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December, 2002 Volume 17, Issue 3 - Battle Lines Being Drawn |
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by Martin M. Goldstein
When I first got involved in part-time faculty issues some years ago, we struggled and floundered just trying to *define* the myriad problems that beset us; today, a scant four years later we find ourselves working out the shape of the solutions. We have moved from defeatist isolation and anger to professional pragmatism and confidence. The future is becoming clearer, and the shape of things to come is emerging from the mists of conjecture and hyperbole and becoming a definable, achievable reality.
COCAL V, as reported on last month, initiated this recent sense of accomplishment; the recent Northern Regional CPFA Conference on Defining the Professional Status of Faculty, November 16 at DeAnza College in Cupertino just added to it, big time.
Consider that Jane Buck, president of the AAUP was there. Head of the most prestigious academic union in the nation, she firmly and eloquently placed the part-time equity movement at the head of their agenda. If you read nothing else on this issue ever again, read her speech printed adjacent and consider yourself well-informed.
Or consider that she just appointed Chris Storer, Legislative Analyst for CPFA, and founding Chair of the organization, to "Committee A" at the AAUP, the Committee on Academic Freedom and Tenure, their oldest and most prestigious Committee, on which only one community college teacher -- and no other part-timer -- has ever served.
And note that Linda Collins, past president of the statewide Academic Senates was also there. And Rich Hansen, head of FACCC. The heads or former heads of three of the most important full-time teachers organizations, national and statewide, were at a brain-storming session on part-time issues in a community college in Cupertino on a Saturday. Something's up.
So let's try to summarize the sense of the conference so we can see why all these planets seem to be in alignment, allowing us to make that both leap from problem definition to solution construction.
First, you have to understand that *all* of higher ed is under attack right now, so that having their flanks fully exposed by an angry and devisive part-time moment would be suicidally self-destructive. This is not cynicism; it's reality, and it's a big factor in the equation.
Linda Collins, another impressive intelligence, discussed many of these related attacks on higher education in her remarks, including recent changes to the accreditation standards, the accountability movement, and the power of the new for-profit institutions (think University of Phoenix) and distance-education providers. There are a lot of enemies out there, and all of higher ed must hang together right now, or most assuredly we will all be hung out to dry separately by corporate greed and it's bastard stepchild, "flexibility."
Everybody's getting this. And given that education seldom prospers in wartime, especially in a state with a $20 billion deficit, the sense of the group was clearly that instead of chasing-our-tails trying to devise mythical parity percentages, we should unite around a unified unbundled conception of teaching professionalism and protect the profession itself. In effect, we redefined the job of defining "parity" into the job of defining our vision of what our profession should be. Hey, we're teachers; we know how to think and create.
As Chris Storer put it, "By the end of the day everyone had come to deeply understand that this task, set to us by the Board of Governors, is not just about getting more compensation for part-time faculty. Rather, it is truly about the faculty's having a real opportunity to undo some of the damage to our profession, our institutions, and our students, damage that has occurred over the past 30 years as faculty work has been unbundled and degraded by the increasing corporatization of higher education under the guise of cost cutting forced by underfunding." That's a mouthful, but it's all true.
It further became clear to all that any attempt to define the professional expectations (and remuneration) of part-time faculty as anything *less* than 100% of those of full-time faculty are merely efforts by greedy or inefficient districts trying to get their hands on the PT Compensation Fund money for purposes other than PT faculty salaries. The lower they set "equity" the sooner they get the money. Apparantly the idea that students deserve the equity of having faculty members who are equally supported by the institution has not entered their minds, much less the sense that fairness and justice are part of why there is a university in the first place, so treating your own employees badly is an inherent contradiction of their own mission statement, as well as a bad way to treat people who are molding the next generation of citizens.
The conference was aided considerably by the presence of union and Academic Senate participation from San Francisco City College, where there is strong faculty commitment to the basic principles that teaching should not be unbundled, and that teachers' work and responsibilities are varied and varying, and that's what being a professional means. They are workshopping the future in their attempt to set the professional expectations of part-time faculty at a load-based 100% pro-rata percentage of comparable full-time faculty members. Teachers are teachers, and teaching is teaching.
And that, essentially, is it. That's our vision of the future, the shape of things to come.. All teachers will be paid at 100% parity with all others at their level and experience, and all will be expected to contribute proportionally (based on number of classes) to the college community and their discipline.
Equal pay *and* equal work, and with the necessary demise of the 60% law, equal access to tenure's due process protections. You may be tenured for one or two classes, or three or four or the full five, but job security for your assigned load gives you academic freedom and makes you a full professional, and that's what's important. The only real difference is what load, academic and professional, you are committed to carry. Our Canadian friends call it "regularization," but we prefer "professionalization." Whatever you call it, it's fair and proper and it is where we are going to end up sooner or later.
Maybe that's why all those people showed up in Cupertino that day. The battle lines have been drawn and the battle joined for the soul of American high ed, and we, the part-timers, are leading the way. But we can only win if we are united with *all* teachers, in a system in which *all* teachers are equally respected as professionals. It's do-able. In fact, we're doing it.
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