Taking a seat at the table: Organizing temporary faculty

Academe, Nov/Dec 2000 by Kartus, Lisa

The union coached, but these temps handled their own person-to-person organizing.

YOU KNOW WHY THEY'RE COMING OUT here," John Dickerman said in the clipped tones of a teacher correcting a student. "They're coming out here to unionize us. What did you expect?" he demanded of Toma Heldt. "Did you think they were just going to come here and tell us how to wave a magic wand to solve our problems?" It was late January 1992, and a group of Northern Illinois University temporary instructors had gathered to discuss what to do next. After four years of fruitless but polite meetings with provosts, department chairs, and deans on the DeKalb, Illinois, campus, the instructors were beginning to contemplate solutions outside of the university community.

A few weeks before, Toma had met with Mitch Vogel and Mike McNally of University Professionals of Illinois (UPI), a local of the American Federation of Teachers (AFT), to see if they had any ideas. The union men insisted on meeting with the other organizing instructors, and Toma was too polite to turn them down. She looked diffidently at John, a lab assistant in the biology department whose shoulder-length graying sandy hair and enormous glasses hid a Jesuit-like mind. Her pink cheeks grew pinker.

"Well, I don't want to unionize," protested Toma, "but these guys from the UPI said they wanted to talk about our options, not about organizing us."

Outside the university campus, corporate management paid temporary employees extra for the kind of flexibility the instructors offered NIU. Inside the striated hierarchy of the traditional university, flexibility did not increase market value. Illogically, it decreased it. Toma, for example, brought an NIU doctorate and years of experience to her work teaching upper-division education courses and supervising Northern's student teachers during their semester-long internships in elementary schools.

Northern had a rule that it wouldn't hire its own doctoral graduates. For Toma to earn the wage her credentials rated, she'd have to travel the country, seeking the brass ring of tenure at other colleges and universities. But Toma's husband was place-bound in nearby Sycamore by the railroad seniority system.

Sandy Flood was in the same situation: her husband, Brian, worked as an entomologist for Del Monte in Rochelle, a little town just west of DeKalb. She could afford to teach physical education, work that she found challenging and stimulating, because Brian earned a real salary. She was hired the first time to replace a Northern professor who was sick. Then she was hired the next year and the next. She had never intended for her work at Northern to be a career, but there she was, with sterling teaching evaluations term after term. Other instructors were foolishly trying to support families on as little as $11,000 a year.

The instructors had discussed their low pay and other problems calmly with the administration for several years. Possibly, thought Toma, if the administrators had given us the minutest part of recognition-a certificate of appreciation, a service pin, or some minor gesture that said "you make a difference in the education of our students"-we would have taken the tokens and gone home happy. When she voiced this notion to Sandy, Sandy just nodded: of course. "But they couldn't be bothered," she pointed out.

"Are we that much trouble?" Toma mused to Sandy.

"Not yet," Sandy said, and then laughed dryly.

Perhaps it never occurred to the deans, provosts, or department chairs to recognize the wallflowers of the department. Perhaps, as David Leslie and Judith Gappa write in 'Die Invisible Faculty, their book on adjunct instructors, the university cornmunity was more comfortable not seeing Sandy, Toma, and John-or Darlene Whitkanack (math), Janet Ainsworth (education), and Brad McDonald (management)-teachers working without hope of tenure. Leslie and Gappa say, "When institutions believe parttime faculty value derives from the quality of what [these faculty] do, employment policies ... tend to translate this belief into practice. When institutions believe part-time faculty value derives from the dollars [institutions `save,' or the 'buffer' and 'benefits' [part-time instructors] create for tenured faculty, employment policies and practices are markedly different." Judging from its actions, Northern appeared to regard its temporary faculty members as cheap thrills in the classroom, a way to save money.

Toma and the others could feel how uncomfortable they made the administration and the full-time faculty. It was as if, Toma laughed, a chicken sat up and insisted on a seat at the dinner table. Their bid for recognition, for regularization of their employment and pay, was certainly greeted with the same consternation that a chicken would have elicited. Gappa and Leslie suggest that such consternation might perhaps arise out of an understanding that "the security, professional lifestyle, and economic well-being of the comparatively insulated full-time tenured and tenure-track faculty may depend directly on the continued exploitation and disenfranchisement of parttime faculty."