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March 2009, Volume 23, Issue 1 - Assessing “Associate Faculty” |
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Originally published in the Advocate in April 1994.
By Jim Prickett
For the past fifteen years the district has opposed every effort to bring a measure of job security for hourly faculty. They have insisted that all hourly faculty are hired for only one semester no matter how long they have been teaching at SMC – 15 years or 15 minutes.
That barrier has been broken: by the time you read this, the district will have offered one year con-tracts to 23 hourly faculty.
But hourly faculty and the Association are critical of most of the specifics of the agreement: one year contracts would be offered to no more than 25 hourly faculty who have (1) been teaching at least four semesters, (2) have student evaluations and retention rates above the departmental average, and (3) have student GPAs within the departmental average, will be granted one year contracts. These instructors will be called ―Associate Faculty.‖
All hourly faculty agreed that the number of 25 (5% of the total of hourly faculty) was absurdly low. This was accepted only as a beginning.
The current plan allows hourly faculty members who have been teaching for at least two years to be eligible for consideration. Hourly faculty generally believe that this threshold is far too low. In a report to the negotiating council the hourly committee recommended that ―at least eight‖ and preferably ten semester of teaching should be required before one could be considered for Associate Faculty status.
As hourly chair Chuck Nelson put it, the original intent was to create a system whereby highly skilled teachers who have demonstrated a commitment to the college over a number of years ―would be encouraged to stay with the college and in return for their excellence and dedication be given an modicum of security.‖
However, the current plan does not reward long term commitment to the college. In the committee only the Association representatives pressed for greater reliance on seniority. We, like most hourly faculty, were disappointed that we were unable to achieve that, but are committed to continuing the ef-fort.
Other full time and hourly faculty raised additional questions about the criteria. One former department chair reviewed the data of faculty teaching the introductory course in his discipline and discovered that ―none of our current full time faculty or our retired full time faculty now teaching part time would have been eligible as Associates.‖ (Five of the faculty members had retention rates and/or GPA’s which were too low, while the other two had GPA’s which were too high.) He also noted that such matters as student grades reflected varying standards and objectives and were more of a ―statistically generated artifact‖ than a reflection of a single shared standard.
At a recent department chairs meeting, many chairs noted that the names generated by the above criteria included many teachers who they thought were only average and excluded many who they thought were outstanding.
Given the imprecision of these categories, it was suggested by the Hourly Committee that ―advancement to the eligible list should require success on only two or three comparative measures,‖ that the statistics should be ―calculated for a multiple of semesters rather than a single semester,‖ and that comparisons be made for comparable courses.
More important than these criticisms, however, was the basic goal of the Hourly Committee which was that ―chair choice must be eliminated or at least constrained within constricting guidelines; length of service is the preferred guideline and a department review committee is the preferred vehicle for any remaining element of choice.‖
For most hourly faculty, length of service is in-deed the preferred guideline. My own belief is that department chairs would find the use of length of ser-vice as a major guideline would make their decisions easier. Certainly people who have given years of ser-vice to the college deserve some consideration for that commitment.
In spite of these weaknesses, I still believe that the agreement creating ―Associate Faculty‖ repre-sents important forward movement. Once we have created a group of hourly faculty who have some form of job security, it becomes much easier to nego-tiate how large that group should be and what criteria should be used to evaluate them. It has taken a long time, but the issues of job security and seniority are on the table, and we are committed to moving for-ward on them.
From 25 Associate Faculty in 1994, we have grown to over 500 in 2009, and our contract, which has developed and matured over the last 15 years, has become the model for future statewide legislation.
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