Protests prompt shift toward full-time faculty at Georgia State

Academe, Sep/Oct 1999

IN MAY, GEORGIA STATE UNIVERSITY administrators announced the creation of sixty-five new full-time teaching jobs. The move at Georgia's second largest campus followed protests over salary and working conditions by part-time instructors, many of whom are now expected to apply for the new positions.

The positions come, however, with built-in drawbacks. These include nontenure-track status and evaluation for one-year renewals. In addition, the titles of visiting lecturer and visiting instructor that apply to the new slots set up another tier low in the faculty pecking order, making advancement more difficult for those on the bottom.

"We are sensitive to the concerns of the part-time instructors," says Ahmed Abdelal, dean of the university's College of Arts and Sciences, after announcing the shift to more full-time slots. "It is very difficult for them, since we don't provide them with offices." The absence of a fixed academic address, he adds, "impairs students' ability to access them and administrators' ability to track them down to ensure coverage of the fullcourse roster." Ultimately, says Abdelal, "the quality of instruction suffers."

Adjunct faculty, while praising the administration's staffing decision, stress that it was neither a noble gesture out of the blue nor a long-term fix. "It's progress," says Tom Coffin, a part-time instructor in sociology at GSU who formed a caucus of adjunct faculty to push for staffing reforms. He considers the new positions, which come with health-care benefits and a baseline salary of $24,000, a definite improvement on the $2,000 per-course pay without benefits he had earned while teaching at GSU for the past four years. The financial pinch on adjuncts is so severe, he says, that some colleagues unable to pay rent have resorted to sleeping in their cars.

Such stories proved compelling for Hugh Hudson, a professor of history at GSU and president of the AAUP's Georgia State Conference. Hudson, who also chairs the university senate, at first encountered disregard among some older, full-time faculty for complaints from part-time instructors, who have no vote in the campus governance body. In accordance with senate rules, however, Hudson appointed Coffin to a subcommittee whose work "opened a lot of people's eyes" to the contortions many adjuncts go through in sustaining a career and maintaining a household with meager pay and few, if any, benefits. Such discussions solidified faculty support for improving adjunct pay and helped gain the ear of administrators, leading to the new positions.

While acknowledging the action by GSU administrators as a step forward, Ernst Benjamin, AAUP associate general secretary, calls the creation of the new jobs insufficient. "Even full-time, non-tenure-track positions fail to provide the assurance of due process essential to protecting academic freedom and effective collegial governance," Benjamin says. He adds that the positions "fail to ensure the degree of faculty continuity needed for student and faculty academic planning and development."

With support from the national AAUP, Hudson and Coffin have arranged a conference at GSU for early October to discuss the plight of parttime instructors elsewhere in the country and potential remedies. Hudson says his goal is to have "nothing other than tenure-track positions." But the recent concession at his campus is "an important step away from exploitation."