President Obama’s plan to offer free community-college tuition to millions of students has little to say about one important matter: who would teach them.
That omission has prompted some adjunct-faculty advocates to express concern that the plan would simply increase the burden placed on college instructors who work part time for relatively low pay. They warn that if the proposal is passed into law without provisions improving those teachers’ pay, job security, and working conditions, it could undermine one of the plan’s goals: improving the quality of instruction at community colleges.
As sketched out by the White House so far, the plan calls for the federal government to pick up the tab for about three-quarters of qualifying students’ tuition costs, with participating states kicking in the rest. It does not call for any overall increase in how much money community colleges receive per student, however. As a result, it could leave in place the same financial pressures that have driven the nation’s roughly 1,100 community colleges to rely more and more on part-time instructors, who now account for about 70 percent of all faculty members at all such institutions.
“Our biggest concern about this is, Is it going to be funded on the backs of adjuncts? Is it going to lead to more exploitation?” said Maria Maisto, president of New Faculty Majority, an advocacy group for contingent faculty members. She called the plan’s lack of any discussion of adjuncts’ working conditions “a glaring omission, especially since it is so well known that the adjunct crisis has reached the proportions that it has.”
Rudy H. Fichtenbaum, president of the American Association of University Professors, predicted that, unless the plan included substantial increases in per-student spending, community colleges would handle enrollment increases mainly by fielding more work to part-time instructors, rather than hiring more full-time faculty members. “We would certainly see that as a negative,” he said, adding that it would be “not particularly good for students and certainly not good for the people who are doing the part-time teaching.”
Guarded Optimism
Not everyone who represents adjunct instructors is focused on such worries.
In a written statement issued on Friday, Mary Kay Henry, president of the Service Employees International Union, said the plan would “both improve student opportunities and increase stability for a largely contingent faculty work force.” An SEIU spokeswoman said Ms. Henry “believes that this proposal creates an opening to address work-force standards.”
Other labor advocates sounded similarly positive notes about the proposal. Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, said last week that the plan “could expand educational opportunity, strengthen our work force, and boost investment in community colleges, which have been hard-hit by austerity budgets at the state level.”
Lily Eskelsen García, president of the National Education Association, praised the plan as offering more educational opportunity. But, she added, “we can’t forget to invest in faculty and staff to ensure our students are receiving the quality education they deserve.”
Up for Debate
David S. Baime, senior vice president for government relations and research at the American Association of Community Colleges, said most such institutions generally could handle any short-term enrollment increases that would be triggered by President Obama’s plan. He noted that, except for a few bottlenecks, the nation’s community colleges were able to accommodate a 22-percent enrollment spike during the recent recession.
William E. Primosch, an adjunct professor of political science at Montgomery College, in Maryland, and president of its SEIU-affiliated union of part-time faculty members, said he knows of adjunct instructors who have lost class assignments as enrollments have declined in an improved economy, and would welcome additional work. He predicted that community colleges could find enough instructors to handle any short-term enrollment increases produced by the plan, but said they might have trouble handling such increases over the long term “without compensation improvements.”
Adjuncts’ working conditions are shaped mainly by state law and institutional decisions. But Mr. Baime said the president’s plan contained incentives for colleges to adequately support their faculty members. The White House has said students would be able to use the money only for academic programs that fully transfer to public four-year colleges or for job-training programs with high graduation rates. Colleges that neglect the needs of their instructors could jeopardize their ability to maintain the educational quality needed to qualify for such funds.
Ms. Maisto, of New Faculty Majority, said she wondered, however, if one result of the plan’s graduation-rate requirements would be that adjunct instructors with few job protections would be put under “huge pressure” to pass students.
It remains unclear whether a Republican-dominated Congress will show much support for the plan or for the concerns of adjunct instructors whose only real political clout comes from being associated with organized labor. When the plan is debated, however, Ms. Maisto said, “we intend to be part of that discussion.”
Peter Schmidt writes about affirmative action, academic labor, and issues related to academic freedom. Contact him at peter.schmidt@chronicle.com.
