Labor rules for adjuncts

[downer]

There was a recent story about CUNY paying adjuncts for office hours. (Not a SLAC).
https://www.psc-cuny.org/clarion/march-2020/adjunct-paid-office-hours

Of course, CUNY did also recently lay off (not rehire) a large number of adjuncts because of the crisis in city funding.

[Mobius]

How often does a contract spell out how much office hour time adjunct faculty are expected to hold? I've never personally encountered such a requirement, and so I never have office hours of any sort.

It is pretty rare, and predominantly limited to a small minority of SLAC's.

You're asking? OK, I'm telling then. I get paid for one office hour per week at school A which does not offer tenure. Part time faculty and full time are in the same union together. This is the far less common situation. Whereas, if you talk to the typical educator with a tenure track position, they maintain it's not good to use adjuncts because they are not available enough to students. Yet an obvious remedy would be  paying the adjunct who is designated part time for one office hour per week (mine always gets filled), which would be a clear bargain at the hourly rates we get, yet their faculty senate and their unions almost never push for, and often push against by outcompeting adjunct faculty for funding.

So, there you have it. More railing against the tenure track undisputed facts.

If a school is willing to pay adjuncts to hold office hours, what is the best structure? If they pay by the course, do they count how many hours and an hourly rate, but package as a lump sum difference in the semester pay?

It may not be in the contract, but it will likely be in a handbook.

[Caracal]

How often does a contract spell out how much office hour time adjunct faculty are expected to hold? I've never personally encountered such a requirement, and so I never have office hours of any sort.

There's also the question of policing office hours. I've known plenty of cases of FT faculty who don't turn up to their own office hours, and presumably the same would happen with PT faculty.

I don't think its in my contract, but my department says I'm supposed to do it. Not an issue for me because I'm usually teaching four classes on the same days, so there are always times in the middle where I'm going to be in my office anyway. And no, there's no enforcement. I guess if I was never there, eventually some student could complain, but there aren't a lot of people who come to the office hours without making an appointment, so it might take a long time for that to happen.

[Ruralguy]

Usually, when someone at my school is found out for not keeping hours, it's because advisees can't find them during registration, even by email, let alone on-site hours (which are obviously much more loosely practiced or enforced during covid, though we must still have posted hours, though they can be online).

[mahagonny]

If a school is willing to pay adjuncts to hold office hours, what is the best structure? If they pay by the course, do they count how many hours and an hourly rate, but package as a lump sum difference in the semester pay?

Our structure is if you have over a certain number of hours contact time per week then you get one office hour pay per week. Full time faculty get two hours per week. While they are on an annual salary calculation, the two hours are required and people have been caught not doing it and brought in line.
Another way to do it could be to make it exactly proportional to the number of minutes contact time.That is, even an instructor who meets only two hours per week in the classroom gets some amount of office hour stipend. I've never heard of this being done however. Why not make the allotment exactly matched to the estimated need of the student or the number taught? Too laborious for the payroll staff, perhaps?

Whereas, most colleges and universities, in my reading over many years in the subject, do not have payroll structured office hours for adjuncts, and then complain that they don't like to use adjuncts because they are not available enough to the students, while they use lots of adjuncts, so whether or not they like to is just a matter of rhetoric. So they are complaining about a problem they have constructed for themselves. Or, more unfortunately, for the students.

[Aster]

The argument for part-time faculty holding office hours is not a simple one because there are radically different operating models for different categories of Higher Education institutions.

For example, the overwhelming majority of adjunct faculty in the U.S. Higher Education system work at community colleges, not at 4-year universities.

And for most of those community colleges, there are multiple failure points that restrict/preclude "non-classroom duty hours" for adjuncts.
1. No payment for office hours (or payment really for anything except the contractual per-class teaching rate). Most community colleges maintain their dollar-store tuition rates by only operating with the barest shoestring of full-time faculty and out-sourcing everything else to part-timers.
2. No office space for adjuncts to physically hold office hours. Indeed, there might not even be office space for *full time faculty* either. Some community college "campuses" are merely satellite centers in strip malls that only comprise classroom spaces.
3. Unsuitable campus access times for adjuncts to hold office hours (many CC adjuncts are employed for working weird times like weekends and nights, and much/all of the campus may be physically closed during those times to everywhere except necessary classrooms).
4. Poor labor protection for faculty overall (many community colleges don't even have labor unions for their *tenure track* faculty, far less for adjuncts).

But then there's the other side of the coin. At commuter-focused institutions and institutions catering heavily to non-traditional students (e.g., most community colleges), there is far less need for faculty to hold office hours because there are far fewer students (by overall percentage) that choose to use those office hours. For example, I can commonly go 2-3 weeks without a single student ever coming by to any of my office hours. This is not an unusual range for most of my colleagues at my current institution, nor for most of my colleagues at peer institutions. Indeed, many of my colleagues will routinely schedule most of their office hours on Fridays when we don't normally hold any classes, and then choose to just take Fridays off and not even come to campus. Now that's a pretty crappy behavior and one that I certainly do not approve of, but it does firmly demonstrate that the actual value of office hours may not be something that can be applied broadly for everyone.

[mahagonny]

The work ethic of the professor is an important piece of how office hours work. When that's absent, things break down.

The reason my office hours are always filled is I tell students when they need extra time with me to keep up with the course, (never a shortage) and eventually they learn to spot their deficiencies better on their own and then ask for an office hour meeting. They know I'm waiting for them, not hiding. That's how it was supposed to work.

If they aren't free during my scheduled on-campus office hour we find another time and either meet in person in an extra room the department provides or zoom.

It helps to have a union that negotiates in such a way that the student has access to part time faculty who are taken seriously as educators.

For example, the overwhelming majority of adjunct faculty in the U.S. Higher Education system work at community colleges, not at 4-year universities.

Source please?