Merit bonuses

[aside]

Why don't they take them as overload? Suggest it seriously at the next meeting. I don't mean sigh and say 'wouldn't it be nice if everyone had good jobs with benefits.' I mean seriously get it done. Here's what you'll find out: the tenured people are going to get pissed off at you, because they want to be able to use adjuncts when it suits their material and career interests.
This business of the tenure track imagining it is not complicit is so arrogant it
s nauseating.

Mahagonny, your experience is not universal.  I am tenured.  I am not complicit in your situation.  Your experience is not applicable at my institution, which is a large private research university.  We have very few adjuncts.  The vast majority of classes are taught by full-time faculty.  Adjuncts are hired only when a course needs to be covered that cannot be covered by a full-time faculty member.  I personally have carried 125% teaching overloads for the last five years while maintaining an active research agenda and a heavy service load.  I have done so partly because our adjunct budget is so limited, and courses needed to be covered.  I am truly sorry for you that your situation is as bad as it is, and I am truly sorry that institutions exist that exploit adjuncts.  Yet your constant portrayal of tenured faculty as the root cause of the adjunct problem is painting with a brush that is far too broad.

[mahagonny]

Bullshit, Kron. Here's what you posted. Unionizing as adjuncts 'legitimizes this practice.' Whatever that means. Excuse me, sir or madam, I have a need to be legitimate.
How would you like it? Someone says "I should have a union, but you shouldn't." Are you fucking kidding me??

Of course, the real problem is using part time (adjunct) positions to fill permanent needs.  This is akin to some stores hiring mostly part timers to avoid paying them benefits etc.  Personally, I think this needs to be dealt with through faculty unions to reduce reliance on adjuncts rather than unionizing as adjuncts  and thereby legitimizing this practice.  My collective agreement has sections like this and we do not have a lot of adjuncts here, which seems like the better solution.

Mahagonny, your experience is not universal.  I am tenured.  I am not complicit in your situation.  Your experience is not applicable at my institution, which is a large private research university.  We have very few adjuncts.  The vast majority of classes are taught by full-time faculty.  Adjuncts are hired only when a course needs to be covered that cannot be covered by a full-time faculty member.  I personally have carried 125% teaching overloads for the last five years while maintaining an active research agenda and a heavy service load.  I have done so partly because our adjunct budget is so limited, and courses needed to be covered.

And partly for the money?

[Kron3007]

Bullshit, Kron. Here's what you posted. Unionizing as adjuncts 'legitimizes this practice.' Whatever that means. Excuse me, sir or madam, I have a need to be legitimate.
How would you like it? Someone says "I should have a union, but you shouldn't." Are you fucking kidding me??

Of course, the real problem is using part time (adjunct) positions to fill permanent needs.  This is akin to some stores hiring mostly part timers to avoid paying them benefits etc.  Personally, I think this needs to be dealt with through faculty unions to reduce reliance on adjuncts rather than unionizing as adjuncts  and thereby legitimizing this practice.  My collective agreement has sections like this and we do not have a lot of adjuncts here, which seems like the better solution.

Mahagonny, your experience is not universal.  I am tenured.  I am not complicit in your situation.  Your experience is not applicable at my institution, which is a large private research university.  We have very few adjuncts.  The vast majority of classes are taught by full-time faculty.  Adjuncts are hired only when a course needs to be covered that cannot be covered by a full-time faculty member.  I personally have carried 125% teaching overloads for the last five years while maintaining an active research agenda and a heavy service load.  I have done so partly because our adjunct budget is so limited, and courses needed to be covered.

And partly for the money?

I apologize how it reads. I did not mean that people shouldnt try to unionize to improve their conditions, but I don't think it actually addresses the bigger issue.  When I said it legitamizes the practice, I meant it legitimizes the administration's choice to hire part time contract staff to fill a perminent full time need to save money at your expense, but you are right that it is worth doing as long as they are exploiting adjuncts in the first place.  You are legitimate, how they treat you is not. 

Unionizing doesn't change the fact that they are using part time contract staff to fill a full time need, and to me this is the bigger issue at hand.  Even unionized, heavy reliance on adjunct seems wrong to me and universities should fill the needs with permanant staff instead. 

[aside]

Mahagonny, your experience is not universal.  I am tenured.  I am not complicit in your situation.  Your experience is not applicable at my institution, which is a large private research university.  We have very few adjuncts.  The vast majority of classes are taught by full-time faculty.  Adjuncts are hired only when a course needs to be covered that cannot be covered by a full-time faculty member.  I personally have carried 125% teaching overloads for the last five years while maintaining an active research agenda and a heavy service load.  I have done so partly because our adjunct budget is so limited, and courses needed to be covered.

And partly for the money?

Ah, that's a reasonable assumption.  The overload is considered along with other factors in the annual review process and could contribute to the size of a merit raise.  It's a voluntary overload, though, and does not directly bring any more money.  The overload results from my combination of administrative and faculty roles, and I assign it to myself in order to keep my hand in the classroom and cover a course that otherwise I could not fund.

[mahagonny]

Bullshit, Kron. Here's what you posted. Unionizing as adjuncts 'legitimizes this practice.' Whatever that means. Excuse me, sir or madam, I have a need to be legitimate.
How would you like it? Someone says "I should have a union, but you shouldn't." Are you fucking kidding me??

Of course, the real problem is using part time (adjunct) positions to fill permanent needs.  This is akin to some stores hiring mostly part timers to avoid paying them benefits etc.  Personally, I think this needs to be dealt with through faculty unions to reduce reliance on adjuncts rather than unionizing as adjuncts  and thereby legitimizing this practice.  My collective agreement has sections like this and we do not have a lot of adjuncts here, which seems like the better solution.

Mahagonny, your experience is not universal.  I am tenured.  I am not complicit in your situation.  Your experience is not applicable at my institution, which is a large private research university.  We have very few adjuncts.  The vast majority of classes are taught by full-time faculty.  Adjuncts are hired only when a course needs to be covered that cannot be covered by a full-time faculty member.  I personally have carried 125% teaching overloads for the last five years while maintaining an active research agenda and a heavy service load.  I have done so partly because our adjunct budget is so limited, and courses needed to be covered.

And partly for the money?

I apologize how it reads. I did not mean that people shouldnt try to unionize to improve their conditions, but I don't think it actually addresses the bigger issue.  When I said it legitamizes the practice, I meant it legitimizes the administration's choice to hire part time contract staff to fill a perminent full time need to save money at your expense, but you are right that it is worth doing as long as they are exploiting adjuncts in the first place.  You are legitimate, how they treat you is not. 

Unionizing doesn't change the fact that they are using part time contract staff to fill a full time need, and to me this is the bigger issue at hand.  Even unionized, heavy reliance on adjunct seems wrong to me and universities should fill the needs with permanant staff instead. 

We're at a peculiar point in the discussion. I thank you for posting something that made me angry to read. Because the hope among tenure track faculty that adjuncts will not unionize is real. It should be exposed. There's no reason to single you out. You just had the candor and honesty to come out with it. As for addressing the bigger issues at hand, the things proposed to do that are less likely than the steady increase in adjunct unions. So who's working on the problems? We are.

I take issue with the idea that adjunct positions were originally created out of some kind of benign, what's-best-for-everyone involved thought process. At one time they were 'faculty wives' who, after all, didn't have economic worries. They had a big strong successful man to care for them. (Any feminists reading?) One thing I will agree with though, the plan was to keep the adjunct population small, disparate and sporadic so they couldn't get any solidarity, visibility or employees' rights. That changed with a kind of me too phenomenon. 'Professor X got and adjunct so he could have a course release to work on his research for his next promotion; I should get one too.'

[polly_mer]

Mahagonny does have a point that some departments at some institutions do rely very heavily on "adjuncts" to carry recurring heavy load and don't do anything about it other than hope that people will continue to do the work.

The example a few years ago of Arizona State's English department sticks out in my mind: https://www.insidehighered.com/blogs/just-visiting/asu-english-numbers-it-aint-pretty

If Mahagonny is on the front lines of a similar situation, then I do have to wonder why someone isn't stepping in to do something that is not working for anyone other than the budget watcher and makes no sense in the either the short-term for high-quality education or the long-term for sustainability.  These folks may have contingent positions, but those positions aren't adjunct-in-the-sense-of-being-extra.

However, my experiences have mostly been at other types of places where we have few truly adjunct-in-the-sense-of-extra folks.  At one point several years ago when unionization was discussed on the CHE fora, I was in a position such that we had many professional fellows (i.e., part-time faculty with long-term contracts who owned a particular course or two in the curriculum), many administrators who taught a class or two, a couple VAPs to cover sabbaticals or a year while we do a TT search, and about 5 true adjuncts covering extra sections of various intro level offerings. 

A union for truly adjunct faculty can't possibly help those literally 1-10 individuals per term who are different individuals most terms because we don't have a recurring need for those extra sections.  We also can't consolidate all those extra sections into a single individual for a full-time hire because the sections are usually a spread of one humanities course, one psychology course, one criminal justice course, one intro science lab, and one intro math course.

As I wrote elsewhere just now, the professional fellows who truly are part-time faculty integrated into the curriculum are a very different case than the mostly interchangeable cogs who are covering dozens of sections that could be consolidated into full-time positions if that choice was made.

[downer]

There is some good info here about the numbers of adjuncts, from a basically conservative site on education, suggesting that trends in not-for-profit places are actually decreasing:
https://www.jamesgmartin.center/2017/05/full-time-faculty-adjunctified-recent-data-show-otherwise/

The discussion after it does include the word "slaves."

[mahagonny]

There is some good info here about the numbers of adjuncts, from a basically conservative site on education, suggesting that trends in not-for-profit places are actually decreasing:
https://www.jamesgmartin.center/2017/05/full-time-faculty-adjunctified-recent-data-show-otherwise/

The discussion after it does include the word "slaves."

"As for-profit institutions grew, so did the concentration of adjunct positions they brought with them. Now that the for-profit bubble is bursting due to issues of fiscal solvency and a government crackdown on the standards used by for-profit accrediting bodies, the adjunct workforce is experiencing its own parallel contraction."

If for-profit colleges go away entirely, it will be a very unpleasant thing for the big money makers in not-for-profit colleges and universities. They will have no one to point to and say 'wow! Look at how poorly they treat their rank and file faculty. We could never stand to do that.'   Except each other. circular firing squad. The plan is probably to cripple them just enough but keep them around.

[Kron3007]

Bullshit, Kron. Here's what you posted. Unionizing as adjuncts 'legitimizes this practice.' Whatever that means. Excuse me, sir or madam, I have a need to be legitimate.
How would you like it? Someone says "I should have a union, but you shouldn't." Are you fucking kidding me??

Of course, the real problem is using part time (adjunct) positions to fill permanent needs.  This is akin to some stores hiring mostly part timers to avoid paying them benefits etc.  Personally, I think this needs to be dealt with through faculty unions to reduce reliance on adjuncts rather than unionizing as adjuncts  and thereby legitimizing this practice.  My collective agreement has sections like this and we do not have a lot of adjuncts here, which seems like the better solution.

Mahagonny, your experience is not universal.  I am tenured.  I am not complicit in your situation.  Your experience is not applicable at my institution, which is a large private research university.  We have very few adjuncts.  The vast majority of classes are taught by full-time faculty.  Adjuncts are hired only when a course needs to be covered that cannot be covered by a full-time faculty member.  I personally have carried 125% teaching overloads for the last five years while maintaining an active research agenda and a heavy service load.  I have done so partly because our adjunct budget is so limited, and courses needed to be covered.

And partly for the money?

I apologize how it reads. I did not mean that people shouldnt try to unionize to improve their conditions, but I don't think it actually addresses the bigger issue.  When I said it legitamizes the practice, I meant it legitimizes the administration's choice to hire part time contract staff to fill a perminent full time need to save money at your expense, but you are right that it is worth doing as long as they are exploiting adjuncts in the first place.  You are legitimate, how they treat you is not. 

Unionizing doesn't change the fact that they are using part time contract staff to fill a full time need, and to me this is the bigger issue at hand.  Even unionized, heavy reliance on adjunct seems wrong to me and universities should fill the needs with permanant staff instead. 

We're at a peculiar point in the discussion. I thank you for posting something that made me angry to read. Because the hope among tenure track faculty that adjuncts will not unionize is real. It should be exposed. There's no reason to single you out. You just had the candor and honesty to come out with it. As for addressing the bigger issues at hand, the things proposed to do that are less likely than the steady increase in adjunct unions. So who's working on the problems? We are.

I take issue with the idea that adjunct positions were originally created out of some kind of benign, what's-best-for-everyone involved thought process. At one time they were 'faculty wives' who, after all, didn't have economic worries. They had a big strong successful man to care for them. (Any feminists reading?) One thing I will agree with though, the plan was to keep the adjunct population small, disparate and sporadic so they couldn't get any solidarity, visibility or employees' rights. That changed with a kind of me too phenomenon. 'Professor X got and adjunct so he could have a course release to work on his research for his next promotion; I should get one too.'

You're welcome? 

Seriously though, I suppose I am coloured by my experience and my opinion may be problematic elsewhere.  Ironically, we have very few adjuncts yet they are protected by one of the local unions on campus and have much of what you advocate for (Our TAs are also unionized).  A primary objective of our faculty union is to prevent an increased reliance on temporary staff and pressure the university to hire full time employees instead as there are always pressures to use adjuncts to cut costs.  This is why I said that I see faculty unions being more effective to reduce reliance on adjuncts, but admittedly this would not be the case in many situations and would not protect the rights of existing adjuncts to any degree. 

   

[Dismal]

Regarding the OP's question, I have worked in several departments and have not seen a merit supplement per book or article published or grant application submitted.  In two departments where I worked, faculty served on the merit review committee and evaluated research, teaching and service on a 4 or 5 point scale.  Then the top performers might get a 3 or 2.5% raise when the average performers were offered a 1.5% or 2% raise.  That extra amount is viewed as merit pay.  We spent a lot of our time considering how to evaluate faculty who had negotiated low teaching loads largely due to outside offers based on strong research records.  Sure they do a lot of research and sometimes service, but they have so much more time to do so.  So then we would discuss their output in terms of the extra time they had available, which made it less likely that those with low teaching loads would ever get the top teaching or service score.  Lots of discussion for what amounts to a 0.5% difference in salary.

[Golazo]

I hear rumors that such things as a merit pool existed once upon a time but no one has seen these endangered creatures recently. I got a certificate that says I am meritorious instead...

[mahagonny]

Seriously though, I suppose I am coloured by my experience and my opinion may be problematic elsewhere.  Ironically, we have very few adjuncts yet they are protected by one of the local unions on campus and have much of what you advocate for (Our TAs are also unionized).  A primary objective of our faculty union is to prevent an increased reliance on temporary staff and pressure the university to hire full time employees instead as there are always pressures to use adjuncts to cut costs.  This is why I said that I see faculty unions being more effective to reduce reliance on adjuncts, but admittedly this would not be the case in many situations and would not protect the rights of existing adjuncts to any degree. 

   

No it wouldn't and it's not clear that it would be good for the institution either, not in all cases. I don't know your field or your school, but in my field, the popularity of certain majors has shifted dramatically over the years to the point where it's not uncommon to see senior tenured faculty who just can't be kept real busy with the small numbers of students attending college to learn what they know. When they retire and an adjunct is hired to cover the teaching they did, everybody thinks it's a crime. My opinion, what they're paying might be, but not the fact that they opt not to search for someone they will committed to for decades.

[Zinoma]

Dear All: I don't want you to think I fell off the map, as the original poster of this question. I've been reading your replies with interest, and it has given me a lot to think about. Thank you, and Zinoma!