There are reasons why non-tenure track faculty members at more than 25 colleges and universities have recently organized under the Adjunct Action campaign led by the Service Employees International Union, and why more will do so in the future. Since the 1970s several higher-education trends have led to a reduction in the number of tenure-line positions; the American Association of University Professors estimates that 70 percent of higher-education faculty members nationwide have non-tenure track, contingent appointments, with more than half of those in part-time positions.
Whether they’re called non-tenure-track faculty members, adjuncts, lecturers, part-timers, instructors, or something else, they are unified by their subaltern status: their lack of job security, a livable wage, health and retirement benefits, and institutional support. This describes the new faculty majority.
Many adjuncts possess the same terminal degrees from the same graduate programs that produced their tenure-line colleagues, yet they are often treated as second-class citizens within their own departments. Deprived of basic teaching support, adjuncts are often assigned the highest enrolled classes with the greatest grading demands.
At most colleges, adjuncts are offered only one or two classes; even in some unionized institutions, like the California Community College system, adjuncts are legally prohibited from teaching more than 67 percent of all courses at a single campus. Given the low pay rates (the national median per three-credit course was $2,700, according to a 2012 report by the Coalition on the Academic Workforce), many are forced to stitch together two or three part-time appointments, leading them to become freeway-fliers and undermining their ability to fully engage with their students.
And the coalition’s study also found that more than three-fourths of adjuncts nationwide had no health insurance, while a majority at public institutions—and over 75 percent of those at private ones—had no retirement benefits. While more recent national data are not yet available, due to the increase in adjunct unionization, contingent faculty may see an improvement in the future.
So what do adjunct faculty members need? First and foremost we need some degree of job security. The mental and emotional strain of not knowing whether you have classes the next term is not conducive to providing quality education. How does it serve the interests of the students if over half of faculty members are unavailable for consultation or letters of recommendation because they are always rushing off to other teaching jobs or are no longer around?
Second, adjuncts need livable wages. At many higher-education institutions, adjuncts are on different salary schedules than tenure-track professors, and are paid a pittance for teaching the same classes.
Third, the new faculty majority needs health and retirement benefits. If a college wants to recruit and retain the most qualified faculty, providing them with a livable wage plus health and retirement benefits is the way to achieve this.
Fourth, adjuncts need the institutional support to effectively do the work we have been hired to do. A great deal of the transformative educational transaction that occurs between professor and student takes place in conversations outside of the classroom, yet too many adjuncts either lack an office altogether or are forced to share one with other adjuncts. Basic institutional support means an office with a phone, computer, desk, bookcase, and file cabinet.
The California Faculty Association, for which I serve as an associate vice president, has shown that it is possible to improve working conditions for adjuncts. The union represents the California State University system’s 24,000 tenure-system professors, as well as its adjunct faculty members and its librarians, coaches, and counselors. Since the late 1990s the union has secured many gains for adjuncts: more job security for experienced lecturers, a path to full-time employment, health benefits for those who teach 40 percent of a full-time course load, and access to a defined-benefit pension plan. Our union has endeavored to integrate lecturers into the academy more fully, recognizing that faculty working conditions are also student learning conditions.
