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Using the Internet for contingent
faculty organizing
by John Hess
I am an organizer.
I work for the California Faculty Association which is the union and
bargaining agent for all the faculty in the huge California State University
system (CSU). The CSU has 23 campuses, about 23,000 faculty and nearly
450,000 students. The CSU is separate from California’s University
of California system that includes UC Berkeley, UCLA, UC Davis, UC Santa
Cruz. The CSU includes San Francisco State, San Jose State, LA State,
San Diego State, Fresno State, and Sonoma State. The CSU offers mostly
undergraduate education plus some important professional masters degrees
in area like education, nursing, engineering, social work, etc.
I
am an organizer. In one part of my job I work closely with the CFA Lecturers’
Council. Lecturers, full and part time, have term appointments that
are contingent on enrollment, budgeting, and other factors. They are
now nearly 60% of the system’s faculty. In the last three or so
years, the Lecturers’ Council has become deeply involved in the
international movement of contingent faculty. I use the Internet to
stay in touch with various individuals, groups, and organizations. A
large network of discussion lists and websites has grown up around the
movement and has become an important organizing medium locally, nationally,
and internationally.
It
is not uncommon for contingent faculty to find out about activists or
activities on their own campus by reading about it on a website on the
other side of the country or in Canada. The most difficult part of organizing
contingent faculty has always been finding them. They are usually isolated
from each other, distant from their departments, marginalized by the
university, which counts on their isolation to keep them from organizing.
The Internet has become one way to overcome this isolation. This little
resource study is for anyone interested in the how the Internet can
work as an organizing tool or with an interest in this issue, but it
is particularly meant to help contingent faculty find their way to activists
on their campus and also to encourage them to become active themselves.To
begin with CFA has its own website.
http://www.calfac.org/lecturers.html
Of
particular interest is the Lecturers Handbook which gives some history
of CFA and its work with lecturers. Most importantly, it sets out the
rights that lecturers have won in our system:
http://www.calfac.org/handbook.html
We
have been greatly influenced in our work by the community college part
time faculty activists. In the mid-1990s, they formed an organization,
the California Part time Faculty Association (CPFA) to lobby all the
unions, senates and other organizations involved in the community colleges
on behalf of the part time faculty. They have done a tremendous lobbying
job. Their organizing skills, thoughtful development of issues and,
perhaps mostly, their wonderful irreverence have been a major inspiration
to CFA Lecturers.
http://www.cpfa.org/index.html
The
major intellectual center for the contingent faculty movement has been
the Association of American University Professors. This page and its
links will give a good sense of what is going on in this movement and
collects AAUP’s numerous statements on contingent faculty:
http://www.aaup.org/Issues/part-time/index.htm
The
central document of this movement is an article by Rich Moser of the
AAUP: “The New Academic Labor System, Corporatization And The
Renewal of Academic Citizenship”( 6/01):
http://www.aaup.org/Issues/part-time/cewmose.htm
The
most important non- or quasi-organization for this movement is COCAL
(The Coalition of Contingent Academic Labor). It is more than anything
an Internet organization, that is, it exits mostly as Internet/email
connections between various activists in the US and Canada. I am telling
a little of its history to give a sense of how much this movement has
grown in less than a decade.
In
December 1996, the first National Congress of Adjunct, Part-time, Graduate
Teaching Assistants and Non-Tenure Track Faculty was held in Washington,
D.C. Concurrently, the Graduate Student Caucus of the Modern Language
Association held a panel on "Making the MLA More Proactive"
in part-time faculty issues.
In
April 1998, the 2nd Annual National Congress was held at the CUNY Grad
Center in New York City. The group renamed itself "The Coalition
of Contingent Academic Labor (COCAL)," and elected its first real
steering committee.
The
3rd Annual conference was be held the following year in Boston (April,
1999), hosted by activists from the University of, Massachusetts, Boston
(UMB) Part-time Faculty Committee of the Faculty-Staff Union (FSU).
For a moment COCAL came to rest in Boston as Boston COCAL.
Leaders
of the California Part-time Faculty Association (CPFA), linked with
their East coast colleagues through Internet list serves and e-mail,
hosted COCAL IV, the first West Coast National Conference on Contingent
Academic Labor, in January, 2001, in San Jose. COCAL –Chicago
was formed later that year:
http://www.chicagococal.org/
Our
primary purpose at this time is to develop strategies for improving
the status, pay and treatment of contingent academic labor in Chicago
and its suburbs and to support efforts by other groups in public and
private universities and colleges to do the same.COCAL V took place
at Concordia University (CU) in Montreal. The CU Part-time Association
successfully hosted the conference in Montreal. This was the biggest
COCAL meeting yet and included a march against the host university.
It was there that California attendees suggested founding COCAL–California.
CFA played a helpful role in its formation in fall, 2002. It is a coalition
of organizations representing contingent faculty in the UCs, the CSUs,
and the community colleges. We put on a large conference on the UC Berkeley
campus in May, 2003, to bring together activists from the UC system,
the CSU, and the community colleges.
http://www.cocal-ca.org/
Finally,
COCAL sponsors the most important listserv where contingent faculty
issues are discussed. To subscribe to the COCAL listserv, send an e-mail
to:
<adj-l-request@listserv.gc.cuny.edu>.
Put
the following command in the body of the message (not the subject line):
SUBSCRIBE
ADJ-L firstname lastname <emailaddress>.
Another
important Internet organization is the North American Alliance for Fair
Employment, an informational and solidarity network of unions and that
links contingent workers from all sectors of the economy.
http://www.fairjobs.org
NAFFE
is an alliance of a great range of organizations who deal with temporary
workers in a variety of fields. We stand for equal treatment (pay, benefits
and protections under the law) regardless of employment status. Our
work is part of the broader fight to ensure that working people have
the right and opportunity to provide for themselves, their families
and their communities.NAFFE is important because it makes the connections
amongst all forms of temporary workers, whether cleaning offices or
teaching in universities .Currently, all these people and organizations
are working on Campus Equity Week (October 27-31, 2003). It will be
a week of protest against contingent working conditions and also a week
of celebration of the contributions that contingent faculty make to
their students and their universities.
http://www.cewaction.org/
In
many ways it could be said that across the country, and in Canada too,
it is the contingent faculty who are fighting to save higher education,
while most of the tenured and tenure track faculty seem oblivious to
the ever accelerating corporatization of higher education, with its
attendant undermining of faculty working conditions (more for less)
and academic freedom.
The AAUP has also published considerable information about Campus Equity
Week along with practical ways to get involved.:
http://www.aaup.org/Issues/part-time/cewpage.htm
The
American Federation of Teachers (AFT), which boasts on its website that
it represents more contingent faculty than any other union, has a lot
of information about what its own locals are doing, a booklet on good
standards and practices that ought to be used, and an endorsement of
CEW and an invitation to its members to get involved.
http://www.aft.org/higher_ed/parttime/index.html
The
other major education union, the National Education Association (http://www.nea.org/)
with which CFA is affiliated, boasts that it represents more higher
education teachers than any other union. However, from its website’s
home page it is nearly impossible to gather that NEA represents any
contingent faculty. Only by accessing “Publications and Multimedia”
on the sidebar navigation tool and then going to “Higher Education
Advocate,” an NEA magazine for higher education members, and then
using the search tool to find “contingent faculty,” will
you find out that NEA has sponsored several of the COCAL meetings and
supports CEW. Looking under higher education policies, I was able to
find one on contingent faculty:
http://www.nea.org/he/policy12.html
On
the more academic side, various of the disciplinary organizations have
done various sorts of research, hand wringing, and moralizing about
the situation of contingent academic labor, especially as it affects
their own graduate students. An example is the Coalition on the Academic
Workforce (CAW) (established in 1997) by disciplinary associations in
the humanities and social sciences. CAW states it purposes as:
*
to collect and disseminate information on the use of part-time and contingent
faculty members and its implications for students, parents, faculty
members, and institutions;
* to articulate and clarify differences in the extent and consequences
of changes in the faculty within and among the various academic disciplines
and fields of study;
* to evaluate the consequences of these developments for achieving and
maintaining quality higher education;
* to evaluate both short-term and long-term consequences for society
and the public good of changes in the academic workforce;
* to identify and promote strategies for solving the problems created
by inappropriate use of part-time, adjunct, and similar faculty appointments;
* to strengthen teaching and scholarship.
In
fall 1999, CAW commissioned a survey of staffing in higher education:
Seven
groups—anthropology, cinema studies, folklore, linguistics, English,
foreign languages, and philology—surveyed all departments in their
fields. Three other groups—history, philosophy, and freestanding
composition programs—surveyed a sample of departments. The surveys
asked departments about who is teaching their classes and what the departments
provide their part-time and adjunct faculty members in the way of support,
benefits, and salaries.CAW has done some valuable research on this issue
and its impact on young faculty and students, but they seem unable to
imagine, much less recommend any sort of collective action. Without
that, it’s mostly hand wringing. The results of the survey may
be found at:
<www.theaha.org/caw/>
One
can reach CAW via email at CAW@mla.org.
Finally,
you will find “A Review of Web Sites for Contingent Faculty,”
by James C. McDonald of the University of Louisiana at Lafayette:
http://english.ttu.edu/kairos/8.1/reviews/mcdonald/
By
following links on the sites described here, you will find a wealth
of information and further links. Email and the Internet are invaluable
tools for reaching out to and organizing contingent faculty. It also
helps the organizers stay informed, work together over great distances,
share and develop ideas together. The dilemma we face, however, is that
face to face conversation is by far the best way to organize, create
relations with people and get them involved. Yet, the difficulty of
doing that on college and university campuses is very great. Reaching
most contingent faculty that way is nearly impossible and certainly
very time consuming. That, of course, has always been true. The Internet
and email have greatly improved our ability to organize people in an
effort to bring about change.
If
you are faculty at all, please join us for Campus Equity Week.
From
Jump Cut <http://www.ejumpcut.org>
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