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Part-time Faculty Issues

John Martin John Martin is the Part-time Director representing Northern California

John Sullivan is the Part-time Director representing Southern California

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Confessions of a Tenured Professor

Seldom have we seen an article that so completely underscores the plight of part-time faculty in our institutions of higher learning, and almost never do such pieces flow from the pen of a long-time full-time instructor...with the notable exception of this personal essay that appeared in a recent issue of Inside Higher Education.

In his discussion of what he refers to as "ad-cons" (adjunct and contingent faculty) and their increasing presence as the majority on most campuses, Peter Brown writes, "The exploitation is indeed filthy, but for me and my tenured colleagues, this scandal is neither little nor secret: the vast majority of those well-educated, skilled professionals who daily teach millions of students in our classrooms are actually being paid far less than the workers who nightly clean them. Ad-cons are treated as chattel or as servants who can be dismissed at the will and whim of any administrator from departmental chair to dean or provost. And woe to those ad-cons who elicit the wrath of their campus presidents! They can be non-renewed without any due process whatsoever, simply zapped, either individually or by the hundreds. We all know this, but most tenured faculty colleagues choose to simply look the other way. C’est la vie. Tough luck. Life just isn’t fair. Keep on walking and change the subject."

Want to read more from this professor who actually helped start the New Faculty Majority, the only national organization advocating exclusively for part-time and contingent faculty? Click here!

So...Can I Really Get Unemployment This Summer?

In a word, YES.

If you're a part-time community college instructor, and you haven't been assigned to teach classes this summer, chances are that you qualify for unemployment compensation during the summer.

Of course, there's a lot more to it than that...but you owe it to yourself to get the facts, do your homework, and apply if you're eligible.

Go to our Part-time Unemployment page for all the details.

GPO/WEP ALERT!
Fiscal Commission Seeks Public Comments

Hundreds of thousands of educators and other public employees continue to be penalized by unfair Social Security offsets –the Government Pension Offset and Windfall Elimination Provision. NEA has been waging an aggressive campaign to repeal these unfair laws.

(See article below for more information on the GPO and WEP.)

The National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform, appointed by President Obama, has been charged with identifying policies to improve the fiscal situation in the medium term and to achieve fiscal sustainability over the long run. Entitlement programs such as Social Security fall within the Commission’s jurisdiction. The Commission's recommendations to Congress and the President are due by December 1, 2010.

The Commission will hold a public forum on June 30 and is also soliciting comments via e-mail.

E-mail the Commission at commission@fc.eop.gov. Tell them that Social Security Social Security is the cornerstone of the social safety net for America’s retired workers and that the program and its benefits must be protected. Share with the Commission your story about how the offsets have impacted you, or will impact you, when you retire. Urge Commission members to call for repeal of the Government Pension Offset and Windfall Elimination Provision.

What else can you do?

See if your Representative and Senator are cosponsors and contact them
Sign NEA’s electronic petition
Use the NEA Activist Toolkit to help advocate this issue

Part-time Rehire Rights

AB 1807, the Assembly bill currently under discussion in the legislature that would require all districts to establish rehire rights for part-time faculty, is generating a lot of talk on community college campuses. Most district administrators, as well as the Community College League (which represents district interests as opposed to faculty or student interests), have trounced on the idea like it was a virulent plague.

Most part-time faculty and a handful of unions--including CCA, as we noted in the article above--herald the legislation, while many full-timers remain uncertain at best and loudly opposed at worst.

So, what's the truth about AB 1807? What does it really mean, and what would it really do? Why do part-timers need it? Moreover, how does it relate to the current state of part-time faculty in California?

For a clearer picture of these and other issues related to part-time faculty rights--or lack of same--in our community colleges, take a look at this .pdf presentation on Part-time Faculty Rehire Rights.

Part-time Health Insurance Catch-22

Tracy Donhardt was thrilled that she and fellow part-timers in the School of Liberal Arts at Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis had found a way to get health insurance together. But when she asked the university’s human resources department for help getting the word out, the whole plan was, almost immediately, shattered.

Like so many other part-timers nationwide, IUPUI's non-tenure track faculty worked without health insurance. The new plan, developed by the Associate Faculty Advisory Board, of which Donhardt is president, wasn't going to cost the university a cent in contributions; it just gave the part-time faculty the huge actuarial benefit of being in a group.

Within a few minutes of sending an e-mail message to IUPUI’s parent institution, “The response was, basically, no,” she said. The problem, wrote Indiana University’s director of health care and welfare services was that “a department, organization or group of employees of the university cannot in any way offer or make available a group insurance plan to employees.”

Read the entire article--and the outraged comments from readers nationwide--from Inside Higher Education.

Faculty Equity: Vision for a New Progressive Era

You may not have gotten around to looking through the latest issue of NEA's higher education journal, Thought & Action--but there's one article in particular that you need to read.

The focus of this quarter's journal is "A New Progressive Era for Higher Education," and in it one professor posits that such a progressive vision requires complete and genuine equity for all faculty across the board. The author of the article, "Wouldn't a New Progressive Era Require Faculty Equity?," is Steve Street, who has taught both part- and full-time in several U.S. colleges and universities, and is the current part-time concerns representative on the State University of New York's Buffalo College United University Professions.

"In much the same way that in order to restore public confidence in a corrupt police force, payoff networks must be dismantled before hiring new cops on the beat or buying new cruisers, the system that created the two-tiered faculty--tenure-line and contingent--on our nation's campuses must go," he writes.

In order to further discussion among our members and colleagues, we have posted the full article here.

NEA Contingent Faculty Resolution

The following statement is the final, approved version of the contingent faculty resolution that contingent faculty and the NEA Resolutions Committee have been working on since the 2008 NEA Representative Assembly in Washington D.C.

Contingent Faculty and Professional Staff Protection

The National Education Association actively supports creating new full-time faculty positions within colleges, universities, and community colleges and, in so doing, giving priority to contingent faculty seeking full-time positions. Contingent faculty and professional staff are valuable and, in many cases, necessary to the programs of the colleges and universities. Therefore, they should be treated no differently than full-time, tenure-track, or permanent faculty or professional staff for purposes of employment conditions, including eligibility to bargain collectively.

However, the excessive use of academic appointments on contingent, temporary, non-tenure track, and/or multiple-year contracts may undermine the academic and intellectual freedom, opportunity for tenure, and participation in the governance structure. Institutions fail to fulfill their responsibility to provide adequate working conditions and educational support when contingent faculty have no office space or allowance for office hours and are forced to teach at multiple campuses, thereby undermining educational quality.

Equitable treatment of contingent faculty and professional staff must include:

Salary and benefits proportionate (pro rata pay and benefits) to their work, including course preparation time, office hours, committee assignments, and involvement in shared governance
Equal treatment with tenure system faculty regarding issues of resource allocation, including office space, access to phone and computer equipment, library facilities, secretarial support, fee waivers, and required professional development
Conversion from contingent positions to full-time tenure positions in programs that need or will benefit from more full-time positions due to growth, reassignment, or retirement. Contingent faculty who have demonstrated competence in the institution through positive evaluations should be offered the opportunity to convert into full-time tenure track faculty. Additionally, those seeking tenure-track positions should have the opportunity to present their qualifications in a fair and unbiased way for new positions. Institutions in collaboration with exclusive representation or appropriate governance procedures must develop and implement an appropriate evaluation system for contingent faculty to assure consideration for such positions.

The Association believes that equitable policies and practices must be in place so that contingent faculty are treated as institutionally supported professionals and can better serve students as an integral and valued part of these institutions of higher education. (2008, 2009)

COBRA Premium Assistance

For the hundreds of part-time CCC faculty who have been laid off due to the state's budget crisis--and for the fortunate ones who were covered by their college's health insurance plan when they were employed--perhaps one of their most pressing concerns is continuation of their health insurance coverage.

If you're one of those people and you elected COBRA continuation health coverage when you were laid off, you are entitled to a 65 percent reduction in your CIBRA premium payments.

For full details, go to our COBRA Health Insurance Premium Reduction page.

"One Faculty for All Students"

A coalition of academic associations has issued a joint statement, "One Faculty Serving All Students," calling on the nation's colleges to adopt a series of policies that would significantly improve the treatment of part-time faculty members. The statement was organized by the Coalition on the Academic Workforce, and has been signed by 14 disciplinary associations representing such major fields as anthropology, art, composition, English, foreign languages, philosophy and religion.

The statement reads, in part, that "[n]o matter the conditions, full- and part-time faculty members teaching off the tenure track are professionals who make indispensable contributions to their institutions. They are committed educators who often serve institutions for significant periods of time. A third of full- and part-time faculty members teaching off the tenure track in the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences have been in their current teaching position longer than six years; a fifth or more have held their current position longer than ten years. These faculty members effectively function as permanent members of the staff at their colleges and universities, yet institutions often perpetuate outdated personnel and compensation policies that assume non-tenure-track faculty members are short-term employees who will make up only a small proportion of the faculty."

The standards set forth in ther statement would represent significant changes for many colleges. While part-time health insurance is more common than retirement benefits, many many colleges do not offer even the barest form of health coverage. Likewise, per-course pay rarely meets standards of being "equitable" to that for tenure-track faculty members, and compensation for out-of-class work is almost unheard-of.

Read the article from Inside Higher Education, or read the entire statement.

MLA Calls for Part-time Equity

The MLA Delegate Assembly has passed a resolution calling for full- and part-time faculty members to “be eligible for tenure” and expressing the view that “[a]ll higher education employees should have appropriate forms of job security, due process, a living wage and access to health care benefits.” While the resolution passed in a 81-15 vote, the passage was not without concerns from delegates that the wording went too far – or not far enough. Ian Barnard, an associate professor of English at California State University-Northridge, said he wanted to see the resolution extended to include a call for all faculty to be eligible not only for tenure but also for full-time employment. Simply voicing support for a lecturer to continue to be guaranteed one course per semester was, he said, “really weak … a way for us to cop out,” for departments to avoid paying for health benefits and for adjunct faculty to continue bouncing around among many jobs just to make ends meet. Read the entire article from Inside Higher Education.

Social Security Fairness Act Reintroduced in Congress

Representatives Howard Berman (D-CA) and Buck McKeon (R-CA) have reintroduced the Social Security Fairness Act to repeal the Government Pension Offset (GPO)and Windfall Elimination Provision (WEP). The new bill number is H.R. 235.

The previous bill, which had over 300 cosponsors, expired at the end of the last Congress. When the new Congress convened this year, Representatives Berman and McKeon--along with 80 cosponsors--immediately reintroduced the bill, demonstrating their strong support for the issue. The Senate version should be re-introduced shortly.

So, What Exactly ARE the GPO and WEP...and Why Should I Care?

The Government Pension Offset (GPO) and Windfall Elimination Provision (WEP) aren't simple to explain. Congress adopted them in 1977 and 1983, respectively, out of congressional zeal to reduce federal budget deficits at the time and as a quick solution to pension "double dipping" abuses.

In brief, here's how these provisions work. Social Security law prevents "dual entitlement" (receipt of full Social Security and spousal benefits at the same time). In 1977, Congress began treating government pensions, such as those earned by educators, as Social Security benefits. The effect of this change was a dollar for dollar reduction in Social Security survivor benefits for anyone also earning a public pension. In 1983, Congress amended the law to a two-thirds offset. The WEP was enacted in 1983 to prevent people with relatively high-compensated government service and relatively low-paying Social Security-covered employment from having their Social Security benefits determined under the more favorable formula used for retirees with the lowest Social Security earnings.

These two little known amendments to the Social Security Act are dramatically and unfairly slashing the retirement benefits of tens of thousands of Americans -- teachers and other public school employees, firefighters, police, social workers, and other civil servants -- who are being penalized for their public service. The GPO and WEP affect at least one-third of America's education workforce, concentrated in 15 "non-Social Security" states, from Maine to Alaska. The list also includes highly populated states like California, Massachusetts, Ohio and Texas. But, because people move from state to state, there are affected individuals everywhere. The Congressional Budget Office estimates that the Government Pension Offset alone reduces benefits for some 300,000 individuals by more than $3,600 a year.

In education, some of the hardest-hit by both the WEP and GPO are part-time faculty, many of who worked in jobs where they contributed to Social Security before they became educators, or who work concurrently in academia as well as positions where they must contribute to Social Security. Once these individuals retire, they find their Social Security benefits slashed because they are also receiving a "public" pension--in the case of California educators, a STRS retirement benefit. In effect, they are being penalized in retirement for having worked in the public education system.

NEA is urging members to contact members of Congress immediately and urge them to cosponsor H.R. 235, concentrating on those who cosponsored last year's bill as well as all new members of Congress. For additional information, go to NEA's Legislative Action Center.

AB 381 - SDI Benefits Information

On October 11, 2009, AB 381 was signed by the Governor. This bill modifies the Unemployment Insurance code to allow community college academic bargaining units the right to choose to elect either all members of the bargaining unit, or only the temporary employees (that is, part-time faculty) within the bargaining unit, into the State Disability Insurance (SDI) program.

Previously, part-time faculty had nothing other than accumulated sick leave to use in case of a short-term medical disability, as most bargaining units did not provide SDI benefits for faculty. (At the time, state law required that if a public employer and the union negotiated SDI benefits coverage, it needed to apply to all members of the bargaining unit. Most full-time faculty are not in favor of this: on average, full-time faculty already receive 12 sick days per year plus access to a sick leave donation bank, making SDI coverage an unnecessary cost burden with no commensurate benefit.)

AB 381 changed this, allowing part-time faculty to participate in SDI even if the tenured or tenure track faculty of a bargaining unit choose differently.

State Disability Insurance provides short-term benefits for any physical or mental illness or injury, or a disability resulting from elective surgery, pregnancy, childbirth, or a related medical condition. It also includes Paid Family Leave (PFL), which replaces lost income to care for a sick relative or bond with a new child. Administered through EDD, SDI offers a minimum of 10 compensated weeks for pregnancy disability leave and up to 52 weeks for recovery from other non-work related illnesses. In addition, under AB 381, if a part-time faculty member were receiving unemployment compensation at the time of the disability and as such could not continue to receive unemployment, he or she would be seamlessly transferred out of UI and into SDI.

Facullty are encouraged to speak to their unit representatives to obtain full information about coverage under the SDI program. To read the text of AB 381, click here.

The Part-timer's Mandate

Take a look at the recent reports on part-time academic labor by the Modern Language Association and American Federation of Teachers, and you'll find a lot of positivism mixed in with the negative.

Taken at face value, these reports offer little that is new or heartening, stating instead what most contingent faculty and many academic labor activists already know: Exploitation of contingent academic laborers is growing in scale.

Debates about how much, to what extent, and at what cost both economically and pedagogically, remain uncertain. What is not uncertain is that more part-timers are being hired, exploited, and abused at more community colleges and universities around the United States than ever before.

So, what's the positive message in all of this bleakness? It's not the information in these reports: rather, it's the presence, timing, and potential application of the information in them. Read more here in Inside Higher Education...

THE LATEST NEWS ON AB 591

The 67% Part-Time Load Bill, AB-591 (Dymally D-LA), went into effect on January 1, 2009.

So: what does this mean to part-time faculty?

It means that a 5-unit science lecture class loaded at 33% of FTE load can now be loaded to a part-time faculty at two sections a semester for a 66% load. Likewise, a 4-unit foreign language class with associated laboratory can be loaded two to a semester to a part-time faculty.

Part-timers teaching 2-unit lab classes can now load three sections a semester to the 61% level without worrying about going over that heretofore-magic 60% limit. Further, part-time faculty teaching normal 3-unit lecture classes can now be loaded 3 to a semester with a 7% safety factor.

The good news for administrators in all of this is that the fewer part-time faculty teaching more units per faculty reduces the amount of support staff time required...meaning fewer paychecks, fewer schedule problems, fewer parking spaces, and fewer personnel searches.

Of course, this presumes that administrators will choose to allow part-time faculty to teach to the new 67% limit. The fact is, many colleges had a policy restricting part-timers to 55% or even 50% when the law was at 60%, simply because they were concerned that an errant part-timer could "accidentally" exceed the limit and demand full-time status. We suspect the same will hold true now that the limit has been raised to 67%, with some districts holding their part-time faculty to less than the maximum allowable loading in order to give themselves the "wiggle room" they think they need.

The Education Code

Or, What Every Part-timer Should Know
About the Law

The following is excerpted from the state Education Code, and relates to the so-called "67% Law" which limits community college part-time faculty to teaching no more than 67% of a full-time equivalent load.

To access the entire Education Code, go to http://www.leginfo.ca.gov/calaw.html.

For more detailed information on the Code of Regulations, including which agencies govern which Code titles, go to WestLaw at http://ccr.oal.ca.gov/linkedslice/default.asp?SP=CCR-1000&Action=Welcome.

87482. (a) Notwithstanding the provisions of Section 87480, the governing board of a community college district may employ any qualified individual as a temporary faculty member for a complete school year but not less than a complete semester or quarter during a school year.

The employment of those persons shall be based upon the need for additional faculty during a particular semester or quarter because of the higher enrollment of students during that semester or quarter as compared to the other semester or quarter in the academic year, or because a faculty member has been granted leave for a semester, quarter, or year, or is experiencing long-term illness, and shall be limited, in number of persons so employed, to that need, as determined by the governing board. Such employment may be pursuant to contract fixing a salary for the entire semester or quarter.

(b) No person shall be so employed by any one district under this section for more than two semesters or three quarters within any period of three consecutive years.

87482.5.(a) Notwithstanding any other provision of law, any person who is employed to teach adult or community college classes for not more than 67 percent of the hours per week considered a full-time assignment for regular employees having comparable duties shall be classified as a temporary employee, and shall not become a contract employee under Section 87604.

(b) Service as a substitute on a day-to-day basis by persons employed under this section shall not be used for purposes of calculating eligibility for contract or regular status.