This report is in support of an attached resolution proposing a direct challenge by the California Federation of Teachers (CFT) to the casualization of academic labor in higher education.  The report will focus on the phenomenal growth of contingent faculty in higher education as a function of corporatization of education, and as a key factor in all of the issues facing members of the CFT working in higher education.

Its main thesis will be the assertion that we can no longer afford to let excellent efforts such as the FACE Campaign to languish under limited, peacemeal support, and we can no longer allow our ranks to be divided by “fulltimer/parttimer” issues.  The time has arrived for all faculty and their organizations to mount an open, frontal, grassroots-based challenge to the casualization of academic labor, and to make that challenge part of any demands stated in defense of the future of Public Education

NOTE: Some people have expressed confusion at the use of the term “casualization”; it is used here to clarify and emphasize that the key to the problems of “part-timers” is not that they are part-time, but that their relationship with administrations is “casual”; they can be let go without cause, without even being fired.  They are simply not rehired.  A growing number refer to themselves as “at-will”, or even “at-whim” employees.

A. A brief history of adjunct faculty in higher education

Being a teacher in higher education today is not what it was yesterday.  As Joe Berry points out in Reclaiming the Ivory Tower, before 1970 the proportions of full-time tenure track (FTTT) to contingent faculty were approximately the reverse of today’s.  The majority of university or college faculty held full-time positions; more importantly, most attained the security of tenure, and adjunct faculty, used mostly to fill specialty positions or temporary shortages, often received the same rate of pay per class and many of the same work conditions as full-time tenure-track (FTTT) teachers.

Beginning in the 1970s, fundamental shifts began to be evident.  California’s Proposition 13, the opening cannon shot of what would only later be recognized as the war to de-fund and corporatize public education, opened the gates to a process that paralleled what was going on in corporate America.  College   administrations began looking for ways to increase flexibility of hiring and reduce labor costs in response to shrinking budgets.  Not only did full-time hires shrink and the proportion of contingent faculty grow, the conditions of employment changed; for adjuncts, job security and such peripheral “luxuries” as health benefits and office space began to disappear at the same time as their wages shrank.  Simultaneously, the workload on FTTT began increasing, and even the concept of tenure for faculty began to come under attack. (Additional sources: Tough Choices or Tough Times, Commission on the Skills of the New American Workforce, National Center on Education and the Economy, 2006, pp. 58-67;

NY Times, 11/20/2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/20/education/20adjunct.html?_r=1)

B. Key features of the current status of contingent faculty

The primary fact of life for contingent faculty is not that they are part-time, but that they are disposable; they are at-will employees who can be dismissed with little or no justification by dint of the administration simply not offering them their position for the new semester.  Secondary features include little or no office space, often little or no pay for non-classroom tasks such as office hours, committee work, professional development and campus involvement; sometimes even exclusion from these activities.  Many community college contingent faculty in fact teach full-time by commuting to two or more districts (hence the name “freeway flyers”), working “part-time” in as many as three districts with few or no benefits and none of the stature given to other full-time educational professionals.

C. Effects of casualization on quality of higher education

The process and experience of education, at any level, is shaped by a complex of factors which extends beyond the classroom, yet dynamically affects the classroom experience.  Although contingent faculty have consistently been shown to work extremely hard to fulfill the highest educational standards, the effects of their status are undeniable:

“Despite our inferior pay and job security, we generally don’t cut many of the educational corners we might be expected to.  We are no more likely to retreat to multiple-choice machine-scored tests, instead of time-consuming essays, than full-time teachers.  Many of us keep office hours for free and give out our home phone numbers to students. ….. Clearly we are doing professional quality work, albeit under unprofessional conditions.” Joe Berry, Reclaiming the Ivory Tower, p.9

“The impact on our campus is the feeling of a two-tiered system – the haves and the have-nots.  This creates an environment of exploitation of nontenured faculty to teach overcrowded classes and take on extra courseloads to secure their jobs.  In the end, it affects the quality of education at the given campus”.  Carolyn Kube, quoted in AFT On Campus article The Shifting Workforce, July/Aug., 2009

Moreover, from personal experience and from discussion with colleagues both contingent and FTTT, it is clear that the “at-will” nature of contingent employment exerts a mostly unspoken but nonetheless powerful effect on academic freedom and free debate on college campuses.  Contingent faculty frequently express hesitation to voice concerns or to be associated with the voicing of criticisms of policies at their institutions, for fear of losing their section or class the following semester or even within the semester.  Without security, there is no academic freedom.

In addition, the necessity for contingent faculty to otherwise supplement and secure their income severely limits their ability to participate in the web of meetings, discussions, social events and committees which form an indispensable part of the technology of education and the life of a campus, and which have a direct effect on the classroom.  A side effect of this, the severe overloading of FTTT faculty with committee work terrifies already overwhelmed contingent faculty, who then maintain a careful distance from such involvements; they teach their classes, and they are gone.

D.  Effects of casualization on contingent faculty

Contingent faculty experience constant stress due to overwork, lengthy and sometimes multiple daily commutes under time pressure, isolation from their colleagues, lack of healthcare and retirement security, and unending worry over whether, and where, they will teach next semester.  No less important, they suffer from a near complete conflict between their standards, desires and dreams as educators and the reality of their class status as temp workers.  Although the author has no statistics to offer as documentation, it follows logically that burnout and depression are significant factors among contingent faculty, leading to the loss of excellent teachers who cannot stand the pressure.

In addition, the threat of losing their assigned course if enrollment falters, subjects adjunct faculty to inappropriate student pressure for lenient grading.  This endangers educational standards.

E.  Effects of casualization on FTTT faculty

Full-time faculty are directly affected by massive casualization of the educational workforce.  Since contingent faculty members tend to shy away from involvement in campus life as stated above, fewer people are available to participate in committees and other meetings, or to take on the assignments these generate.  Since these represent communications and work which are absolutely essential to the ability of any college to fulfill its educational mission, they must be taken on in order to maintain campus sanity and even accreditation.  Yet, it is usually a small fraction of mostly FTTT faculty who appear at meetings and take on responsibilities peripheral to their classroom duties; even other FTTT teachers see the danger of overwork and hesitate to put their toe in the water of involvement.

F.  The Destructive Spiral

The dynamic created by this polarization of faculty is destructive to all; there is a tendency for FTTT faculty to see contingents and less-involved full-timers as parasites with lower skills and standards than they themselves hold, having neither awareness of nor the desire for academic community and collegiality.  There is sometimes an internalized sense of superiority.  Contingents, colloquially referred to as part-timers, often tend to see their FTTT colleagues as snobbish, self-satisfied and complacent, blind to the struggles and problems of their contingent fellow teachers.  There is often an internalized sense of oppression and inferiority.  (If this seems harsh, please understand it is an attempt to paint a picture, with blunt language, of tendencies that are present among all of us to some extent, with no allegation of malicious intent on anyone’s part.  Yet they are present and hurt us all.)

Such division is now being exploited to the detriment of all faculty, and the very concept of faculty security is under attack.  The Kentucky Community and Technical College District recently eliminated tenure for all new faculty, and there is a measure before the Tennessee State Legislature to eliminate tenure statewide.  (Sources: KCTCD website, and Tennessee State Legislature website)

With public education under direct assault, we can no longer afford to continue in disunity; the basis for unity is always found in the fight for equality.

 G.  Effects of casualization on administrators

While not the focus of this paper, most administrators with educational backgrounds desire the same outcomes as classroom teachers.  Therefore, casualization has the same adverse effects on conscientious administrators as it does on frontline faculty.  Conversely, the increasing tendency to corporatize education, addressed in greater detail below, pressures administrators to turn “to the Dark Side” and comport themselves like the increasing number of administrators hired from for-profit business backgrounds to direct public education institutions.  When we hear our administrators describing themselves as CEOs and our schools/departments as Profit Centers, we are hearing the trappings of the corporate takeover of education.

H. Total effect

The sum of these effects is that, in all of our efforts to carry out our mission as educators, the destructive role of the casualization of the academic workforce constantly stands directly in the way of our ability to fulfill those efforts.

I. Relationship to other trends: lean manufacturing, privatization, and economic crisis

The changes and challenges we experience here on the ground are controlled and shaped by agendas being pushed forward at the highest levels of our society.  These, in turn, are propelled by changes in technology so fundamental their effects are undeniable and irreversible.  This section will attempt to treat key elements of these agendas and changes in summary form:

Lean Manufacturing

The shift from mostly full-time, secure faculty staffing to mostly contingent faculty is not an isolated trend, nor is it coincidental that it began in the 1970s.  The concept of continual flexibility of staffing with the shortest possible lead-time comes directly from techniques of Lean Manufacturing (specifically Just In Time supply), pioneered by Toyota.  While the basic ideas of Lean have been around for over a century and were clearly articulated by Henry Ford, a quantum leap in technology was required to bring it to the foreground, just as the industrial revolution was unleashed by perfection of the steam engine.  It was the microchip-computer-telecommunications revolution of the 1970s that first fully realized the necessity and potential of Lean in modern business.  (Wikipedia’s article on Lean Manufacturing is quite good, and worth reading.  See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lean_manufacturing)

From the ‘70s on, we have seen astounding changes.  As first manufacturing, and then services became increasingly automated with the application of computer control, the world effectively shrank, borders became increasingly invisible for the flow of capital as well as manufacturing and communications, the first homeless families and beggars began to appear as factories increasingly operated without people, unsupportable wars were pursued, mental facilities were closed and gentrification began to transform low-income neighborhoods in large and small cities. 

The list could go on, but for this report the important phenomenon to note is that in this period the attitudes of the corporate world (which first pushed public education to the fore in the United States to fill its growing need for huge numbers of educated workers), switched from support of public education to neglect, and then to antagonism.

Privatization

Antagonism took the form of an interest in privatization, or corporatization of education.  Hardly an isolated trend, this parallels the intrusion of corporations into every hitherto public aspect of American life: healthcare, military services up to and including combat, our government’s computer systems, water and other critical utilities, sports and cultural venues, even our parks and other natural treasures have all come under great pressure to perform as profitable ventures or been converted outright into corporate ventures.  Driving all this has been a continuous drop in profit rates for manufacturing, documented for the first time in a revealing report, The Deloitte Shift Index (http://www.deloitte.com/view/en_US/us/About/Catalyst-for-Innovation/Center-for-the-Edge/article/f142fcb75ef22210VgnVCM200000bb42f00aRCRD.htm)

This drop has driven investors and corporations to pursue any and all avenues to expand profitable investment, and education is now on the counting-table to be put up for sale.  For a thorough, concise discussion of privatization in education, see Oakland high school teacher Steven Miller’s article With Malign Intent, available on line at http://www.thefrustratedteacher.com/2008/11/corporate-education-or-education-as.html.

Economic crisis

The worldwide economic crisis, which is now descending on California public education via the decimation of the State budget, is a direct outcome of the above process.  While we could spend hours discussing this (the author teaches a two-hour workshop on the subject), a short treatment will have to do here.

Manufacturing and service industries no longer need large numbers of workers to produce; every manufacturer has at least a section of their plant which runs without people, and many factories operate almost devoid of human intervention.  While these same corporate producers absolutely need consumers with money to buy the goods produced, they are incapable of employing workers they don’t need, and labor costs are the great variable in any branch of industry, regardless of country.  As far back as 1995, this has been documented by authors such as Jeremy Rifkin, in his book The End of Work.  They also cannot, will not, pay to educate workers they don’t need, and so education becomes less an avenue of supply for them and more a means to profitable investment, as shown by With Malign Intent cited above.

In case we ever doubted it, their interest is not in developing the full potential of all humans, but in whatever makes billionaires richer.  Anything that doesn’t do that is on the chopping block.

The great financial crash of 2008/09 is not a result of bad banking practices, but rather of the growing inability of American workers of all sorts to participate in the market economy.  Simply put, without so-called “ninja” and “liar” loans the housing industry and real estate investment market would have collapsed at least 3 years before they did. Although there has been, and still is, plenty of bad behavior by those with their hands in the piggy bank, the truth is, this is how our system works in the age of electronics. There is no basis for any real recovery, regardless of any temporary recovery of profitability.

J.  Where we stand now: the corporate world goes all-out

Although many will no doubt be unhappy to hear this, and some may reject it as alarmist “left” rhetoric, what has been laid out above amounts to a state of class warfare.  All things of use or necessity to the vast majority of people are being cut, increasingly becoming available only to those with money to buy them.  Our government is deeply entangled with corporate forces seeking to control its actions and policies in favor of corporations and the billionaire class which controls them.  These forces are orchestrating massive propaganda campaigns to confuse everyday Americans and to attempt to develop popular support for the drastic measures implied by their inability to offer Americans jobs, livable income, healthcare or education.  (The End of America: Letter of Warning to a Young Patriot, Naomi Wolf, 2007; The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism, Naomi Klein, 2007

K.  What we must accomplish: from defense to offense

Even leaders we trust and admire are unable to confront these forces openly without risking their political and, it now appears, even physical futures.  Anyone who has followed the Healthcare Reform debates can see the storm being whipped up at the behest of insurance companies who know their profits and future fortunes are on the line.  The exclusion of Single Payer proponents from this debate has left it polarized between the corporate free-market forces and their shock troops on the one hand, and what might have been a good fall-back position, the “Public Option”.  Single Payer should have been the hammer to drive back corporatization.  Instead, the effort was merely to hold corporate healthcare at bay, a defensive action.

Can we expect any better fate for the FACE Campaign, or even a repeal of the 2/3 Tax Rule, if left to the two corporate parties?

We are now in an era of what some call “sho-nuff politics”, and the stakes are the highest.  It is increasingly clear that our leaders can only be as strong as we support, or force them to be.  This is said in the same spirit in which President Franklin Roosevelt said to A. Phillip Randolph “Mr. Randolph, you must make me do it”, in response to Randolph’s query about FDR’s support for Negro emancipation.   No longer can we wait for leaders to do for us or tell us what to do; no longer can we beg or plead; what is just now starting to take shape is a social movement which can drive forward our interests, the interests of the vast majority of Americans.  This movement must redefine all issues, including education, to reflect the new polarity; a few hundred billionaires versus all of humanity. This will give true leaders a place to stand and a bully pulpit. 

Our future is, truly, up to us, and our section of this movement must be built on defending the right of all to the highest levels of education and the right of educators to fulfill that mission.

L.  The challenge: the central role of the contingent issue in the fight for higher education

The fight for public education is on.   It takes different forms in different sectors: in K-12 education, standardized testing and charters have held center stage.  In the universities, prior to the present, increasing domination of corporate funding has been the key thrust of privatization.  In the community colleges, until the financial meltdown began in earnest there was no clear attack against their public nature, perhaps because the community colleges have traditionally very directly served the personnel needs of local industries.

Now, however, it is clear to all that very serious cuts are beginning.  If the above analysis of the crisis is correct, there is reason to believe that they will continue and become much worse.  It is clear that these cuts, drastically affecting all levels of education, are a catalyst and uniting factor we can put to good use.  People are beginning to get ready for a fight, and some are already fighting for the cause of public education.

How, though, can we best reach out to our fragmented, disillusioned, dispirited, overworked colleagues to help them become energized and involved in our mutual salvation?  Up to the present, there have been many efforts, often heroic, to improve the lot of contingent faculty.  This report argues that the time is right for a direct and frontal challenge to the casualization of the academic workforce, and that such a challenge can play a vital role in invigorating a huge section of our fellows, both organized and unorganized.  The author has already seen it in the responses of some of the part-timers he has asked about this idea; the response is unmitigated enthusiasm best paraphrased as “Hell, yeah! When do we start?  I can’t stand this anymore.”

Such a challenge must explain to contingent and FTTT faculty alike, as well as to our communities, the destructive effects casualization has on us all and education as a whole.  It must focus on the mutual benefits to all, of making full-time tenure-track positions available to the vast majority of college and university teachers.  It must insist that all teachers, part- or full-time, be paid comparable wages per class or per hour of work, all must have security of employment with separation only for cause, and all must have comparable benefits including healthcare and retirement, with appropriate allowance for those part-time teachers whose other employment offers them such benefits.

If we take on the challenges facing us and confront them directly, if we take new ground instead of merely defending remaining ground, we can energize, unite and inspire not only our membership, but our entire communities.

For the CFT Educational Issues Committee,

Peter Brown
Laney College
Oakland, CA

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