Like many in higher education, Rachel J. Tollett, an instructor of music and humanities at Harold Washington College, part of the City Colleges of Chicago system, is busy moving her courses online. (Harold Washington suspended classes this week to allow faculty members to shift online.)
But she’s also holding office hours — not for her students, but for her fellow adjunct faculty members. Tollett is vice president of her union, which represents part-time professors, librarians, and vocational lecturers. Many of her 1,100 constituents across the City Colleges system aren’t prepared to teach online. That’s because the videoconferencing platform Zoom, soon to host the system’s classes, became available at Harold Washington only in January. Adjunct faculty members were never trained how to use it.
As colleges and universities have struggled to devise policies to respond to the quickly evolving situation, here are links to The Chronicle’s key coverage of how this worldwide health crisis is affecting campuses.
“Now that the crisis is here, we’re all expected to learn how to use it pretty much on our own,” Tollett said. Some of her colleagues don’t have the technology in place to take the online training offered by the college this week, so Tollett is inviting them to her office to train one on one. A dozen adjuncts showed up at her Monday session, including one who stayed for four hours and planned to return on Wednesday.
“They would rather risk coming out in public than risk their classes not being ready for Monday,” the day classes resume at Harold Washington, said Tollett. “It shows a lot of admirable dedication for people who can, at the very maximum salary level, make $25,000 a year.”
Some of her union constituents, Tollett said, don’t even have access to the internet or a reliable computer at home. “We are much closer in financial situation to our students than the full-time faculty are,” she said.
Tollett’s peers at Harold Washington and across the nation say the Covid-19 pandemic poses a unique set of challenges for adjunct faculty members. They point to the hours of extra labor involved in adapting their classes for virtual instruction, a contingency they say is better accounted for in their tenured and full-time counterparts’ salaries and contracts than in their own. They note that as part-time workers, many don’t have health insurance.
And they worry about how heavily student evaluations will be weighed in decisions about part-timers’ future employment, and about whether that future employment will even be available, as higher-education observers predict enrollment declines and an economic tailspin. The pandemic has made an already-precarious work force even more vulnerable to decreased wages or job loss.
Tollett, for one, doesn’t know whether she’ll still be working in academe when the effects of the health crisis recede, or even if she’ll have a job in the summer. Having recently earned her Ph.D. in musicology, she has been looking for full-time work but had skipped applying for jobs that would take her outside the classroom — positions at nonprofit groups and arts associations — until now.
On Wednesday morning, when Tollett sent in her first applications for nonacademic jobs, she said, “It’s a 50-50 chance” she’ll stay in higher education.
A Risky Time to Lack Health Insurance
Michael R. Allen, a senior lecturer in architecture, landscape architecture, and urban design at Washington University in St. Louis, finds himself in a similar position.
Allen teaches half time in Washington University’s graduate architecture program, offering seminars in the fall and spring while picking up summer courses to maintain his health benefits through the university.
He recently checked in with the coordinator of the summer program, promising to make his summer class as “resilient” as possible through online or hybrid means, only to be informed that the institution is considering whether to hold its summer classes. (As of Wednesday evening, WashU had not responded to a question from The Chronicle about summer courses.)
If the classes are not held, Allen will be forced to pay the full health-care premium for the summer months — or go without health insurance. Meanwhile, in a meeting of his design school, he said, “it was made explicit that part-time and non-tenure-track teaching will be the first to be cut in the fall semester if our enrollments decline.”
As part-time employees, Allen and his peers do not yet have contracts for the next academic year. “We’re stuck in a complete limbo, and without any contract yet, they have full leverage over us,” he said of the institution’s administration.
Under ordinary circumstances, Allen said, he wouldn’t think much of not yet being under contract for the fall.
“A lot of the things we take for granted as normal operating procedures, as minor irritants, are revealing instituted precarity,” Allen said. “The lack of contract, in a normal time, it’s just like something we all complain about. But in this circumstance, it could be debilitating and lead to no employment in the fall.”
Organizing in protest, he said, would be difficult given that his campus is shut down except for essential staff members. “How do we create the new vanguard for labor online?” he wondered. “A lot of us don’t even know each other that well as adjuncts, because we only come to campus and teach.
“We have weak ties to begin with,” he continued. “We need to make them very strong, somehow, very quickly.”
‘Disastrous’
More immediately, some part-time faculty members are concerned about whether they will be compensated fairly for moving their classes online — a process that normally might be eligible for course-redevelopment funding but is now an expectation of all faculty members.
That faction includes Seth Kahn, a professor of English at West Chester University of Pennsylvania and a board member of the advocacy group New Faculty Majority.
“There’s a whole bunch of extra work that’s just popped up on people’s to-do lists,” Kahn said. “For me, as a tenured full professor near the top of our salary scale, who gets a bunch of time from the university like paid time to do that work, that’s fine. But if you’re somebody who’s getting paid $1,800 to teach a class and, all of a sudden, you get three days’ notice that you have to do six weeks of it online, and nobody’s compensating you for that work, that’s disastrous.”
Cortni McNamara, who teaches English composition and workplace communication at three community colleges in southeastern Michigan, spent 30 hours over the weekend preparing to move her five face-to-face classes online. But she doesn’t expect extra compensation for that extra labor.
“Because this is so unprecedented, I’m not really worried about getting a pat on the back for all this hard work that I’m doing,” she said. “I know that my full-time counterparts are scrambling just as hard as I am. They’re getting paid more to do it, and I understand that. But at the same time, this is my profession.”
The union representing Rutgers University’s adjunct instructors called on the institution’s administration to provide free health care and additional compensation for its members who build online courses, a demand a university spokeswoman rejected in a Bridgewater Courier News article.
“We are pieceworkers, paid per course, without health-care benefits and with little job security,” Amy J. Higer, vice president of the union’s Newark campus chapter, responded in a news release. “The university has now made it abundantly clear that it does not value the health and well-being of nearly 3,000 of its employees and those with whom we work.”
The Power of Student Evaluations
The shift to online instruction has implications for student evaluations, too, although faculty members don’t always agree on what those are.
Allen, at Washington University, said evaluations risked being colored by students’ feelings about the sudden change, so he’s pleased that the dean of his design school had decided not to use them to determine whether adjunct faculty members were offered contracts to teach fall courses. He hopes other institutions will make the same call.
Sarah Chivers, who teaches sociology at Portland State University and Chemeketa Community College, both in Oregon, feels differently.
“I count on my student evaluations to get new jobs, and when the university says, ‘Evaluations won’t matter this quarter,’ it really affects my future employment,” Chivers said.
“There’s just a number of ways that we’re getting thrown to the wall here,” Chivers said, “and just sink or swim.”
