The Modern Language Association has one. So do the National Council of Teachers of English, the American Mathematical Society, and the Teachers of English to Speakers of Other Languages. All those groups have policy statements on the employment and treatment of part-time and temporary faculty members. Typically, the statements urge institutions to treat such instructors just as they would full-time professionals, including providing them office space, merit raises, and prorated benefits, such as health insurance.
Unfortunately, not one of the policy statements I’ve cited calls for sanctions against institutions or individuals who do not comply with those guidelines, or who otherwise treat part- time and temporary faculty members shabbily. Yet, according to research conducted by the adjunct advocate magazine, adjuncts continue to be paid an average of just $2,000 per course, and to teach some six courses a year to about 150 students. The average adjunct also works at two institutions each semester, has no job security, no resources for professional development, and usually no health-and-pension benefits.
Given this situation, how far should a national association go to enforce its written policies, particularly when one member of the organization (for instance, the head of a department) is exploiting another member (say, a part-time faculty member in that department)? That scenario is not at all far-fetched, because many adjuncts do join their professional associations.
Does an association have an ethical or legal obligation to stop “member on member” exploitation, particularly when the group is on record about the issue? Do adjunct faculty members who belong to such organizations have the right to expect them to enforce their own policy statements actively and vigorously?
What could academic associations do to add muscle to their policy statements? They might publish a list of institutions that have agreed to comply voluntarily with their guidelines for treatment of adjuncts. They could refuse to allow individuals or institutions to become members -- or to participate in conferences -- if the way they treat their adjuncts and temporary faculty members violates the policy statement. This ban on membership or participation would remain in force until the treatment of adjuncts by the institution or by individual faculty members came into line with the associations’ policy statement. Period.
How could associations afford to investigate claims of unfair treatment? All of the organizations mentioned at the beginning of this article have multimillion-dollar annual budgets and tens of thousands of members. None of the organizations keeps track of how many members are adjunct instructors. But they should, and if they did, they could set aside a small proportion of the dues and conference fees paid by adjunct faculty members to try to insure that adjuncts were treated fairly. (For example, if adjuncts accounted for 5,000 of the 21,000 members of the Teachers of English to Speakers of Other Languages, the association could set aside a portion of their dues for compliance activities.)
Better yet, if associations’ boards of directors and members are really serious about stopping the exploitation of adjunct instructors, why not assess all members of the group a certain amount -- say $5 or $10 per year -- to go directly toward insuring compliance with the policy statements on adjuncts? In the case of the National Council of Teachers of English, which has 120,000 members, a $5 annual assessment per member would produce $600,000 to investigate charges of unfair treatment. And why not assess institutional members even more, say $50 or $100 per year?
Consider the model of the National Collegiate Athletic Association. The N.C.A.A. hasn’t simply issued policy statements concerning fair treatment of athletes. It also has detailed rules and regulations about such treatment, an enforcement staff that investigates colleges and universities accused of breaking those (and other) rules, and the authority to impose penalties. The system isn’t perfect, of course, but it does suggest how academic associations could encourage their members to abide by their stated policies.
The board of the National Adjunct Faculty Guild has just begun to consider allowing full-time faculty members, as well as administrators and institutions, to become members. Full-time faculty members and administrators often want to join the guild to take advantage of certain member discounts on goods and services, which are available only through the group. For its part, the guild hopes that such memberships would encourage better treatment of adjunct faculty members, since it would accept only those full-time professors and administrators who meet the guild’s standards for treatment of such instructors.
If the guild does broaden its membership, it may decide to issue its own policy statement on the employment and treatment of adjunct faculty members. But the guild would attempt to monitor compliance. Of course, this would mean that it would have to investigate and resolve allegations of violations. That, in turn, would risk alienating people who would like to become members, but who, for whatever reason, have not enforced the terms of the policy statement. And this would mean that the guild would lose dues-paying members.
Similar concerns may help explain why other associations have not acted against members who exploit adjunct instructors. Were they to do so, I am sure that we would see a tremendous outcry from tenured and tenure-track faculty members. Yet, to put it bluntly, they are the ones who benefit tremendously from the use of adjuncts.
According to a 1994 study by the Department of Education, 35 per cent of full-time faculty members reported that classroom teaching was not their primary duty. Does this mean that the other 65 per cent of full-time faculty members were teaching 100 per cent of the courses that their institutions offer? Of course not.
Over the past 25 years or so, tenured and tenure-track faculty members have come to rely on adjuncts to teach a large proportion of the introductory courses in certain disciplines -- for example, English, mathematics, and foreign languages -- and the classes designed to help inadequately prepared students do regular college work, such as instruction in English as a second language. This frees full-time faculty members for research and writing and allows them to teach more-challenging material.
If associations are reluctant to enforce their own policies, perhaps they can be prodded to become more active by the adjunct professors who belong and who generally were responsible for persuading the groups to adopt the policy statements in the first place. But the adjuncts obviously do not have enough power to force changes by themselves.
Are the current leaders of the national associations prepared to do more than publish policy statements, in spite of probable resistance from some members? Doing so would involve financial risk. But the fact remains that simply issuing policy statements has done little to correct a situation that may be out of control. The Education Department’s 1994 study concluded that the number of adjunct professors employed in the United States had doubled over the past two decades, and it projected that, if current hiring practices continued, by 2000 one of every two faculty members would work part time.
Allowing this situation to continue also presents a financial risk: In five years, half of the potential members of these associations may not earn enough to pay dues or to buy association publications, nor will they be eligible for travel funds from their employers to allow them to attend the groups’ conferences.
If associations officially and publicly decry the overuse and exploitation of adjunct faculty members, they also should be prepared to use the most-powerful means at their disposal to stop it: the right of membership. Enforcing the terms of policy statements by withholding membership may sound like an unsound financial move. Then again, it is much sounder than relying on policy statements to combat the exploitation of adjuncts, who now make up about 40 per cent of the college educators in America.
P.D. Lesko is executive director of the National Adjunct Faculty Guild, in Ann Arbor, Mich.
