At a school where I no longer teach, they (the adjunct faculty) are trying to move forward in having a voice in the shared governance and presenting adjunct issues to the administration. The adjuncts do have a seat on the faculty senate. In fact, the senate had just met the day before my conversation with a full-time professor who is not a new to the university community. In fact, she had just gotten tenure there. I mentioned to her that the adjunct faculty now had a seat on the senate and she told me she didn't know about that. I asked her if she knew about the process the adjuncts had in place to meet with the Provost over their concerns and she had never heard of that either.
Please note that the university is not a large one and adjuncts teach a significant number of courses in the liberal arts and other areas. They teach in the business school as well, although AACSB (business accreditation) limits the number of adjunct faculty members who can teach their courses.
I then ran into another full-time, tenured faculty member at the same school and she had not heard anything about the adjunct organization there or about their seat on the senate. Yes, I'll admit that this is an extremely small sample of full-timers, but it is an indication that further study or communication might be necessary.
Meanwhile, even if full time faculty are not hearing about the adjunct plight at their own institutions, the press is overwhelmingly moving forward with articles every week about how adjuncts are organizing across the country. Not only are unions cropping up on community college campuses, they are now at four year institutions as well. The Service Employees International Union, the leading group seeking adjunct membership, has also been joined by the American Federation of Teachers and even the AAUP, traditionally a full-time faculty organization, in recruiting adjunct faculty across the United States.
For specifics on this country-wide movement of unionization, I refer you to the Chronicle of Higher Education's multi-page article by Peter Schmidt in the April 18th edition. He points out that the new push from unions is using a strategy "that holds that sufficient union saturation of a given local labor market not only produces big gains at unionized colleges, but puts non unionized ones under pressure to treat adjuncts better, too". To put it plainly, "it's not over until it's over". Stay tuned, I am sure there is more to come.
