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Notes from the Union Forum Meeting
In attendance: Lorraine, Lisa, Carol, Ethan, Rita, John, Sandra, Heather, and Victoria, the latter of whom reacted with surprise to David Neumann's morning email announcement, elevating him to Vice President of the PTFU.
Report back from Heather on her experience getting interviewed for full-time music faculty:
The reshuffling of department chairs has generated strong opposition among English adjuncts. Ellen Olmstead was asked by the dean to step down, presumably to make way for another professor who's more willing to play "toady" for the administration. Olmstead has long been seen as an ally to the part-time faculty.
Lorraine shares her heartwrenching story of downward mobility in her department. Despite contributing almost single-handedly to the growth of the course offerings in gender studies and women's health, Lorraine is now barred from teaching online courses, and even some face-to-face courses due to a new policy on the required credentials. Again we see that adjuncts have almost no job security, even after 10+ years with the same employer.
Victoria proposes two themes around which we can build a fall semester event: tuition-free community college, and pay parity. Why just one big event, rather than several smaller events? We saw with the gubernatorial panel discussion how difficult it is to attract a critical mass of adjuncts. A series of smaller events offered at different times of the week might better serve our purpose of growing the union membership.
Victoria's preference is to avoid wearing ourselves out with too much planning. One big event maximizes the ratio of impact to "investment of energy and time."
One concern with having a single event to address both themes (pay parity and tuition-free community college) is that the audience members attracted by one theme might have total apathy about the other. How can we ensure that every minute of the event engages equally the "two factions" in the audience? As a test run, let's go around the table and hear what these dedicated union members think about the proposed topics.
On free community college:
1. Our classes are already heavily populated by students who tune out and show no interest in the educational opportunities we're providing. Some of this disengagement can be traced to the absence of "skin in the game," as happens with veterans whose entire tuition is paid by Uncle Sam. How much worse would this problem become if even more students were given the option of not facing the costs of their education?
2. Adjuncts are pressured by some departments not to insist on high expectation from their students, in order to keep the DFW rates low. Would this pressure increase if community college were made free, thereby opening up the gateway courses to larger numbers of underprepared students?
3. The lack of academic preparation is more evident among recent high school graduates, who have been used as guinea pigs in various experiments to reform the high school curriculum. Nontraditional college students come to our classes with greater self-discipline and soft skills, but they won't be able to benefit from the free college bill passed in Annapolis.
4. The "sheepskin effect" says that most of the economic value of a college education comes from earning the degree, not simply from passing a number of courses. If the result of this free college bill is a greater enrollment in gateway courses but a much smaller growth in the number of associate's degree recipients, then the return on the state's investment might even be negative. A better use of taxpayer dollars might be an experiment in universal basic income.
5. Let's be optimistic and assume that everyone who takes advantage of the free college bill actually does go on to earn an AA degree. Although there are intangible benefits to society from a more educated citizenry, for the individual AA holder the economic value of having a degree is reduced, since the labor market now has many more AA holders from which employers can choose. The credentialing arms race will simply escalate to the next level, leaving all these new AA recipients no more employable than when they and their peers were content with a high school diploma. Witness Lorraine's story of downward mobility in her department, perhaps due to a glut of higher-credentialed candidates for faculty positions currently on the labor market, and the decline in rankings that the college might suffer if it had to report a low percentage of terminal-degree holders teaching in this discipline.
On pay parity:
1. The compensation gap between part-time and full-time faculty includes not just salary but also benefits. With external providers of services such as health care and legal advice, the college can justify its stinginess in limiting the pool of beneficiaries, but for in-house benefits such as tuition waivers and fitness classes, this stinginess is less excusable.
2. (citing Mitch Tropin) Action on the pay parity issue is unlikely to come from winning the sympathies of college administrators. Other institutions that offer pay parity had it imposed on them by state legislators.
3. (added July 28 thanks to a comment from Caroline) The most realistic scenario for an internally-driven move to pay parity is by building stronger bridges between part-time and full-time faculty. Low morale on the latest equity and inclusion survey stems partly from worries among the full-time faculty that their jobs might be cut for budgetary reasons. This insecurity suggests an opportunity to build allies for pay parity, by pointing out that greater equality in compensation between them and their part-time colleagues will weaken the financial case for eliminating a full-time position and hiring adjuncts to provide the same services.
After the union forum meeting, I took a detour through the Clifton park neighborhood and the Long Branch Trail, finally arriving home to be greeted by a more vigorously dripping faucet in the kitchen. Mom and I tried to call Moen to order some replacement cartridges, but the hold time would have been about an hour, so we hung up and kept filling vessels with the drips from the leaky faucet.
To escape the annoying sound of dripping water, I biked to the college and took a late afternoon swim. The act of pushing aside large volumes of water to propel myself up and down the lane restored somewhat the sense of control that had suffered a blow from the leaky faucet.