Part-time faculty gaining strength as numbers rise

by Inger Sandal

(from Arizona Daily Star; Tucson, Ariz.; Aug 8, 2001; reprinted with permission)

At least half the students who take classes at Pima Community College this fall will have part-time teachers who don't get paid for preparation and office hours and often work other jobs to make a living.

The University of Arizona also uses adjunct teachers - part- timers who are paid by the course credit hour - but relies more on graduate assistants and nontenured faculty positions.

Colleges save considerable amounts of money in the short run, but increasingly vocal critics say poor pay, lack of health care and other benefits and lack of due process protections all add up to disincentives to quality instruction.

And that exposes students to faculty turnover and the loss of good teachers.

"It's not helpful to the students. It's a cheap way to educate students, but it's not as good an education," said Carol Bernstein, president of the American Association of University Professors, Arizona Conference.

State colleges have more than 8,000 adjunct faculty members, and up to 50 percent want to teach full time, she estimated. "It's been building up. Adjuncts have become much more a part of higher education."

Those numbers are part of the reason adjuncts are having success organizing statewide for the first time. Another is that communicating is easier by e-mail, so adjuncts are sharing information about a problem of national scope - Washington state added $20 million last year for equity for part-timers, and adjuncts in other states have been successful in obtaining benefits.

Arizona's adjuncts will join their counterparts throughout the nation and Canada in celebrating the first annual Campus Equity Week, Oct. 28 to Nov. 3, to publicize "the overuse and abuse of contingent faculty."

Pima College's fall semester starts Aug. 27, but psychologist Jim Lytle doesn't know exactly what courses he'll be teaching - or where - because that depends on student enrollment. He hopes to teach at the West Campus, but in past semesters has taught in Nogales.

He gives students his home telephone number and tries to meet those who need help on days he has class, but he also works in another field to support his family. "If I don't work as a gemologist, I can't make enough money to eat," said Lytle, who wants to teach psychology full time.

His wife, Heidi, recently earned a media communications degree at Pima College, and is taking more classes to enhance her online skills. Some of her favorite teachers have been adjuncts who ultimately left the college. "They put in a lot of work and they're not compensated," she said. One instructor, she said, "left to put more time into a family business because teaching at the adjunct level took up too much of her time for too little."

Adjuncts at Pima College earn $1,710 per three-credit course regardless of experience, and are limited to teaching two courses per semester. Some adjuncts only want to teach a class or two because they are retired or teaching is a sideline to their careers, ranging from art to law enforcement to small business ownership.

Pima College has had a guideline for the past 12 years that half of its student credit hours should be taught by full-time faculty members, with the exception of a community campus program which primarily uses adjunct teachers. The college had about 1,000 adjuncts and 340 full-time faculty members in 1999.

"We use less adjuncts than other community colleges, and that's been a conscious decision," said Pima College Chancellor Robert Jensen. He and writing adjunct Lee Shainen recently co-authored a column in the Adjunct Advocate, a national magazine, recommending that adjuncts get the same instructional pay as full-timers.

The column used a general formula - estimating that if roughly 60 percent of a full-timer's $40,000 salary, or $24,000 per year, is for instructional pay, then adjuncts should receive $800 per credit hour, or $2,400 for a three-credit-hour class. Pima College's faculty members are paid more than their peers statewide with an average salary of more than $48,000.

But Jensen said he believes equalizing adjunct pay will take time in Arizona, where community colleges receive less than 4 percent of the state's education funding.

"I think over the long run, if the trends continue to use more non- tenured faculty and adjunct professors, I think the pay is going to get better,"said Jensen, who predicts a "tremendous" teacher shortage in higher education.

"It really is in everybody's best interest, in creating the best school system for our community, to hire the best teachers and compensate them fairly," said Shainen, who is also chairman of Pima College's Committee for Adjunct Affairs.

Shainen said there have been recent improvements at Pima College. The adjuncts helped the college start a listserv - a single e-mail address that links all the campus and employee e-mail addresses - so anyone can ask questions and discuss issues, and got approval to add adjunct representatives from each campus to the faculty senate.

Adjuncts at Cochise Community College now have three pay steps based on duration of service and their educational degrees that range from $500 to $550 per unit. But some will actually lose money, despite the increase, because the college's board also reduced the unit teaching load to nine from 11 per semester.

Arizona's legislators need to heed recommendations recently made by the Governor's Task Force on Higher Education, said Dan Frey, a social studies adjunct teacher who is president of AAUP's Cochise College chapter.

The task force recommended 329 more full-time instructors be hired at Arizona's community colleges in order to achieve a 50/50 ratio of full- to part-time instructors - a figure Frey noted is desired by community college presidents but still low compared to Nevada's 65/ 35 legislatively mandated full- to part-time split.

It also recommended that lawmakers direct more money to community colleges, which today draw 400,000 students statewide, compared with 100,000 at the state's three universities.

"If Arizona doesn't act on some of the task force's recommendations, it runs the risk of being uncompetitive with other states for the best faculty," Frey said.

The report concluded that Arizona's community colleges operate in a highly competitive marketplace and their ability to offer competitive salaries to new faculty and to retain the best faculty is severely strained and at times compromised. Failure will diminish the community colleges' ability to produce a highly-educated and well- trained work force.

The universities want more students to come through the community college system, Frey said. That will put more pressure on the community colleges to produce students who flow seamlessly into the university as juniors.

David Menchaca, a doctoral student in English rhetoric and co- chair of the English Graduate Union at the UA, said graduate assistants, who are still in school, are sensitive to adjuncts' plight. "When we try to better our own work life, we make sure that we're not harming theirs," he said.

But Menchaca, who was an officer in the U.S. Coast Guard for five years, said he'd go into another field if he couldn't be a professor because there is too much uncertainty in being an adjunct. "I'd rather do something else than worry if I'm going have to a job next semester."

Contact Inger Sandal at 573-4115 or isandal@azstarnet.com.