Liesl Orenic makes roughly $12,000 a year at a job that offers no benefits and no guarantees that the next day won’t be her last.
But in the last few years colleges and universities looking to cut back on labor costs have increasingly used part-timers as cheap substitutes for full-time professors.
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The result is that temporary positions once seen as stepping-stones have become permanent. “There have been people teaching part-time at Roosevelt for 11 years,” says Orenic. “At what point do you no longer become an adjunct and become a regular part of the university? At what point do you trade in the part-time existence for the benefits and higher wages of full-time teacher, which is what you are?”
For her efforts, she gets at best $2,000 a course, no health benefits, and no pension. A course can be canceled at any time, and if it is she won’t be reimbursed for preparation work. Once she finishes a course, the university is under no obligation to hire her again. The natural question is why anyone who’s not independently wealthy would do it.
In 1998, Columbia’s part-timers voted to be represented by the Illinois Education Association, which mostly represents public-school teachers. In February, IEA officials negotiated a contract for Columbia’s 450 part-timers. “Some professors got a 100 percent raise as a result of our new contract,” says Tom Suhrbur, an IEA organizer. “Members of our bargaining unit get a minimum of $2,000 a course. The top of the scale there is about $3,000 a course.”
It’s by no means certain that RAFO will sign up enough adjuncts to force an election, much less win 50 percent of the vote. Many part-timers are easily intimidated, afraid to take an aggressive public stand that might mark them as “troublemakers” in the eyes of prospective employers. There’s also the status issue: professors, even part-timers, see themselves as members of a professional class of scholars and ill suited for a union.
