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.
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