I’m on vacation this week and am happy to turn this spot once again to Craig Smith, associate director of AFT Higher Education, assisted by Barbara McKenna, who first reported the stories included in this post in AFT On Campus. Both Craig and Barbara blog on the issue of academic labor at FACE Talk.

Ah, the academy—red brick, ivy-covered buildings, bucolic days spent wandering on the quad, heady discussions about the arts, literature and science. What a great place to be! No wonder so many people aspire to be professors. It is, after all, a perfect job, right? I mean, c’mon, you teach a couple classes, do research at your own pace, meet with a few students, have summers off—what could be better, right?

Kathleen Lopez might tell you a different story. Not too long ago, Lopez, a speech communications instructor and video producer, looked at the 15 years she’d spent shuttling between teaching jobs at Portland State University, Portland Community College, Marylhurst University and the Northwest Film Center and said, enough! The teaching—about which she is passionate—“was the easy part.” The hard part was “running around between schools, dragging my material, trying to get to my classes, setting up, being emotionally prepared for students.”

So two years ago, she applied the brakes on her freeway-flying treadmill, deciding she could continue to impart her craft one well-chosen class at a time and go back to the video production work that more reliably pays her bills.

In her view:

in higher education is, if you work hard, get a degree, take on extra, you will get hired as full-time faculty.

She wishes someone had clued her in earlier that it was just a myth. 

Another myth, she notes, is about the American professoriate, which, as a whole, is showing the stress of having been under-resourced for years:

I fully support tenured professors because there is a level of excellence that happens with continuity and supportive collegiality. I don’t see how that can happen when a fairly high percentage of faculty are teaching part time.

Marty Slobin might agree, if he had the opportunity. But, unlike Kathleen, he didn’t leave teaching to return to another career; Marty Slobin literally died for the love of teaching.

His obituary in the Dec. 12, 2000, edition of the Detroit Free Press is moving in its brevity. It memorializes the lecturer who, just the year before, had received a distinguished teaching award from the University of Michigan-Dearborn, and who also taught at Wayne State University and Henry Ford Community College.

Outside the classroom, Slobin commuted to his teaching jobs on three campuses by bus because he could not afford to keep a car. “Marty’s whole life was devoted to his students and his teaching,” says a fellow professor.

Suffering from heart disease, Slobin could not afford the treatment—surgery—because the income he would lose during convalescence would make it impossible for him to keep up his health insurance payments.

At one point, the university asked Slobin to stop going through the trash in search of the pop cans he returned to collect their deposit refunds.

So much for institutional respect.

Slobin, 55, died in his office after a heart attack. Embarrassed for the university after his saga came to light, the behavioral sciences faculty moved to get raises for the adjuncts. After 14 years with no raises at all, the adjuncts received increases of $250 per course for two years. For those who knew, it was telling what it took to get the university to act.

These are only two of hundreds of stories you hear when you talk to contingent faculty—college faculty and instructors who are part-time, adjunct, full-time but on limited contracts, or graduate employees. These are workers who do what is supposedly extremely important work to the future of this country and yet receive little recognition, either professional or economic, for their work. They are what one author has called “invisible” faculty.

You are probably saying, “Now, wait just a minute. College professors make a good living, don’t they?” Well, in some cases, absolutely. But the higher education instructional workforce in this country is rapidly becoming part-time, underpaid and undersupported. Today, fewer than half of college and university instructors are full-time employees, and less than one-third of instructors have continuing appointments with job security—that is, they are contingent employees. Amazingly, this is the reverse of the national distribution of work, where approximately 70 percent of employees are employed full-time and 30 percent are contingent employees. Further, a large percentage of instructors are teaching for pay that doesn’t even constitute a living wage.

For example, an adjunct instructor at a typical community college might earn $1,500 (or less) for teaching a three-credit course. Now let’s say this faculty member teaches five courses a semester, which anyone who has taught at the college level would consider an extremely full teaching load. That amounts to $7,500 for the semester and $15,000 for an academic year (gross pay)—maybe $18,000 for the whole year if they are lucky enough to find a couple courses to teach over the summer. On top of that, most adjunct faculty members don’t receive health benefits, leave or pensions, and most don’t have the professional support you would imagine a faculty person would receive—”perks” like an office, a phone, professional development opportunities or even a decent orientation to the college. In short, we are staffing our college classrooms as if faculty members are simply entry-level service workers rather than highly qualified professionals entrusted with the education of the next generation.

Meanwhile, students are paying skyrocketing college costs: Over the past 10 years, tuition increases have totaled 51 percent at public four-year colleges, 36 percent at private four-year colleges and 26 percent at two-year colleges. 

Despite their working conditions, contingent faculty do incredible work for their institutions and their students, which is why students are rarely aware of their teachers’ employment category. Colleges and universities exploit that fact to hide what is really going on at their institutions, painting a picture of a caring and nurturing institution for future students (if not for their employees).

The American Federation of Teachers (AFT), which represents nearly 200,000 higher education workers among our 1.4 million members, believes we must address the problems associated with higher education’s unfair treatment of and over-reliance on contingent faculty. Policymakers continue to miss this very real problem, despite all their talk about what needs correcting in our higher education system and how important such change is to ensuring our “leadership role” in the world. It’s one of the dirty little secrets of higher education. Just when we are supposed to be investing in higher education because it is more important than ever, we are disinvesting in it. And the place institutions are cutting corners the most is not the athletic facilities or the recreational activities or the dining halls. It’s in the academic staff—those who do the core work of the academy: the faculty.  

The world-class U.S. education system was not created from a mish-mash of underpaid part-time adjuncts, visiting professors and graduate employees. If we are going to maintain our world-class system, we need to return to the foundation of a full-time faculty workforce with job protections. We need to treat all faculty members, whether they are teaching part-time or full-time, with respect, and that means both economic and professional support. After all, one faculty member’s working conditions become many students’ learning conditions.

To address the issues related to contingent faculty, the AFT has launched the Faculty and College Excellence (FACE) campaign. The FACE campaign is focused on getting states and institutions to invest once again in faculty to ensure a quality education for college students—it is the least students and their families should be able to expect given the rising cost of higher education. FACE calls for at least 75 percent of undergraduate courses to be taught by full-time, tenure-eligible professors and for all faculty members to receive compensation commensurate with their qualifications and responsibilities.

Perhaps the biggest obstacle to addressing higher education staffing issues is that so few people are aware of them. We hope the FACE campaign will help raise public awareness about the exploitation of contingent faculty and the decline of tenure-track positions in higher education. Stop by our campaign website for much more information, and join us at our blog FACE Talk for discussions about these issues.

Finally, if you are a student embarking on the college search process, or a parent of such a student, remember to consider these issues as you gather information. Ask the college admissions representatives what percentage of classes is taught by other than full-time faculty. Ask whether freshman classes are taught by tenured faculty or graduate students. Ask if part-time, adjunct instructors have offices for planning and meeting their students. Ask if they receive health benefits. Let them know that you expect a college or university to make academics its first budget priority and you question skimping on those who are most responsible for the learning and success of the student body—faculty. Because, as we like to say: FACE Facts: Investment Counts.

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