Campus Equity Week is October 24-28, 2011

Ok-so that cool photo up at the right is from www.opednews.com/articles/Occupy-Santa-Fe-Photo-Ess-by-Meryl-Ann-Butler. Well done guys.

And, in that spirit, what are you doing for Adjunct Equity week? I mean, insofar as you know that ejicashun and gud jobs don't go together like they shud? I suggest:

1) Making this known to you full-time faculty colleagues, who generally don't know about adjunct/contingent trends or conditions: if they knew, they would surely help out. 

2) Wearing a loudly informative hat and/or t-shirt, such as those available through the New Faculty Majority web store. You can get stuff printed with Higher Ed Hand, or Fair Trade in Education.  There's a nice bumper sticker too: ADJUNCTivitis is a social JUSTICE disease, thought I think maybe the printing on it should be clearer. BTW, have any catchy slogans? 

3) Organizing an informational meeting with your union, if you have one, or with your faculty senate or other faculty organization if possible, or just getting everybody to shut down the college or university for a couple of weeks until you get your point across.

And here are other places for other ideas-

http://www.cocalinternational.org/ http://www.aft.org/higher_ed/cew/ http://www.fpse.ca/library/few http://www.fneeq.qc.ca/en/accueil/communiques/communiques_2007/new019.html http://www.caut.ca/pages.asp?page=572 http://www.aaup.org/AAUP/issues/contingent/cewpage.htm  (Events from 2009, plus many helpful sample documents)

How Many Adjunct/Contingent Faculty?

I think it's about 16 million, and perhaps there are 1200 faculty teaching full-time, with multi-year contracts, or tenure, or on tenure track; with salaries, health and retirement benefits, and so-forth.

Maybe I am wrong. But I'm not sure.

Here's an example of my problem. If I look, say, at the page marked "Employees," which you can get from the "Facts and Figures" page helpfully published by the Office of Institutional Research and Planning for Westchester Community College, which is one of the places where I ply my trade (teaching anthropology and related subjects), you will see that, under "faculty," are the numbers 164, for Full-time, and 2 for Half-time. Insofar as I teach at this same college—as an adjunct, and therefore part-time (there is a cap on adjuncts that prohibits us from working full-me)...and I know, well, more than two other people who do the same...that's already more than the 2 mysterious "Half-time" employees, so that can't be us, can it? And, insofar as there is, in "Facts and Figures," no report on adjunct faculty, well, that's a problem.

At the analogous page for LaGuardia Community College, where I also teach, I can see that 64% of faculty are accounted for as "part-time," which is the standard, and belittling, code for adcon faculty who, of course, are usually employed full-time—they'd better be, at 1/3 or less the payrate of "traditional" faculty—but not at one institution. But at least the reporting is fairly open.

And, let's see-at Fordham University, where I also teach, as a "part-time" adjunct (what else?), on the "Fordham Facts" page I read that there are 703 full-time instructors (41% are women, and 16% are minorities, in case you're interested—they do collect some info). 391 of these are tenured. By the way, you can also see that 95% of all faculty hold not a, but "the Ph.D. or other terminal degree." That the thing always make it sound like there's only one, doesn't it? Anyway, I hold a Ph.D. myself, and as a 20-year adjunct the difference between it and something "terminal" begins to seem trivial.

You see what I mean. Or not. Do you have something mysterious happening where you teach? Disappearing faculty? Percentages of full-timers approaching 100% Please let me know. Maybe I am missing something.