Contextualizing and organizing contingent faculty – reclaiming academic labor in universities (original) (raw)

Contextualizing and Organizing Contingent Faculty

2018

The title listed is the book; we (Joe Berry and myself) wrote Chapter 3: The Metro Strategy: A Workforce-appropriate, Geography-based Approach to Organizing Contingent Faculty. The editor of the book is Ishmael Munene and the publisher is Lexington.

New Models of Contingent Faculty Inclusion

Journal of Collective Bargaining in the Academy, 2008

Thanks for the invitation to be here, which we take as recognition of our supportive and aware membership and to the efforts and successes of our many, many activists over the past twenty years. The VCC is one of the larger post-secondary institutions in British Columbia. There's an average of close to 700 faculty. It has the typical array of about 50 programs one would expect from a community college, with a smaller proportion of academic, university-transfer type programs than other BC colleges. It is primarily government funded (60%) with other income and tuition making up the rest of its 90millionannualbudget.Forlabourrelationpurposes,allcollegesanduniversity−collegeadministrationsinBChaveoverthepastdecadebecomemoreintegratedintothegovernment−mandatedPost−SecondaryEmployers′AssociationofBC.ThisorganizationnowcontrolsVCC′sfinancialmandateforbargainingandabilitytosettlegrievancesifthesettlementwouldcreateanewprecedent.TheVCCFAstartedin1951asanindependent,provincialvocationalschoolinstructors′union.Weretainourownbargainingandgrievancesettlingauthority,andhavejoinedourvoluntaryprovincialfederationoffacultyunionsforprofessionalandpoliticalsupportandadvice.Ourcurrentmembershipisroughly6090 million annual budget. For labour relation purposes, all colleges and university-college administrations in BC have over the past decade become more integrated into the government-mandated Post-Secondary Employers' Association of BC. This organization now controls VCC's financial mandate for bargaining and ability to settle grievances if the settlement would create a new precedent. The VCCFA started in 1951 as an independent, provincial vocational school instructors' union. We retain our own bargaining and grievance settling authority, and have joined our voluntary provincial federation of faculty unions for professional and political support and advice. Our current membership is roughly 60% regular (46% full time and 14% at half-time or more) and 40% term. We collect dues of 2% of gross wages from all of them (union dues are tax-deductible in Canada); 43% of member dues go to our provincial federation and we retain the balance, about 90millionannualbudget.Forlabourrelationpurposes,allcollegesanduniversity−collegeadministrationsinBChaveoverthepastdecadebecomemoreintegratedintothegovernment−mandatedPost−SecondaryEmployers′AssociationofBC.ThisorganizationnowcontrolsVCC′sfinancialmandateforbargainingandabilitytosettlegrievancesifthesettlementwouldcreateanewprecedent.TheVCCFAstartedin1951asanindependent,provincialvocationalschoolinstructors′union.Weretainourownbargainingandgrievancesettlingauthority,andhavejoinedourvoluntaryprovincialfederationoffacultyunionsforprofessionalandpoliticalsupportandadvice.Ourcurrentmembershipisroughly60400,000 annually, for our operating purposes and for our local defense fund. Starting with a strong union legacy We will always owe a debt to every hard won labour victory over the past one hundred plus years. Because of the selfless sacrifice and determination of generations of labour activists, we, as new faculty workers, came to our jobs with automatic dues check off, collective bargaining, the right to strike, and legally enshrined grievance and arbitration rights. We at VCC were fortunate compared to many North American post-secondary workplaces today. We originally did not have many part-timers and we were

Contingent Faculty as Nonideal Workers

New Directions for Higher Education, 2016

This chapter explores how contingent faculty address the issue of work and family and demonstrates the importance of understanding the diversity of contingent faculty experiences and of underemployment rather than notions of the ideal worker to explain their work lives.

The Current and Future State of Contingent Faculty

New Directions of Institutional Research, 2018

This volume provided descriptive data to illustrate the current state of faculty representation by tenure-track and contingent status by institutional sector and type. In addition, this issue examined factors driving contingent faculty use, the various roles contingent faculty play, how those roles differ by institutional type, and how institutional researchers collect and disseminate information regarding contingent faculty on their campus. In this chapter, we synthesize the previous seven chapters and discuss several themes that emerged from the chapters. Theme 1—Growth in Contingent Faculty The increased specialized demand for higher education, coupled with decreases in funding for higher education, has resulted in immense growth in the number of contingent faculty members as institutions have sought to be more flexible and increase tuition revenue. 1 Chapter 1 illustrates that this trend spans all institutional types and sectors by disaggregating IPEDS data to explore this topic in a more nuanced way. Specifically, there has been significant growth in the contingent faculty population throughout higher education over the last two decades. Chapter 1 provides a descriptive analysis of the current demographics of contingent faculty by sector, race/ethnicity, gender, and international status. Furthermore, our findings align with the common narrative that women and racial/ethnic minorities are overrepresented within the contingency ranks. Institutional researchers can use Chapter 1 as a benchmark to examine how their institution compares nationally to other institutions within their sector. In Chapter 5 of this volume, Morphew, Ward, and Wolf-Wendel use data from IPEDS as surveys from institutional leaders of independent colleges to show that the immense growth in the number of independent NEW DIRECTIONS FOR INSTITUTIONAL RESEARCH, no. 176

Not in the Greater Good: Academic Capitalism and Faculty Labor in Higher Education

Education Sciences

American public universities have assumed business-minded practices and norms that more closely align with the goals and values of corporations than social institutions charged with creating and disseminating knowledge. One consistent strategy to lower costs involves faculty labor. Institutions have outsourced educational missions to a largely contingent workforce to decrease instructional costs; over the last two decades, the number of adjunct or part-time faculty now comprises 70% of all faculty. As a result, policies have decreased instructional costs and provided administrators with increased flexibility to respond to student demands. However, research indicates compromised student outcomes, less shared governance, and faculty work–life pressures that can undermine commitment, motivation, and professional identity. The following literature review examines the locus of academic capitalism and faculty labor, theorizing how faculty labor policies infer consequences for equity, incl...