The independent student newspaper of Northeastern University

The Huntington News

The independent student newspaper of Northeastern University

The Huntington News

The independent student newspaper of Northeastern University

The Huntington News

With uncertain futures, adjuncts seek to unionize

By Madelyn Stone, News Staff

Tucked in the basement of Hayden Hall is a classroom-sized space with a half a dozen desks and chairs, a couple of computers and a few knitted tapestries hanging from the walls. It’s not clear what the proper word would be to describe the room, or others like it. For the 20 lecturers who teach an introduction to business course at Northeastern, this is their shared space, their common area, their workroom.

William Shimer, one of these 20 business school instructors, calls it his office, for lack of a better word. He may share it with 19 others, but besides his car and the student locker he rents, this is the closest approximation to a personal space where he can put down his things and work.

As far as ambiguous terminology goes, Shimer’s title itself is a bit of a conundrum.

“Our paycheck has our official job title, but it’s funny because it varies,” he said. “Part-time instructor, instructor and so on … But my supervisor does use the term ‘professor’ in reference to us.”

Technically a part-time lecturer who teaches seven classes at two colleges, Shimer falls into a class of educators that often seems in limbo within the university hierarchy. They work under many labels: adjuncts, contingent faculty members, part-timers, lecturers, non-tenure track instructors.

Students mostly just call them professors. But there are some critical differences between the traditional tenure-line professor’s position and that of the adjunct who works for a college part-time.

It is these differences – relevant to issues such as pay, benefits, job security and recognition – that have spurred a movement at Northeastern mirroring that of other colleges across the country. As The News reported last week, adjunct professors are seeking to unionize through the Service Employees International Union’s (SEIU) Adjunct Action campaign for the power to negotiate with the administration on their terms of employment. Part-time faculty are currently in the process of gathering signatures in support of collectivization, and will be able to hold a union election when they receive at least 30 percent of eligible faculty members’ signatures. Shimer said he believes they have already met this threshold, but organizers are still seeking signatures before submission to the National Labor Relations Board for a more decisive win.

According to Adjunct Action campaign organizers, adjuncts represent more than half of the faculty at Northeastern, evidencing a national trend that has seen numbers of part-time faculty increase at almost three times the rate of full-time faculty in the past 15 years. Because adjuncts cost little and are easily hired at the last minute before classes start, they are an attractive option for many universities.

Since part-time professors work on a model like that of independent contractors, they don’t accumulate enough hours at any single institution to make them eligible for health care or retirement benefits. They receive payment on a class-by-class basis, unlike full-time or tenure-track professors. Northeastern doesn’t report compensation figures for its part-time instructors, but nationally the median pay falls around $3,000 and in New England it is $3,400, according to American Association of University Professors’ 2012-13 Annual Report. The Adjunct Project lists a sampling of self-reported payments per course, with Northeastern’s figures ranging from $2,100 for a history class to $11,250 for a computer science course.

One senior adjunct lecturer, an English Ph.D. who wished to remain anonymous, said he always wanted to spend his career as a full-time professor, but has not been able to find a position despite sending out dozens of applications over the last several years. He currently teaches online courses for Northeastern’s College of Professional Studies (CPS) and said he receives $2,500 for each class each semester.

“A typical full-time professor will teach on average three classes a term, so at $2,500 for three classes that’s $7,500, which is $15,000 for the year,” he said. “I don’t know if that is poverty level but… it just doesn’t make sense. It’s not doable.”

He currently teaches a total of ten classes between six colleges, some online in Massachusetts and some in-person in the greater Philadelphia area. Part of the reason he’s accumulated so many, he said, is because job security is tenuous given the short-term contracts and the possibility of last-minute class cancellations.

“I think this past year I had two cancel at Northeastern,” he said. “I’ve generated a portfolio where I’m now at six colleges just to bring about some redundancy. So if courses cancel on one end maybe they’ll pick up on the other.”

Adjunct contracts are good for one term; that is, about four months. At the end of each semester, the university has full discretion to retain or dismiss an instructor. For those who don’t get their contracts renewed, there is no severance pay.

Shimer said adjuncts’ demands aren’t unreasonable.

“I don’t really want tenure so much as just a decent pay. I am happy to be fired if I’m not a good teacher, like all people should be. But if I am a good teacher and I get good results, I would like to know that I have a job. At least, like, for a year. Couldn’t you do it for one year, instead of every term, three times a year? It’s just very hard to plan your life.”

He said he’ll find out whether or not he’s being retained for the spring semester around Dec. 20.

These contracts give a lot of leeway to administrators in terms of rehiring instructors, allowing them to refuse renewals for any reason.

The flexibility helps with budgeting and accommodating unpredictability in course loads. Instructors say it comes at the cost of their job security.

The senior adjunct lecturer who teaches in CPS wished to remain anonymous because, as he said, “I’m just concerned about losing my position at Northeastern.”

And considering the numbers of highly educated graduates out of work – the National Science Foundation reports Ph.D.s have a less than 50 percent chance of finding a full-time job. Shimer said, “If I left tomorrow, probably 300 people would be happy to take my job.”

Teachers’ feelings of insecurity in their jobs have ripple effects, said Mayra Besosa, the chair of the American Association of University Professors Committee on Contingency and the Profession, and a lecturer at California State University San Marcos.

“Your academic freedom is not protected because you’re vulnerable to not being appointed again,” she said. “That’s not good for the students who want to have a stable faculty, a faculty who’s able to speak up, even when something is unpopular, and not be afraid… The stronger the job security of the faculty, the better it is for the students.”

She referenced a refrain that’s become somewhat of a catchphrase in the movement: the idea that teachers’ working conditions are students’ learning conditions.

“It’s not the case that students aren’t getting the best that they can get from us,” Shimer said. “But I know I could do even better if I could have time to prepare for a course. I’ve literally been given textbooks on a Friday and then told to teach on Monday. Without any direction – no syllabus, no nothing – something I haven’t even taught before. And you’re really like 24 hours ahead of the students the whole term.”

Shimer said in his experience, freshly hired adjuncts receive no orientation, no training. A report from the Institute of Higher Education notes this trend: In a 2011 survey of 500 contingent faculty, 94 percent of respondents received no departmental or institutional campus orientation, though 54 percent were new to their departments and 49 percent were new to the campuses. Minimal supervision compounds communication issues, where instructors say they feel there is little contact with administrators or other faculty members.

“I’ve been working in the business school for three years,” Shimer said, “and other than contact with my direct supervisor, with whom I have a great relationship, I’ve never met an administrator in all the entire hierarchy of the business school. Never an email, never an in-person meeting. So the net result of all that is we don’t really feel connected to the very university at which we work.”

One way adjuncts do receive feedback is through the anonymous Teacher Rating and Course Evaluation (TRACE) that the university asks students to complete for each class.

“That’s like everything,” Shimer said. “In the business school, TRACE is the only thing that matters.”

Aside from student feedback and contact with a direct supervisor, there does not seem to be any recognition for contingent faculty members’ work. They aren’t eligible for the university’s Excellence in Teaching Awards, despite evidence such as the recent report from the National Bureau of Economic Research that non-tenure track educators can be as effective or more effective than their tenured colleagues.

To Shimer, this ineligibility is one of the indignities that makes his position difficult. General perceptions of contingent faculty by those on the tenure-track are another point of frustration for adjuncts.

“I think that the perceptions of adjunct faculty are that we’re just kind of second-rate or second-strain. ‘They don’t have Ph.Ds, they’re just doing it as a hobby,’ or that sort of thing. But a lot of us are doing it as a living and we do have Ph.Ds,” the English lecturer in CPS said.

At 41, he has been teaching in part-time positions since he earned his doctorate. Shimer, on the other hand, had a career as a lawyer and two-time business owner before coming to teaching: “And were I not successful in those earlier businesses I could not afford to be a teacher. I love teaching and I put up with the pay because I like this and because I’m using cash from an earlier life to support myself.”

Tara Blumstein, a fourth year student with dual majors in political science and international affairs, is president of Northeastern’s Progressive Student Alliance. She said the sense of unsustainability in the current contingent faculty model is a reason the alliance is supporting adjuncts’ unionization efforts.

“The reason they get through a lot of the things they have to deal with is because they genuinely love teaching. We want those people here,” she said. “It’s really hard for them to sustain that lifestyle or any sort of sustainable lifestyle on the wages they get… It’s not fair, and it’s not sustainable because things like this will happen. People will rise up and say that ‘We’re not going to do a job that we’re not appreciated for and we’re not being paid adequately for,’ and students are going to support those people.”

When reached for comment, a Northeastern spokeswoman would not speak about the issue on the record.

The senior adjunct lecturer in English said the recent unionization at the University of Massachusetts Lowell, where he teaches one class online, brought changes for better and worse. His compensation per course jumped to $5,500 per course from $3,500, but the college reduced his class load.

Nevertheless, he said, “I’d rather teach five classes instead of ten. I can’t keep this up for the rest of my working life. It’s a struggle, and it just means I’m not available for the students. And what kind of educational experience is that?”

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