Over the last couple weeks, while the eyes of the nation have been on the workers’ rights standoff in Madison, Wisconsin, two normally quiet Chicago colleges have seen their own labor uprisings. At Columbia College and Northeastern Illinois University, faculty and students are protesting what they call dictatorial governance and exploitation. In both cases, the plight of adjunct teachers—the dirt-cheap, dispensable day laborers of academe—is at issue.
It’s a situation ripe for the push-back a union can supply—and here again Columbia has been ahead of the curve. The school’s adjuncts have had representation from the Part-time Faculty Association, or P-fac—an Illinois Education Association affiliate—for 13 years. But union president Diana Vallera says that until a new slate of officers was elected in November, it was a sleepy, sweetheart arrangement. Member interest was low and the union was relatively inactive. There wasn’t even a record of any grievances having been pursued.
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“A year ago there were about 180 adjunct faculty in my department,” Wolfson says. “This spring there are about half of that. The college reduced the number of sections offered and increased the number of students in each section. I was replaced in both classes by new hires who make less than me.”
Louise Love, Columbia’s vice president for academic affairs, denies that the college has shifted assignments from higher- to lower-paid adjuncts. In a phone interview last week, she said, “We looked at that, and the opposite is is actually true.” According to Love, Columbia’s highest-paid adjuncts went from teaching 17 percent of all credits offered in 2008 to 24 percent in 2010, while the lowest-paid dropped from 9 percent to 4 percent. “You can’t generalize from individual cases,” she said, and “we’ve had a hard time getting data from the people making these statements.” Love added that assignments are made “according to the needs of the students, first to full-time faculty and then to part-time faculty based on qualifications and availability, and the regular process was followed.”
Meanwhile, at Northeastern Illinois University (where adjuncts and regular faculty are members of the same union, University Professionals of Illinois) contract negotiations have dragged on for nearly three years, and last month the faculty issued a vote of no confidence in president Sharon Hahs and provost Lawrence Frank. Concerns there include a lack of “shared governance” as well as heavy teaching loads and low pay for adjuncts—or instructors, as NEIU calls them. Faculty members say the no-confidence vote was intended to get the attention of the board. Contract negotiators were set to meet March 1.
