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Twin Cities Daily Planet: Macalester adjunct faculty fight for fairness

Macalester College contingent faculty are uniting to form a union and make improvements on their campus and beyond. Make sure you check out the Twin Cities Daily Planet story about the movement to raise standards in higher education and share SooJin’s story.

The TCDP writes:

“Pate noted a general trend in the way money is spent at Macalester – fewer dollars going to professors and more going to the administration – as a reason for contingent faculty members to unionize.
“Case in point: his salary. The president makes three quarters of a million dollars. He is one of the highest paid college presidents in the nation,” she said.”

The High Cost of Adjunct Living: St. Louis

Quickly rising tuition has resulted in record levels of student debt, putting higher education out of reach for more and more working families.
At the same time, universities are shifting resources away from instruction. Today, more than two-thirds of all faculty work on a contingent basis, facing low pay and no benefits or job security. Many do not even have access to basic facilities such as office space, making it increasingly difficult for adjuncts to do their best for their students.
Being a university professor, once the quintessential middle-class job, has become a low-wage one.
St. Louis is no exception. Find out how much it takes to afford the basics as an adjunct working in the area, read and share The High Cost of Adjunct Living: St. Louis.

Diane Rehm Show Profiles Adjunct Working Conditions, Unions

Adjunct union organizing and working conditions were featured on the Wednesday, April 16th broadcast of the Diane Rehm show. Show guests included Maria Maisto of the New Faculty Majority, the Chronicle of Higher Education’s senior reporter Peter Schmidt, who recently wrote the aptly named article, “Power in Numbers“, about Adjunct Action campaigns in Boston, plus guest administrators from American University (where adjuncts are united in SEIU Local 500) and Kansas State University.

You’ll want to hear and share this important hour-long discussion about how adjunct faculty are working to solve the crisis in higher education.

You can listen by clicking the “Listen” icon at the top of the page: http://thedianerehmshow.org/shows/2014-04-16/growing-reliance-adjunct-professors

St. Louis Adjunct Faculty Discuss Higher Education, Unions at Symposium

This spring, adjunct faculty across the country are forming unions in order to raise workplace standards and build a national movement in higher education. On Saturday, April 12, 50 faculty from 10 St. Louis area colleges and universities met at the Missouri History Museum to build on the momentum they are creating to win a voice in their profession and to reverse the trend of low pay, few benefits and little job security.

“Adjuncts are teaching the majority of classes at many universities, yet we are excluded from any conversation about our own work conditions and how the university should be run, said Jeffrey Maret, an adjunct at Lindenwood University. “We need to get organized to get back in the dialogue and this symposium is a great way to get the conversation started.”

Part-time and non-tenure track faculty are now the majority of faculty at our colleges and universities and their numbers continue to increase. At the same time, revenues and tuition have increased steadily over the last two decades while spending on instruction has declined – and it’s adjuncts and their students who are suffering as a result.

A new study released at Saturday’s meeting explores how difficult it is for an adjunct instructor in St. Louis to afford basic necessities like housing, health care and food.

The report called the High Cost of Adjunct Living: St. Louis, finds that 80 percent or nearly 8,600 faculty members in the St. Louis area were not on the tenure track in 2011. All of the faculty at St. Louis’s for-profit colleges—close to 1,050 faculty employees—do not have access to the tenure system. The median pay per course was $2,700 for master’s level courses at private not-for-profit institutions and $3,000 for doctoral level courses at private not-for-profit institutions. This means an adjunct teaching 12 courses a year—an extraordinary course load—may have an annual income of just $32,400 below the 13 classes a year an instructor must teach to afford a median-priced home and utilities in St. Louis.

Lindenwood University adjunct instructor Andrew Nelson said, “There's real momentum for changing the status quo and that's reflected in the turnout today. Adjuncts in St. Louis are coming together, just like they are in other cities, to talk about how we can raise standards in higher education by uniting for our families and students."

RSVP for the St. Louis Adjunct Symposium on April 12

Saturday, April 12th, adjuncts from across the St. Louis metro area are coming together at the Missouri History Museum to discuss the most pressing issues facing contingent faculty: fair pay, job security, and the lack of voice within the university system.

You’re invited. Click here to RSVP.

The symposium will include panels on the contingent academic workforce and contingent faculty organizing, a discussion of campus organizing, and a number of speakers. It runs from 2 p.m. to 6 p.m.

Adjunct Action is a campaign organized by the Service Employees International Union, and is uniting adjunct professors across St. Louis-area campuses to address the crisis in higher education and the troubling trend toward a marginalized teaching faculty that endangers the profession.

Join us to discuss how we can work together to change those trends and give adjuncts and contingent faculty a voice in the system. Click to RSVP.