent years, advocates for part-time faculty members in Washington State and Wisconsin have complained that their calls for fairer work assignments are being ignored by unions dominated by faculty members who are tenured or on the tenure track.
A lawsuit in 2010 by the Madison Area Technical College’s Part-Time Teachers Union, challenging a bid by the full-timers’ union to increase overloads, was rendered moot a year later by Wisconsin’s passage of legislation curtailing such unions’ collective-bargaining rights. But advocates for Washington’s adjunct faculty members continue to defy faculty-union leaders by pressing state lawmakers to limit overloads at public colleges.
“Whenever full-time faculty teach overtime, they displace part-time faculty jobs,” argues Jack Longmate, a part-time instructor of English at Olympic College, where the most recent data reported by the Washington State Board for Community and Technical Colleges shows that overloads accounted for nearly 13 percent of the instruction provided by full-timers in the 2011-12 academic year.
Maria C. Maisto, president of New Faculty Majority, a national group that represents contingent faculty members, argues that in debates over limits on overloads, “the wrong question is being asked.”
“It shouldn’t be an issue of how much overload should be allowed,” she says. “It should be, Why is overload even being allowed? If we care about the quality of education, it should be rare.”
What Problem?
The proposed law in California, AB 950, would limit the overtime of full-time faculty members at the state’s 112 community colleges to no more than 50 percent of their regular quarter or semester workload. It would include service work generally counted as an overload assignment but would not apply to work taken on during the summer or involving special courses offered between academic sessions. It would not supersede existing collective-bargaining agreements but would kick in once such agreements expired.
The California Assembly voted, 51 to 24, to approve the measure in April. The state’s Senate Appropriations Committee is expected to vote as early as Monday on whether to send the measure to the floor of the Senate, which would have until mid-September to act on it.
Discussion of the measure has prompted lawmakers, higher-education officials, and faculty-union leaders to examine the prevalence of faculty overloads and the costs associated with them.
Last year California’s community-college system surveyed member institutions to ask about their use of overloads and the likely effect of a cap on the practice. Of the 44 colleges that responded, 13 had either policies or collective-bargaining agreements that allowed overloads in excess of 50 percent of the regular workload of about five classes per semester.
The University Professional and Technical Employees, which represents part-time faculty members at three California community colleges, has argued in opposing any allowance for overloads that simply knowing how many faculty members teach overloads above the proposed cap is not enough. The Senate committee, it says, should commission research showing how many full-timers have taught overloads in the past 10 years.
Cost Concerns
Part-time faculty members’ opposition to overloads is fueled partly by their resentment of a longstanding state law capping the workloads of the community colleges’ part-time faculty members at 67 percent of a full-time workload. An analysis of AB 950 conducted by the Senate Appropriations Committee notes that some districts limit part-time faculty members to teaching a single course at a time.
And as community colleges have responded to budget cuts by reducing the number of courses they offer between academic sessions and during the summer, full-time faculty members who had relied on teaching such courses for extra money have been turning to overloads as an income source, intensifying the competition between them and part-timers for available work.
The California Federation of Teachers, which represents all faculty members in 25 of the state’s 72 community-college districts and part-timers in four others, hopes that a cap on overloads would prevent full-timers, who have first dibs on classes, from taking work away from their part-time colleagues.
But in an August 5 letter to the Senate Education Committee, representatives of the University Professional and Technical Employees and the California Part-Time Faculty Association, an advocacy group for community-college adjuncts, noted that being able to teach up to a 50-percent overload would still allow full-timers to raise their average annual income from $86,458 to $129,687.
Because accruing overtime can increase faculty members’ retirement benefits or eligibility for sabbaticals, the letter said, a state law allowing overloads of up to 50 percent would leave the state “on the hook for millions more.”
The Senate Appropriations Committee’s analysis of the bill said its financial impact would vary substantially from one community-college district to the next. Districts would save money if the overload cap led them to farm out more work to part-timers, who generally are paid a lower rate for their services. But districts would lose money if such a shift forced them to hire more part-timers to keep those already on the payroll below their own workload cap.
Striking a Balance
Advocates for California’s part-time faculty members have characterized limits on overloads as necessary to maintain educational quality. In testifying for AB 950 this month, Phyllis Eckler, chairwoman of the California Federation of Teachers’ committee on part-time faculty, argued that the proposed cap on overloads would “improve the access for students to their teachers” and enable full-timers to devote more time to developing curricula and programs.
In Michigan, Daniel J. Phelan, president of Jackson College, says some faculty members are teaching excessive overloads, especially if they are near retirement and trying to increase benefits pegged to their income. Under the college’s collective-bargaining agreement with its faculty union, which represents 90 percent of full-time faculty members but just 10 percent of part-timers, the full-timers have first dibs on classes as overloads. Nearly half of them teach overloads.
Most faculty members at Jackson “have a sense of what is quality instruction, and they do a good job,” Mr. Phelan says, but “logic would dictate that the delivery of quality becomes more questionable” as overtime responsibilities increase.
Mr. Phelan is considering further restrictions on overloads as part of contract negotiations with the faculty union. But Alana Tuckey, the union’s president, says its members feel that the current overload system “works well for all parties.”
“A lot of people rely on that money to make ends meet,” she says, “especially if spouses have lost jobs and things like that.”
Other college presidents appear less inclined to try to limit faculty overloads.
“If it has the department chair’s support, and you see positive evaluations, why wouldn’t you have a great teacher teach more, if they have the stamina to do it?” asks Kevin E. Drumm, president of Broome Community College, part of the State University of New York.
Linda Kaminski, president of Yakima Valley Community College, in Washington, says her institution discourages faculty members from taking on excessive overloads by paying them substantially less for work beyond 10 additional instructional units per quarter. But, given the rural college’s difficulty in recruiting instructors, she says, “more often we are asking the full-timers, ‘Will you please teach a section?’”
Part-time faculty members are not the only ones who object to overloads. Rob Jenkins, an associate professor of English at Georgia Perimeter College who recently wrote about his reliance on overload income for a Chronicle blog, says some full-timers “got really angry at me for teaching an overload or assigning an overload as a [department] chair.”
Many of them were “constantly trying to argue for a lower teaching load,” Mr. Jenkins says. They “felt people teaching more than the standard teaching load contradicted that argument, or at least gave the administration ammunition to say, Look at these people, look at what they are doing.”
