#Adjunct Faculty Bear Brunt of Washington State Budget Deficit

…In December 2010, Jack Longmate published an editorial in The News Tribune (December 31, http://www.thenewstribune.com/2010/12/31/v-printerfriendly/1483951/adjunct-faculty-bear-brunt-of.html)

Something seems to have happened at the TNT website. The URL to the editorial no longer works. At the TNT website, a search of the author's last name "Longmate" turns up a 2009 editorial that he wrote, but not this 2010 editorial. The editorial appears to have been removed. The mysteriously missing editorial is reproduced below in its entirety as originally published.

Also available is a scanned in editorial as it appeared in hardcopy version of The News Tribune can be viewed at http://americanfacultyassociation.blogspot.com/2013/04/adjunct-faculty-bear-brunt-of-higher-ed.html

Adjunct Faculty Bear Brunt of State Budget Deficit

by Jack Longmate, Dec 31, 2010

In his Thanksgiving address to the nation, President Obama stated that “as long as many of our friends and neighbors are looking for work, we’ve got to do everything we can to accelerate this recovery and keep our economy moving forward.”

The President’s call falls on the shoulders of the Washington State Legislature, which, like the legislatures of nearly every other state, confronts the question of where to cut in the face of our $4.6 billion shortfall. When programs and services are cut, jobs are eliminated.

Since July, 35,000 state workers have been forced to take 10 furlough days, which seems mild compared to the fate of those who held the 8,200 state jobs that have been eliminated in the last three years. Governor Gregoire, in a 15 December letter, laments “no good options” remain on the table. Even tenured college faculty, whose jobs were once considered close to bulletproof, are vulnerable—Shoreline just announced the layoff of 13 of its 129 tenured faculty. But if tenured full-time faculty jobs are endangered, what about the majority of faculty who are non-tenured and part-time?

One might suppose that the lower costs of hiring part-time faculty would protect their jobs during austere budgets—part-timers are paid 50 cents on the dollar for teaching the same classes as their full-time colleagues; are not provided private offices, computers, or professional development stipends; and many receive no health or retirement benefits.

Also, part-timers offer colleges “flexibility” that tenured faculty do not. Like airlines that maximize profits by overbooking flights, colleges can offer courses which, if filled, generate revenue, but if not filled, can be cancelled without repercussions for the college. But certainly there are repercussions for the part-time faculty when their assigned classes are canceled or they are displaced or “bumped” by tenured faculty: they are out of a job (and possibly more than one job if they had to forego another opportunity to teach at another college).

Being “bumped” by full-time tenured faculty can be the result of the tenured faculty’s own classes not receiving sufficient enrollment, so the college, under contractual obligation to compensate the tenured faculty, displaces the part-timer. Bumping can also result from a tenured faculty’s own decision to teach an additional course or courses beyond his/her normal full-time teaching load, which is called teaching “overloads” or “moonlighting.” According to the Washington State Board for Community and Technical Colleges (p. 72), in 2009-10, the state’s 3,644 full-time instructors taught course overloads equal to 452 additional full-time loads.

This means that roughly 11 percent of all classes delivered by tenured faculty statewide were overloads.

The ability to voluntarily work overtime by teaching course overloads runs counter to shared sacrifices that many in the public sector are undergoing and comes at the direct expense of the impoverished part-time instructor, whose working conditions once moved retired state senator Ken Jacobsen to characterize our state’s community colleges as “a chain of academic sweatshops.”

The State Board for Community and Technical Colleges declared a financial emergency in 2009. The Washington State Legislature should call on the board and the two faculty unions (AFT and NEA) to immediately prevent full-time tenured faculty from teaching course overloads (overtime) during this economic crisis. This modest measure would be a way to protect the right to work of those willing to work and to “keep our economy moving forward.”

Jack Longmate, M.Ed., is an adjunct English instructor at Olympic College and secretary of the WEA-affiliated faculty union. He was also a founding member of the New Faculty Majority.

References to the article in other publications include:

(1) Washington State Board for Community and Technical Colleges (SBCTC) News Links of January 3, 2011 at http://sbctcnewslinks.blogspot.com/2011/01/news-links-jan-3-2010.html

(2) "Senate Committee Services Higher Education & Workforce Development Committee, Part-Time Faculty at Colleges and Universities" (A report commissioned by the Washington State Senate) at
www.leg.wa.gov/Senate/Committees/HIE/.../PartTimeFacultyRpt.pdf, footnote 184,
(3) The January 3, 2011 issue of the Capital Buzz, an on-line newsletter published by the Washington State House Republicans at http://houserepublicans.wa.gov/uncategorized/capitol-buzz-january-3-2011/