Earlier this week U.S. Secretary of Labor Hilda Solis appeared on NPR's Talk of the Nation.  During that interview a question was raised about the working conditions of part-time faculty, specifically at community colleges.  The Secretary's response (excerpted below) worried some activists concerned about contingent faculty working conditions.  They took the Secretary's answer to imply that part-time faculty were not committed to their students.

"If that were the case, we would be very concerned about that as well" stated AFT President, Randi Weingarten.  "However, having worked with the Secretary and knowing her concern for workers in all professions, we were sure that was not her intent and so we approached the Department of Labor seeking clarification."

In response, Secretary Solis made the following statement:

Adjunct faculty are being particularly hard-hit by the financial crisis at the state level. They deserve to be represented in collective bargaining, and their collective bargaining agreements should be respected. I certainly was not implying that adjuncts are not committed to their students, or that they are anything other than excellent educators.  In fact, my involvement with California community colleges has shown me that they are committed professionals who are dedicated to helping students succeed. What I wanted to get across is that, too often, adjunct faculty do not get the level of compensation or professional supports that full-time faculty receive to advise students academically, follow students through their academic careers, develop the college's curriculum, etc. Too many adjuncts, I noted, wind up needing to move from college to college each week just to put together a small living. 

                                                          --Secretary Hilda Solis

We appreciate the Secretary's concern and commitment to improving the working conditions of our members and her desire to make sure that she was clear about her support of part-time faculty.  We will continue to work with her and the Administration in general on finding ways to address the staffing crisis that our colleges and universities face, now even more acutely than before.

Excerpt from Talk of the Nation after the jump.

Some shocking news being reported today about the link between investment in faculty and staff and student success.  Apparently, according to an upcoming report, institutions that invest more in instruction and student services have improved rates of persistence and attainment.  Wow-who would have thought that possible?

The report does state that the findings are ones that "neither faculty around the country worried about declining funding for faculty positions nor critics of higher education who point to the wasteful growth of expenditures on non-instructional use are likely to be happy about."  This presumably because the report finds that increased investment in student services has a higher correlation to student success than does investment in instruction. 

However, I suggest we not take the bait that this is an either/or proposition.  I am going to go out on a limb here and suggest that the real message is that if we are serious about persistence and attainment, we are not going to simply re-program or innovate our way to success, we are going to have to invest in the human endeavor that is education-and that means investing in student services and instruction, particularly at the schools that serve the students with the most needs. 

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.   

Late Saturday night, the Oregon Senate voted unanimously to put the principles of  the FACE campaign into Oregon Law.  The Senate's 30-0 vote follows last week's nearly unanimous 54 to 1 vote in the House on HB 2557, the Oregon Faculty and College Excellence (FACE) Act. The bill is now scheduled to be signed by Oregon Governor Ted Kulongoski.  This will represent the first time that components of AFT's Faculty and College Excellence Act is officially included in state statute.

"This is a great step for contingent faculty and for Oregon's higher education system," said David Rives, AFT-Oregon President-elect and part-time community college instructor who has taught English as a Second Language for the past 15 years. "I'm thrilled that we're finally getting public awareness about the faculty staffing crisis."

The FACE campaign presses for more full-time faculty and pro-rata pay and benefits for contingent or adjunct faculty. Dozens of AFT-Oregon members have attended hearings and written their legislators in support of the bill.  While FACE legislation introduced around the country has drawn significant attention to the staffing crisis in higher education and resulted in progress toward solutions including increased pay equity money for part-time faculty and money to convert part-time positions into full-time positions, this is the first time that a bill with the FACE title and principles has passed a state legislature.

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.

Had someone asked me who I thought would be a good person to serve on the National Advisory Committee on Institutional Quality and Integrity (NACIQI), I probably would have said something a bit different than those who were asked.  I might suggest that perhaps the administration should have some folks on that panel who would be willing to ask accreditors about their wishy-washy policies on the hiring and treatment of contingent faculty.  I might suggest that they have someone who would ask them why, while the regional accrediting agencies have elegant language about the role of full-time faculty, they seem unable to use their policies and practices to even encourage colleges and universities to invest in a stable full-time corps of faculty.  I might even suggest that faculty be more involved in the accreditation process from NACIQI all the way down to institutional-site-visit teams.  But hey, nobody asked me.

The ubiquitous Kevin Carey recently posed a question that we care a great deal about:  "Do Full-Time Faculty Help Students Complete College?"  Kevin's take, over at The Quick and the Ed (and Brainstorm), is that there are a lot of "correlation/causation issues to work out here" and lots of other factors to account for in answering this question. Ultimately he wonders if there is any good research he is unaware of on this topic and if not, why?

A few folks have weighed in regarding some of the existing research that is out there, research that we have been compiling here, but the basic point that the body of research that exists is relatively small, is accurate.  On the other hand it is increasing at a fairly rapid rate as the academic staffing situation becomes both more apparent and of more concern-that is, of enough concern that people are now looking at the impact of the changes.

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.

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.