In another act of amazing foresight and long-term thinking, the Washington State Board for Community and Technical Colleges has declared financial emergency which will allow community and technical colleges to more easily lay-off full-time faculty.  AFT Washington's press release is below.

State Board Votes to Declare a Financial Emergency to Expedite Faculty Dismissals
at Community and Technical Colleges

In a controversial vote, the Washington State Board for Community and Technical Colleges (SBCTC) today declared a financial emergency over the protest of faculty leaders throughout the state. A law created in 1981, RCW 28B.50.873, allows presidents at community and technical colleges to expedite the termination of full-time, tenure-track and tenured faculty and modifies some reduction-in-force processes outlined in collective bargaining agreements. This law does not apply to four-year colleges and universities.

Many faculty wrote to board members and testified at state board meetings protesting the action. AFT Washington, the union representing faculty at 22 community and technical colleges, is considering a vote of no confidence against Charlie Earl, SBCTC executive director, for his support of the financial emergency declaration.

"We are deeply disappointed in the board's decision," said Sandra Schroeder, AFT Washington President. "The financial emergency declaration is an unnecessary blunt object that will allow college presidents an easy way to resolve their bad management decisions on the backs of faculty and will impact the students' success in achieving their degrees."

Despite record-high student enrollments, a number of colleges had already eliminated classes and laid off adjunct faculty as a result of the state budget deficit.  Most had resolved their budget cuts without terminating full-time faculty.

Full-time faculty currently make up only about 40 percent of the college faculty workforce statewide. The remaining 60 percent are "perma-temps" - part-time instructors who are hired to teach from quarter to quarter.

Our community and technical colleges are the key to economic recovery for Washington. Supporting them makes economic sense in these tough times. For every dollar spent on higher education in two-year colleges, there is a 7% return on this investment - higher than average for most public investments. Because of the bad economy, over 9,000 additional students have enrolled since last fall, of which 15% are enrolled for the worker retraining programs; 31% are parents; 51% work full- or part-time; and 20% are currently unemployed.

Full-time faculty are the core of this recovery effort. Terminating them hurts students.

AFT Washington has posted a fact sheet on the financial emergency declaration on their web site at http://tinyurl.com/financial-emergency.

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AFT Washington represents more than 6,000 pre-K through 12 classified employees, para-educators, Head Start, and early childhood educators, and higher education classified, faculty, and professional staff in Washington State.

I know.  I should wait for the book, perhaps even the movie, but the article in last week's Inside Higher Ed about the new book coming out on academic staffing just keeps lingering in the back of my mind.  The new book Off-Track Profs: Nontenured Teachers in Higher Education by John C. Cross and Edie N. Goldenberg is an in-depth look at the issue of contingency in "elite" colleges.  Now it could just be the way the IHE article portrays the work, but I must say I am left with a number of questions.

As the cost of college continues to rise, as more and more working class and immigrant students explore college for the first time, and as more and more jobs require retraining and updating skills on a regular basis, community colleges increasingly have come to hold a critical place in our higher education system.  And with the passage of the recent federal fiscal stimulus package, community colleges are gaining even more attention as the Obama administration seeks to have community colleges serve a key role in our economic recovery.  They are fortunate to have an articulate and knowledgeable spokesperson for that cause in Dr. Jill Biden, wife to Vice President Joe Biden.

Dr. Biden, who was a professor at Delaware Technical & Community College for 15 years, and now teaches as a contingent faculty member at Northern Virginia Community College, was recently interviewed in USA Today.  In that interview when asked how educators can help students succeed, Dr Biden says this.

It's hard to underestimate the power of a personal connection between the student and teachers, along with other faculty, staff and specialists. I discuss mentoring in my doctoral thesis. A support network at all levels - academic, psychological, social and physical - is critical, especially for students who are the first members of their families to enter college. They don't necessarily have a parent or sibling who can help them navigate all of the challenges of choosing courses, finding financial aid resources and making their way through the system. Programs that provide mental-health support and early-detection systems for struggling students are also important.

And she goes on to talk about her effort to stay up-to-date with technology and work to better herself as an instructor:

Students definitely expect their teachers to stay up-to-date with the technology. I started as a chalkboard teacher, and now I use a computer lab, e-mail, online communications and other tools. This summer, I will be working to learn more about the technology systems used at my community college so that I can stay up-to-date. But I strongly believe that my interaction, personal contact and building confidence in my students remains the most critical part of my teaching, and I think my students would agree.

Clearly,  Biden is a committed faculty member. Her firsthand knowledge will make her a great spokesperson for these important institutions.  Our hope is that as the administration looks closely at the role of community colleges, we are able to engage in a  substantive discussion about funding and academic staffing. We believe all of our faculty should have the opportunity to develop their professionals skills and build the personal relationships as a matter of course that are so essential to helping students succeed. That's what Biden so articulately describes. 

Unfortunately, particularly in this recession, that is simply not the case.

So much happens during legislative sessions in the states each year that it is easy to miss important developments if you don't know where to look.  That is the case with the recent legislative session in the Old Line State.

Despite its "blue state" image, Maryland does not have what we would consider very progressive laws when it comes to collective bargaining rights for higher education faculty.  Community college faculty can gain the right to organize, but only through a complicated process in which Senators and Representatives of a  particular county can petition the full legislature for collective bargaining rights for community college faculty within their county or district.  And in the University system there is currently no legislation that enables collective bargaining for faculty.

But AFT Maryland has been working to change that and in this last legislative session they were able to get the legislature to take the first step in that direction on behalf of contingent faculty and graduate employees.

Deep inside the "Joint Chairmen's Report on the State Operating Budget and the State Capital Budget and Related Recommendations" on pages 167-8, you will see that the University of Maryland system has been charged with forming a working group including various stakeholders to study and report on "the status of graduate assistants and adjunct faculty in Maryland's state public higher education institutions."

"Examining the growth and use of contingent faculty and graduate employees in Maryland is long overdue" said Lorretta Johnson, AFT Executive Vice President and former president of AFT Maryland under whose watch this process was started.   "We know that these employees have been growing in number and doing more and more of the teaching in Maryland and yet their compensation and treatment is simply not commensurate with their professional responsibilities."

Yikes!  We got so caught up in the release of our new report American Academic, that we fell behind in our posting here.  So let's get caught up with a quick look at what has been happening out there on the nets.

• First off, Historiann, Sherman Dorn, and Professor Zero joined Dr. Crazy in responding to our questions about how they would change higher education if they could, but you already knew that from the updated header above (you did see the updated header, right?).
• In a moment of serendipity, the day The Chronicle of Higher Education reported on our new report, the other featured story was about St. John's University's decisions to convert 20 contingent faculty positions in their writing program into full-time tenure track lines.
• Meanwhile, Marquette University continues to debate how they treat their contingent faculty members.
• Over at Inside Higher Ed, Linda Muzzin from York University in Canada, considers what the recent contingent faculty strike at York teaches us about the treatment of that group of workers and higher education in general.

And of course, there are countless stories about faculty cuts all over the country-most of them contingent faculty cuts.  You can keep up with that news in the Recent News section of our Facebook page.

Today, the AFT releases American Academic: The State of the Higher Education Workforce 1997-2007. The report documents the ongoing growth of contingent faculty in higher education and the continuing shift away from tenure-track positions. The data available from the most recent ten years show not only a continuation of these trends, but a significant expansion. For example, in community colleges, only 17 percent of the instructional workforce is tenured or on the tenure track, and the proportion of full-time tenured and tenure-track faculty members at public comprehensive universities dropped by nearly 13 percent during that ten-year period. 

"The faculty trends revealed in this report represent a staffing crisis that threatens the quality of our nation's colleges and universities," said AFT President Randi Weingarten. "The truth is, disinvesting in faculty is unfair to contingent faculty, many of whom are miserably compensated. It also shortchanges students, who may have less access to a part-time professor who has to teach at several institutions to patch together a living."

The report , which is the first of an annual report that the AFT will be producing on the higher education workforce, provides more details on the instructional workforce as well as information on the non-instructional workforce in higher education.

Key findings from the report include: 

• The number of full-time tenured and tenure-track faculty members declined from approximately one-third of the instructional staff in 1997 to just over one-quarter in 2007.
• The increased reliance on contingent faculty and instructors is manifested in all sectors of higher education, although the mix varies by institutional type.
• Even if we focus just on full-time faculty positions, the trend toward hiring off the tenure track prevails.
• The number of noninstructional staff grew by 24 percent from 1997-2007, with the most significant growth in the category of professional staff, which increased by 50 percent.
• The number of administrators, the majority of whom were full time, also increased by a substantial percentage.

Read American Academic: The State of the Higher Education Workforce 1997-2007 (pdf) and explore the national data or find out about the staffing levels at any institution in the country at AFT's Higher Education Data Center. 

Update:  Now you can read the full press release on American Academic.  Also check out today's stories about American Academic in Inside Higher Ed and The Chronicle of Higher Education.   And check out the new ED BEAT blog over at Learning Matters who also picked up our new report.

This time it is the faculty at Owensboro Community and Technical College overwhelmingly voting "no confidence" in the KCTCS board actions and the president.  The vote was 73 in favor of the resolution of no confidence, 6 opposed and 3 abstained. That makes 13 of the 16 colleges where faculty have clearly stated their positions.  This chart out together by Roy Silver from Southeast Kentucky CTC demonstrates the widespread feelings of the faculty in Kentucky's Community and Technical Colleges.

We have been arguing for some time now that the academic staffing crisis needs attention at all levels-from the federal government down through the states to the institutional level and into departments.   So it is great to see the good work that the Modern Language Association has been doing on academic staffing to do just that, take the conversation and action to the disciplinary and department level.

Late last year, the MLA released a report on staffing levels in departments of English with policy recommendations for staffing in those departments.  Just recently, they have put that report into action with a new Academic Workforce Advocacy Kit with resources and guidelines for departments of English and other modern languages to pursue the issue of academic staffing at the campus level.  And today, as Inside Higher Ed reports, MLA is "sending a letter to all English and foreign language department chairs urging them to organize discussions and activism to draw attention to the treatment of adjuncts."  Read the letter.

This work is particularly important for MLA since English and related disciplines are an area that is so reliant on contingent labor.  We commend them for addressing this issue head on.  Let's hope that other disciplines-particularly those where contingent labor is a major issue-follow suit and start encouraging their departments and chairs to become advocates and put some upward pressure on institutions to address these issues.

Make it an even dozen.  That is the number of Kentucky Community and Technical Colleges where the faculty have voted "no confidence" in the KCTCS board of regents and president Michael McCall.  The faculty at Ashland Community and Technical College voted this week and the results were clear:  66 in favor of the resolution opposing the board's action to eliminate tenure for the KCTC system, with only six voting against and three abstaining.  Ashland CTC joins Henderson Community College who voted last week and ten other colleges who had previously cast votes of no confidence in the board and president McCall.  That makes 12 out of 16, 75 percent, of the colleges where faculty have expressed their lack of confidence in the leadership of KCTCS.

When the ballots were counted this past Friday, it was clear that graduate employees at Florida State University wanted a union.  By an overwhelming vote of 448-140, FSU grads voted in favor of the United Faculty of Florida being their sole representative for the purposes of collective bargaining.  The new union, the FSU Graduate Assistants United, will represent 2,800 graduate employees.

Key issues during the campaign were concerns about increasing workloads; substandard, inadequate pay; expensive health insurance that employees had to purchase and a lack of input on any of those working conditions.

"We teach a majority of the classes at FSU," said FSU-GAU Co-President Danielle Holbrook. "We are the largest group of employees on campus but we have been working without job security or health insurance. Our workloads have been increasing while our salary remains the same, which means in this economy we're being paid less each year. Without our labor, the university could not function, but we've had no legal voice in how we are treated, so we organized a union and are ready to negotiate with the university." 

The graduate employees in the FSU-GAU will be joining graduate employees represented by United Faculty of Florida (UFF) at the University of Florida, University of South Florida, and Florida A&M and become the19^th graduate employee union affiliated with AFT.  UFF represents the faculty at 12 universities and nine colleges in Florida and is affiliated the Florida Education Association/NEA/AFT.