NFM campaign to help adjuncts get unemployment insurance.

Adjunct faculty who find themselves without work are often eligible for unemployment insurance. New Faculty Majority has launched a campaign to help adjuncts get the money they deserve. Employers sometimes claim that adjunct faculty have "reasonable assurance" that they will be hired in the future, but this has been successfully challenged in California and Washington. NFM president Maria Maisto says in a press release

In other industries, seasonal employees who face similarly precarious circumstances do not have to prove 'no reasonable assurance'; neither should college teachers who are denied continuing contracts. This situation stems from higher education's overdependence on contingent employment, which is devastating the teaching profession and is detrimental to education."

New Faculty Majority is a advocacy group fighting for adjunct and contingent faculty. This is the first of what will hopefully be many campaigns to improve working conditions for the 73% of the academic workforce that is not on the tenure track. Please help spread the word to adjuncts you know.

Update: Reliance on Adjuncts Drives Away Students

Earlier I blogged about a study by Allison Jaeger showing that when adjuncts teach introductory level courses, students are less likely to go on to take other courses in that field. The study had only been presented at a conference, but had been written up in the Chronicle of Higher Education.

The full peer reviewed version of a related study by Jaeger is now available. This study only covers one institution, but it is quite large. The final sample included 14,494 students at a "a large research-extensive institution located in the
southeast" presumably NC State University, Raleigh, the authors' home institution.

They examined ten variables to see if they would predict an eleventh, student retention. The potential predicting variables were

1. ethnicity
2. gender
3. high school GPA
4. high school percentile
5. rank
6. SAT verbal score
7. SAT math score
8. total SAT score
9. percent exposure to graduate student instruction
10. percent exposure to part-time faculty instruction
11. percent exposure to full-time faculty instruction

Of those only HS GPA, gender, number of hours attempted and exposure to part time faculty had any predictive value. Interestingly, exposure to part time faculty did not have as strong a negative effect on retention as being female.

One of their citations seems worth following up on:

Hagedorn, L., Perrakis, A., & Maxwell, W. (2002). The negative commandments: Ten
ways community colleges hinder student success. (ED 466 262).

I don't know what (ED 466 262) means, but the article seems related to this

Florida Journal of Educational Administration and Policy, Fall, 2007 by Linda Serra Hagedorn, Athena I. Perrakis, William Maxwell

Cal State Instructor Fired for Statement of Pacificism

Since the McCarthy era, teachers in California have been required to sign a loyalty oath before taking their jobs. Wendy Gonaver, a quaker and pacifist, asked to include a statement about her commitment to nonviolence along with her pledge to "defend" the constitution "against all enemies, foreign and domestic." She was summarily fired from her adjuncting position at Cal State Fullerton.

The LA times reports that the effect of the loyalty oath has mostly been to drive members of certain religions, mostly Quakers and Jehovah's witnesses, out of the California school system. The report gives examples of people who refuse to sign the loyalty oath because of because it implies that they must be willing to use violence. A couple months ago, a math instructor was fired from Cal State East Bay for inserting the word "nonviolently" into her loyalty oath. She was rehired after enlisting the help of the UAW. The Times says that other teachers refuse to swear allegiance to anyone but God. The paper gives a couple of examples of Jehovah's Witnesses being fired on these grounds.

This is an installment in our ongoing series about government efforts to crack down on the menace posed by people who take a principles stance against violence.

Link via Unfogged, where Alex points out that John Yoo must have signed one of these things to teach at Berkeley. This gives us grounds to have him summarily fired, since writing the torture memo is clearly an attack on the constitution.

Report: Reliance on adjuncts drives away students

Here's one that has been sitting in my "to blog" pile for a while.

Audrey Jaeger and Kevin Eagan of NC state have found that that when adjuncts teach introductory level courses, students are less likely to go on to take other courses in that field. The two looked at four state schools in the American southeast and found that when adjuncts taught "gatekeeper" courses, like Biology 101 or Chemistry 101, students were significantly less likely to go on to take other courses in the field.

The study was presented at the American Educational Research Association, and reported in the Chronicle here. Jaeger's web page also gives this citation for what seems to be the peer reviewed version of the research

Jaeger, A. J., & Hinz, D. (2008 - in press). The effects of part-time faculty on first-year freshman retention: A predictive model using logistic regression. Journal of College Student Retention: Research, Theory & Practice, 10(3).

.

Interestingly, the effect appears only for part time adjuncts, and not graduate students or non tenure track visiting faculty. This lets us know something about what in the mistreatment of contingent faculty really begins to hurt students. Students have very little access to part time adjunct teachers, and the teachers have extremely difficult schedules and no institutional support, even something basic like an office.

My division uses adjuncts for 60% of its courses, and as a two year college, everything we teach is a intro level course. This should tell the administration something about how counter-productive their strategy is.

AAUP releases data on contingent faculty

The AAUP just released a new report, the Contingent Faculty Index, 2006. It includes a table of over 2,600 colleges and universities and the proportion of their faculty who are contingent, that is not tenure eligible. You can look up your own institution! Here at SLU 35.4% of the faculty is not tenure eligible, compared to 52.5% for private baccalaureate colleges nationwide. The report also contains an essay on the effects of the reliance on contingent faculty "Consequences: An Increasingly Contingent Faculty" which concludes on this note

The nature of contingent employment is stark: an exchange of constrained teaching for minimal pay. The scholarship or collegial participation in shared governance of these faculty members is not of concern to the institution, and if fully 65 percent of the current academic workforce is employed in this way, the other 35 percent cannot be far behind.

Update:

More fun stats:

Auburn University: 63.3%
University of California System: ranges from 72.4 to 83%
Northwestern: 64.9%
Number of Doctoral and Research Universities with 100% contingent faculty: 13.