This article was pretty amazing considering that Angelo-Gene Monaco
comes from a school, the University of Akron, that spent approximately a
million dollars of taxpayer money fighting unionization of its faculty.
It took over two years for faculty to win their first contract. The
University did all that it could to prevent the faculty from unionizing
and then used standard tactics to break the union after it one its
election. The dirtier the tactics the more the faculty supported the
union. One of the issues in negotiations surrounded agency fee. The
union agreed to allow all members of the bargaining unit vote on whether
or not they should have agency fee. Incredibly the vote in favor of
agency fee was won by the union by a larger margin than the original
vote in favor of collective bargaining which the faculty won by more
than a 2:1 margin if memory serves me.
Incidentally the bargaining unit at the University of Akron includes not
only tenured and tenure track faculty but non-tenured full-time faculty
as well. Ohio law explicitly prohibits collective bargaining for
part-time faculty so no part-time faculty are unionized in Ohio. Rather
than creating more tenure and tenure track positions Monaco wants to
have tenured and tenure track faculty do more teaching and less research
since in his view the research that faculty do at non-elite universities
is worthless except for research that brings in grant dollars.
Rudy
Jeffrey Fisher wrote:
this reads to me like the guy's presentation was essentially a warning
to avoid unions. and frankly more full-time employment is great, but
in my experience, it's not departments begging for adjuncts they can
exploit while they rebuff administrative offers of tenure lines or
even full-time non-tenure positions. it's departments begging for more
full-time positions and not getting them. if that's the case, then
"taking on" those "tenured, permanent faculty" (as if they are the
same thing) is hardly the answer. and i don't mean ivy institutions
with 2-1 or 2-2 loads. i mean small colleges with 4-4 (including 4
preps, which is where i was recently), and 3-3 (but with higher
expectations for scholarly productivity, which is where i am now).
even at the places with higher requirements for scholarly production,
let's acknowledge that research and writing takes time and energy.
especially if it's going to be any good. ahem. so acknowledge what it
would mean to increase teaching loads.
i have no doubt that there are elitist departmental feudal lords who
get a sick charge out of walking all over their adjuncts, but if you
ask me, this is not the real problem, and his solution about
administrators taking on tenured faculty is the reverse of what has to
happen. what has to happen is that tenured faculty have to take on
administrators to get full-time slots and better pay and treatment for
adjuncts. there are places where this happens. others where it does not.
in my experience, when tenured faculty oppose hiring adjuncts, it is
precisely because they think it's exploitative and, simultaneously,
gets in the way of making a case for FT and tenure line slots. i might
disagree with the strategy, depending on the seriousness of the case,
but the principle is hardly one of exploitation.
j
On Tue, Oct 14, 2008 at 11:27 AM, Louis Proyect <[EMAIL PROTECTED]
<mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]>> wrote:
The Chronicle of Higher Education
http://chronicle.com/daily/2008/10/5086n.htm
Today's News
Tuesday, October 14, 2008
University Official Offers Harsh Critique of Policies Toward Adjuncts
By JEFFREY J. SELINGO
St. Louis
Wal-Mart, the nation's largest private employer, long criticized
for its workplace policies, is a "more-honest employer" of
part-time workers than colleges that employ thousands of adjunct
faculty members. That was the harsh message delivered to a group
of college human-resources officials here on Monday by one of
their own: Angelo-Gene Monaco, associate vice president for human
resources and employee relations at the University of Akron.
Mr. Monaco's presentation was a rare airing of such a
controversial topic at an annual meeting of a higher-education
association. Such meetings are typically plain-vanilla affairs
that closely follow a script. In this case, the meeting was of the
College and University Professional Association for Human
Resources, and Mr. Monaco didn't hold back in his critique of how
poorly most colleges treat adjunct professors. He filled his
presentation with examples drawn from surveys he has conducted,
and his own experience as both an administrator and a consultant.
"We helped create a highly educated part of the working poor, and
it's starting to get attention from outsiders," he said, noting
that unions are trying to organize part-timers, and lawmakers in
nearly a dozen states are examining the issue.
After pointing out that more than 20,000 part-time faculty members
were added to college payrolls each year between 2003 and 2007,
Mr. Monaco aimed his criticism at several groups, including:
* Hiring managers. Sloppy hiring practices at times give
adjuncts hope that they could eventually fill a full-time slot.
Only 5 percent of 60 department chairs he recently surveyed at
colleges in the Midwest, for instance, said they were willing to
consider long-term part-timers for full-time jobs, even for
non-tenure-track positions.
* Community colleges. Two-year colleges, he said, run a system
of employing part-timers that "crosses the line in many places."
Since 1993 as many as 75 percent of the credit hours taught in
community colleges have been taught by part-timers.
* Accrediting agencies. The organizations "are run by and for
the benefit of present or former tenured faculty" members whose
job it is to protect tenure, Mr. Monaco said. "The only way to
defend the highly paid tenure track is declare lower-paid
nontenure folks less competent," he added. But concerns about
adjunct quality—supported by data that suggest that students
taught by adjuncts take longer to graduate or drop out of college
at higher rates than students taught by permanent faculty
members—fails to account for the fact that temporary professors
are often hired when institutions enroll record numbers of
students, some of whom are not qualified to be admitted in the
first place.
* Faculty associations and unions. The American Association of
University Professors, the American Federation of Teachers, and
the National Education Association all claim to represent the
interests of nontenured faculty members, he said, at the same time
they push colleges to decrease their reliance on that group of
employees.
The message clearly resonated with the group of some 50
human-resources managers. At the end of the presentation, when a
reporter asked if Mr. Monaco's views reflected reality on their
campuses, nearly everyone raised a hand.
But given that human-resources officials rarely have much say in
how the academic side of the work force is managed, would the
message have been more effective if delivered to, say, a meeting
of college presidents? "No," Mr. Monaco said later. "This is the
group that has to argue for better hiring practices and benefits."
Some institutions, he said, have built their financial structure
in such a way that they cannot survive without temporary faculty
members, whether they are part time or full time.
Even the term "temporary faculty" is in many ways a misnomer, Mr.
Monaco said. Some 35 percent of part-time faculty members have
been supporting themselves for four years or more as part-timers.
Some 50 percent are "road scholars," meaning they teach at
multiple institutions. He told one story, based on interviews he
has conducted with adjuncts, of an instructor from the St. Louis
area who is teaching eight freshman composition classes this fall
at several institutions for an average of $2,000 a course.
"That's all an effort to cobble together a salary of $36,000 for
the year," he said. "We rely on them for a very important
function, and we assume that they will continue to accept
mistreatment in return."
At some point, part-timers may simply say enough is enough, he
said. He predicted that that time could come within the next five
years at many colleges, particularly public institutions, where
conditions are the worst for this group. "What stops someone from
walking out of a class in the middle of a semester for a better
offer?" he asked.
Mr. Monaco suggested several ways colleges could improve their
treatment of temporary faculty members:
* Be more creative in hiring. Use existing professional-staff
members to teach courses; provide full-time employment in other
areas of the institution to part-time faculty members; and combine
some part-time positions into full time nontenure positions.
* Take on tenured, permanent faculty members. Increase their
course loads. Demand a return on the investments associated with
sabbaticals, which now increase a college's reliance on part-time
professors. Keep full-time permanent faculty members from dumping
work on temporary faculty members.
* Treat adjuncts like professionals. Give them office or
storage space. Invite them to holiday parties. Allow them to sign
up to teach summer classes before permanent faculty members.
If colleges don't improve conditions for part-time instructors,
they risk increased unionization efforts, and not just from the
groups that have traditionally organized professors, said Mr.
Monaco. He mentioned the United Auto Workers and Teamsters as
potential organizers of adjuncts. "I'm worried about them. They
don't care about the full-time faculty," he said.
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