From annabor.com, “Eastern Michigan University’s part-time lecturers campaign for union.” From the opening paragraphs:
A campaign is underway at Eastern Michigan University to unionize 450 part-time lecturers, who are asking for better pay and benefits.
The administration will negotiate a contract in a timely manner if the employees vote to unionize, but students could end up paying for any increased costs through their tuition bills, school officials warned.
I guess we’ll see how this works, out, but I have two thoughts on this, at least initially:
- I have a very VERY difficult time believing that the administration will simply shrug their collective shoulders and say “sure, that’s okay.” Rather, I just assume that the administration will do everything it can to resist this, and if it does happen, I predict that the suits will offer only a very bare-bones contract that is practically not a contract at all.
- I personally have mixed feelings about all this. On the one hand, I’m all for unionization and we have in my department some great part-timers. In fact, we have a number of folks who are “part-time” in name only: that is, they are teaching a full-time load but they are being paid considerably less (especially if you factor in insurance and other benefits) than full-time lecturers. I think that’s wrong, and if the part-timer union is able to stop this practice, it will be worth it.
On the other hand, one of the reasons why every college and university in this country has some sort of category of part-timer is to deal with the ebb and flow of enrollment, of faculty and lecturer lines, and so forth. In that sense, EMU is like any other business that hires both full-time and part-time employees: grocery stores don’t hire everyone full-time because a) they can’t afford to, and b) they don’t need to. My concern would be that a part-time union might cause some problems that would ultimately hurt both faculty and lecturers, not to mention students who probably would indeed end up paying at least part of the bill.
Use of part-time lecturers to hold costs down is one of the dirty little secrets at Eastern and other universities. If you think that there are over 450 people in this group it is a significant amount of the overall teaching staff at Eastern. We talk about wanting to deliver a quality educational experience for the students but treat part-time lecturers as second class citizens. The Part-time lecturers have no rights, receive no benefits, and can be dropped at anytime based on individual department heads opinions or favoritism. We need the full-time lecturers and professors to stand in solidarity and help make this union a reality. Surely a University that can afford to pay a football coach over $250,000 to go 0-12 and other recent high priced administrators will step up and recognize the right of the part-time lecturers to make a decent living and have a few basic rights in the work place. The worst thing the university can do is to pay a high priced attorney to fight this and negotiate the contract but that probably will what will happen.
Further, to add to Tomg76′s well reasoned points, EMU has a huge problem in “retaining” our first year students. We lose, what, like a third of them in their first year? And why do they drop out? Mainly because they are stuck in large, impersonal sections of General Education courses taught by adjuncts! So the university uses poorly paid instructors to “deliver” courses to freshmen, and the freshmen respond by leaving. EMU has the economics of staffing these courses exactly backwards.
I am almost done teaching a section of first year writing this term, Law and Order, and I got to tell ya: I don’t think we lose a bunch of students out of these first year classes because they are taught by adjuncts. Based on my very VERY small sample this term, I think we lose a lot of first year students because a) they changed their mind about attending EMU and are transferring to some other institution, or b) they really were not prepared to be in college in the first place.
Besides, the argument you have doesn’t really advocate for a part-timers union; rather, it is an argument for smaller first year classes taught by full-time faculty.
Yes, I advocate smaller classes taught by full time faculty. Precisely. That’s the way to put Education First.
But do we genuinely have many “first year classes”? Almost none of our classes are populated solely or even mainly by first year students, aside from the comp courses.
I have taught as a part time instructor at Eastern and the main reason I won’t ever do it again is the low pay. The last class I taught was in 1994. I was paid $2,000. From what I understand this is still the same approximate going rate. To teach the same class again, which I had to design from scratch I would expect at least $5,000. When I taught the class I was a seasoned professional in my specialty.
As far as large classes being taught by adjuncts and the loss of freshman due to the same, I can relate that one individual who transferred to Michigan was very disappointed to find out that he had to take Biology 101 over again in a class section that contained 800 people that was not taught by a full time staff person. There was virtually no access to the professor. Eastern does a pretty good job of undergraduate education, some people just think that a name and paying more makes the difference. I find it kind of disturbing that people don’t realize what a great place Eastern is, sure it has it’s con’s, but as far as I’m concerned they are way out weighed by the pro’s. I have three children who are successful in their current endeavors. All three went to good old EMU. My oldest daughter is a special ed. teacher, my other daughter is a nurse/administrator at St. Joe’s in A2. My son is a Ph.D candidate at Roosevelt University in Chicago. They all received a great undergraduate education in Ypsilanti.