Equality for Contingent Faculty

Vice President Joseph Biden has blamed tuition increases on the high salaries of college professors, seemingly unaware of the fact that there are now over one million faculty who earn poverty-level wages teaching off the tenure track. The Chronicle of Higher Education ran a story entitled "From Graduate School to Welfare: The PhD Now Comes with Food Stamps." Today three-fourths of all faculty are characterized as "contingent instructional staff," a nearly tenfold increase from 1975.

Equality for Contingent Faculty brings together eleven activists from the United States and Canada to describe the problem, share case histories, and offer concrete solutions. The book begins with three accounts of successful organizing efforts within the two-track system. The second part describes how the two-track system divides the faculty into haves and have-nots and leaves the majority without the benefit of academic freedom or the support of their institutions. The third part offers roadmaps for overcoming the deficiencies of the two-track system and providing equality for all professors, regardless of status or rank.

Auteur
Keith Hoeller is an adjunct professor of philosophy at Green River Community College, where he became the first adjunct to win the college's Distinguished Faculty Award. He was also the first adjunct to win the Georgina Smith Award from the American Association of University Professors for improving the status of women and advancing collective bargaining. He is the cofounder of the Washington Part-Time Faculty Association and co-organizer of the New Faculty Majority. He has published more than two dozen opinion articles on adjunct faculty in the Chronicle of Higher Education, Inside Higher Ed, and elsewhere.

Contenu

CONTENTS

Preface

Keith Hoeller

Part 1: Case Studies of Progressive Change

Organizing for Equality Within the Two-Tier System: The Experience of the California Faculty Association

Elizabeth Hoffman and John Hess

The Case for Instructor Tenure: Solving Contingency and Protecting Academic Freedom in Colorado

Don Eron

Online Teaching and the Deskilling of Academic Labor in Canada

Natalie Sharpe and Dougal MacDonald

Part 2: The Two-Tier System in Academe

Organizing the New Faculty Majority: The Struggle to Achieve Equality for Contingent Faculty, Revive Our Unions, and Democratize Higher Education

Richard Moser

The Academic Labor System of Faculty Apartheid

Keith Hoeller

The Question of Academic Unions: Community (or Conflict) of Interest?

Jack Longmate

Do College Teachers Have to Be Scholars?

Frank Donoghue

Part 3: Roadmaps for Achieving Equality

The New Abolition Movement

Lantz Simpson

The Vancouver Model of Equality for College Faculty Employment

Frank Cosco