In a case that holds national implications, the Metropolitan State College of Denver board of trustees has decided not to appeal a significant state district court ruling on faculty tenure protections written into faculty handbooks. In June, a Denver District Court judge ruled that the college violated faculty rights when it rewrote the faculty handbook to eliminate tenure retroactively.

The case began six years ago, when the board of trustees at Metropolitan State College of Denver rewrote the handbook. The Metropolitan State Faculty Federation, an affiliate of the AFT, filed suit in a Colorado court challenging the board's actions. As a story in the July/August 2009 issue of AFT On Campus details, the District Court judge ruled that the board's actions were legally void, and the rights of the faculty's tenure rights were restored. Last week, the Metro State board of trustees decided not to appeal the court's ruling.

AFT general counsel David Strom believes that "it was a significant accomplishment to convince a court that a handbook is binding and can confer vested tenure rights. Most employers believe that handbooks are policy statements, subject to change, that do not create permanent rights."

Ellen Slatkin, president of the Metropolitan State Faculty Federation, says the union will be working on new handbook language that protects faculty hired after 2003, when tenure rights were edited out. She also says that in a state without public employee bargaining, "we have to have collective bargaining so this can't happen again."

Just in time for "Just Ask," AFT's newly launched campaign to bring public attention to the people who teach the majority of classes to undergraduates today, is an illuminating  and spare commentary in Saturday's New York Times.  In "Quenching the Thirst for Learning," adjunct writing professor Katherine Jamieson tells why she keeps coming back to the job: "When I walk into my classroom and look into 20 pairs of eyes ready and waiting to learn, I can't turn away."

Jamieson opens with an overview of her situation:

I'm an adjunct professor, one of hundreds of thousands in an overeducated, unmoored, disposable work force staffing a majority of the nation's colleges and universities. At the community college where I work, I have no permanent desk or office, no telephone, no benefits and, to many, no name. When I calculate the time and money spent traveling, grading, answering e-mail, teaching and planning, my wages come to about $9 an hour.

Yet, she notes, her students make no distinction between the tenured and untenured who teach them. "They're oblivious to the internal wrangling of academia, and the heroic efforts of the unions to garner us a living wage. They're just looking for someone to teach them."

Most of Jamieson's piece is about the students she encounters and the complicated lives they bring to class.  Yet, as we are set to begin a new school year,  we can't help but note and pay tribute to Jamieson and the other "nameless" legions of adjuncts who bring opportunity to students of all ages and backgrounds.

It's not news that higher education is staffing its academic and research endeavors on the backs of a growing corps of contingent workers. But one group we hear little about is postdoctoral fellows. These are academic workers who, to advance their careers-and oftentimes in lieu of tenure-track job offers-jump onto research projects where they can trade their diligence and lab or research skills for pay a step above the stipends they received in grad school and little in the way of benefits. And in a tough job market, they can find themselves lingering in limbo for much longer than they intended.

One reason we don't hear from postdocs is that not many are organized into unions.  But today, we celebrate the fact that Rutgers University postdocs have spoken. Exercising their right under New Jersey's card check law, a majority of the 350 postdoctoral fellows working at Rugters University signed cards indicating their desire to be represented by a union. Today, the NJ Public Employment Relations Commission certified them. They will be represented by the Rutgers Council of AAUP-AFT chapters, which also represents grad employees and faculty at the university.

Read the press release here.

The new Rutgers union brings to three the number of postdoc unions nationwide.  The first postdoc union to form, the United Health Professionals at the University of Connecticut Health Center in Farmington, Conn. voted to affiliate with the AFT in 2004.  In their first contract, they were able to secure paid leave, paid sick leave, daycare scholarships, state employee health and pension benefits, and wage increases worth a 27 percent increase in the minimum postdoc salary in their first contract. They also got something invaluable-a raised voice in the university and statehouse.

Let's hope our friends at Rutgers will rapidly assume the same.   

We see in today's Washington Post report on President Obama's Michigan announcement signs that community college leaders share the FACE campaign's concerns about the need to target resources to address the academic staffing crisis:

[snip]George Boggs, president of the American Association of Community Colleges, said Obama's proposal would be the largest federal investment in community college history.

But he said the money cannot come soon enough to deal with the most pressing problems: a lack of money, staff and classroom space to serve students this fall. Many colleges have already mapped out their plans for the fall semester.

There is a question, too, of whether colleges will be permitted to use the new federal funds for their most urgent needs in faculty and teaching space.

We hope we can enlist community college leaders as allies in the campaign to achieve adequate staffing levels and compensation for full-time and part-time faculty.

Today, Rep. George Miller (D-Calif.) added blocks to the foundation President Obama laid down yesterday with the American Graduation Initiative. Rep. Miller, who is chairman of the House Committee on Education and Labor, introduced the Student Aid and Fiscal Responsibility Act. This legislation would pump money into student aid, target resources to community colleges and historically black colleges and universities, and also support front-end investments in early childhood programs, which, research shows, pay off with high school and college completion rates down the road.

Another selling point of the bill is that it pays for itself, using the $87 billion in projected savings from switching to a federal direct loan program.  It also takes $10 billion and directs it to deficit reduction (thus the "fiscal responsibility" in the bill's title).

The overall goal of this legislation and the President's initiative is to make the US the largest international producer of college graduates by 2020. Along the way, however, the President's and Miller's proposals would continue to address economic recovery, strengthen community colleges in their efforts to build a skilled and innovative 21^st century workforce, and provide boosts to the Pell Grants that include adjustments for inflation.

As the legislation works its way through the House, the AFT will be emphasizing the importance of ensuring that institutions have adequate staff to make all this beefed up education delivery work.

After 40 long years of advocacy and a roller coaster ride of hopes raised, then dashed, academic employees in the University of Wisconsin system finally have the right to decide whether they will be represented by a union. On June 29, Wisconsin Gov. Jim Doyle signed the 2009-2011 biennial budget, which includes a provision extending collective bargaining rights to more than 20,000 UW faculty, academic staff and research assistants.

The new right extends to 6,600 full-time, tenured and tenure-track faculty and 13,100 academic staff-defined to include part-time and full-time lecturers, adjuncts, advisors, IT technicians, and others. Another provision gives 3,200 research assistants the right to determine whether they want bargaining representation through the state's first card check-off process. That option would allow research assistants at UW-Madison and UW-Milwaukee to be represented by the UW Teaching Assistants' Association (TAA) or the Milwaukee Graduate Assistants' Association (MGAA) when 50 percent plus one of the RAs in the unit have signed cards.

The UW academics are the only non-management class of public employees who have lacked bargaining rights in the state. It has been a very sore point on every campus, says Rep. Cory Mason (D-Racine), who was co-sponsor of a motion that passed within the Legislature's Joint Finance Committee supporting collective bargaining rights for UW faculty and staff. "This is all about fairness," he says.

What does it take to get more students--new and returning--through college?

The U.S. Department of Education wants to know and has been sponsoring forums this month to seek practical advice on what works. But is the department listening to those on the ground and in the trenches?  The faculty?

Upon taking office, Pres. Barack Obama stated that by 2020, the U.S. population must resume its place in the world as first in the percentage of adults with postsecondary degrees or credentials.

To that end--and as part of its implementation of the Higher Education Opportunity Act of 2008-- the U.S. Department of Education embarked on a listening tour this month, sponsoring forums in Denver, Little Rock and Philadelphia,  to gather up examples of best practices that bring students to college and ensure that they persist through to a degree. The department is looking for ways to leverage federal postsecondary programs to produce a more educated and skilled adult population.

Education officials also want to know what obstacles institutions and students encounter on the path to degree completion. And, because the goal is to reach all adults, not just college-aged students, the department is interested in both traditional and nontraditional-aged college students. With a net cast this broadly, the administration has indicated community colleges will be significant players in achieving the goal.

That's a good start, but at the last forum, which took place June 23 at the Community College of Philadelphia, it was surprising to see a panel filled with administrators and nonteaching staff. Had not AFT Higher Education director Larry Gold signed up and CCP Faculty and Staff Federation Secretary Jennie Smith attended as a vocal observer, the three DoE officials might not have heard about how the trend of hiring fewer and fewer full-time faculty is affecting persistence and degree attainment.

California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger suggests that community college districts should hire more part-time faculty to help the state close its $24.3 billion shortfall.  Already, community colleges have been cut $800 million, which districts say will result in an estimated 250,000 students being iced out next year.  Now, the students who remain will find themselves plunk in the middle of a California's growing staffing crisis. It's suddenly starting to look a whole lot worse.

According to a story in the June 8 Sacramento Bee, the governor has asked the legislature to suspend portions of state education code that require 50 percent of a community college district's educational expenditures to be used for teacher salaries and which set a systemwide goal that 75 percent of instructional hours be taught by full-time faculty.

"This is almost silly," says Marty Hittelman, California Federation of Teachers president, a former math community college professor. "Under these kinds of economic conditions, districts don't have to keep to those 75:25 requirements anyway.

The bigger issue, says Hittelman, is that "if the Legislature enacts the governor's current budget proposals, our students and the society we live in are not likely to recover for decades."

In back-to-back elections this spring, part-time/adjunct faculty teaching at two private colleges, the Manhattan School of Music and Cooper Union, have voted to unionize. The new unions are affiliated with the New York State United Teachers/AFT/NEA.

While salaries are always a worry to people who make their living in the arts, as most of MSM and CU teachers do, of greater concern is having job security and some say in how the work is determined. At both colleges, the faculty say administrators haven't played fair with them.

Head over the jump to read about each union's story.

AFT Michigan has added another notch to its belt, as nontenure-track faculty at Michigan State University voted by a two-to-one margin for representation. The new union, the Union of Nontenure-Track Faculty (UNTF), will represent 650 part-time and full-time nontenure-track faculty on MSU's East Lansing campus. The mail-in ballot election was overseen by the Michigan Employment Relations Commission and the votes were counted May 29. The final tally was 240-113.

Job security, health insurance and wages are the top concerns of the UNTF members, who work on year-to-year contracts. "Although I have been treated well in my department," says sociologist Ralph Pyle who has been teaching at MSU for 12 years, "I feel that I would have more piece of mind if I knew that my job was secure."

"What matters to me most is having a voice," says Naoko Wake, a visiting assistant professor in MSU's Lyman Briggs college. "Now we will be real citizens of the university community."

The victory is part of a national trend of nontenure-track organizing. In Michigan, faculty have been on an exceptional roll, with AFT Michigan-affiliated unions recently organized at the University of Michigan, Wayne State University and Henry Ford Community College. Next month, the union hopes to pick up more when part-time faculty at Western Michigan University will also be voting for union representation.