Category: Adjunct Faculty

  • According to “America’s Censored Classrooms,” a report released in August by the nonprofit human rights group PEN America, 39 percent of the 137 educational gag orders introduced in state legislatures so far this year have targeted colleges and universities. Most of them focus on race and LGBTQIA+ issues and seek to suppress discussion of topics the right wing deems “divisive.”

    This, PEN concludes, is an about-face for the right: “Just four or five years ago, Republican lawmakers were touting so-called Campus Free Speech Acts purportedly designed to protect intellectual diversity and free expression. Now many are targeting higher education with some of the most censorious language to date.”

    Indeed, bills to restrict the freedom to teach and learn have sparked outrage — and organizing — on campuses throughout the country. In addition to increased COVID-inspired health and safety concerns and an ever-increasing spike in the number of low-paid contingent laborers, it is not surprising that campus workers are mobilizing in every region of the U.S. and pushing for a New Deal for Higher Education. The effort is being led by the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) and the American Association of University Professors (AAUP), two groups that entered into a permanent affiliation agreement that took effect on August 1.

    The agreement builds on more than a decade of joint work in support of intellectual freedom but allows the 50,000-member AAUP to retain its independence and autonomy.

    In promoting the New Deal for Higher Education campaign, both the 1.7 million-member AFT and the AAUP say they are elevating the “common good,” advancing a platform that defends academic freedom, and promoting shared governance between administrators and faculty. In addition, they are mobilizing members to push Congress and the states to reinvest in higher education, oppose censorship, cancel all student debt and protect part-time employees from arbitrary firings.

    The stakes have rarely been higher.

    “People see that democracy is under assault,” AFT President Randi Weingarten told Truthout. “We now need to protect knowledge and critical thinking and go beyond bread-and-butter issues to redefine union activity. We have to fight authoritarianism as we work to make a difference in people’s lives and communities.”

    Paul Davis, national vice president of the AAUP and an emeritus professor at Cincinnati State Technical and Community College, agrees and sees the affiliation as providing enhanced organizing opportunities. “This country and its people are changing,” Davis says. “OK, so let’s adjust and not throw our hands up in the air in despair. When the economy changes, we have to be able to react; we have to change, too.”

    The pace of change, he adds, has escalated. In fact, he reports that shortly after campuses shut down because of COVID-19, both the AAUP and the AFT began receiving requests for help in forming bargaining units. “We began to hear primarily from adjuncts, in every part of the country, who were being treated horribly. They were mobilizing for respect, job security and better pay,” he says.

    But it was not just adjuncts who were fed up — and riled up. Cathy Wagner, a professor of creative writing at Miami University of Ohio, began working with the Faculty Alliance of Miami in the spring of 2020, following the announced layoff, in March 2020, of 150 full-and-part-time faculty for the Fall 2020 semester.

    “The cuts meant that everyone’s workload was going to go up,” Wagner explains. “Worse, it meant that we would not be able to work with students in the way that we wanted to. It was a scary time, but we talked to a lot of people who’d formed academic unions at their schools. In some of these places, faculty and administrators had come together to discuss budget projections. This did not happen at Miami University. Our administrators refused to come to the table and discuss anything with us.”

    During the subsequent 18 months, Wagner says Miami’s full-time faculty and librarians worked to organize the campus and got enough union cards signed to demand an election. Adjuncts, Wagner explains, were excluded because Ohio law bars part-time public employees from collective bargaining. Still, the full-timers prevailed.

    But, Wagner says, the union still has not been recognized by Miami University’s administration.

    “They are dragging their feet to slow down the process, quibbling over the composition of the bargaining unit,” she explains. “They want to keep librarians, visiting professors and non-tenure-track faculty out. We say ‘no,’ and are hoping the State Employee Relations Board will force them to stop stonewalling.” Wagner says the Faculty Alliance of Miami, in tandem with the AAUP and the AFT, is pushing the State Employee Relations Board to issue a decision on the make-up of the bargaining unit; since 9 of 10 public university faculty unions in Ohio include non-tenured faculty, “we believe that precedent is on our side,” she says.

    Another issue has also promoted increased activism — and made the Faculty Alliance increasingly visible on campus. “Turns out, Miami had higher enrollment numbers for the 2021-2022 academic year than the administration expected,” Wagner says. “The college also got CARES Act money so we ended up with a $262 million surplus. It makes my stomach hurt to even think about this.”

    Financial boondoggles notwithstanding, AFT/AAUP organizers say faculty throughout the country are united in demanding administrative transparency, faculty and staff input in decision-making, better pay and the academic freedom to determine what course materials to use and what content to include in the courses they teach.

    Ernesto Longa, president of United Academics at the University of New Mexico (UNM), says those concerns motivated faculty to begin organizing there in 2014. He credits both the AFT and the AAUP with helping them win union recognition in 2019. “We began negotiating our first contract at the beginning of 2020,” Longa told Truthout. “Then the pandemic hit and since we were dealing with a very anti-union administration it took us 18 months to hammer out the first three-year contract. Thankfully, the AFT provided some of the heavy lifters who helped us with table negotiations and research.” The successful result included a 7.12 percent raise in year one, with annual wage reopeners during each of the following two years covered by the contract.

    Longa says that while he and the negotiating team were pleased with the initial contract, everyone understands that more needs to be done to ensure that adjuncts and others are paid decently and have job security. “There are still adjuncts who make $2,500 for teaching a three-credit class,” he says. He also notes that United Academics still has a lot to learn about organizing and negotiating. “We’re slowly finding out just how pro-employer the law is when it comes to contract interpretation,” he says. “We now know that our language has to be precise. A clause that says UNM may do something, rather than shall do something, allows UNM to sidestep the protections we thought we’d won.”

    Another challenge, Longa continues, involves outreach to form a coalition between United Academics and members of unions that represent other staff at UNM — the college’s hospital employees, food service workers, graduate students, security staff and medical interns and residents belong to what he calls a “smorgasbord of unions” — to build solidarity.

    “We want to do wall-to-wall organizing and coordinate our bargaining efforts,” he says.

    Unlike the faculty at UMN, faculty at New Jersey’s Rutgers University have been organized for decades. Nonetheless, they have been working without a contract for more than three months. Rebecca Kolins Givan, an associate professor in the School of Management and Labor Relations, says that although students and faculty recently returned to campus, staff are already planning a series of escalating actions to ensure that they get an equitable contract.

    “We’ve been in an ongoing and beneficial affiliation with the AFT and the AAUP since the early 2000s,” Givan told Truthout. “Right now, we’re seeing heightened awareness of the need for greater investment in public higher ed due to the outsourcing of staff roles and increased dependence on adjunct labor.” Additionally, she sees the need to defend academic freedom as a priority since 12 members of the Rutgers faculty are on the Professor Watchlist compiled by the right-wing Turning Point USA. All 12 have been targets of hate mail, doxing and smear campaigns because of their anti-racist and pro-LGBTQIA+ work.

    While the University Faculty Senate has denounced the list, Givan nonetheless worries that some faculty may self-censor in an effort to avoid negative publicity.

    That said, Givan says she is proud that Rutgers’s bargaining unit continues to be a leader in academic unionism, promoting equal pay for equal work for adjuncts, supporting environmental justice initiatives on- and off-campus, and opposing overspending on athletics. A recent scandal in which the 50-plus member football team racked up $450,000 in DoorDash bills — 19,745 orders between May 2021 and June 2022 — is a case in point.

    Challenging this, and fighting attacks on higher education more broadly will, of course, be an uphill slog. At the same time, several recent campus labor victories bear mention. A five-day strike, led by AFT/AAUP members at Eastern Michigan University in Ypsilanti, ended in mid-September after 500 faculty walked off the job. Similarly, AFT/AAUP-organized faculty at Rider College in Lawrenceville, New Jersey, reached a tentative agreement on a five-year contract, averting a strike earlier this month.

    The AFT’s Randi Weingarten sees these victories as harbingers of future successes. “Every AAUP member is now an AFT member,” she says. “Together, we’re fighting for democracy and for academic freedom. Both are under assault. Precarity has become a through line on campuses throughout the country, but people understand the importance of organizing. They know that we’re working to make our communities better and make a positive difference in people’s lives.”

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • When COVID-19 descended upon the United States, college and university administrators used the disruption caused by the pandemic to slash the jobs of adjunct faculty. Now, two years into the pandemic, these same administrators are continuing to use the conditions of the pandemic to rapidly accelerate the same neoliberal transformations they had been pushing for pre-pandemic, such as replacing “expensive” tenure-line faculty with a cheaper and more exploitable adjunct workforce.

    My employer, Portland State University (PSU), is just one of many schools that has used the excuse of the pandemic to place entire programs (and their tenure-line faculty) on the chopping block, favoring a move toward cheaper and more exploitable adjunct laborers.

    As we face these threats, it has become clear that adjuncts and tenured faculty alike will only be able to defend our jobs and institutions from this continued onslaught from neoliberal university administrators if we organize ourselves in one union wherever possible and, where not possible, act as one union even if we are forced formally to speak in different voices.

    The Adjunctification of Higher Education

    At my college graduation ceremony back in 1991, a professor pulled me aside to share some good news: a report had predicted that there would be five jobs for every four candidates available by the time I finished graduate school. It wasn’t until 1999, when I in fact was finishing a Ph.D., that I realized that the profoundly misguided prediction shared with me at my undergraduate graduation must have been based on a now-infamous study of academic job markets titled Prospects for Faculty in the Arts and Sciences by former president of Princeton University William G. Bowen and Julie Ann Sosa.

    Projecting that a wave of retirements would result in an abundance of open tenure lines (they didn’t), Bowen and Sosa’s study kept alive a high degree of denial and mystification about the deprofessionalization of academic labor that had been underway since the 1970s. My generation was but another casualty of “casualization,” the conversion of stable jobs into part-time, at-will work.

    I, however, got a good job so I survived the last two decades as tenure-eligible positions continued to evaporate, and contingent positions increased to make up 75 percent of the faculty workforce. I always understood, though, that my good fortune was a matter of luck not merit, and I never forgot the lesson we were all being taught. Faculty can be divided and played by rank (those with job security and those without), and we are all pawns in the corporate university.

    Sure enough, my own moment has arrived with what I’m calling “Pandemic Opportunism 2.0”: my department is one of 18 at the university that the provost identified for “curricular revision, program reduction, or program elimination.”

    To borrow words from scholars Reshmi Dutt-Ballerstadt and Bertin M. Louis, Jr. — the curators of Truthout’s special series on “Challenging the Corporate University” — the “project of transforming higher education into an industry run on contingent faculty (insecure faculty positions like postdocs, teaching assistants, adjuncts and lecturers with little job security) and student debt, rather than a public good funded by taxes” is in many places now in its final stages.

    Pandemic Opportunism 1.0 and 2.0

    The American Association of University Professors’ (AAUP) special report entitled “COVID-19 and Academic Governance,” issued in May 2021, details Pandemic Opportunism 1.0. The report explains how administrators capitalized on COVID-19 by following the “disaster capitalism” rulebook:

    This phenomenon, generally known as ‘disaster capitalism,’ a term coined by Naomi Klein, was exemplified in early December 2020 by James White, interim dean of the College of Arts and Sciences at the University of Colorado at Boulder, who, after announcing a long-term plan to replace tenured faculty members with non-tenure-track faculty members, said, ‘Never waste a good pandemic.’ Even though Dean White apologized the following week, calling his remark ‘flippant and insensitive,’ to many faculty members the gaffe seemed to exemplify what in political circles is called saying the quiet part out loud. In this respect, as in so many others, COVID-19 served as an accelerant, turning the gradual erosion of shared governance on some campuses into a landslide.

    The AAUP investigation found that university presidents at eight colleges and universities invoked “force majeure” to discontinue programs and lay off faculty without due process and boards of trustees denying shared governance — and ignoring the votes of no confidence protesting that denial — to ram through drastic cuts without faculty input.

    The AAUP report shows that Pandemic Opportunism 1.0 laid waste to tenured faculty and adjunct faculty alike, but it is also clear that adjunct faculty have been the first and easiest victims across the country. After all, little work is involved in not rehiring someone you never promised to rehire, even if that person has served you and your students for decades.

    Now the more calculated Pandemic Opportunism 2.0 is upon us, both at some of the institutions discussed in the report and at others. In this phase, administrations target “expensive” tenure-line faculty through something other than dictatorial fiat. This involves ratcheting up methods like retirement incentives to facilitate “the decades-long transition from a majority tenured to a majority nontenured faculty,” to borrow a phrase from the report. Retirements are then “non-replacements.” Community college dean Matt Reed explains:

    Nonreplacements don’t trigger the same kind of scrutiny, or pushback, as layoffs. For one thing, nobody loses their job. It’s possible to argue that someone is harmed — presumably, the person who otherwise would have been hired — but most of the time, nobody knows who that is. No one person has the standing to sue. There’s a cumulative, generational cost, but that doesn’t trigger the same kind of conflagration as firing an incumbent.

    Of course, “nonreplacement” is obfuscating because the retiring salaried faculty member is typically replaced — just by poorly paid adjunct instructors without access to health care or job security. And the many remaining duties — service, governance, advising — of the original position are heaped onto fewer and fewer full-time shoulders.

    Retirement incentives were all the rage after the 2008 recession, and they are back in full force, but more aggressive means of cutting salaried positions are also on the table. Take the attempt by Point Park University to eliminate the positions of 17 faculty members but not their courses, which would continue as adjunct sections. The union took the administration all the way to arbitration where the arbitrator sided with the faculty union. American Federation of Teachers (AFT) Local 2121, which represents the City College of San Francisco (CCSF) faculty, fought a similar attempt to replace full-time faculty workers with part-time work. In an open letter to their trustees in April 2021, they wrote that AFT 2121 is “particularly alarmed to learn that administration also plans to convert much of City College’s stable, full-time faculty into contingent, part-time workers.” If CCSF succeeds, they added:

    Entire departments will be left with no full-time faculty. Our ability to write or update curriculum as required by accreditation standards, work with community agencies, bring in students, or do outreach needed to ensure San Francisco’s black and brown students know about the opportunities City College provides will be severely diminished. Students will lose access to office hours and faculty support. The structure that keeps our college going as an intellectual and community resource will be undermined.

    The form Pandemic Opportunism 2.0 has taken at Portland State University is a case in point. Though our union negotiated a memorandum of understanding with the administration at the start of the pandemic which stipulated that no new initiatives be undertaken during the crisis, the administration nonetheless did just that — forging ahead with a set of efforts that led to the identification of 18 programs for curricular reform, reduction or elimination. This is what is being called “ReImagine PSU.”

    Once I digested the fact that my own department was on the chopping block, I was struck by how, with few exceptions, these were programs with reputations on campus for refusing to generate tuition dollars through exploitative labor practices. When I asked how departments had been identified, my alarm was apparently validated. I was told that the first set of calculations had been made simply by dividing the total number of student credit hours generated (which translates to student tuition dollars) by the average total term full-time equivalent cost of all faculty.

    This is some breathtakingly crude math that guarantees that departments which deliver student credit hours as cheaply as possible look like paragons while those that maintain a commitment to jobs providing a decent living that allows instructors to dedicate themselves to the university and its students are the miscreants. By administration’s logic, in other words, the departments that had been identified as problematically expensive were just as likely to be problematic because their students were taught predominantly by full-time faculty with health care benefits as they were because of low enrollment or poor management. This neoliberal exercise in “reimagining” the university ought to decisively prove that tenure-line faculty’s fate is inextricably bound up with that of adjuncts.

    Adjunct faculty have long warned that corporatization was coming for their tenured counterparts, too. Pandemic Opportunism 2.0 must spell the long overdue death of tenured faculty’s inability to grasp this basic fact.

    We Need Only One Union

    We are all precariat now and it would behoove us to act like it by organizing ourselves in one union. Back in 2014, Jamie Owen Daniel wrote:

    The administration is the only constituency that benefits when we faculty see each other in terms of these increasingly arbitrary divisions, instead of as faculty, pure and simple. Tenured and tenure-track faculty who still see their non-tenure-track colleagues as “supplements” to, rather than part of, their departments, or who view these colleagues as academic service labor, doing the faculty’s work but not included as faculty, do so at their own peril.

    At Portland State, tenure-track and full-time non-tenure-track faculty are in one union, PSU-AAUP, but adjunct faculty are in a separate one, PSUFA. When the administration tries to implement program elimination, will the interests of these two unions be aligned? Full-time faculty may need them to be, but why should adjunct faculty care? Just to underscore the point, let me give you the numbers: In Fall 2021, PSU-AAUP represented 843 tenure-line and full-time non-tenure-line instructional and research faculty while PSUFA represented 785 adjunct faculty, as noted in an email that I received from my university.

    This is not the case at the University of Oregon in Eugene, where interests have been aligned since 2013 when faculty of all ranks formed United Academics. Perhaps not coincidentally, the raw numbers there are strikingly different from those at Portland State. United Academics represents roughly 1,566 tenure-line and full-time non-tenure-line faculty and 233 “pro tem” faculty (equivalent to PSU’s “part-time” or adjunct faculty).

    United Academics negotiated bargaining contracts that required adjunct faculty be promoted into career positions after three years or not be rehired. While the data is not easy to chart over time, the efforts made by the University of Oregon union to limit adjunct exploitation are surely one major reason why there are significantly more “good” than “bad” jobs there. The outcome sought by the pandemic opportunists among administrators — fewer decently paid secure positions and more badly paid, insecure ones — will be very hard to achieve in the unionized environment created by United Academics at the University of Oregon.

    Another place to look for inspiration and a path forward is Rutgers AAUP-AFT. Rutgers AAUP-AFT leaders understood that the pandemic offered not just administrators but also unions an opportunity — to educate faculty of all ranks and categories that bargaining for the common good was how to transform the neoliberal university into something more democratic, just and sustainable. In spring 2021, AAUP-AFT union leaders Todd Wolfson and Donna Murch wrote in “Reclaiming Paul Robeson in the Time of COVID-19”:

    The unprecedented pain and disruption caused by COVID-19 has helped create a united front of unions that would have been unimaginable before the pandemic. Workers across the sector are advocating for a compassionate and commonsense response to the pandemic that insists on holding the line on layoffs until the end of the fiscal year 2022; providing graduate student workers — who are essential to the teaching and research mission of the university — funding to make up for the time lost toward their degrees; rehiring part-time lecturers who lost their jobs; and providing free COVID-19 testing at sites on all three Rutgers campuses.

    The solidarity built over these last few years is manifesting itself in precisely the kind of increased unionization that needs to happen everywhere unions are possible. On May 18, 2022, the Rutgers Adjunct Faculty Union delivered the signatures necessary to demand that their union be allowed to merge with the full-time faculty unions.

    At Rutgers, if these academic laborers are successful in bringing into being a single union, it will be much harder for administrators to pit faculty against each other. At Portland State, where whole programs (and their tenure-line faculty) are being set up for elimination, but adjunct sections are not, I can only hope that the adjunct union will work with the tenure-line and full-time non-tenure-line union to fight the neoliberal measures proposed by our Provost. But if the adjunct membership tells us full-timers to take a walk when we come hat in hand, who could blame them?

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • We are living through a moment of great decline in the United States. The U.S.’s turn toward authoritarianism is evidenced by actions of the Trump administration and the GOP; the January 6, 2021, assault on the Capitol fomented by the big lie that former president Donald Trump won the 2020 presidential election; and anti-Black right-wing attacks against voting rights, among many other right-wing machinations. Meanwhile, there is a growing gap between the wealthy and the poor. We are living in an age where the world’s 10 richest men (8 out of 10 of whom are American) have doubled their wealth during the COVID-19 pandemic, which has claimed the lives of nearly 1 million people in the U.S. alone; increased child poverty, hunger and food insecurity; and driven the highest rate of inflation in 40 years. In the meantime, Elon Musk, who refers to himself as a “free speech absolutist,” has bought Twitter for $44 billion to promote unfettered free speech rights for all. Anthropologist and journalist Sarah Kendzior has framed the moment we are enduring as the “erosion of America.” This erosion, characterized by a restructuring of how industries operate, attacks on democratic institutions, and a widening gap between the wealthy and the destitute also extends to higher education, a sector of society which is a key pillar of democracy.

    The Emergence of the Corporate University

    Bill Readings, a late Université de Montréal professor noted the move towards corporatization of universities in his 1997 study, The University in Ruins. While the 1990s were certainly not the golden age of higher education, there were aspects of them that were palatable compared to the current moment. At that time, tuition was lower and more affordable. Technological incorporation in teaching and internet accessibility had just begun. Google and Wikipedia were nonexistent, and living accommodations for students on college and university campuses were modest. Universities relied on shared governance (faculty participation in the governance of an institution) for decision-making. The rhetoric of excellence, innovation and efficiency in managing universities was beginning to gain traction, but it was not the driving force in decision-making in the neoliberal marketplace of ideas.

    Yet, what has happened in recent years is a shift into what some have called the gilded age, where “the rich schools are getting richer, while the poorer ones are struggling to survive, with increasing numbers of fairly well known schools announcing they are closing or severely retrenching their operations.” In particular, since 2020 (the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic), this gilded age is far more alarming than the situation described by Readings in the 1990s. From unsafe working conditions, to 700,000 (just over 50 percent) of faculty in the U.S. classified as “adjuncts,” to corporate-controlled donors, attacks on tenure, monetization of diversity initiatives, and strategies of restructuring to eliminate low revenue generating programs, corporatization of universities is no longer a theory but a reality.

    Universities, both public and private, have been gradually moving away from their mission-driven models to market-driven models, where profits, branding and revenue-generating streams and programs are prioritized. With skyrocketing costs of education and tuition, fancy dorms, cafeterias, gyms and even a water-themed campus park, university campuses have been investing in fancy infrastructures — increasing their operational costs and pouring money into athletic programs, particularly football and men’s basketball, while lowering their instructional costs.

    Joshua Hunt’s eye-opening book, University of Nike: How Corporate Cash Bought American Higher Education, narrates the relationship that the University of Oregon cultivated with Nike’s founder Phil Knight to transform “a once cash-strapped liberal arts college” into a “college football powerhouse with an increasingly competitive basketball program.” Hunt goes on to say how other universities have followed in the footsteps of the University of Oregon. “In 2016 the University of Michigan announced a $169 million contract with Nike” followed by a month later when “University of Texas at Austin inked a $250 million Nike deal.”

    While corporations like Nike have been actively funding programs that university boards and presidents are welcoming, students are viewed as “tuition dollars” and as consumers. Many faculty and support staff have entered the exploited class who are disposable and easily replaceable. Despite receiving millions in pandemic-related federal relief funds, universities are slashing faculty and staff and blaming the cuts on COVID. Arvind Dilawar in The Nation reported, “In May of 2020, the University of Vermont’s president, Suresh Garimella, issued an update on the school’s finances. Citing the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic, Garimella put forth a bleak prognosis of lower enrollment, higher costs, and stagnant tuition rates necessitating reductions in salaries, benefits, and staff.” Unfortunately, what has happened at University of Vermont is a national story, as universities are using the false justification of COVID to push through long-sought budget cuts like cutting retirement benefits, freezing salaries, and cutting support staff and programs.

    Barbara Madeloni, a facilitator with Public Higher Education Workers, a network that supports organizing among university workers, attributes the persistence of cuts to a much longer-term project of transforming higher education into an industry run on contingent faculty (insecure faculty positions like postdocs, teaching assistants, adjuncts and lecturers with little job security) and student debt, rather than a public good funded by taxes. Terminologies of right-sizing, student-centered, restructuring and reimagining are being used to create committees that recommend the elimination of disciplines, programs and majors that no longer serve the market-driven corporate universities that are built on revenue-generating enterprises. Portland State University most recently announced their own “Reimagine PSU” initiative “to provide spaces to create transformational possibilities at a larger scale.” One of the transformational possibilities will require “program reviews and reduction” and multiple programs are slated to be reviewed and possibly reduced or eliminated.

    In the meantime, “administrative bloat” and administrative costs, as witnessed by large salaries paid to university presidents, numerous provosts, deans and coaches, have disproportionately increased. Even when university presidents are found to be most unsuitable due to various malpractices and wrongdoings (and where sacking them would be the most appropriate action), they are given golden parachutes by highly corporatized boards of trustees. Such expensive severance packages are often categorized under “mutual agreements” between the boards and the presidents asked to resign.

    For instance, in 2017, Northern Illinois University (NIU) declared a $35 million funding shortfall. At the same time, former NIU President Douglas Baker was declared by state investigators to have mismanaged the public institution by sidestepping competitive bidding rules to hire consultants who were paid more than $1 million. The Hechinger Reporter noted, “Within two weeks of that report’s release, Baker resigned — and, in a closed-door meeting of the university’s board of trustees, was given $587,500 in severance pay, plus up to $30,000 to cover his legal fees. He’s also due a previously unreported $83,287 for unused vacation time, the university acknowledged. That’s a total of $700,787.”

    Rahmat Shoureshi served as the president of Portland State University for only 21 months after he came under fire for “his treatment of employees and several ethically dubious deals following a 2019 investigation by The Oregonian/OregonLive.” In 2019, The Oregonian’s headline read, “Shoureshi exits Portland State with $855,985 golden parachute; two years of health insurance, even his legal fees.” And then there is Jerry Falwell Jr. who left Liberty University with a $10.5 million dollar golden parachute after years of scandal.

    Of course, the term “golden parachute” did not originate in the higher education sector but in corporations, as a response to hostile takeovers, mergers and acquisitions in the late 1970s. As higher ed has become increasingly corporatized, the concept of the golden parachute has been coopted by university boards that are comprised of wealthy donors, CEO’s and transplants from corporations. These board members have little to no knowledge either about shared governance or the internal workings of the university. These days, and particularly in the era of the #MeToo movement, such golden parachutes are not given due to any hostile takeovers, but to cover up scandals and other financial wrongdoings by university presidents. On February 17, 2022, Chancellor Joseph I. Castro notified the board of trustees of the California State University of his resignation as chancellor over his mishandling of sexual harassment complaints. He too will receive a $401,364 salary for one year and then return to teaching, according to the settlement agreement.

    Under the corporate university the wage gap between those that belong to the top 1 percent and their compensation packages (even after they are no longer affiliated with a university) and those who are seen as “the employees” have grown wider and wider. The American Association of University Professors (AAUP) reported the rapid erosion of tenure and shared governance for university professors, and the number of adjunct instructors living below the national line of poverty is at an all-time high.

    Adding to the day-to-day realities of the corporate university is the ongoing attack on labor in higher education. Academic tenure, according to the AAUP, is an indefinite appointment which safeguards academic freedom for scholars in higher education and “allows faculty to pursue research and innovation and draw evidence-based conclusions free from corporate or political pressure.” This feature of academia is one of the targets of the U.S.’s right wing and is consequently being eroded. For the corporate university, tenure is an expensive system. And with right-wing forces declaring that “professors are the enemy,” as J.D. Vance, a Republican candidate for the U.S. Senate in Ohio, put it, tenure is under serious threat. According to the AAUP, a recent attack on tenure in South Carolina via the introduction of the South Carolina’s House Bill 4522, the “Canceling Professor Tenure Act,” seeks to “end tenure in the state’s public colleges and universities by prohibiting the awarding of tenure to employees hired in 2023 or later. If passed, this would be the first law of its kind in the nation.”

    Of course, such attacks on tenure are part of a broader pattern of actions in states with Republican-led legislatures. For example, the University of Florida is trying to forbid its faculty from testifying in court cases against the state government. It is also blocking faculty attempts to include racial equity content in curricula under the guise of combating “critical race theory,” the latest bogeyman concocted by the right to chip away at academic freedom and push a conservative agenda in K-12 educational systems nationwide.

    Dangers of the Corporate University

    What are the negative effects of the restructuring of colleges and universities into corporate entities with top-down management models? One downside is the increasing adjunctification (defined as temporary and part-time workers with low pay, little to no benefits and any job security) of academia. In “There Is No Excuse for How Universities Treat Adjuncts,” Caroline Fredrickson noted, “thirty-one percent of part-time faculty are living near or below the federal poverty line.” Increased adjunctification, coupled with attacks on tenure and academic freedom, have only one major goal — accumulating more power and financial capital for the 1 percent of administrators, while depleting the resources, working conditions (as poor working conditions during the pandemic have highlighted) and livelihood of the 99 percent.

    Another downside of the proliferation of corporate university models in higher education is an emphasis on producing STEM majors and less of an emphasis on encouraging majors in the humanities and social sciences. While more scientists, technological advancements, engineers, and mathematicians are certainly needed, what the humanities (fields such as art history, Africana studies, English, foreign languages, religious studies and history) and social sciences (anthropology, sociology and political science) bring to the table are deemphasized in a corporate-influenced educational setting as reflected in cost-cutting measures which tend to sacrifice humanities-related majors. The humanities and social sciences teach students empathy, humility, analytical techniques and critical thinking skills: humanistic qualities that are lacking in current public discourse and in various sectors within American society. Once they graduate, some college students will become leaders at local, state, national and international levels, and while the skills associated with the STEM fields are vitally needed, so are the qualities from the humanities which help people become better citizens and can promote human flourishing.

    Other problematic features of corporate universities include increasing managerial costs and outsourcing as a model of governance, from deploying hiring firms used to hire presidents who are disconnected from faculty to the use of strategic plans created by outside organizations instead of created and driven by faculty, to the use of outside firms to manage enrollments instead of employing institutional staff.

    Challenging the Corporate University

    Challenging the corporate university will require a number of actions: Tenured and tenure-track faculty must join in solidarity with the exploited workers at these institutions (adjuncts, administrative and custodial staff, undergraduate and graduate workers). Solidarity includes, but is not limited to, the following:

    • Participation in one’s union,
    • Encouraging university workers to join organizations like United Campus Workers which organizes faculty, staff and student workers all across the South,
    • Resist some of these changes through a withdrawal of one’s labor. Case in point: Faculty at the University of Chicago were able to create a department of Race, Diaspora and Indigeneity partly through the threat to participate in committee work.

    People inside and outside of academia must raise awareness about the ongoing changes in higher education and continue to pose questions that can lead us to viable solutions to the restructured corporate university. These questions include: What are the challenges, realities, symptoms and failures of corporatized colleges and universities? Who is impacted and how? What should the role of higher education be in forging a democratic society? And how can we move forward toward a more equitable and liberatory era in higher education?

    These and other related ideas will be discussed more in the new Truthout series “Challenging the Corporate University.” We seek timely and well-written essays, op-eds, articles and interviews to expose and explore the various precarious labor and working conditions that the corporate university has produced. We are also interested in pieces which discuss creative ways to challenge corporatized higher education. The essays should be written for a broad audience and minimize the use of jargonized language, and the length of the essays should not be longer than 2,000 words. Please embed hyperlinks to sources seamlessly into the article text instead of including a works cited page. To submit a piece, please send an email with the subject line “Re: The Corporate University” simultaneously to bertinmlouisjr@gmail.com and DuttBallerstadt@gmail.com.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Academic labor should be compensated no matter who is doing the teaching.

    Teaching college has the odd social position of being a job with high prestige but, in the vast majority of cases, very low wages. More than half of all teaching faculty are “adjuncts” — part-time, precarious workers paid on a per-class basis, with no benefits or guarantee of continued employment. According to one survey, more than half of all adjuncts make less than $3,500 per 3-credit course, and in 2012, the median pay-per-course was only $2,700, the equivalent of $24,000 per year for a full teaching load. At large research universities, many introductory courses are also taught by graduate students, who are typically paid between $13,000 and $34,000 per year, depending on their school and subject area. Graduate student workers at Columbia, New York University, and Harvard have all gone on strike in the last year, because student workers are not paid a living wage even at the wealthiest, most elite universities.

    But as pitiful and exploitative as these wages are, the median adjunct rate of $2,700 per course is still five times as much as Grinnell College in Iowa is paying some of its language instructors. And Grinnell — one of the most prestigious liberal arts schools in the country — isn’t the only college doing it. In fact, similar practices are fairly common.

    The source Left Voice spoke with knew of two so-called “language assistants” at Grinnell who make $12/hour, although wages for each language assistant are at the discretion of each academic department. Their duties include teaching conversational courses and lab sections, as well as tutoring. On a per-credit basis, the language assistants are paid less than a quarter of what an adjunct would be paid to teach the same class.

    Language assistants at Grinnell can be asked to work up to 20 hours per week, although it’s unclear how many hours are actually scheduled for the typical student worker. However, if someone worked 20 hours per week every week for the full academic year (nine months) at $12/hour, they would still only make $9,072. Even including the value of room and board, which the language assistants receive for free, their income is still only $23,470 for the year — about $5,000 less than what is considered a living wage for Poweshiek County, Iowa, where Grinnell is located.

    On Student Workers and Exploitation

    It’s an adage among student workers that whether they count as “students” or “workers” depends on which label benefits the university most at any given time. For example, when student workers try to unionize, the universities argue that the labor they perform is part of their studies, similar to an internship, so they should not be viewed as workers. This happened at Grinnell, when the union of dining hall workers voted to expand membership to all student workers, but the university filed a complaint with the National Labor Relations Board claiming that tutoring and research assistant jobs are not real labor. But when unionized student workers go on strike, suddenly they are in violation of their labor contracts and should have pay deducted accordingly.

    One of capitalism’s internal laws demands that every employer seek to minimize labor costs as much as possible without sacrificing productivity. It’s part of how capitalists extort “surplus value” from workers. Universities do this in several different ways, including using the labor power of adjuncts and students. As of 2018, more than 90 percent of all Grinnell students work for the college at some point during their time there. The college cannot function without them.

    In rural locations like central Iowa, it can be difficult to attract adjuncts, and with only undergraduate programs, Grinnell College has no graduate students to draw from to teach classes for cheap. Rather than invest in hiring permanent full-time faculty, the college instead recruits young adults to provide language instruction on 1-year contracts, without providing them any pedagogical training. While the language assistants do receive free tuition, most of them already have undergraduate degrees from their home countries, making one year of additional credits from Grinnell of little value, even as transfer credit.

    One way universities justify this sort of behavior is by claiming that lab sections and conversational courses are not “real” classes, so they hire student workers at rates far lower than a faculty member would make. Even though the total number of hours for labs and conversation courses is less than a standard lecture or seminar, and hence total compensation will of course be lower, the pay per hour in the classroom is still egregiously low. And these classes count as real credits, with students receiving actual grades.

    There is no hiding that this is real academic labor, and it should be compensated as such no matter who is doing the teaching.

    Employing international student workers also benefits the college, as it seeks to maximize its financial position, in other ways. First, the student visa prohibits international students from working off campus under most conditions. Workers with this type of visa are more constrained in their ability to find alternative employment, which makes them easier to exploit.

    Second, employing student workers gives the university additional leverage to defend its exploitation. The labor the language assistants are hired to perform is framed as supplemental, as a “great opportunity” for young adults to make a little bit of money while enjoying the “main” experience of studying and socializing abroad. Even if many student workers hired for these positions do enjoy themselves, exploitation is still exploitation, and $12/hour is still not a living wage. These workers are being taken advantage of regardless of whether the experience has some “enjoyable” elements.

    Full-time lecturers at Grinnell make almost 10 times as much per hour of teaching as these assistants, which means the surplus value generated by hiring student workers instead of faculty is very high. Even private tutors, who work with only one student at a time, are typically paid at a higher rate.

    The Grinnell College student newspaper wanted to run a piece about underpayment of language assistants, but was unable to do so because all of the language assistants they reached out to declined to comment — most likely out of fear over losing their jobs. Given that at least two had been willing previously to discuss their working conditions privately, it seems that the university may have issued some form of gag order.

    These kinds of labor practices, specifically exploiting international students to teach language courses, are not limited to Grinnell. The source Left Voice spoke with already had direct knowledge of similar systems at Wesleyan University and Pomona, Middlebury, and Williams colleges — all very highly ranked schools. Many more schools participate in the Fulbright Language Teaching Assistant Program, which operates in a very similar way. For speakers of “less commonly taught languages” in this program, universities are not required to pay students a penny in wages, and instead are recommended to give students a monthly stipend of $500–$600 or free room and board in exchange for up to 20 hours of work per week. That arrangement is even more exploitative than the conditions at Grinnell.

    Exploitation is a material economic relationship, not a feeling. Over half of billionaires in one survey said they work 60 or more hours per week, and they may feel very tired, but they are not exploited. At the same time, teenagers who work at the neighborhood pool with their friends all summer, or campus tour guides who genuinely love talking to people about their schools, are both still being exploited. It doesn’t matter how easy, fun, or even well-paying your job is; if someone is generating surplus value from your labor over which you have no control, you are being exploited.

    Colleges and universities like Grinnell are exploiting international students for their multilingual capabilities, paying them a tiny amount compared to what a faculty member or even a graduate student would make, and claiming it is okay because the real pay comes in the form of a “cultural experience” and the tuition value of the courses they take — even when those courses count toward no degree or other useful credential. Neither one puts food on the table. These student workers deserve a living wage that is, at minimum, comparable to other instructors on campus who teach labs and other one-credit classes.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.