By Harold Henderson
Part-timers rarely have organized, partly because they don’t think of themselves as part-timers and partly because they don’t work together and may not even see each other from one year to the next. But the biggest reason may be that they know how many others are waiting to take their place. Prestigious academic departments across the country continue to pump out new PhDs as if there were a 1980s baby boom for them to teach–when in fact academia has been a buyer’s market for more than a quarter of a century. Thus even prestigious schools that make relatively little use of part-time faculty themselves contribute to the problem. According to Linda Ray Pratt, who chairs the English department at the University of Nebraska at Lincoln, English departments nationwide awarded 1,080 PhDs in 1995 but listed just 605 available jobs, only 243 of which were likely to lead to stable full-time work.
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Why would presumably intelligent graduate students volunteer to become sellers in a buyer’s market, year after year, decade after decade? This unsavory situation has been sustained by the optimism of youth (I know I’ll get a full-time job), the opportunism of age (If we cut back on graduate admissions, who will teach all the introductory courses? Who will do the grunge work involved in research?), and just plain bad guesses about the future. Richard Stacewicz–who teaches history part-time at Columbia, Roosevelt University, and the University of Illinois at Chicago–says that when he started on his PhD “the prognostication for 1995 was wide-open because of [expected] retirements. I’d just completed a master’s, and they offered money [for doctoral study]. Nobody acknowledged that full-time positions would be replaced with part-time or fewer larger sections.”
Telling tales out of school has made Nelson something of a renegade among full-time tenured faculty. True, the American Association of University Professors has repeatedly viewed with alarm the trend toward a part-time professoriat, in reports published in 1980, 1986, and 1993. Its “Guidelines for Good Practice” defines exploitation of part-timers as failing to offer them “raises in pay, access to benefits, opportunities for promotion, or eligibility for tenure and the procedural protections essential to academic freedom.” The AAUP also holds that institutions relying heavily on part-time teachers hurt themselves in that they “diminish academic freedom, respect for teaching, and public confidence in higher education.” (Left unstated is the fact that every full-time position replaced by part- timers reduces the status and clout of full-time college professors, and hence of the AAUP.)
During October and November more than 360 Columbia part-timers (over a third of the part-time staff) did more than disagree with Gall. In a step rare for college faculty of any kind, they signed union cards, saying they want to be collectively represented by the Part-Time Faculty at Columbia (P-FAC), now an affiliate of the National Education Association. An election to decide whether this will happen will be held by mail ballot January 20 through February 3, supervised by the National Labor Relations Board. If a majority of those voting support the NEA, Columbia will become the first four-year private college in Illinois to have professors wearing the union label.
P-FAC members–who repeatedly emphasize that they love teaching and Columbia–don’t deny the existence or value of this kind of part-time faculty. But they know it’s no longer the only kind. And they suspect that it may actually be a minority, even at Columbia. They contend that many, perhaps most part-timers these days are in fact underemployed academics and artists who want full-time work but can’t find it–people for whom part-time teaching is not a pleasant sideline but a desperate necessity.
