Table of Contents
- Continuing to Move Forward
- NFM's Health Insurance Plan Launches
- Meet the NFM Board
- NFM and the Campaign for the Future of Higher Education
- How to Organize or Raise Awareness on Your Campus
- Present the Facts
- My Experience as an Adjunct: A Tale of 2 Faculties
- A Word from NFM's Treasurer
- Follow Your School's Re-accreditation Process
- Announcements
| Continuing to Move Forward by Maria Maisto, NFM President |
| Dear Colleagues:
One of the lessons that every teacher learns is that you can't be a good teacher without being attuned to what it feels like to be a student. Over the last two years as we have worked to get NFM up and running, all of us on the NFM Board have periodically found ourselves feeling very much like our students: alternately confident and confused, often elated and occasionally dejected, determined but exhausted, sober but energized. We try to remind each other that while our objectives are ambitious, every step we take is instrumental, and every new member who joins us is a reminder of the first steps we all took to become activists for change and of the hopes that we all had, and continue to have, for NFM as an agent of change.
That's why we're especially proud to announce that, after some unexpected delays, our health insurance initiative has officially launched! Thanks to the tireless work of Board member Tracy Donhardt, NFM members can now obtain health insurance in most states. As Tracy explains, some states are excluded, so we are working to see what might be available in those states excluded by the carrier with whom we have partnered. Keep checking back for updated information, and if you know of plans (or other solutions) that might be accessible to contingent faculty, please let us know.
We are also thrilled to report that our nascent 501(c)3 foundation will be receiving grants from The Ford Foundation and the French American Charitable Trust to support the educational, outreach, advocacy and research effort embodied in our January 28, 2012 "summit" on contingent academic employment in Washington DC. This meeting, to be held in conjunction with the Annual Meeting of the Association of American Colleges and Universities, will launch a nationwide effort to mobilize all stakeholders in higher education - faculty, administrators, students, legislators, and the public - to work together to achieve FTE - Fair Trade in Education for faculty and students. Naturally, we want to have a healthy contingent of contingent faculty at this event, so keep up to date on plans for this summit at the NFM Foundation website: www.nfmfoundation.org.
Meanwhile, our efforts to encourage faculty unions to include and support their members with contingent employment status continue as we support groups like the new Contingent Faculty Caucus of the National Education Association in the Caucus's own efforts to address serious concerns like the retaliatory behavior of his union toward NEA (and NFM Board) member Jack Longmate. Jack's situation is particularly troubling at a time when other NEA affiliated locals are moving in the right direction, like the recent success of NFM Board member Betsy Smith's NEA local in securing equal voting rights for contingent faculty. At NFM we believe that the best unions are those that embrace the principle that no union can be strong when its most vulnerable members are mistreated or ignored.
A good example of a union acknowledging this principle is the most recent support NFM has received from the New York State Union of Teachers (NYSUT), which has just made a second donation of $2500 to NFM. This donation will help us to improve NFM's two websites - the main website and the site for the Unemployment Compensation Initiative, which needs better, more sustainable support. (Please be sure to pass along the Website Manager position description in this newsletter to anyone who might be qualified and interested in applying!) Among our plans for the NFM website 2.0 is a robust discussion board so that NFM members can connect with each other at the local and national levels and work toward having our first national members' meeting. (We are continuing to seek financial support for these and other projects because IRS rules stipulate that they do not fall under the purview of the NFM Foundation.) We look forward to working with NYSUT and other unions which are committed to confronting and overcoming the problem of contingency in higher education faculty hiring.
Similarly, the launch of the recent Campaign for the Future of Higher Education continues to hold much promise for a faculty-led reform effort. The Campaign is working on a November meeting in Boston on November 4-6, on the heels of Campus Equity Week 2011 (October 24-28), a week-long, national campaign to highlight the problems associated with contingency and the lack of equity on campuses across the country. Start planning now for events on your campuses, and let us know of your plans so we can help publicize them.
Social change movements grow in fits and starts, and ours is no different. NFM has learned that the mark of successful movements is the determination to keep working at every level, learning from every effort and keeping focus on the ultimate goal. Our focus is clear and our determination strong as ever! So keep the faith and know that we continue to work with you and for you and the students whose future is our collective responsibility.
Best wishes,
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| NFM's Health Insurance Plan Launches |
Hopefully you all saw our announcement July 8 about NFM's health insurance plan for members. Yes, after months of working through the process, we have secured a limited medical plan with four coverage level options for members in 37 states and the District of Columbia.
NFM wants to thank you for your patience as we encountered a number of unexpected obstacles and issues which may have made you wonder if we'd ever get here. This initiative certainly took longer than any of us thought it would but we're thrilled to finally be able to say any adjunct in the states where the plan is allowed can now obtain health insurance.
This is a limited medical plan, which means it does not cover everything and has limits on the amount that will be paid toward those accidents and illnesses. This is not a traditional group employer plan which many of you may be familiar with. NFM is young and an association, not an employer, therefore we are not able - at this time - to offer a full-blown medical plan as much as we'd like to do so. But down the road when NFM gains longevity, visibility, and members, insurance carriers will be more inclined to take a risk with us and provide us better coverage to offer our members.
But in the meantime, this coverage provides a level of protection for many adjuncts who have no coverage at all or have access to coverage so cost prohibitive they are unable to buy into it. We look forward to offering dental coverage soon and are also working on life insurance.
For more information about our medical plan, including benefits, rates, eligible states, and a short informational presentation, visit NFM's websitehere. Here you also will find a link to the insurance carrier's site where you can obtain more information and enroll.
If you have any questions, please email Tracy Donhardt, an NFM Board member, at Tracy.Donhardt@newfacultymajority.info.
We hope you find this new health insurance beneficial because as we all know health insurance is not only a basic right we all deserve, but also is crucial to our ability to be as effective as possible in the classroom.
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Meet the NFM Board: Meet Betsy Smith
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I'm the newest member of NFM's Board. I've been teaching for about 40 years, with groups ranging from fourth graders to full-time faculty. I'm currently Adjunct Professor of ESL (a self-bestowed title) at Cape Cod Community College, which is an affiliate of the Massachusetts Community College Council (MCCC), which is an affiliate of the Massachusetts Teachers' Association, which is an affiliate of the National Education Association. During my long career, I've taught English in France, French in the U.S., and ESL to people from all over the world.
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I taught for many years without being involved in, or even aware of, union work. From as early as I can remember, I knew that I wanted to be a teacher, but, even though I'm third generation union, I can't recall ever wanting to grow up to be a union activist. It wasn't until I moved year-round to the Cape after a 30-year marriage dissolved that I started to learn first-hand about the struggles of contingent faculty. My first encounters with my union came when I discovered that my part-time colleagues and I only got a 1/4 vote in union elections. To my mind, that violated the whole concept of unions, so for eight or nine years, I introduced by-laws proposals to give us a full vote, and this past April, we won. For me, even more important than changing the rules was changing attitudes. Seeing full-time colleagues begin to support our cause, going from an overwhelming consensus against granting us full rights to an almost 3/4 vote at our recent Delegate Assembly in favor of making us equal members has helped me understand just how much persistence and patience can accomplish.
I have become gradually more and more involved in union activities. This includes being one of the two DCE (Department of Continuing Education, aka contingent faculty) members on the MCCC Board of Directors, a member of the executive committee of my college chapter, a member of the MCCC Adjunct Committee, and a member of the most recent DCE bargaining team. In those capacities, I have attended NEA Higher Ed conferences, COCAL, the NEA-RA, the MCCC Fall Conference, and the MCCC Delegate Assembly. I have testified before legislative committees considering including contingent faculty in the colleges' health insurance plan and I'm a plaintiff in the MCCC lawsuit to accomplish the same goal. At the same time that I've become a union activist, I've become politically active, working for a variety of candidates in last November's election and working against a tax-cutting ballot measure that would have drastically reduced funding for state and municipal services. I also write op-eds and letters to the editor of the Cape Cod Times and the Boston Globe because, as an educator, I feel I have a responsibility to counter some of the misinformation out there about unions and higher ed. Lucky to be a union member in a union-friendly state, I hope that becoming a board member of NFM will allow me to work with colleagues in other places and other situations so that we can all achieve better working conditions, ranging from pay to benefits to job security, so that we can provide better learning conditions for our students.
Betsy Smith
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NFM and the Campaign for the Future of Higher Education
By Anne Wiegard, NFM Secretary
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Maria Maisto, NFM's president, was one of the featured speakers during the May 17th press conference to launch the Campaign for the Future of Higher Education at the National Press Club in Washington, DC. Maria emphasized that addressing issues of contingency must be at the heart of any meaningful campaign to improve the quality of higher education in America. She also announced NFM's upcoming national summit to confront contingency, to be held in Washington D.C. on January 28, 2012. Her remarks are included in their entirety at the end of this report. A webcast of the kickoff can be viewed via the Campaign's website.
The packet prepared by the organizers of the Campaign for the Future of Higher Education included an annotated list of the campaign's seven principles, one of which refers to the staffing of universities. The third principle states, "Quality higher education in the 21st century will require a sufficient investment in excellent faculty who have the academic freedom, terms of employment, and institutional support needed to do state-of-the-art professional work." The other principles outline an agenda of increased higher education funding, accessibility, and faculty control of curricula.
In the panel discussion that followed, moderator Phil Smith, President of United University Professions, asked Maria to answer a question called in by a viewer who wanted to know how adjunct and contingent faculty could be expected to become activists given the insecurity of their positions.
Maria said we can effectively overcome our fears by recognizing the strength of standing shoulder to shoulder with many thousands of colleagues in the same position, and that activism itself affords a certain amount of protection. She briefly recounted her own process of overcoming fear supporting a family of five on an adjunct income of less than $20,000 a year.
Following the press conference, Maria was interviewed by Peter Schmidt for a story in The Chronicle of Higher Education, who noted the significance of NFM's participation in the Campaign.
Other NFM and NFM Foundation board members Pablo Eisenberg, Anne Wiegard, Paul Ehrlich, and Ross Borden joined Maria for the meetings before and after the press conference as well as the main event. As representatives of the various groups involved in the campaign discussed the next steps, we continued to highlight the urgency of contingency.
Remarks by Maria Maisto, President, New Faculty Majority:
I am one of approximately one million faculty members on contingent appointments who now constitute 75% of the faculty in colleges and universities and who are systematically deprived of basic professional support. We are permanent temporary workers, and we are denied equitable pay and benefits - for many, not even a living wage-- and academic freedom protections.
I represent New Faculty Majority, a national nonprofit whose mission is to advocate for academic excellence through professional equity for adjunct and contingent faculty. As our being invited to join this Campaign suggests, none of the Campaign's goals can be achieved without honestly confronting contingency. This is a social justice issue. Students need us to teach and lead by example.
As a teacher and parent, I am inspired by the Topeka families who stepped forward in 1951 to fight for their children's future. I am involved because I will not stand aside while my three children - or anyone else's children -- are cheated by policies that weaken the core mission of higher education. Policies that divide and demoralize educators are a direct assault on the right of all students to the highest quality education possible, because educators' working conditions are students' learning conditions.
Like the Topeka families, we have to overcome our fear and turn our anger into action, to show that the hierarchies and so-called efficiencies higher education has embraced uncritically are in fact undermining our best efforts to serve our students and our communities.
This campaign can be a turning point, if only we make it one. We can make it one by pushing ourselves to ask uncomfortable questions and work on real solutions.
We support the Campaign. We expect it to help us change the counterproductive and substandard employment practices in higher education. The Marguerite Casey and Ford Foundations are supporting NFM's efforts to reverse the profound and pervasive harms of contingency, and in January of 2012 we will hold a national summit on contingency to help us move from envisioning reform to implementing it. We invite everyone who understands the urgency of this issue to join us. Together we can mobilize students, parents, colleagues, neighbors, and whole communities to set the goal of excellence through equity - and to achieve it.
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How to Organize or Raise Awareness on Your Campus
By Tracy Donhardt, NFM Board Member
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NFM is beginning a new series of articles to help members who are thinking about becoming more active organizers on their campuses or are already active and want more ideas for awareness-raising intiatives. Keep in mind, you do not need to be on a union campus or even work in a union-friendly state to organize and raise awareness of the issues on your campus. As a noted adjunct and union organizer once told me, "You don't have to be a union to act like one."
I live in Indiana, not a state anyone would say is union friendly. My university is a state university; the faculty is not unionized nor in a position to get there anytime soon. But a group of part-time and full-time faculty has been organizing adjuncts and raising awareness of the issues for two years. Yes, these are grassroots efforts that take time and require much patience and persistence. But we're making progress and we've had some successes.
You can too. Don't think you can't. Don't think that your administration is impossible to sway. Don't think that your university's entrenched policies related to its part-time faculty can't be changed.
So read this first installment by NFM's newest Board member, Betsy Smith, about one of the initiatives she undertook on her campus.
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Present the Facts by Betsy Smith
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Last spring, I started attending the Board of Trustees meetings at my community college, Cape Cod Community College. They are open to the public, but basically, the attendees come from the administration--deans and Vice Presidents and numbers crunchers. Very few faculty come, and if they do, it is usually to hear the discussion about a particular item that they have found out about. If meeting agendas are publicized somewhere, I don't know about it. Those of us who are not seated at the table can watch, but only under the most unusual circumstances are we allowed to participate in the discussion, offer a clarification, or even ask a question.
A couple of the officers of our union chapter go when they can, and they talked about it during a meeting of our executive committee, on which I serve. When I wondered if any contingent faculty ever went, their looks of disbelief that I would ask such a silly question gave me their answer. So I decided to go. The first meeting that I went to had attracted a crowd. A long-time contingent faculty member had been passed over for a full-time appointment, contrary to the recommendation of his department. People were there to testify on his behalf and to urge the Trustees to reconsider. They refused. And I was hooked. I discovered in the course of attending several more meetings that the Trustees were very nice people, dedicated to helping the college in any way that they could, but with only a very limited knowledge of what went on on the campus. They knew what the president told them, and that was about it. At about the same time that I started going to the meetings, a contingent faculty member at one of the other fifteen public community colleges in MA did a presentation to his Board of Trustees. When I learned what he had done, I got inspired. One of my full-time colleagues, also a union activist, and an IT professor, sat down with me to do the PowerPoint since I had never done one. We looked at the two departments with the highest number of developmental courses, math and English, and counted how many sections were taught by contingent faculty. Our slides showed that 60% of our English classes, 75% of our language classes, and 50% of our math classes were taught by part-time faculty. We pointed out the negative effects of an over-reliance on contingent faculty for both students and full-time faculty: not enough academic advisers for all students; students attend many classes taught by faculty who do not have posted office hours; academic rigor is more difficult to maintain; retention and graduation rates decline; smaller pool of faculty to advise clubs: increased responsibilities on full-timers for committee work; smaller pool of faculty to enhance/update the curriculum: smaller pool of faculty to participate in governance. We also spelled out the negative consequences for contingent faculty: Uncertainty of assignments from semester to semester--substantial job insecurity; many contingent faculty want a career in the academy; many contingent faculty have this part-time, low-paying, non-benefited work (no health or dental insurance, and no retirement or Social Security) as their primary source of income; crowded office space with limited access to computers, telephone, and support services. Finally, we suggested some ways they could help: Support state legislation to restore full-time faculty positions; support better working conditions for contingent faculty; support a consistent higher education funding system in Massachusetts. I was supposed to have the last five minutes of the meeting, but instead I was asked to go first. I started my presentation not with the power point but with the college catalog. The final pages list all the faculty and staff, and I displayed them to the Trustees: part of a page for administrators; a page for staff; three columns for full-time faculty; and for contingent faculty, and I turned the pages slowly and counted, one page, two pages, four pages, six pages... They got the point. The Q&A after the power point presentation went on for about 20 minutes and would have gone on longer, but the Chair needed to get back to the agenda. The asked me if I'd come back, but I'm still waiting for my invitation from the president. At the end of a subsequent meeting, I was telling one of the trustees about my multiple advanced degrees (M.A., M.Phil., M.S., Ph.D.), my almost 40 years of teaching experience, and my disappointment that I'm only offered one course a semester, the contractually-mandated minimum. She looked at me, and in all seriousness, she remarked, "But you have tenure, don't you?" Our trustees are very nice people, with a sincere commitment to the college, but we cannot rely on the president to inform them adequately about life at our school. As educators, at least part of that responsibility falls to us.
A copy of Betsy's PowerPoint presentation can be downloaded here.
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My Experience as an Adjunct: A Tale of 2 Faculties
By Winifred Pallante
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This experience was 10 years ago, but the disillusionment and anger remain.
My perception of Lakeland Community College had been positive prior to being their employee. Today, looking back, I feel used and believe that LCC views the majority of its part-time faculty as being dispensable disposable resources. It is my contention that their motivation for hiring part-time staff is to bolster their income to balance their books. At least that is my personal experience.
The initial contact was over the phone. The dean of health sciences was in a jam - the man who was to start teaching the new Massage Therapy program had just backed out - classes were starting soon.
My job was to establish the program and teach both classroom and practical sessions. I was told that for every hour spent in class, two should be spent in prep and follow-up (grading, etc.). Little did I realize how far short this time would be and I would need many, many more hours to "bone up" on anatomy and physiology, as well as read continually, radically changing textbooks in addition to creating lesson plans and tests. The science department routinely skipped entire chapters of text and since the State Medical Board would be testing students over the entire text, I felt a need to teach more science.
Perhaps if an adjunct prof is given one or two classes per term and can repeat them term by term with limited text changes, teaching may be worth it. In my case, I felt more and more buried by the information I would need to master in order to teach effectively. I was given no additional compensation for program development.
In addition to teaching duties, I also did administration for the program. At one point, I was .2 hours shy of what full time professor's duties were with no health care and a maximum pay of $17,000 per year (including summer and in 2000 wages).
My attitude really changed when a fellow health science prof (full-time) showed me what full-timers earned. Starting pay was around $35k-$45k (2000 wages) and the majority of that department's staff who were "long-timers" earned around $90k/year (no summer term, full benefits).
Imagine my surprise while attending a teaching development class for part-timers when a man stated that he earned more than $100k/year teaching part time at LCC. He was a retired prof getting about $70k/year in pension and he was being paid at his prior high rate for his part-time class. In other words, my annual pay of $15k (no summer term) had double the teaching load than he had, yet he was paid $30k for his teaching, while still collecting pension.
I was further disgusted by learning that the state paid LCC $4k/per student/per year as "new job program" students, and since I was encouraged to "grow the class" to 25 initial students, LCC raked in $100k in extra money due to my efforts. I did a study of department teaching duties - number of students times scholastic hours divided by faculty hours - and found that my program had the highest demands, followed by radiology, other programs in the middle, and the "star" programs of dental hygiene and nursing the least teaching demands.
In conclusion, I am disgusted and offended by what passes as "normal protocols" at our institutions of higher learning and personally believe that many part-time profs across the nation are working for less than minimum wage and that this is all perfectly legal and that institutions knowingly use and abuse part-time staff.
I am encouraged that an organization like NFM exists, as the misuse of part-time staff is not widely known.
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| A Word from NFM's Treasurer by Bill Lipkin |
Dear NFM member,
Early in 2009, a group of activists began to form the first nationally
incorporated nonprofit organization dedicated exclusively to advocating for adjunct and contingent equity. In the two years since then, NFM has launched a series of ambitious projects:
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Follow Your School's Re-accreditation Process
By Tracy Donhardt, NFM Board Member
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As we are all aware, each accredited university must be reaccredited every 10 years. This is a process where we can all get involved or at least follow the process on our own campuses because part-time faculty are not always portrayed accurately by universities in their reports to their accrediting body, nor do accrediting bodies appear to fulfill their role of ensuring quality teaching and learning when they ignore the now common knowledge that universities routinely overrely on part-time faculty to the detriment of student learning. Accrediting bodies and universities routinely refer to "full-time faculty" but count part-time faculty as full-time equivalents - or discount part-time faculty altogether - thus making these numbers look smaller. But if and when accreditors ask for and review actual headcount, the story is much different.
In the case of my university, IUPUI in Indianapolis, the issue of its overreliance on part-time faculty had been noted by our accrediting body (North Central Association of Colleges and Schools) for 30 years at the time I began looking into this. In 1982, NCA said in its report that IUPUI needed to reduce its reliance on part-time faculty. In 1992, the accreditation board said the school had not addressed this issue and in fact was relying even more heavily on part-time faculty than it had 10 years earlier. In 2001, one year before it was due for its next site visit, Indiana University, IUPUI's governing body, called for IUPUI to address its reliance on part-time faculty through a 3-year plan to fund converting part-time positions into full-time lecturer positions.
Thus, in the school's most recent site visit in 2002, evaluators found that, "IUPUI has worked hard to plan, fund and effect the conversion of many part-time teaching positions into full-time lecturer positions." But the report also noted that "Intentional care must be exercised to prevent the Teaching and Learning function from becoming disassociated from Research; the team is not impressed by the prospect of lower division courses being taught primarily by lecturers and part-time faculty, and upper division courses taught primarily by faculty."
You can learn about your university's reaccreditation history, too. Your university is required to post this information on its website and while it can be difficult to find, it's there. Mine was under my university's Institutional Portfolio pages. It's clear that certain accrediting bodies appear less interested than others in addressing this issue when we look at the wording they use to address this subject. Click this link to download a summary of each accrediting body's stance on part-time faculty.
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Announcements
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NFM Board Member Debra Leigh Scott Sets Up Emergency Relief Fund for Contingent Faculty: 'Junct Rebellion, the project founded by NFM Board Member Debra Leigh Scott, has set up an emergency relief fund for contingent faculty who are in financial need and without access to other resources. Scott was prompted to set up the fund in the course of conducting interviews for her film and book project of a growing number of desperate faculty members.
The situation that finally convinced her to take action was that of "an artist and educator living in California, who will be homeless as of August 15. Even worse, he now faces the possibility of losing his life's work. Most of his paintings and artwork, 30 years worth of work, is stored in a facility that will not give him access because he is several months behind in rent. They have not discarded or destroyed the artwork yet, but that is becoming a real possibility as the month comes to a close."
For more information and to donate to the fund, click here or contact Debra at junctrebellion@gmail.com.
Web content manager needed to assist with redesign and maintenance of existing organizational websites and creation of new website for separate project. Familiarity with higher education and/or nonprofit organizations preferred. Experience required: website design, SEO, Joomla 1.5.x (will eventually upgrade to 1.7), Jomsocial, LAMP (Linux, Appache, MYSQL, and PHP), Control Panel, and installing and managing Joomla extensions. Please send letter and resume to NFM at info@newfacultymajority.info
Post Your Comments on the New Faculty Majority Blog and Facebook: The NFM blog and Facebook page, developed and managed by Vanessa Vaile, support the NFM mission and promote an open exchange of ideas and information about higher education and professional issues, especially concerning adjunct and contingent faculty. Your comments are welcome.
Got regional news you'd like to share?
Is there a local adjunct rally going on in your area? An education forum? An anniversary of your group's organizing efforts? Send us your calendar events or other regional news and we'll run them in the next newsletter (events generally must be two months out as the newsletter is published every other month, although we can acknowledge past events in celebration). News and events can be sent to Tracy Donhardt, at tracy.donhardt@newfacultymajority.info.
Call for contributions
NFM wants to run stories and commentary from our members. For our next newsletter, we are seeking stories that illustrate the implications of working within the two-tiered higher education system. In other words, stories that show what it means to work as an adjunct or contingent faculty member within a system that treats the tenure-track model as the norm. Send your stories to tracy.donhardt@newfacultymajority.info.
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