Inside the Current Issue

Reports from the Front: The Adjuncting Experience

In this special section... The Tensions of Teaching Marriah Star Critical Adjuncting Kimora Reflections of an Adjunct Teacher Daphna El-Roy On Love, Hate and Adjuncting Dan Skinner Graduate Students: Sign your Union Cards! Andrea Morrell Against Tuition Remission, Against PSC Adjunct Unionization Spencer Sunshine The Value of Student Evaluations Jonathan R. Wynn Experts Ask: Do We Need Adjunct Pedagogy? Mark Wilson The New Proletarian Academy James Hoff Teaching Shakespeare with an Eastern European Accent Szidonia Haragos

Against Tuition Remission, Against PSC Adjunct Unionization

Spencer Sunshine

I want to present an analysis which runs counter to the logic that most graduate students and union bureaucrats hold: simply, that tuition waivers for students who adjunct classes, in conjunction with the PSC program of unionizing adjuncts to gain reforms while not working for structural changes in the adjuncting system itself, will have the effect of making the adjunct problem worse, not better. All graduate students who are adjuncting under this system are not merely scabbing - they are also actively working to destroy their own futures.

There are two premises behind this argument. The first is that the proposed tuition remission (which will supposedly cover all graduate students by 2009) most likely increase the number of lower-level graduate students who adjunct. Currently, the Graduate Teaching Fellowships (which have been beefed up in lieu of full tuition remission) are not available to Level III students; and when full remission is instituted, because tuition decreases as students advance in level, it will be more advantageous for students at lower levels (especially Level I, which now costs $2,860 a semester, but under the new Compact will rise every year) to have this waiver. In fact, the financial value of an adjunct position for a Level I student has now just risen from $2,400 a semester to $5,260 (wages plus tuition). One can assume that more students - and especially Level I students - will now be struggling to get these jobs, since their value has doubled. The waiver will be less valuable to higher students however, even if they are eligible, since their tuition will be lower.

Not just will this increase the number of inexperienced students who adjunct, it will forestalls the scant CUNY funding from being allocated to students in other ways. The tuition waivers will cost CUNY money because they will constitute a large loss of tuition revenue which will have to be made up; and even if Albany provides the money, it could still go to students in other ways. This money could have been spent, for example, to bank against tuition increases, to create more jobs for students, etc. Instead they function as bribes to get students to scab.

So what about the PSC's program for adjunct unionization? We're going to leave aside any issues about whether adjuncts should form a separate union (for the PSC may be unique in that it includes everyone from Distinguished Professors to first-year grad student adjuncts, although it does far more for the former than the later). The problem is that the PSC's response to CUNY following the national trend in institutionalizing the adjuncting system has been to militantly stick its head in the sand.

According to Marcia Newfield, the PSC Vice-President for Part-Time Personnel, the CUNY system currently consists of around 8,000 full-time faculty and 9,000 part-time faculty (if you include Continuing Education instructors and Graduate Fellows in the latter). That means that over half of instructors are adjuncts, part-time or non-tenure track positions. This number follows the national average, according to Joe Berry in Reclaiming the Ivory Tower: Organizing Adjuncts to Change Higher Education (see James Hoff's book review in this issue). Out of the 1.2 million higher-education teachers in the US, 44% are part-time while many of the others hold Full-Time Non-Tenure Track positions. This has been a national trend since the early '70s. Gwendolyn Bradley reports that in 1969, 96.7% of faculty appointments were Tenure Track; now that number is a mere 25% ("Contingent Faculty and the New Academic Labor System," Academe January-February 2004).

And who are replacing these Full-Time, Tenure-Track professors? In the CUNY system, a large number of the scabs are graduate students. And Tuition Remission will not just promote this trend, but it forecloses resources being allocated elsewhere: therefore its function will be to actually subsidize the situation.

What is the PSC doing about this? In a nutshell: nothing. The new contract that they are seeking includes only paltry benefits for adjuncts, including a small pay raise and a restoration of the welfare fund.

There's widespread discontent with adjunct pay, but the meager crumbs that the PSC is asking for will do nothing to stem the tide. What it may do, however, is to soothe the adjuncting pains enough with these crumbs that the adjuncts will shut up for a while. This will only dissipate the rightful anger of adjuncts against the structure of the system itself, and therefore will function to propagate it.

So what is the solution? According to Bradley, the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) policy, adopted in 2003, calls for part-time and non-tenure track appointments to be no more than 15% of instruction within an institution, and no more than 25% within any one department. In California, state faculty even forced the state legislature to pass a resolution to raise the number of tenured and tenure-track faculty to 75% over an eight-year period. The PSC and other bodies advocating for adjunct rights must adopt stances which will act to close the breach that graduate students are naively rushing into. At the present, they are doing nothing of the sort. (In fact, the Board of Trustees's new Compact is more progressive than the PSC, since it claims to want to bring up "the percentage of instruction taught by full-time faculty up to 70 percent" in the next four years. Even if this isn't just hot air, the revenue for this will come from the proposed annual tuition increases.)

Unless the Board does it for them, CUNY part-timers and adjuncts are unlikely to win these changes, even if the PSC had either the backbone or foresight to pull its head out of the sand and put this perspective on their agenda. Alliances must be sought on two sides: one, full-time faculty need to act in solidarity with their less-secure fellow workers. Of course, as upper middle-class professionals with annual salaries of $50-80,000 (and sometimes over $100,000), asking them for solidarity might be like waiting for the PSC to do something. Perhaps grad students may wish to organize boycotts of professors who refuse to support their struggles, especially if they put on progressive fronts in the classroom.

On the other side, adjunct workers need to break from American labor's traditional mode of acting by itself, and only in its own interests (like tenured and tracked professors are doing now). Adjuncts need to form alliances with students, who are often in the same boat as the adjuncts (working part-time shit jobs for low wages and no security). The students - and their parents - need to demand that their classes be taught by secure professionals, not contingent laborers. The adjuncts also need to make links with other social movements - not just labor unions outside the university, but also with environmental, feminist, queer, anti-racist and other social justice movements. This will require that adjunct organizations offer these other activists resources - whether it is encouraging membership to attend their demonstrations, or providing office-space and other material resources to them - but will in turn allow greater leverage in pressuring university and governmental officials to institute limits on the number of contingent and part-time teachers. This strategy of making linkages across single-issue perspectives helped build the alliances which led to the anti-globalization movement.

This suggestion is a completely reformist scheme which doesn't even ask back what was had in 1969. Any radical critique of the university system would involve the dismantling of the ridiculous hierarchical professor-student relationship, as well as the destruction of the "ivory tower" itself as a pointless separation from the rest of society (which should render the idea of "reclaiming" it as the conservative notion that it is). In fact, anything less than what I have proposed is either an approval or an acceleration of a situation in which grad students are actively digging their own graves. They are making sure that their will be no jobs for their future selves - because they are being taken by themselves in the present, and for pennies at that.