Publishing in art history is often a complex and expensive endeavor, not least because of those pesky permissions issues.
Now four university presses—the University of Washington Press, Duke University Press, Penn State University Press, and the University of Pennsylvania Press—will share in a collaborative grant of $1.257-million from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to support the publication of first books by scholars in art history.
The Art History Publishing Initiative, announced in January, will aid in the publication of 40 books over a period of five years, each work appearing in both print and digital editions. The AHPI says that the four presses will acquire books individually, but will cooperate in areas of permissions, production, marketing, and e-publishing.
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20 Responses to $1.257-Million for First Books by Scholars in Art History
william_barnett - March 10, 2011 at 5:00 pm
I deplore the overuse and exploitation of contingent faculty as much as anyone. But your comment about 4-year institutions is naive. Yes, they could reduce enrollment to fit more closely the number of full-time faculty on staff, but such a reduction in revenue would allow non-instructional expenses to become overwhelming. Many of those expenses are fixed, regardless of enrollment. And if they were to do as you suggest, the labor market for contingent faculty would be even worse!
ccenglishprof - March 10, 2011 at 5:49 pm
I remember well the “Freeway Flyer” hell I was a part of in the years after graduate school (1986-93). My hourly rate was about 31% of what full-timers at Los Angeles area community colleges made and, at that time, part-timers had no shot at health benefits. (Gigs at 4 year schools were a bit better.)
And Mr. Sweeney is absolutely right about adjunct faculty improving. If you get a lot better as an adjunct it’s usually because you worked hard at self-improvement. Few institutions invest in part-time faculty support and professional development given that the individual faculty member could walk away at any time, even in the middle of a term.
Colleges and universities will continue to be addicted to the adjunct/contingent labor market if they can save 50-65% in labor costs. If you are an administrator what incentives do you possibly have for jacking up your labor costs? Workplace equity? Fairness? There’s no demonstrable evidence that pass rates or other gross measures of student success will increase if your adjunct faculty member is paid better. From the administrator’s standpoint, the basic tenets of this article hold true and a response to the article would be to say “Yup. That’s the way of the world.” (I once had a dean say to me with a biiiiiiiig smile, “Oh come on now. We all know that this is a plantation system.” I often wondered how often she used that metaphor…)
The most powerful thing that all faculty can do, full- and part-time, is to relentlessly negotiate to decrease the disparities between full-time and part-time pay. For most faculty this commitment is a 15 to 20 year proposition. If colleges and universities have less financial pay-off for having huge numbers of classes be taught by adjunct/contingent faculty, they won’t rely on that kind of labor.
Currently my college pays part-timers 87% of what a full-timer makes. So the disparity is only 13% (When I first came here in 1996 that disparity was 35-40%, so we have made real progress). The college has committed to 100% parity though when that will be financially possible is unknown. Adjunct/part-time faculty have health care benefits offered if they carry 50% of a full-time teaching load. Long-term part-timers make more hourly at our college than salaried full-timers teaching an overload class. Obviously, our college’s commitment to pay and workplace equity is pretty unusual. But I am proud of that commitment and while yes, like all public community colleges we have some abysmal deadwood faculty (full- and part-time), we also have more hellaciously devoted and talented adjunct faculty than I saw in my days as a mobile itinerant lecturer/teacher in L.A.
wilkenslibrary - March 11, 2011 at 1:58 pm
Over-reliance on contingent faculty threatens all of the constituencies of higher ed, and the sooner we acknowledge that, the better.
Researchers like Dan Jacoby (“The Effects of Part-time Faculty Employment upon Community College Graduation Rates”, Journal of Higher Education 77:6 p 1081-1103, (Nov.-Dec 2006) and Audrey Jaeger (* Eagan, M. K. & Jaeger, A. J. (2009). Part-time faculty at community colleges: Implications for student persistence and transfer. Research in Higher Education, 50(2), 168-188), to cite just a couple of articles, show the negative effect on retention and graduation rates for students whose instructors do not have contractually mandated office hours and are just not available on campus beyond their teaching time.
Full-time faculty suffer when contingent faculty are hired in ever-greater numbers because as the number of students stays constant or increases, the proportion of people to advise students, staff committees, do curriculum development, and participate in governance decreases.
Department chairs and deans have an ever-growing cohort of part-time faculty to oversee, faculty who frequently teach at the margins of the regular working day which makes mentoring them challenging.
Rather than hiring new contingent faculty, or even new full-time faculty, colleges should follow the example of the Vancouver model (see an earlier CHE article, http://chronicle.com/article/A-Canadian-College-Where/123629/, for details), offering new courses to current part-timers. In addition to teaching, all faculty should have the same obligations, on a pro-rata basis, to advise, serve on committees, and have the same sorts of on-campus responsibilities. And salaries and benefits should also be pro-rata.
A system like this would secure a path to eventual full-time employment for those who desire it while offering job security to those who prefer to teach part-time. It would make all faculty active participants in the life of the college.
To say that we have no options to reversing the trend of the past several decades that threatens the quality of higher education in this country is short-sighted and misleading. We have an obligation to our students to provide them the best possible education, and the only way that we can do that is by integrating current contingent faculty into the fabric of our institutions in substantive and meaningful ways.
Betsy Smith
Adjunct Professor of ESL
Cape Cod Community College
IsaacSweeney - March 11, 2011 at 5:57 pm
Your post gives me hope. Pro-rata seems fair.
I agree that negotiation is key, but you run the risk of being seen as a bothersome employee. And since there’s little security in your adjunct job, you could easily lose it. I guess getting everyone organized is helpful, but man, that’s a lot of extra work for people who are underpaid and overworked.
And there’s story after story of adjuncts who speak out and get “not rehired.”
butteredtoastcat - March 12, 2011 at 2:12 pm
Let’s just hope that Schwarzenegger appointee and multi-millionaire David Crane doesn’t set a new agenda in California:
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2011/02/27/IN5N1HUAMS.DTL
butteredtoastcat - March 12, 2011 at 2:26 pm
Betsy Smith,
With all due respect, what adjuncts do you know have the time to serve on committees and have other departmental responsibilities? Most adjuncts I know are trying to keep their heads above water teaching at 3 or 4 different places. At most schools, the number of hours an adjunct can teach is limited and the pay is often greatly inferior to that of the full-timers. This forces adjuncts (who would like to pay their rent, utilities, and other basic expenses) into teaching at multiple places. Most adjuncts are lucky if they remember all the different due dates at their colleges, and to ask them to sit on committees (uncompensated, I am assuming) is just insane.
Now, if you are the kind of adjunct who has a spouse at home bringing in the larger paycheck, then I can see taking a single adjunct position at a single institution and serving gratis on various committees. This kind of person will have a great advantage in full time hiring because the department knows and likes her or him. The poor single breadwinner adjunct, unfortunately, does not have the same kind of face time with the department and is at a distinct disadvantage. Long-term career goals versus rent/utilities/gas is not a decision any adjunct should have to make.
wilkenslibrary - March 12, 2011 at 3:22 pm
Buttered toast, check out the Vancouver contract. It’s not just that contingent faculty stop being contingent once they are regularized, it’s not just that they have advisees and office hours and committee assignments, it’s that they are PAID on the same salary scale as full-time tenured and tenure-track faculty and receive pro-rata benefits, too. I would never advocate doing all of those things for free, but when your time is fairly recompensed, and when you have job security and the prospect of becoming full-time, should you so desire, it is an entirely different proposition. If we want to provide quality education to our students, we need to have all faculty with the same rights and responsibilities. As the old Campus Equity Week button says, “Teachers’ Working Conditions=Students’ Learning Conditions. We need excellence on both sides of the equation.
Betsy Smith
tuxthepenguin - March 14, 2011 at 9:59 am
Yes, but…
Given the other discussion about this, I placed an inquiry at my school. While they might not strictly speaking be illegal, you would be hard pressed to explain how a question related to the duties of the job, asked during an interview, is not part of the hiring decision. What would you think of someone asking about your race in an interview? Why would you ask the question in a formal interview setting if it were not a factor in your decision?
Look at the question that was presented above: “With juggling the demands of your writing and your very busy family life, how do you intend to do this job?” How could the family possibly not be a consideration in the hiring decision?
Edit: I commented on this post to make sure that others don’t read it and just assume it’s okay to ask any question that pops into their minds. This is most definitely a gender issue.
drangie - March 14, 2011 at 10:05 am
There seems to be some disagreement as to what is and is not an “illegal” question. The HR office at my institution has given a different ruling than what I read here. Could the editors at the CHE offer some helpful information here by referring this to a legal expert who can give us a definitive answer? This whole article and comment thread would be more useful with some clarification of the legal issues.
For the record I don’t ask any of these questions when I’m interviewing candidates–I just would like to have the legal facts at hand, since that’s at issue here.
tuxthepenguin - March 14, 2011 at 10:14 am
Just to make it clear, this is from the EEOC website. It is not an official opinion of the commission, but it nonetheless is relevant, coming from an assistant legal counsel.
http://www.eeoc.gov/eeoc/foia/letters/2007/pregnancy_discrimination.html
“Although asking applicants about pregnancy or their marital or parental status does not violate Title VII, a fact finder is likely to presume that the answers to such questions formed the basis for a selection decision. As a result, if the selection decision is challenged, the fact that the employer made such inquiries will be evidence that the employer unlawfully used sex or pregnancy as a factor in the selection decision.”
Thus one is being careless when trying to find the exact line where a question becomes ‘illegal’.
kgodwin - March 15, 2011 at 11:02 am
Another solution to the problem – find other jobs. Administration will find the money if people are no longer willing to work for the low wages paid to adjuncts. Or adjuncts could unionize separately from full timers and strike. I know the faculty union at my college consistently throws adjuncts under the bus, even though more than two-thirds of the union members are adjuncts.
gsudduth - March 15, 2011 at 12:11 pm
This has been going on since I can remember.
cowdogz4 - March 15, 2011 at 1:54 pm
The problem with adjuncting in the hope of eventually being hired-on full time is that there are so many more adjuncts than there are full time positions opening up. As long as the impetus for hiring adjuncts is economic rather than pedagogic, there will never be enough full time positons available to cover the rising number of students, especially in the core course areas of English, math, and science. And the trend towars online courses only aggravates the problem by making it apparent that student facetime and individual attention are not really necessary to produce a successful student .
Perhaps a law requiring colleges to employ no more than say, 50% adjunct faculty, or to open no more sections of a given course than can be covered by full-time instructors would help, but that would impact the “open admissions” policies of most ccs, which are already affected by oversubscription to classes. With states withdrawing funding and students already screaming about rising tuition and fees, the only thing left is higher district taxes, but even then the revenues are likely to go towards upgrading anything but salaries and working conditions for faculty, part time or full time.
It may be that kgodwin has it right: if you can’t find full time employment and can’t afford part time, go do something else.
11250382 - March 15, 2011 at 2:58 pm
If he does, Jerry Brown can always get rid of him.
Ilene Sandman - March 16, 2011 at 2:24 pm
Louder! Encore! And many thanks Mr. Sweeney.
Ilene Sandman - March 16, 2011 at 2:28 pm
Thanks Mr. Barnett. Your reply to Mr. Sweeney’s article brings a little more clarity to our predicament within an even larger picture for adjuncts across the board. At any rate, I think selectivity of students and professors is a privilege that private colleges and universities are much more apt to use than either public 2-year or public 4+ year colleges and universities would use. Public universities such as the University of Illinois, Northeastern Illinois University and many other public higher education academies are easier to be admitted to because they are less expensive than such colleges/universities as De Paul and Loyola and much less expensive than Northwestern and the University of Chicago. I don’t know for sure, but I am assuming that these more expensive universities use far fewer adjuncts than public colleges and universities. Also, the two-year public colleges can hire teachers with less than a PH.D. Most (public and private) 4+year colleges and universities require the PH.D. and that usually means full-time tenure-track professorships. Of course, there are PH.D teachers at the 2 year public colleges, but they are often hired as adjuncts which I believe is depressing. Not that I think it is okay to hire Master’s Degree teachers as mostly adjuncts because that does annoy me. What is needed to help solve this now old and getting older “tradition” of hiring more part-time than full-time faculty? Besides the obvious, money, what is mostly at stake, as Mr. Sweeney points out, are the students. Higher education is at risk of being “de-professionalized,” “corporatized,” and disassembled piece by piece, inch by inch until all we have left are a population of men and women who might still aspire to freedom of speech, but just don’t know why or how they may reverse the process of what could become a massive “dream deferred” tragedy. “What happens to a dream deferred? Does it dry up like a raisin in the sun? Or fester like a sore and then run? Does it stink like rotten meat? Or crust and sugar over like a syrupy sweet? Maybe it just sags like a heavy load. Or does it explore?” (Harlem: A Dream Deferred by Langston Hughes).
Ilene Sandman - March 16, 2011 at 3:08 pm
We have. It is causing a little friction as separatism can do, but when we began to consider unionization here, we wanted the full-time union, and even though they solicited our joining, it was done so weakly and vaguely, we opted for the other union for adjuncts that went full force for us. We were happy, but as unions evolve, it has not been easy. However, I am happy to announce both unions are beginning to work with more solidarity and mutual concern here in Chicago and elsewhere. Kgodwin, I hope your unions become more cooperative and mutual in the nearest possible future.
tufff - March 17, 2011 at 11:50 pm
- Go do something else.
Yes, that is what I did several years ago. I had an adjunct offer from a local college. When I inquired about full-time work, I was told that the college employed many adjuncts. They said that most of their adjunct faculty worked at several colleges. Benefits? They had none.
“There are whole departments”, they said, “without a full-time employee on staff”.
Sensing that this was an impending disaster for our previously highly regarded American higher educational system, I voted with my feet and never looked back. (I told them to stuff it.)
I still sometimes think that I would have enjoyed the “academic life”.
I still read the Chronicle!
- But I will not cheapen my labor, or the labor of my colleagues. It’s time to say, “No” to the deterioration of American higher ed.
robat345 - March 20, 2011 at 6:23 pm
I have been adjuncting for 5 years, both at community colleges and at universities. I love teaching, and bring to the profession 20 years of pharmaceutical and academic research experience, a masters degree and postgraduate education classes. I try to follow the scholarship and new developments in my field, although there is no budget in the schools where I teach to send me to professional development or meetings. I am well aware of the statistics that are cited in proof of adverse effects of adjuncts on community college students transferring to four-year colleges. The cost savings of community colleges when contingent faculty exceed 70% is astronomical. I know adjuncts who are teaching 7 courses to support their families, without retirement or benefits. I also know full professors who are teaching only one and one-half course equivalents (research classes). I drive 400 miles a week to teach 4 classes and often accept night assignments in order to continue teaching. I offer my students unpaid office hours and additional review sessions before exams. My time with family is severely curtailed due to paper grading and course planning: many additional unpaid hours. University and college professors should align themselves with part-time faculty in order to eliminate the slave-labor conditions that characterize part time college and university employment. We are colleagues in the struggle to improve the quality of education.
dobe2434 - January 9, 2012 at 4:52 pm
Temple University biologist, Tonia Hsieh, who studied with Professor Full at Berkeley, analyzes lizards’ movement in hopes of finding clues to better prevent falls among the elderly. She’s profiled in today’s Philadelphia Inquirer: http://www.philly.com/philly/health/20120109_Learning_from_lizards.html