Part-time Employment Hurts the Entire Profession
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 Hall Read the part-time standards developed by the joint AHA/OAH Committee on Part-time and Adjunct Employment. Read the original part-time survey report, as published in the November 2002 issue of the OAH Newsletter. |
I was one of the lucky ones. When I found a tenure-track position in 1973, the academic job market was still riding the wave of the 1960s. Little did I know that that wave had already begun to crash. Now I am a mentor to graduate students who face a very different job market, one with a shrinking proportion of full-time, tenure-track positions and an alarming increase in the number of contingent workers. It is painful to recognize how much things have changed. To steal a phrase from a recent column on this issue by American Historical Association President James McPherson, the historians of our generation are experiencing a "professional version of survivor's guilt" (1). I hope that those of us who have survived, for whatever reason, will not sit back enjoying our good fortune and assuming that things will improve or throw up our hands at the intractability of the problems. The vagaries of the academic job market are the result of institutional policies and political and economic forces that, however overwhelming they may seem, offer opportunities for choice and action. We owe a debt of gratitude to the part-time and adjunct faculty who have done so much to raise the issues that confront us today. But self-interest and moral obligation alike compel us to collective action. Like so many other trends of late twentieth-century history, our situation has its origins in the politics of the Cold War and the imperatives of a global marketplace. The postwar infusion of federal dollars into academic research fueled a thirty-year period of expansion in higher education. In the 1970s, public spending on education plummeted. At the same time, a downturn in the economy gave rise to new styles of corporate management, including a heavy reliance on contingent workers. Higher education administrators soon adopted these business strategies. By some estimates, the proportion of academic adjuncts rose from 22 percent in 1970 to a staggering 46 percent by the late 1990s (2). Within history departments, the figures are somewhat less grim, but still give cause for alarm. According to one AHA survey, in 1999 approximately 33 percent of history faculty were classified as part-time, up from around 6 percent in 1980 (3). There are a number of reasons to believe that these figures will continue to climb. The recent spate of state budget cuts suggests that administrators will intensify their efforts to lower labor costs. Moreover, the production of new history Ph.D.s, which reached a twenty-year high in 1998, insures that academe will remain a buyer's market (4). If all these trends continue, we are headed toward an academic workplace that looks far different from the one in which many of us began our careers. The costs of this transformation will be great. The most obvious victims are the part-timers and adjuncts themselves. A 2002 survey conducted by the Joint AHA-OAH Committee on Part-Time and Adjunct Employment indicated that only one-quarter of adjuncts earn over $20,000 a year, and the vast majority receive no health insurance (5). Very often these workers carry heavy teaching loads, without the benefit of adequate office facilities. The financial constraints of such work often require part-timers and adjuncts to take on multiple jobs, which allows little time for publications and conference presentations, the very professional activities that might offer an edge in today's brutal job market. The combined effect of these workplace conditions is an insidious trap that keeps many of the profession's promising teachers and scholars standing at the margins of professional recognition and security. While we must turn our immediate attention to our colleagues who are trapped in a cycle of contingent jobs, all of us who participate in and care about the academic enterprise stand to lose if we do not take this crisis seriously. As the gulf widens between tenure-track professors and a large and permanent underclass of contingent faculty, departments grow increasingly fragmented and a vital sense of community and collegiality is lost. As the proportion of tenure-track faculty declines, those who find themselves among this small elite take on a greater share of the advising and committee work that are the lifeblood of their departments. Most important perhaps, overreliance on part-time and adjunct faculty erodes both the already diminished power of the faculty and the viability of tenure. Some have argued that our best strategy is to mobilize public opinion by convincing students and their parents that universities are practicing a version of bait-and-switch: they advertise the presence of overpaid "star professors," then crowd students into large classes taught by underpaid adjunct faculty. While that argument is tempting, it is also misleading. First, at most colleges and universities, "star professors" are few and far between; the faculty in general is overworked and underpaid, particularly in contrast to other professions. More important, most nontenure-track workers are highly qualified, dedicated teachers, despite their often abysmal pay and working conditions. In short, the quality of classroom teaching is not compromised simply because a part-time or adjunct faculty member is standing behind the podium. Nevertheless, the growing reliance on such contingent workers does undermine the larger instructional culture and has implications for our students and for the society at large. Since such workers do not have as much voice as tenure-track faculty in shaping curricular and other policies, we are losing a vital innovative impulse that often comes from our youngest colleagues. Because they have little time and no research support, members of the upcoming generation often cannot make the contributions to knowledge they could and would otherwise make. And as working conditions in the academy deteriorate, it is difficult to believe that our most talented young people will continue to see higher education as a calling and a feasible career. The pressure to shrink drastically or eliminate graduate programs will be overwhelming. Finally, I would agree with American Association of University Professors Field Representative Richard Moser, who argues that when academic institutions uncritically take on the labor and management policies of corporations, we are setting a disturbing example for our students. By condoning labor exploitation, moreover, we relinquish the moral credibility with which we speak to students or to the public about issues of social justice, past and present. (6). I do not underestimate the complexity of these issues. Many administrators struggle to fill their department's teaching needs with ever more constricted budgets. They are often left with the difficult choice of either hiring part-time and adjunct instructors or canceling courses. Furthermore, some scholars want the flexibility offered by part-time employment, although the 2002 survey indicated that 67 percent of part-timers held their current positions because they could not find full-time work. Still, whatever their motives, part-time and adjunct faculty deserve both equity and respect, and our whole enterprise is compromised when they enjoy neither. While sensitive to departmental budget constraints and the appeal of part-time positions to some of our colleagues, the OAH believes that its primary obligation rests with the part-time and adjunct workers who desire tenure-track positions and with all of those who labor under debilitating working conditions. To meet that obligation, the AHA-OAH Joint Committee on Part-Time and Adjunct Employment has worked long and hard to formulate strategies that take the needs of a diverse constituency into account. Building on the pioneering efforts of the Coalition on the Academic Workforce, this committee has now developed a set of standards to govern the use of part-time and adjunct employment. At its annual meeting in Memphis in April, the OAH adopted these standards; in May, the AHA Council did the same (7). These standards are printed on the next page, and I urge you to read them carefully and to consider their implications for your department and institution. I hope also that you will consider the opportunities for broader advocacy of equity in the workplace and investment in higher education. To date, approximately forty-five thousand part-time faculty have joined forces with the American Federation of Teachers, which has helped to pioneer standard-setting for contingent academic workers (8). The American Association of University Professors has also been a vital force in this effort. The AAUP each year sponsors a "Campus Equity Week," which encourages the consciousness-raising that is needed right now. It also works closely with both the Coalition on the Academic Workforce, a confederation of professional organizations (including the OAH) and the Coalition of Contingent Academic Labor, a broad network of academic activists (9). Through such collective efforts we can act to end the exploitation of part-time and adjunct faculty. We can also begin to make long-range plans to reverse the trends that are transforming colleges and universities from communities of scholarship and learning into substandard corporate workplaces ruled by the bottom line. Endnotes For help with this column, I want to thank Sarah Thuesen, one of the promising teacher/scholars now facing the conditions I describe. 1. James M. McPherson, "Budget Cuts and History Jobs: Many Problems, No Easy Solutions," Perspectives (January 2003). <http://www.theaha.org/perspectives/issues 2. For a good overview on this issue, see Richard Moser, "The New Academic Labor System, Corporatization and the Renewal of Academic Citizenship" (2001). <http://www.aaup.org/Issues/part-time/cewmose.htm>. 3. See "Figure One" in Robert B. Townsend, "Part-Time Faculty Surveys Highlight Disturbing Trends," Perspectives (October 2000). <http://www.theaha.org/perspectives/ 4. "History PhD Production Hits 20-Year High," Perspectives (January 2000). <http://www.theaha.org/perspectives/issues/2000/0001/ 5. Robert B. Townsend and Miriam E. Hauss, "The 2002 AHA-OAH Survey of Part-Time and Adjunct Faculty," Perspectives (October 2002). <http://www.theaha.org/perspectives/issues/ 6. See Richard Moser, "The New Academic Labor System, Corporatization and the Renewal of Academic Citizenship" (2001). <http://www.aaup.org/Issues/part-time/cewmose.htm>. 7. See AHA Press Release, which includes copy of proposed standards: <http://www.theaha.org/press/PR_Parttime.htm>. 8. See AFT website: <http://www.aft.org/higher_ed/parttime/index.html>. 9. For links to all these organizations, see the AAUP's web site: <http://www.aaup.org/Issues/part-time/>. |
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