The accreditor of Olympic College has rejected a part-time instructor’s plea to punish that institution for failing to protect him from alleged retaliation from his labor union, but national advocates for adjunct faculty members say the development does not represent a setback in their campaign to enlist accreditors in improving adjuncts’ working conditions.
Jack Longmate, the part-time English instructor who filed the complaint against the community college in Bremerton, Wash., argued on Tuesday in an e-mail that the Northwest Commission on Colleges and Universities had shown it “does not take academic freedom for adjuncts seriously” in refusing to take action against the college on his behalf. Officials of the Northwest Commission, one of the nation’s six regional accreditors, declined to comment on Tuesday.
In the complaint letter he submitted to the Northwest Commission last March, Mr. Longmate, who has had a long-running battle with Olympic College’s faculty union, argued that the college had violated the commission’s standards dealing with academic freedom by failing to act on his allegations that union leaders had libeled him, may have conspired to reduce his teaching load, and otherwise had sought to make his life difficult. Union officials responded to his letter by denying such conduct, and Olympic College officials said they had not taken action in response to his complaints of union misconduct because his dispute was with the union, which is affiliated with the National Education Association.
‘A Thorough Review’
In a two-sentence letter that the college forwarded last week to The Chronicle, Sandra E. Elman, the Northwest Commission’s president, told David C. Mitchell, Olympic College’s president, that the commission had conducted “a thorough review” of materials sent it by Mr. Longmate and documents subsequently submitted by the college. Ms. Elman’s letter said the commission had “determined that with respect to this matter, Olympic College is not out of compliance with the commission’s standards for accreditation and eligibility requirements.” She did not provide any details as to the reasoning behind the decision.
Mr. Longmate on Tuesday said he had never been contacted by the commission about his complaint and the commission’s letter informing Olympic College of its findings “makes a mockery of due process.” His e-mail noted that Ms. Elman had similarly declined to act on a 1997 complaint by an adjunct instructor who accused community colleges in that state of violating the commission’s standards by relying too heavily on part-time faculty members.
Advocates for adjunct faculty members have sought to persuade college accreditors to more rigorously examine the treatment of adjunct instructors in institutional reviews, based on a belief that the poor working conditions of many such instructors represent an educational problem. Maria Maisto, president of the New Faculty Majority, said in an e-mail that she could not say whether the Northwest Commission’s recent decision represented a setback for such efforts because “we still really don’t know what, if anything, accreditors are willing to do with respect to the working conditions of faculty off the tenure track.”
Adrianna Kezar, an associate professor of education at the University of Southern California who has sought to focus accreditors’ attention on the conditions of adjuncts through a research effort called the Delphi Project on the Changing Faculty and Student Success, said she sympathized with Mr. Longmate. But, she said, the Northwest Commission “can legitimately make the case that the union is not part of the college,” and Mr. Longmate would have made a better case if he had been able to demonstrate that other adjunct faculty members have experienced the problems of which he complained.
