Jane Buck, Ph.D.

Full-time Students, Part-time Faculty

Presented at the 87th Annual Meeting
American Association of University Professors
Washington, DC, 9 June 2001

   
    Welcome to the 87th annual meeting of the AAUP and the first of the millennium. It has been an extraordinary year for the Association and for the profession. I shall comment briefly on a few of the most remarkable events before moving to my main topic, the impact of contingent academic labor on the quality of higher education.
    First, a personal note. A few months ago, someone asked what I found to be the most surprising thing about being AAUP president. I replied that I had anticipated most of the demands--the mountains of paper, the daily dozens of e-mail messages, and the extensive travel schedule. What I had not foreseen was the amazing deference I have been accorded, not as an individual, but as a representative of the Association. I invite those who think that we have lost our luster to shadow me for a week or two. I have been invited to embassy receptions, scholarly forums, and an international conference in Paris where I was placed on the agenda between former United Nations Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali and a member of the French Academy. The AAUP is highly regarded.
    A few high points from the past year. Bennington College settled a wrongful dismissal case with 17 former faculty members for almost two million dollars. As part of the settlement, the victorious faculty members contributed $35,000 to establish the Jack Glick, Neil Rappaport, and Richard Tristman Memorial Fund in memory of the three plaintiffs who died while the case was in litigation. The AAUP will administer the fund and use it to sponsor a Neil Rappaport Lecture on Academic Freedom and Shared Governance at the annual governance conference.
    The Supreme Court has let stand the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals ruling that diversity in higher education is a sufficiently compelling reason to allow the use of affirmative action in admissions. In another Ninth Circuit case, the Court of Appeals held that the posting of handbills on campus is protected speech.
    The first annual governance conference, co-sponsored by AAUP and the American Conference of Academic Deans, was an unmitigated success. The next governance conference will be co-sponsored by AAUP, ACAD, and the Faculty Senate of Howard University and will be held the 12th through the 14th of October on the campus of Howard University here in Washington. The first day will be devoted to issues of special significance to the historically black colleges and universities.
    In the collective bargaining arena there were major victories. In a joint venture with the AFT, we conducted a successful campaign to represent the faculty at the University of Vermont. The part-time faculty at Emerson College in Boston voted 3-1 to have the AAUP represent them as their exclusive bargaining agent. And we have entered into a two-year affiliation with the Santa Cruz Faculty Association, the only faculty collective bargaining representative among the nine University of California campuses.
    Students at Harvard shamed the administration into agreeing to consider their demands that one of the wealthiest universities in the world pay its employees a living wage. The administration’s justification for its tight-fistedness was, not that employees were paid an adequate wage, but that they were paid in consonance with the local market.
    There were, however, low points, especially on the legal front. A United States District Court judge held that the admissions policy of the University of Michigan Law School was unconstitutional because it gave undue weight to race. The ruling is peculiarly fascinating, given recent rulings at Michigan upholding the university’s use of race in undergraduate admissions.
    In a very troubling case that strikes at the heart of our professional judgment, the Third Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that a tenured professor’s First Amendment rights were not violated when the president of California University of Pennsylvania, Angelo Armenti, Jr., ordered him to change a student’s grade from F to Incomplete. This bizarre decision makes it extravagantly clear that academic freedom and freedom of speech are not isomorphic. We must incorporate in our handbooks and collective bargaining agreements guarantees of independence from arbitrary administrative interference.
    Now to the main point--the impact of contingent academic labor on our students’ education. Data provided by the Department of Education indicate that 33% of the faculty were part-time in 1987. The figure rose to 43% in 1998, and some estimates put the current figure at 46%.
    In framing discussions of this issue, there are two numbers more important and more telling than the percentage of faculty employed part-time. The first is the percentage of courses taught by contingent faculty, because it is a more revealing measure of the phenomenon. Not all part-timers teach the same number of courses. The second important figure is the percentage of faculty who are tenured or tenurable. The real issue is not one’s part-time or full-time status, but whether one is on the tenure track. Part-time faculty are almost never tenured or tenurable. Their numbers are a measure of the continuing, but more subtle attacks on tenure.
    The Coalition on the Academic Workforce recently released a study of ten social science and humanities disciplines that documents the deplorable truth about the percentage of courses taught by contingent faculty. With the exception of history and art history, graduate students and contingent faculty teach more than half of the courses offered in those disciplines.
    According to data released by the Modern Language Association, full-time, tenured or tenure-track professors teach only 28% of the foreign language courses at doctoral institutions and 26% at institutions granting associate degrees. In other words, just over a quarter of all foreign language courses are taught by full-time tenured or tenurable faculty. Department of Education figures indicate that in 1987 only 8% of the full-time faculty were working off the tenure track. Just over a decade later that percentage was an egregious 18%.
    What is the impact on students? It is not uncommon for contingent faculty to teach as many as six courses per semester at several institutions in order to survive financially. These “road scholars” only rarely have office space or academic support and typically do not keep office hours or serve on committees. They are often evaluated only by their students, because their numbers preclude more thorough peer review. Because they are neither tenured nor tenurable, as a practical matter they are deprived of the protection that academic freedom affords.
    For contingent faculty, vulnerable to arbitrary hiring and firing decisions that are often made on the basis of last-minute enrollment figures, the temptation to pander to their “customers” is, although indefensible, understandable. An assistant professor of creative writing at Columbia University was quoted in Time magazine as flattering his students in order to guarantee favorable evaluations. In his words, “Submitting students to the rigors of learning seemed only to incur the wrath of many of them, which entered the record as my teacherly shortcoming....The business model has taught me that the customer is always right. But maybe a few more dissatisfied customers would mean a better learning experience.”
    Most contingent faculty members are highly qualified and dedicated members of the profession, but they are often stretched beyond any reasonable limit by their exigent schedules. Anecdotal evidence suggests that contingent faculty might be more vulnerable than others to a number of quality-impairing temptations. Cutting corners by not giving frequent writing assignments must be almost irresistible. Although well-designed--and the operative word is well-designed--multiple choice tests are superior to essay tests for many purposes, they cannot assess students’ ability to write coherently or to organize material. The perceived need of contingent faculty to self-censor in the absence of tenure’s protection of academic freedom threatens the integrity of their teaching. And inflating grades in order to boost student evaluations deprives students of an honest evaluation of their work.
    If we are to accept the language of the market place and speak of our students as customers, let's be clear about what they are buying. They are buying an education that, at a minimum, will teach them to think, to participate fruitfully in the larger society, and provide a measure of personal satisfaction. Even those whose primary purpose in attending college is to obtain marketable professional skills will benefit from the rigorous application of reasonable standards. Employers value literacy, numeracy, disciplined thought, and hard work, qualities that are learned in an atmosphere where faculty are not penalized for demanding the best from their charges.
    How can we best meet the challenges presented by the increasing use and abuse of contingent faculty? A number of possibilities have been proposed, and I offer them as avenues to explore, not as fully developed guidelines. If we are to adopt the market metaphor, let's think about pushing it to its limit. If students are customers, let them demand a high-quality product, truth in advertising, a list of ingredients, and warning labels. Colleges and universities, in order to achieve or maintain accreditation should be required to disclose the percentage of courses taught by contingent faculty and others ineligible for tenure, the disparities between the CEO's compensation and that of junior faculty members, the proportion of the operating budget devoted to instruction, and the compensation of support staff.
    There are those who believe that we should spend more time instilling values in our students. It is, of course, a truism that we instill values willy-nilly by our behavior in the classroom and by the choices that our institutions make. The corporate model that might be appropriate to a manufacturer of tin whistles is inimical to our purpose. Furthermore, the notion that corporations operate in a free market is ridiculous on its face. In the industrialized democracies, we have placed many constraints on the market, lest its untrammeled avarice lead, as it has too often in our own past, and in other places in the present, to excessive profiteering, unacceptable restraints of fair trade, slavery, child labor, and indentured servitude.
    Tenured faculty must reach out to their contingent colleagues by demanding reasonable compensation; the conversion of contingent positions to tenure track positions, where appropriate; and their inclusion in collective bargaining units. I recognize that there is a legitimate need, in a few instances, to employ contingent faculty. These cases most clearly resemble those of several decades ago when contingent faculty almost always were those who provided expertise in arcane or highly specialized areas not provided by the regular, full-time faculty. They were the local lawyer who taught one course per semester in real estate law to business majors, the psychiatrist who taught a graduate seminar in Jungian analysis, and the retired French professor who wanted to keep her hand in by offering a literature course that no one else in the department was interested in teaching, but that was popular with senior language majors. They were employed to fill a genuine need, not as a ruse to deny tenure.
    How can tenured faulty help? By dying at their desks, refusing to retire until they have a written guarantee that they will be replaced by a tenure-eligible faculty member; by organizing with or without the protection of collective bargaining to put pressure on their administrations and state legislatures to limit the use of contingent faculty; and by encouraging their students to value the ingredients of a real education.
    If our so-called customers--students, their parents, and those who subsidize our enterprise--demand it, the market will reward those institutions that provide an honest product--a real education, not simply a certificate of attendance. Let the heroic Harvard students be our role models.
    We are not always right when we speak out, but we are always wrong when we do not.