Ed Note: I missed the usual "immediate" part but better late than never. This version is also on the website. There's a shorter one too that I'll post when I find the file. We invite you to share this press release, this length or shorter with your local or campus newspaper and blogs. Broadsite it: go the traditional, low-tech broadsheet route: print it out and pin to the break room bulletin board. Slip it under doors anonymously... and wherever else your imagination takes you, the more original the better. Let us know where that takes you. Anything but just standing in line passively, waiting passively.
National advocacy group, New Faculty Majority, launches campaign to assist jobless part-time, adjunct professors.
(May 24, 2010) NFM announced a national campaign to help eligible adjunct college and university faculty obtain unemployment compensation in between academic terms. Many instructors don’t check to see whether they are eligible. Others are denied on grounds of having reasonable assurance of re-employment, a phrase in federal law whose invocation by postsecondary employers has been challenged, most successfully in California and Washington, by arguing that employment which depends on variables like enrollment, funding, and administrative prerogative cannot constitute reasonable assurance.
Adjunct (also called contingent, contract, or non-tenure-track) faculty are professors and graduate teaching assistants who work term-to-term, often at multiple institutions. They constitute 73% of the postsecondary instructional workforce nationwide, numbering over one million. They have the same responsibilities to their students as full-time, tenure-track faculty, but usually work for a fraction of the per-course compensation, often without benefits or adequate professional support, increasingly while carrying the same or a heavier workload. Their ability to secure union support is often restricted.
