Akron, Ohio
There was a time when Maria C. Maisto didn't know much about the struggles of adjunct professors. She didn't know that teaching six courses could still pay less than $20,000. She didn't know that adjuncts are likely to be on the outskirts of faculty governance. She didn't know that adjuncts can't count on unemployment checks to fill in the gap when they're not able to teach. But four years after teaching her first English-composition class at the University of Akron, Ms. Maisto knows all of that. In fact, now she thinks about the plight of adjuncts all the time.
"It's hard to know what the reality is for many adjuncts until you live it," says Ms. Maisto, an adjunct who this week left her job at Akron for a full-time, non-tenure-track job at Cuyahoga Community College that pays more and offers benefits. But if Ms. Maisto has anything to do with it, adjuncts' working conditions will no longer be invisible to those outside the academy. She is leading a new association, named New Faculty Majority, intended to be a national voice solely for the 70 percent of faculty members who work outside the tenure track. They are typically poorly paid when compared with their tenured and tenure-track colleagues, have no health benefits, and no academic-freedom protections. And the major faculty unions, adjunct activists say, cater to the concerns of tenured and tenure-track professors. So for the last seven months, Ms. Maisto and others have been painstakingly building the framework for the group, even as many adjuncts lose their jobs as part of colleges' cost-cutting moves. New Faculty Majority isn't a union, but it does plan to work closely with unions and other organizations to achieve common goals.
"There are a whole range of different issues to address when it comes to adjuncts," Ms. Maisto says. "We want to make sure that adjunct- and contingent-faculty perspectives are represented at the table so people aren't talking about us when we're not in the room."
Ms. Maisto is determined that the new group succeed, but it faces serious challenges. Past attempts to create a national network that fights adjuncts' battles on a day-to-day basis have failed. Adjuncts, particularly those who work part time, are immensely preoccupied with trying to make a living and are not likely to have time and money to give to the fledgling group. The new organization will also have to figure out how to recruit from a pool of people who traditionally don't join such groups because they fear for their jobs, especially in this economic downturn.
The Making of an Activist
Ms. Maisto, 41, graduated from Georgetown University, where she earned an undergraduate degree in foreign service with a concentration in humanities. After earning a master's degree in English at her alma mater, Ms. Maisto moved on to the University of Maryland at College Park to pursue a Ph.D. in comparative literature. Her oldest daughter, now 10, was born just after she completed the first chapter of her dissertation. Her adviser urged her to continue her studies, but Ms. Maisto—who also has two other children, ages 8 and 2—says she and her husband realized that "just wasn't going to work."
Instead, Ms. Maisto took jobs at two higher-education associations in Washington, but she could never shake the feeling that she belonged in front of a classroom.
After her family moved from the Washington area to Akron in 2004—in part to escape a pricey housing market—Ms. Maisto began teaching as an adjunct at the university in the fall of 2005. The first sign that the path she chose might not be so smooth: "I didn't get a handbook," Ms. Maisto says. "And there was no orientation." The second sign: She became pregnant with her third child and knew that "there were no resources for adjuncts in my situation." During the entire 2006-7 academic year, which would have been her second at Akron, Ms. Maisto was out of work and out of pay.
"Meager as the salary is, you need every penny," says Ms. Maisto. "That created an incredible strain on my family."
Getting Organized
Something needed to change, Ms. Maisto thought. She credits a fellow part-timer in Akron's English department, Peggy Richards, for pushing her into advocacy. "I could see she had such strong feelings about changing things for the part-time faculty here," says Ms. Richards, who has taught English composition for 20 years at Akron. "It's incredible the amount of energy she has."
When the university's Faculty Senate held elections in the fall of 2008, Ms. Richards convinced Ms. Maisto to run for the position of part-time faculty representative. "I told her, Here's where you get your foot in the door on campus because you have legitimacy in an elected position." She won.
Around the same time, some adjuncts were bandying about via e-mail the idea of forming what would later become known as New Faculty Majority. Ms. Maisto, who had largely been a "lurker" on the group's e-mail list for some time, was increasingly intrigued by the possibilities of a national organization.
But ironically, it was a tenured professor who sent a February 2 e-mail message that pushed the list's members beyond their rhetoric and put New Faculty Majority on the path it is on today.
Peter D.G. Brown, a German professor at the State University of New York at New Paltz, had started two adjunct-advocacy groups from scratch—one at his own campus and another statewide organization that is part of United University Professors. "I felt the time was really right for a national organization," he says. But "I didn't really feel like I was the appropriate person to get the ball rolling, being a senior, tenured faculty member."
Instead, he turned to Joe Berry, a nationally known adjunct activist who, in a sense, had been at this juncture before. Months earlier he was part of an unsuccessful push to transform the Coalition of Contingent Academic Labor into something similar to New Faculty Majority. The coalition, known as Cocal, mostly focuses on conferences and regional meetings. Cocal is also the creator of the very e-mail list on which New Faculty Majority came to life. However, it is not structured to take on adjunct issues in a sustained way. Yet Mr. Berry, chair of the group's Chicago chapter, declined to take the lead in New Faculty Majority's beginnings.
"I was extremely busy, and I just made the decision not to be heavily involved in the center of it at this time," says Mr. Berry, a visiting adjunct labor specialist at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. In a nod of support, however, Mr. Berry says, "Given the history of activity among contingent faculty, there's no bad activity. Anything that gets more people into motion is helpful."
A Volunteer Effort
In early February, Mr. Brown sent a message calling for volunteers to serve on the organizing committee, and Ms. Maisto was among those who stepped up. Soon after, the committee, which included Mr. Brown, held a two-hour conference call, the first of many to plot the new group's course. When the call was over, Ms. Maisto had been elected co-chair of the committee. She would share the job with Deborah Louis, an adjunct for 38 years who teaches political science, criminal justice, and women's studies online for Asheville-Buncombe Technical Community College, in North Carolina, and Eastern Kentucky University.
"It was exciting to see how committed people were to what we were doing," says Ms. Maisto, who is now president of the group's board of directors. "I just remember being ready to get to work. We had a lot to accomplish."
But the duo wouldn't work together for long. About four months in, the task of laying the groundwork of the new organization proved to be too taxing for Ms. Louis.
"It was daily work, all day and through the night responding to e-mails," says Ms. Louis, who has a Ph.D. in political science. "We broke into subcommittees, but then every organizational issue was so important everybody wanted to say something about everything. I was juggling too much stuff to be able to continue giving it fair treatment, especially in a leadership role."
Time conflicts plagued another member of the original organizing committee as well. The well-known adjunct activist Keith Hoeller, who has worked tirelessly for adjunct rights in Washington State, also left. Mr. Hoeller gave, for him, an unusually guarded explanation: "I had to use my time where I think it's more efficient."
To be sure, there are seasoned activists still engaged in getting New Faculty Majority up and running. But does the absence of some heavy hitters signal a bumpy ride for the group or merely pave the way for others to make their mark? Matthew Williams, vice president of the group's board of directors, is banking on the latter. After all, he notes, the pool of people across the country who teach outside the tenure track numbers about 800,000.
"Of course, we're not going to be able to get everyone involved, but even 2 percent of that," would be a good beginning, says Mr. Williams an assistant lecturer in communication at Akron who also teaches Web development and Web analytics for Akron's continuing-education and workforce-development unit. He sees an "evangelical approach—tell one person and they tell one person and that person tells another person" as the best way to for New Faculty Majority to grow.
Over the summer, Ms. Maisto and Mr. Williams say, they sometimes spent six to eight hours a day on New Faculty Majority business. It's a workload that they will probably continue to struggle with now that they are back in the classroom.
The Lure of Full-Time Work
Meanwhile, the financial strain that comes with being an adjunct has forced Ms. Maisto to grapple with whether she can afford the possible cost of her dedication to New Faculty Majority—her family's economic survival and privacy. She recently applied for a full-time professional staff job on the Akron campus that pays more and comes with health benefits. Ms. Maisto didn't get the job. But as the group's leader, she is worried about what her job choices may signal. "I hate that some adjunct activists might question my commitment to teaching because I applied for that job at the university so I can make a decent living and also work with students."
But the same way that adjuncts' financial fortunes can take a turn for the worse—a dropped class, a salary cut—Ms. Maisto found out this week how quickly things can begin to look up—even if only temporarily. Cuyahoga Community College, where Ms. Maisto had just begun teaching a Saturday English composition class last month on top of three courses at Akron, asked to her to fill in for a full-time, non-tenure-track professor who couldn't finish the fall semester. Ms. Maisto quit her job at Akron, where the semester was about two weeks old, and immediately picked up that professor's three classes—and the higher pay and benefits she had sought that went along with it.
"I wrote a really long letter to all of my students at Akron explaining the situation and how the system works in such a way that adjuncts have choices that they have to make," says Ms. Maisto, whose husband, a former high-school teacher, is now on the job market. "It all happened very quickly. I was worried about how Akron would act when I told them, but my department head was very understanding. She knows what it's like and what we're dealing with."
Akron quickly found adjuncts to take over Ms. Maisto's classes, and she talked to them about the material she had covered so far. Where she'll be teaching in the spring is uncertain.
"I don't know what will happen next," Ms. Maisto says.
In the meantime, Ms. Maisto and others are busy recruiting members.
Reaching Out Online
Mr. Williams sees the group's online presence as crucial in its recruitment efforts. The Web, Mr. Williams says, allows the group to send information to people who might support New Faculty Majority but are afraid to align themselves with the group publicly.
"People feel safe online, and that's important for us," says Mr. Williams, who says his love of teaching led him to quit a lucrative information-technology job to work at the university. Still, to supplement his income, Mr. Williams is a marketing and Web-communications consultant and also hits the highway to do cross-country deliveries for a company that makes teardrop trailers. "If we can gain a critical mass of people on a particular campus that are willing to receive information about what we're doing and what they can do to help, that's a good start. Still, that doesn't mean a lot if we don't see some results."
The group's Web site, which Mr. Williams created, provides a way for people to donate money for the group and offers educational material about adjunct issues, among other things. Membership is free until the end of the year, and eventually local chapters of the organization, as well as regional conferences, might develop.
Mr. Williams also believes that it is key for New Faculty Majority to go beyond the data and put a human face on the problems adjuncts deal with. But just last year, Ms. Maisto learned firsthand how challenging it can be to spread her message in that way. In November the local paper in Akron ran an article that scrutinized the compensation package of the University of Akron's president. The article compared his salary to that of the average faculty member—a figure Ms. Maisto says applied to full-time tenure-track professors, not to people like her.
She wrote a letter to the editor to correct the misinformation and highlight the working conditions of adjuncts who are not employed full time at the institution. But despite the letter's generally positive tone, "we had the hardest time getting people to sign their name," Ms. Maisto says. In the end, the letter was printed with Ms. Maisto's name and an editor's note that said, "Also signed by 20 others."
Such events however, have merely served as a source of motivation for those working to fine-tune New Faculty Majority. There are the Sunday-evening conference calls, held at least once a month, with board members—Ms. Maisto sometimes calls in from her car. There are Web-site tweaks to make. An affordable dues structure to iron out. And, of course, discussions about how to get the money needed to operate.
The group will soon be a tax-exempt nonprofit, it has bylaws, and is now incorporated in Ohio. It also has applied for a separate nonprofit status that allows the group to engage in lobbying. Other small successes include mentions on various blogs, and Ms. Maisto says she and other members of the group have been invited to speak at a few academic conferences.
"I'm constantly communicating with people and reading everything that's out there," Ms. Maisto says. "I think change is going to happen," she says. "We're at the point now where it has to happen."
Comments
1. 22176686 - September 10, 2009 at 02:39 pm
Chronicle Reporter Audrey June correctly mentions that I resigned from the Organizing Committee of the New Faculty Majority to devote more time to my independent adjunct activism. I remain as committed as ever to achieving true equality for all contingent faculty and abolishing the two-track system.
While an all-adjunct organization is a necessary first step in transforming the academy, it is not sufficient in itself to bring about major change. Any such organization should have strong goals and offer adjuncts something quite different than they have been getting from the three national unions (AAUP, AFT, and NEA), which remain committed to preserving the two-track system. Otherwise, why should adjuncts join?
Any new organization must be careful not to fall into the trap of rankism, thereby ceding control to the tenured faculty, be they members or advisors. It must also be vigilant to avoid being compromised by other organizations and determined to remain both strong and independent in both principles and funding.
Keith Hoeller
Co-founder, Washington Part-Time Faculty Association
Seattle, WA
2. smstreet - September 10, 2009 at 05:44 pm
The new NFM meets the requirements Keith Hoeller mentions, I believe. The numerous contingents on its organizing committee, including both vice presidents, have ceded no control to any tenured faculty member. And while NFM expresses willingness to work with unions, it taked dictations from none. Most contingents with any involvement at all in the struggle for equity are painfully aware of the questionable help they can expect from teachers' unions composed largely of faculty from the other of academia's tiers. Indeed, that's why NFM was formed.
Steve Street
Lecturer, SUNY - Buffalo State College
Member, NFM Communication Committee
Part-time Concerns Representative, United University Profession
Buffalo, NY
3. vcvaile - September 11, 2009 at 11:44 am
The NFM Coalition is a diverse group, representative of adjunct diversity as well as issues, which also diverse and, despite common thread of seeking fair treatment, vary widely with type/size of institution and from one geographical region to another. Speaking for myself, I am confident that NFM respects this diversity of perspectives. Negotiating differences will be both challenge and source of strength.
4. hopems - September 13, 2009 at 12:58 pm
There is a misleading statement in this article. Adjuncts who do not have work for a particular time period ARE eligible to apply for unemployment.
5. charlescarrillo - September 14, 2009 at 10:03 am
I'm adjunct at an accredited university and I love the classroom experience. Retired, health plan in place, I can afford to work for the low pay offered. The position is a delightful challenge, the pay covers my costs plus an occasional lunch out. Overall, the students respond positively, my annual reviews are strong, fellow faculty express approval and respect for my professionalism. Two subject-focused MAs but no doctorate underpin my knowledge base. This is heaven for a person who came to higher education late in life. Of course, the reality is that my position could end at any moment, but thanks for the ride, I accept the conditions.
It is a pity that universities and community colleges must resort to non-tenure faculty to make their programs work. But until academe can restructure costs and income streams to attract and retain the best PhDs in greater quantities, how can the plight of adjuncts improve? At the moment our existence depends upon the dysfunction between income and expenses at institutions. When things improve, the adjunct phenomenon will largely disappear. It is amazing that such dedicated people fill the adjunct ranks, but we perform the work of Sisyphus. Higher education must restructure its expenditures (and) or gain larger funding to cure the problem.
6. redweather - September 15, 2009 at 10:24 am
Charles, you can't be serious. Academe has no intention of restructuring costs and income streams in order to attract and retain the best PhDs in greater quantities. Inexpensive adjuncts provide academe with exactly what it wants: low cost indentured servants.
As for whether NFM accomplishes anything, and I'm a member and plan to contribute time and money, I'd say it's a longshot. But as my good buddy Bob Dylan once said, "When you got nothin', you got nothin' to lose."
7. wolf123 - September 15, 2009 at 03:21 pm
I am fortunate to have a great union to represent adjunct issues. My problem is that of survival - getting enough classes to pay the bills. while I usually have 3 classes, this semester I have only 1 class. I am also applying for full time positions at the local community college, but find a pattern where they seem prejudice agains hiring their current adjunct faculty. I didn't notice this until a few full time professors mentioned this to me as I try to learn why I didn't get an interview (a step in the hiring process). I don't know if there is anyway to prove that and bring it to light, so I appreciate your input. Also, how do you join this group?
8. shariyat5 - September 15, 2009 at 05:15 pm
I hate to break it to you but adjuncts are always mistrated in some form or another. Less classes,low pay, no health care, or even apathetic unions who cliam there is nothing they can do. Stats add that part timers would do better to NOT apply at the schools they teach at simply because its a two tired system and adjucnts are just like the civil rights movement.I could write a book after teaching in seven distcricts.The inequities are Endless!Your only hope is apply where they dont know you.Good luck!I have collegues who have been part time for 37 years!
9. bodnfm - September 15, 2009 at 07:42 pm
Wolf123-
You can join our group by following this link http://www.newfacultymajority.info/national/
I am happy to say that our organization is gaining steam. Membership is free for now.
Earl Yarington, PhD
Board of Directors
New Faculty Majority
10. laoshi - September 16, 2009 at 01:43 am
All of you who take adjunct jobs and then complain about it can't see the forest for the trees. If we refuse to take adjunct jobs in the first place, then colleges would have to recruit more tenure-track instructors. Then more teachers could collectively bargain.
As is, adjuncts are a form of scab labor. Scab labor hurts us all. Now the scabs want to organize? Boo-hoo-hoo my eyes water profusely. Why did y'all sell yourselves short in the first place?
Refusal is the greatest act of courage.
11. redweather - September 16, 2009 at 11:26 am
laoshi -- Adjuncts are not scabs. As for your tears, which I assume are an attempt at humor, adjuncts are not looking for those, feigned or otherwise.
As for selling ourselves short, were the job market a place of equal opportunity there would undoubtedly be fewer people accepting adjunct teaching assignments. Many of us are teaching as adjuncts because it is one of the only ways we've found to put food on the table. Refusal may indeed be an act of courage, but survival -- especially when it involves spouses and children -- can make refusal seem quite heartless.
In at least one respect, the colleges that hire us are to be commended. The adjunct faculty members that I work with are fully representative of the larger society with respect to age, gender, and race. The same cannot be said for the broader job market.
12. laoshi - September 16, 2009 at 11:49 pm
I refused an adjunct position just two months ago, after spending a summer waiting around for a tenure-track interview that never happened. I also have a wife and children. But I don't want to teach my children to be water-carriers for anybody, which means refusing to be exploited. I stould my ground and found full-time work teaching, and all of you can too if you muster your resources.
No, my tears aren't in spite, but in pity. I've been a union organizer during my first career, and know the power of the walkout. Employers love non-union workers, especially part-timers that they have no liability for. Non-union workers are the biggest threat to collective bargaining. In union parlance, we refer to these threats as scabs; it's the language of the collective bargaining which y'all suddenly want, not intended as a personal slight:
"The scab sells his birthright, country, his wife, his children and his fellowmen for an unfulfilled promise from his employer.
Esau was a traitor to himself; Judas was a traitor to his God; Benedict Arnold was a traitor to his country.
A scab is a traitor to his God, his country, his family and his class." (Jack London, The Scab)
I only accept full-time work, and I'm surviving. Those of you who have traditionally accepted part-time work, with no benefits, have been selling yourself short and betraying your colleagues in academia. As long as a majority of teachers are willing to accept the terms of adjunct employment, employers have no economic incentive to create full-time posts. That means less union-represented jobs are available for everybody, thankd to the pool of part-time employees willing to prostitute themselves that has created this situation.
Ironically, some of these scabs of education are now starting to organize. Where was their solidarity when they accepted the adjunct crap sandwich in the first place?
Survival is easy. Stand your ground and only accept decent working conditions for decent pay. Don't give the power to the bean-counters who see you only as pedagogical coolies, while sticking your knives in the backs of those with the tenured or tenure-track positions that you envy.
I truly wish everyone success in their careers. My words are harsh because it's time to wake up and smell the coffee.
13. redweather - September 17, 2009 at 07:01 am
laoshi -- First adjuncts were scabs. Now their traitors. You have a way with words.
14. redweather - September 17, 2009 at 07:09 am
That should read, Now they're traitors. (Oh for the days when we could review our posts before submitting them.)
15. mmlynch - September 19, 2009 at 04:40 pm
Scab, traitor, prostitute: these are indeed harsh words. I'm particularly concerned about the fact that the writer of these words, who may be male, is disregarding the gendered dimensions of contingent faculty exploitation.
"I only accept full-time work, and I'm surviving. Those of you who have traditionally accepted part-time work, with no benefits, have been selling yourself short and betraying your colleagues in academia."
I would want to know who cares for the writer's children, and/or what would happen if there were no spouse in the picture either to share the childcare or financial support.
There are many people, probably the majority of them women, for whom traditional full-time work is simply not an option, because of child-care or elder-care responsibilities, or because of personal or family health issues. Is the relative flexibility of faculty work -- not having to be on campus from 9-5, being able to work from home -- really sufficient to justify the extreme inequality between "part-time" and full-time pay, particularly when the flexibility is the same, indeed perhaps even greater for the full-timers than the "part-timers"? And when the "part-time" work, if it is done properly, is really full-time work for (less than) part-time pay?
Should the ultimate qualification for being a faculty member (whether full-time or "part-time") be whether or not you have a partner who makes enough money to support you and your dependents?
As for what one teaches one's children: I will teach mine that resistance against injustice takes many forms, as does collusion with the perpetrators of injustice.
16. hannah103 - September 22, 2009 at 06:04 pm
After being active in many contingent faculty movements and unions in several community colleges over the last 20 years, I can confirm others' comments that contingents get gains in any institution ONLY if the full-time faculty approve and, sometimes miraculously, support the cause.
But even if the NFM movement does build momentum and becomes "loud" enough to finally get many in charge to listen, it will all be rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic until, bottom line, the taxpaying public becomes motivated to pressure legislators to devote more state money to funding higher education properly, so that ALL faculty CAN be properly compensated. If a miracle federal law required contingent faculty to be paid pro-rata with full-time faculty, community colleges and public higher education would need to shut down.
What the taxpayin public sees, at least at the community college level, however, are a huge group of teachers who will teach their best and keep colleges accredited, no matter how little they are paid or how badly they are treated. Why pay more to politically unglamorous community colleges when they are doing "just fine" with nurturing, dedicated, professional teachers too professionally proud and nurturing to teach less well just because they are not getting compensated properly?
When the first nurses's union formed about a century ago, it took almost 100 years for RN's, who were even more exploited than contingent faculty, to finally get decently paid. Why? Because "real" nurses do not treat patients less compassionately because of low pay, and "real" teachers do not give students any less attention because of low pay. It was only when potential nurses finally got the message that they should not pursue nursing as a profession that a severe shortage of nursing students happened, resulting in a shortage of nurses that still exists today. Almost overnight, RN's became decently paid. Good old supply and demand driving wages.
Graduate schools also need to put ethics over money and loudly warn students wanting to become teachers in community and public colleges that their odds of getting a job in which they can actually support themselves after spending 80K on that Ph.D. is slim to none, and almost impossible if the graduate is over 45. Best to get a certificate to teach K-12.
I really wish this organization well, and I'm sure it won't lack for members. I'm afraid, though, that until there becomes a real shortage of contingents "willing" to give all the attention they can to their students for abysmal pay and institutional respect, that all the whining, bemoaning, shouting, organizing, venting, and lobbying will do little or no good.
I will bet, however, that if an when a real shortage of contingents happens, state and federal money will suddenly materialize, because despite their "lowly stepchild" status in many taxpayers' eyes, shutting down community and public colleges is NOT an option if we want to grow the economy again. It appears that the best action for contingents to take to improve their compensation and overall treatment is to move onto a different career.
17. laoshi - October 01, 2009 at 09:05 am
Yes, the writer of those words was male. Jack London wrote them almost 100 years ago. And he addressed them to two genders of that time: "No man (or woman)has a right to scab as long as there is a pool of water to drown his carcass in, or a rope long enough to hang his body with."
Since you've asked, my wife takes care of our children in the home, while I earn money to bring into the household. At night, she goes to school with the money I earn. Neither of us are prostitutes, scabs, or whiners about our condition.
As the previous poster has suggested, the best action for those of you who've sold yourself short is to move on into a different career. But unionizing when the very nature of your contingent assignment undermines the unions is an absurd proposal indeed.