CUNY Adjuncts Refusing to Teach Spring 2020

[marshwiggle]

I ended up on a page titled "How the Increases in Adjunct Pay Would Work" where the claim is made that a 3-credit course at $5500 (starts fall 2022) comes to a rate of $91.67/hour.  When I do the math, that means 60 hours of work is expected for a whole term.

Anyone teaching classes in which the total workload is only 60 hours per term?  That's only 4 hours per week for a 15-week semester, which seems pretty low if the 3-credit class meets for 3 hours and the faculty member has a required office hour as the new contract would mandate.

The whole idea of trying to count hours is, and always has been, pointless. Teaching, as well as scholarship, just aren't jobs where there's any way to do this in some consistent, reasonable way. The basic distinction between hourly work and salaried work is supposed to be that hourly jobs are ones in which work takes place under certain conditions and can be strictly separated from non work time. When I worked at Blockbuster a long time ago, I was paid hourly because if I wasn't in the store I wasn't working. The store manager was on salary because if they were short staffed she had to figure out, if the fire alarm went off in the middle of the night she had to come down, when the new titles came in, she needed to go set them up etc etc. My job was just to be there when I was scheduled to be and do what people told me to. Her job was to make sure the store was functioning, which isn't an hourly job.

Managing a store is a lot harder than teaching a class, but neither of them are hourly jobs. I have a lot of flexibility about my schedule, but my job is not to just show up to class and an office hour and do some set amount of grading. I'm in charge of making the class work. I'm not trying to claim I work really long hours. I don't. But, it isn't an hourly job.

This is all very true, but it leads to the unavoidable question of how to determine the appropriate salary. If we use "whatever the market will bear", then that leads to the current situation. (Or worse; since certain disciplines have much bigger surpluses of candidates, we could have very different salaries for different disciplines.)

[mahagonny]

I ended up on a page titled "How the Increases in Adjunct Pay Would Work" where the claim is made that a 3-credit course at $5500 (starts fall 2022) comes to a rate of $91.67/hour.  When I do the math, that means 60 hours of work is expected for a whole term.

Anyone teaching classes in which the total workload is only 60 hours per term?  That's only 4 hours per week for a 15-week semester, which seems pretty low if the 3-credit class meets for 3 hours and the faculty member has a required office hour as the new contract would mandate.

The whole idea of trying to count hours is, and always has been, pointless. Teaching, as well as scholarship, just aren't jobs where there's any way to do this in some consistent, reasonable way. The basic distinction between hourly work and salaried work is supposed to be that hourly jobs are ones in which work takes place under certain conditions and can be strictly separated from non work time. When I worked at Blockbuster a long time ago, I was paid hourly because if I wasn't in the store I wasn't working. The store manager was on salary because if they were short staffed she had to figure out, if the fire alarm went off in the middle of the night she had to come down, when the new titles came in, she needed to go set them up etc etc. My job was just to be there when I was scheduled to be and do what people told me to. Her job was to make sure the store was functioning, which isn't an hourly job.

Managing a store is a lot harder than teaching a class, but neither of them are hourly jobs. I have a lot of flexibility about my schedule, but my job is not to just show up to class and an office hour and do some set amount of grading. I'm in charge of making the class work. I'm not trying to claim I work really long hours. I don't. But, it isn't an hourly job.

I think the thing is not whether hourly counting could be valid, but who gets to construct the formula. In this case, the union (which advocates for the full timers and screws the adjuncts) can give an unrealistically low number of hours and then the raise appears to be more than it was. If an hourly counting were assigned by a part timer's union that actually had a lot of power, the professor might be able to say 'I graded 60% of the exams in the allotted time. Here are the ones I didn't get to in case someone is going to grade them. It's now time to for me to begin the next piece of the syllabus.' [Dropping the folder full of exams on the chair's desk.]
I can easily spend a few hours a day not thinking about work when I fell it's been done well enough for a break. Avoiding worrying about whether you'll have enough employment in six months is harder.

[Wahoo Redux]

See, I actually think that with the slow walk of trees we can save our schools.

Won't someone please think of the children?!

[marshwiggle]

See, I actually think that with the slow walk of trees we can save our schools.

Won't someone please think of the children?!

There are two pieces of information that aren't in that article that would be useful to see:

• The ratio of instructors to students. If the student population is declining as fast or faster than the instructor population, then the situation is getting even better, since that will mean smaller class sizes.
• The "full-time equivalence" of the part-time instructors. Since part-time instructors teach fewer courses, in general, it's not quite an "apples-to-apples" comparison in numbers, especially if the focus is on employment. One full-time position may be as much employment as 3 or 4 part-time positions.

[Caracal]

If an hourly counting were assigned by a part timer's union that actually had a lot of power, the professor might be able to say 'I graded 60% of the exams in the allotted time. Here are the ones I didn't get to in case someone is going to grade them. It's now time to for me to begin the next piece of the syllabus.' [Dropping the folder full of exams on the chair's desk.]

I think this just reinforces my point. I have no desire to do this, and I'm not going to do it. I made the syllabus and I designed the exams, so it would be fairly bizarre for me to act like I've just finished my shift and now I'm not going to do my grading. I'm not remotely interested in teaching in this way and I can't really understand why this would be a goal rather than making positions salaried.

[Caracal]

If an hourly counting were assigned by a part timer's union that actually had a lot of power, the professor might be able to say 'I graded 60% of the exams in the allotted time. Here are the ones I didn't get to in case someone is going to grade them. It's now time to for me to begin the next piece of the syllabus.' [Dropping the folder full of exams on the chair's desk.]

I think this just reinforces my point. I have no desire to do this, and I'm not going to do it. I made the syllabus and I designed the exams, so it would be fairly bizarre for me to act like I've just finished my shift and now I'm not going to do my grading. I'm not remotely interested in teaching in this way and I can't really understand why this would be a goal rather than making positions salaried, or at least just increasing pay per course.

[mahagonny]

If an hourly counting were assigned by a part timer's union that actually had a lot of power, the professor might be able to say 'I graded 60% of the exams in the allotted time. Here are the ones I didn't get to in case someone is going to grade them. It's now time to for me to begin the next piece of the syllabus.' [Dropping the folder full of exams on the chair's desk.]

I think this just reinforces my point. I have no desire to do this, and I'm not going to do it. I made the syllabus and I designed the exams, so it would be fairly bizarre for me to act like I've just finished my shift and now I'm not going to do my grading. I'm not remotely interested in teaching in this way and I can't really understand why this would be a goal rather than making positions salaried.

Making the positions salaried at the rates part timers currently make would contradict this (below), as the amount of compensation, (moreover, sans benefits) would show that economic security is not provided. Therefore the need to make up something that says the people accepting the jobs already have enough money to live on, so their lives and work and the delivery of education are not impacted by the deficit:

"Tenure is a means to certain ends; specifically: (1) freedom of teaching and research and of extramural activities, and (2) a sufficient degree of economic security to make the profession attractive to men and women of ability. Freedom and economic security, hence, tenure, are indispensable to the success of an institution in fulfilling its obligations to its students and to society."

1940 statement on academic freedom and tenure

The adjunct advocacy groups say 'faculty working conditions are student learning conditions.'

[marshwiggle]

If an hourly counting were assigned by a part timer's union that actually had a lot of power, the professor might be able to say 'I graded 60% of the exams in the allotted time. Here are the ones I didn't get to in case someone is going to grade them. It's now time to for me to begin the next piece of the syllabus.' [Dropping the folder full of exams on the chair's desk.]

I think this just reinforces my point. I have no desire to do this, and I'm not going to do it. I made the syllabus and I designed the exams, so it would be fairly bizarre for me to act like I've just finished my shift and now I'm not going to do my grading. I'm not remotely interested in teaching in this way and I can't really understand why this would be a goal rather than making positions salaried.

This is one of the things I've always found awkward about unions for professionals; much of the language of unions (with "stewards" and "grievances") comes from the factory floor and doesn't really match a professional setting. And like an "hourly wage", it attempts to force any situation through a template which doesn't really fit.

To the person with only a hammer, every problem looks like a nail.

[mahagonny]

If an hourly counting were assigned by a part timer's union that actually had a lot of power, the professor might be able to say 'I graded 60% of the exams in the allotted time. Here are the ones I didn't get to in case someone is going to grade them. It's now time to for me to begin the next piece of the syllabus.' [Dropping the folder full of exams on the chair's desk.]

I think this just reinforces my point. I have no desire to do this, and I'm not going to do it. I made the syllabus and I designed the exams, so it would be fairly bizarre for me to act like I've just finished my shift and now I'm not going to do my grading. I'm not remotely interested in teaching in this way and I can't really understand why this would be a goal rather than making positions salaried.

This is one of the things I've always found awkward about unions for professionals; much of the language of unions (with "stewards" and "grievances") comes from the factory floor and doesn't really match a professional setting. And like an "hourly wage", it attempts to force any situation through a template which doesn't really fit.

To the person with only a hammer, every problem looks like a nail.

So is the part time adjunct work situation equally 'professional' as the tenure track one? The tenure track, as a group, does not see the poor fit you see. They love unions.

[Wahoo Redux]

Posted it once.  Will post it again.

I have worked at both union and non-union schools.

The union school is far, far better in every regard.

[Caracal]

Making the positions salaried at the rates part timers currently make would contradict this (below), as the amount of compensation, (moreover, sans benefits) would show that economic security is not provided. Therefore the need to make up something that says the people accepting the jobs already have enough money to live on, so their lives and work and the delivery of education are not impacted by the deficit:

Perhaps, but going down this particular path isn't going to end well for anyone. Right now the hourly fiction is just a dishonest way for Universities to avoid giving out benefits to adjuncts. You're proposing pointing out the absurdity of it with some strict accounting of hours. The problem is that I have a suspicion that if adjuncts actually wouldn't work more than a set number of hours, the result would not be better pay to account for the actual hours worked, but a loss of independence. I bet we would see an increase in set syllabi, no instructor control of assessment methods and no ability for adjuncts to teach courses of their own design.

To get Marxist on it, I'm not eager to join the push for my labor to be alienated. Instead, we should work towards systems in which current systems of adjunct labor could be replaced by ones where the professional work of teaching is valued and rewarded. I actually think there's a good case to be made that unions might be the only realistic path towards this goal.

[mahagonny]

Making the positions salaried at the rates part timers currently make would contradict this (below), as the amount of compensation, (moreover, sans benefits) would show that economic security is not provided. Therefore the need to make up something that says the people accepting the jobs already have enough money to live on, so their lives and work and the delivery of education are not impacted by the deficit:

Perhaps, but going down this particular path isn't going to end well for anyone. Right now the hourly fiction is just a dishonest way for Universities to avoid giving out benefits to adjuncts. You're proposing pointing out the absurdity of it with some strict accounting of hours. The problem is that I have a suspicion that if adjuncts actually wouldn't work more than a set number of hours, the result would not be better pay to account for the actual hours worked, but a loss of independence. I bet we would see an increase in set syllabi, no instructor control of assessment methods and no ability for adjuncts to teach courses of their own design.

Of course, because all too often the only way the part time adjunct can keep the tenure track happy (and that only temporarily) is to sacrifice his own quality of life, maybe even sanity in order to work more hours to see the job to a satisfactory completion. For the vast majority, there's no advantage in doing this beyond the opportunity to do it again next semester for the same money. The minute he falters, the tenure track has that long awaited opportunity to say "you see: adjunct faculty staffing fails because they are are not dedicated to the long term success of the institution. Time to cut their numbers and run their affairs with a micromanaging heavy hand. And certainly don't invest any more in them." It's a win for the tenured to be able to say "we've been trying adjunct staffing and we're paying for it." Ultimately of course, they will continue to use it while grumbling about it just enough to keep up a facade of protest.
The system is its own adversary.
I have lived all of this.

To get Marxist on it, I'm not eager to join the push for my labor to be alienated. Instead, we should work towards systems in which current systems of adjunct labor could be replaced by ones where the professional work of teaching is valued and rewarded. I actually think there's a good case to be made that unions might be the only realistic path towards this goal.

Unions and pseudonymous forums are the only realistic path towards honest discussion about the dysfunction that is higher education labor relations and management. What could happen after that, I have no idea.

[marshwiggle]

To get Marxist on it, I'm not eager to join the push for my labor to be alienated. Instead, we should work towards systems in which current systems of adjunct labor could be replaced by ones where the professional work of teaching is valued and rewarded. I actually think there's a good case to be made that unions might be the only realistic path towards this goal.

Honest question: What does that mean? I value the work of

• wait staff
• transit drivers
• accountants
• neurosurgeons

and pretty much anything else done well, but I wouldn't argue that they should all get paid the same.

One can argue that breaking up full-time positions into part-time ones to save on benefits is "devaluing" the work, but as long as there are legitimate reasons for a proportion of part-time positions (enrollment fluctuations and emergency replacements, not to mention professionals teaching individual courses in their field), then how is "value" to be determined, and prosaically, how does that actually get reflected in their pay?

(Sure, access to things like office space, computer, phone, and other resources reflect value, but even if those are dealt with appropriately, there's still the paycheque to be determined.)

[mahagonny]

To get Marxist on it, I'm not eager to join the push for my labor to be alienated. Instead, we should work towards systems in which current systems of adjunct labor could be replaced by ones where the professional work of teaching is valued and rewarded. I actually think there's a good case to be made that unions might be the only realistic path towards this goal.

Honest question: What does that mean? I value the work of

• wait staff
• transit drivers
• accountants
• neurosurgeons

and pretty much anything else done well, but I wouldn't argue that they should all get paid the same.

One can argue that breaking up full-time positions into part-time ones to save on benefits is "devaluing" the work, but as long as there are legitimate reasons for a proportion of part-time positions (enrollment fluctuations and emergency replacements, not to mention professionals teaching individual courses in their field), then how is "value" to be determined, and prosaically, how does that actually get reflected in their pay?

(Sure, access to things like office space, computer, phone, and other resources reflect value, but even if those are dealt with appropriately, there's still the paycheque to be determined.)

I can take a stab at that one and I look forward to Caracal's response also.

If you take the 1940 statement on academic freedom and tenure and substitute the words 'tolerable, for the present' for 'attractive'  and also 'managing, for the present'  for 'success' then we have something like a description of the present situation. Thus teaching and learning get devalued.

"Tenure is a means to certain ends; specifically: (1) freedom of teaching and research and of extramural activities, and (2) a sufficient degree of economic security to make the profession tolerable, for the present, to men and women of ability. Freedom and [a modicum of] economic security, hence, tenure, are indispensable to the managing, for the present, of an institution in fulfilling its obligations to its students and to society."

What is illustrated being you get what you pay for, and we're fine with paying much less, because teaching and learning have a little bit of value.

but as long as there are legitimate reasons for a proportion of part-time positions (enrollment fluctuations and emergency replacements,...

As the New Yorker Magazine used to say 'example of a sentence I never finished reading.'

Marsh wiggle, no one here thinks that fluctuating enrollment caused the explosion of temp hiring. I wonder if you actually do? (You don't have to answer.)

[Wahoo Redux]

We have new indoor tennis courts and a barely used campus shuttle system with shiny new vehicles.

Our VIP box at the football stadium has been refurbished even though the football team has had a series of lackluster seasons and generates no heat even when it has a good season.

We are losing tenure lines in virtually all departments while our enrollment stays fairly stable.

This is devaluing the teachers.

I've posted this before and will again: There are enough classes taught in virtually every discipline to justify an army of FT instructors and TT professors.   If admin is breaking up full time positions they are devaluing the work.