AAUP organizes part-time faculty, The

Academe, Nov/Dec 2000 by Moser, Richard

As business models increasingly shape higher education, corporate principles replace academic values, and making a profit elbows out the public good as the primary goal of colleges and universities. Tenured faculty would seem to be well situated to question this "corporatization" and to articulate alternatives to it, but they find their power compromised as the ranks of tenured professors dwindle. The ascendancy of the corporate view and the weakening of the full-time faculty have hinged on the replacement of tenured faculty positions with part-time and contract faculty who, administrators swear, will never see the light of tenure. These contingent professors now make up approximately 60 percent of all faculty in the United States; their proportion relative to tenured faculty has grown by about 1 percent a year since the early 1970s.

As tenured faculty become an increasingly slender minority, academic values, including academic freedom and the right to share in university government, are undermined. The faculty are not alone in this loss; members of every other university constituency, save the administration, find their jobs more and more at risk, their work degraded, and their connection to the campus attenuated.

Although adjuncts account for most of COCAL's member-- ship, the group seeks to emphasize the common interests of full- and part-time faculty and graduate assistants. It does so by linking together demands for better compensation and conditions for adjuncts with the need for quality education for students, the restoration of the academic job market, and the defense of the academic profession. It is the AAUP's goal to make explicit the connection between the growing reliance on contingent faculty and the corporatization of higher education.

In this way, the Association hopes to connect self-interest with high ideals and make the fight for adjunct rights commensurate with the struggle being fought over the soul of the university.

Coalition Building

Over the past several years, efforts by COCAL and the AAUP have succeeded in stimulating activities on campuses. Faculty at Suffolk University, for example, revived their AAUP chapter and showed how tenured and part-time faculty can cooperate to win pay raises and governance rights for part-time faculty.

As the 1999-2000 academic year began, faculty activists seemed to be everywhere. COCAL organized demonstrations at Emerson College, Northeastern University, and Massachusetts Bay Community College.

The demonstrations caught the attention of thousands of students and faculty, and newspapers and radio stations covered the events and interviewed faculty leaders. In addition, COCAL held packed meetings on other Boston campuses and distributed thousands of copies of its newsletter.

With the educational campaign in full swing, AAUP and COCAL organizers looked for new allies. They contacted two Boston-area labor groups with reputations for activism and nononsense coalition building: the Campaign on Contingent Work and Jobs With Justice. Representatives from the four groups agreed to call for a new coalition that would target the university as a site for organizing.