Adjuncts Helping Adjuncts

As we are now seeing, adjunct faculty, along with full-time faculty and staff, are being approached by various unions to join in for the purpose of support in grievances, pay scales, and other issues.  Colleges and universities are being asked to provide the names and positions of employees to these unions, and because of the freedom of information laws, they cannot avoid doing so.  Unions are being pretty persistent in these efforts of late.

However, adjunct faculty, in some instances have already formed their own organizations, not to seek higher wages or deal with grievances, but more positively, to help in networking, professional development and sharing best practices in teaching.

In this week's blog, I want to share with you one such group that has been actively working together for 12 years.  It is the Maryland Consortium for Adjunct Faculty Professional Development (MCAPD).

Initially this group formed when one community college put out a call to other local colleges to invite a representative for a meeting where professionals in the areas of continuing professional education could discuss what the schools were doing in their work with adjunct faculty.  That first meeting had about 20 or so administrators, faculty and adjunct faculty attend.  From that point on, a monthly meeting was held where these folks could share best practices in teaching, administration of programs and various topics of interest to each college.  All found the meetings helpful in the area of professional development.  They were no longer alone in their work, but had a new group of colleagues with whom they could share information freely.

Important to these discussions is that the primary recipients of the work of MCAPD were the adjunct faculty. What seemed to be missing however, was a way to provide the professional development opportunities to a wider number adjuncts.  Thus, an annual conference was born.

MCAPD has now held yearly conference each first Saturday in October for seven years and is working on their 8th..  Besides a keynote address from outside of the organization, workshops and presentations are almost exclusively the purview of the adjuncts themselves.  The conference is well known around the Baltimore region and now draws some 300 adjunct faculty members who give up their Saturday to share and to network with others across the state.  The meeting has had rave reviews and is again planned for October 4th in 2014.

Beyond the networking and sharing, adjunct faculty are given the opportunity to offer a professional presentation and show others the great work they are doing in the classroom.  If you haven't heard of this group or the conference itself, I highly recommend them to you and hope you will take the time to join them online or in person at one of their monthly meetings as they prepare for this year's gathering.

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I encourage you to  join MCAPD on facebook.  Go to your facebook page and search MCAPD or go to the MCAPD website and click on the facebook link.  The Website where you will soon find information about this year's conference can be seen at ola.aacc.edu/mcapd  

Adjuncts' Goals

Posted recently in the Chronicle of Higher Education was a quote by the Provost of Boise State University, as he spoke to a local newspaper.  The Provost said "The goal is not to hire adjuncts who are doing this for their living.  The goal is to get the practical experience in the classroom from someone who is out working in their field".

Having recently been with some fellow adjunct faculty members at a local university, the nature of such a statement lit a serious discussion with one of my colleagues.  In fact, I had stated pretty much the same idea as the Provost to him.  I had obviously hit on a very sensitive part of his personal life.  He, like many of us, was teaching as a part time faculty member while trying to maintain a decent salary to meet his family financial situation.  His true love, also like many of us, was to teach; hopefully full time some day.

Admittedly, he and I are in very different stages of our academic careers and because of that, our goals related to teaching were clearly not the same.  That conversation gave me pause and when I saw the quote from the Provost at Boise, I was immediately taken back to my interaction with my colleague.  

What that situation exemplifies is that we adjuncts come to our contingent lives with our own stories, and while others would like to see us all the same way, we adjuncts like our full time counterparts, teach for very different reasons.  

As part of a team of authors writing about the needs, the demographics and personal goals of adjunct faculty, I saw that in a group of 1600 contingent faculty in Maryland, few were teaching to make a living. Very few were teaching at more than one school and relatively few were aiming at becoming full time faculty members via the adjunct route.  

That study was a follow up of one done five years before and though the first survey was based on only 800 respondents, the results were pretty consistent over the entire 10 years.  That does not negate the personal plight of my colleague and it certainly does not put all adjuncts in the same boat with the same oars.  We do indeed bring that practical experience to the classroom and perhaps that is akin to our greatest strength. However, we are a diverse group and colleges have diverse needs which we are available to meet. So, some of us do our teaching to "make a living", even though the Provost would rather hire faculty for their experience in the work force.  

So why do you continue to teach as an adjunct faculty member while being paid wages that are not even close to full time faculty? Visit this site for adjuncts' stories.

Adjuncts United (no, not an airline)

Almost every week in the Chronicle of Higher Education there's a new article on adjunct faculty.  Occasionally we can read about how a university has been more welcoming, has made benefits available to adjunct faculty or has allowed contracts to be longer than just one semester at a time. Times have changed slowly over the years for contingent faculty.  For many years, we had to scrape for courses to teach and we had to do that every semester.  It has long been an era of discontent, with nothing left to do, but continue the ritual, hope for as many courses as we could reasonably teach and go through that ritual over and over.  There were no organizations that made us feel welcome and represent us for any of the benefits that were given to our full-time faculty colleagues.

However, those times are changing. Notice, I didn't say they have changed.  This is a work in progress, although not a fast one.  Today, we are hearing more about adjunct organizations springing up.  A google search of adjunct faculty yields a variety of such groups.  Some are nationally organized and are often the subject matter of the Chronicle articles.  One university system (Maryland) had developed guidelines for adjunct faculty to organize in what is known as "Meet and Confer" in which representatives of the adjuncts might meet with university leadership to discuss issues of concern at their specific school.  It should be noted that these are state-wide guidelines and can be put into place with some variations at the college or university.  In other cases, adjunct faculty have organized through union membership. 

I invite you to join in a conversation about what is happening where you teach as an adjunct.  Please share how or if you are part of an adjunct organization, what has been addressed by the group, and whether there are indications that having the organized group has been beneficial to you and your colleagues. 

Obviously, changes are going on.  It remains to be seen how much change will happen and what the results will be. 

A New Place to Find An Adjunct Home

Hi
Adjunct Expectations is a brand new place for adjuncts or contingent faculty to hear about what's happening in the news and in our colleges and universities related to the life of adjunct faculty.   This is the very first post to the Blog.  I developed this vehicle based on my own history of serving as an adjunct faculty member for a number of different colleges over the period of the last 30+ years.  To be perfectly honest, I have also had full time work as a college administrator, former Dean, Higher Education Consultant as well as a previous life in a microbiology laboratory.  I currently continue my adjunct teaching in a masters program in management. Over the last 10 years I have been an actively engaged advocate for adjunct faculty and have been the co-author of a couple of papers dealing with what adjuncts want, where they come from, the environments in which they teach, etc.  What I have learned over these many years is that the plight of adjunct faculty has changed a bit, but it is now getting much more attention in the press than it ever had back in the day.

So, all that being said, this blog will try to continue the discussion, listen to all of you who are currently adjunct faculty, want to be adjunct faculty, or never want to hear that word again.  Hopefully, we can explore topics that excite you about teaching (even as an adjunct), talk about where you see yourself going next, ask for advice from us veterans, or anything that relates to the world of teaching as contingent faculty members.

Welcome to Adjunct Expectations!
Linda Martinak