In the fights over public-sector collective bargaining in Wisconsin, Ohio, and elsewhere, critics of organized labor have tried to paint public employees—including those in higher education—as a privileged group. Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker, for example, declared in one speech: “We can no longer live in a society where the public employees are the haves and taxpayers who foot the bills are the have-nots.”
The recent release of the American Association of University Professors’ annual pay report, on the surface, makes professors, even those from public institutions, look pretty well-off compared with the average American. In a New York Times article on the study, for example, one reads that the most recent pay increase was “small,” but that full professors at doctoral universities earn $127,296 on average. The full-professor pay at private doctoral institutions is higher ($157,282) than at public doctoral institutions ($118,054), which undercuts Walker’s point. But the casual reader may conclude that teachers in higher education as a group are pretty well-off.
In the large and growing community-college sector, however, The Times points out that “pay is substantially less” ($73,869 for full professors, according to the Chronicle). Moreover, the Times notes, across college sectors, more than three-quarters of teaching is done by “graduate student employees, part-time professors, and non-tenure-track instructors.” According to Andrew Hacker and Claudia Dreifus’s book, Higher Education?, adjuncts can make one-sixth the pay per course as full professors. Likewise, they note, with instructors effectively earning as little as $8.65 an hour, colleges have “helped create a highly educated part of the working poor.”
The assault on labor is particularly troublesome because it is for these lesser-paid positions, research finds, that higher-education unions can make the biggest difference in boosting wages. As Inside Higher Education‘s Dan Berrett outlined recently, unions make a much larger difference, for example, at the community-college level than at baccalaureate institutions. While research finds that collective bargaining at public four-year institutions has little impact on pay among full-time university faculty, “a significant difference does exist in the wages of unionized and non-unionized faculty at two-year institutions.” One study found that unionized faculty at community colleges earned 32 percent more than colleagues on non-unionized campuses.
Likewise, it is especially critical for faculty to be able to band together and enhance their voice at community colleges, where the need is greatest to reduce class sizes and course loads so that students can get more attention. As the American Federation of Teachers’ Sandra Schroeder argues, “Our working conditions are our students’ learning conditions.”
It is also important for community-college faculty in particular to organize in order to leverage political support for greater resources. Walter G. Bumphus, president of the American Association of Community Colleges, recently noted that “Last year we were awarded only 27 percent of all government dollars expended on higher education, while serving almost half of the country’s undergraduates.” Because community colleges cannot, like four-year flagship institutions, rely to the same extent on favorable consideration from alumni in state legislatures, it’s particularly important that they unite with other parts of the labor movement to fight for adequate resources.
If America is going to increase graduation rates and improve outcomes for college students, governors should cease the assault on labor unions in higher education. A closer look suggests that the public employees who do most of the teaching of students in higher education are not pipe-smoking tenured faculty at four-year institutions with six-figure salaries, but graduate assistants, lecturers, adjuncts, and community-college professors whose educational credentials and hard work suggest they deserve more, not less.
