A breakthrough political year for advocates for adjunct instructors appears to be ending on a down note, with only modest gains to show for their efforts and newly diminished prospects that Congress will act to improve adjuncts’ working conditions anytime soon.
The results of this week’s elections, which will give Republicans control of the Senate and tighten their grip on the House of Representatives, are expected to leave Congress much less willing to support any federal intervention in colleges’ dealings with their employees, and much more hostile to the labor unions that provide nearly all of the political clout contingent faculty members have.
“The political climate now is such that I don’t see any sort of relief for adjuncts going very far in Congress,” said Richard K. Vedder, a former Congressional staff member and an emeritus professor of economics at Ohio University who often has testified on Capitol Hill.
Mr. Vedder, a self-described libertarian who is now director of the independent Center for College Affordability and Productivity, said adjuncts’ reliance on labor unions for political advocacy “is going to be viewed as anathema by Republicans.” The Service Employees International Union, which has emerged as one of the principal organizers of adjunct instructors and one of their chief advocates in Washington, is so closely associated with the Democratic Party that it is viewed as “poisonous, almost, to Republicans,” Mr. Vedder said.
Adrianna Kezar, a professor of higher education at the University of Southern California and director of the Delphi Project on the Changing Faculty and Student Success, predicted that adjuncts would have trouble persuading Congress to see their poor working conditions as anything but a problem best left to state governments.
“What this means,” she said, “is slower change.”
Promising Starts
Adjuncts’ prospects of securing the federal government’s help in improving their jobs seemed drastically better last summer, following several months in which Congress appeared to be paying attention to their workplace concerns for the first time.
They first triggered that wave of Congressional attention a year ago, when the House education committee invited several part-time instructors and Maria C. Maisto, president of the New Faculty Majority, to testify about how adjuncts were being denied work by colleges that were worried about keeping their hours low enough to avoid being required to provide them with health coverage under the Affordable Care Act.
Although seen as an attempt by Republicans to point out flaws in the Obama administration’s signature health-care law, the hearing soon turned into a broader discussion of adjunct instructors’ working conditions by members of both parties. The committee’s top Democrat, Rep. George Miller of California, responded by having its staff establish an online forum for adjunct instructors and write an unprecedented Congressional report on their working conditions based on their comments.
Contingent faculty members were given more hope for federal help in July, when Sen. Richard J. Durbin, an Illinois Democrat, offered a bill to make adjuncts at four-year public colleges eligible for a federal student-loan-forgiveness plan now reserved for community-college adjuncts and other public servants who work full time. In introducing the measure, Senator Durbin called adjuncts “overworked and undervalued.”
This year “was probably a watershed year for adjunct faculty, just because their issues are now out there,” said Malini Cadambi Daniel, director of the SEIU’s national higher-education campaign.
Mixed Success
Congressional attention, however, is not the same thing as Congressional action. Senator Durbin’s bill immediately stalled in the Senate education committee and appears unlikely to go anywhere soon, especially with Republicans taking control of that chamber.
Adjunct instructors did have at least one political gain in Washington that was not purely symbolic. Partly in response to their testimony before the Internal Revenue Service, that agency this year established minimum standards for how their hours should be counted by colleges, in the context of new guidelines for colleges under the Affordable Care Act.
The House in July passed a bipartisan measure that would require colleges to collect and report more information about their part-time instructors. Although the Senate did not take up the measure, similar language remains under consideration by Congress as part of the reauthorization of the Higher Education Act.
Part-time instructors at public four-year colleges continue to hold out hope of qualifying for public-service loans—through regulatory instead of Congressional action—and this week they were urging the Education Department to alter its rules to declare them eligible.
To the extent that adjunct instructors retain hope of Congressional help, however, they are losing a key ally. Representative Miller announced in January that he would retire when his term ended with the new year.
Needing Allies
Partisan considerations aside, adjunct instructors are at an inherent disadvantage in a Washington environment where money often equals political power.
College administrations, which are often on the opposite sides of debates over measures to improve adjuncts’ working conditions, are represented by an assortment of established organizations with sizable lobbying budgets.
Such groups have been open to discussions about improving adjuncts’ working conditions, but they generally balk when the talk turns to government involvement in relations between colleges and their instructors, or any proposal seen as threatening colleges’ financial autonomy. Several opposed leading adjunct representatives, for example, in the recent debates over how colleges should calculate the work hours of part-time instructors under the Affordable Care Act.
“Colleges—like all employers—are already subject to extensive labor law regarding the treatment of employees, and I doubt that new federal regulations focused specifically on adjunct faculty are necessary or desirable,” Terry W. Hartle, the American Council on Education’s senior vice president for government relations and public affairs, said this week in a written statement.
The sole advocacy group representing only contingent faculty members on Capitol Hill is the New Faculty Majority, which has an annual budget of less than $250,000, one full-time and two part-time employees, and a tax status that precludes it from contributing to political campaigns.
Adjuncts have been able to turn to the big labor unions that represent them to push some of their causes, but they do not always share the same interests, especially when the unions are dominated by tenured or tenure-track faculty members who may see their part-time colleagues as competitors for colleges’ instructional funds. Such tensions came to a head in Washington State last winter, when the Washington Part-Time Faculty Association unsuccessfully pushed legislation that would require separate labor unions for full-time and part-time instructors at public community and technical colleges.
When unions do advocate on behalf of adjuncts in Congress, said Matthew Williams, a Republican who is the New Faculty Majority’s secretary and treasurer, “there is going to be a visceral resistance” from GOP lawmakers.
“If Democrats had a majority in Congress, and the White House, I think you could move this agenda,” Mr. Williams said. That day, however, seems several years off.
