Democrats project the public image of standing up for the little
guy, favoring unions and workers over management, promoting equality and
fairness, and condemning discrimination and systemic racism. But good
intentions can be subverted when the supposed good guys are sustaining
unfairness and discrimination.
While the Democrats have heralded
colleges as engines of equality and upward mobility, they have ignored
the unequal two-tiered faculty labor system, the upper tier being
tenure-track instructors, with lifetime job security, premium pay and
full-time employment, while the non-tenure-track lower tier are
contracted term-by-term, receive heavily discounted pay (e.g., often 60
cents on the dollar) and a workload that is often capped (e.g., no more
than 67% of full-time), which can result in poverty-level wages. As a
nontenured adjunct instructor for 28 years, I earned a gross annual
income of about $20,000 for teaching roughly a half-time load in Kitsap
County, where the median annual income is $82,000.
The
treatment of nontenured professors would be inconsequential if their
role were inconsequential, but they are integral by any measure. In
Washington’s community and technical colleges, they staff nearly half of
all classes, 45.3%, and in terms of head count, they are the majority —
the 7,870 nontenured part-time instructors vastly outnumber the state’s
3,597 tenured instructors.
It seems decidedly Orwellian when
Democrats proclaim their dedication to forgiving student loans, free
tuition and other programs aimed at lifting people out of poverty while
denying a living wage to the very people who provide the means to
execute those proclamations.
Democrats generally feel confident
aligning themselves with faculty unions, which for years have been
pushing for more full-time tenure-track faculty positions (e.g., in
Washington state, last year’s Senate Bill 6405 was recycled this year
into current E2SSB 5194
and its identical House companion House Bill 1318, all sponsored
exclusively by Democrats). But when adjuncts outnumber full-time
instructors, adding more full-time positions does not solve the problem.
What’s more, these bills offer false hope to part-time instructors as
they convert positions, not individuals, leaving the substandard working
conditions of adjuncts intact.
If these bills replaced sketchy
paraprofessionals with bona fide professionals, they could be celebrated
as improvements, but they cannot be so characterized. No credible
research findings suggest the superiority of tenured instructors nor
that non-tenure-track instructors are only 60% as effective, as their
discounted pay rate would suggest.
At play is the tenurism
bias, the belief that tenure is a merit system, that the tenured are
superior instructors and deserving of job security and premium pay with
its cruel corollary that the nontenured are inferior and less deserving.
Tenurism is the cognitive dissonance when confronting the abject
unfairness of the two-tiered faculty workforce: Tenure-track and
non-tenure-track instructors satisfy the same credential requirements,
award grades and credits that have the same value, and have the same
tuition charged for their classes, but are certainly not treated as
equals. Tenurism rationalizes this lack of equality, giving rise to
reasoning like: “Since the tenured are treated so much better, they must
actually be better.” Like racism, sexism and ageism, tenurism makes the
immoral seem moral and closes the mind to considering counter
positions, such as correcting unfair working conditions.
If the
squeaky wheel gets the grease, then nontenured faculty may be doomed.
Lacking job security, most adjuncts are not about to complain about the
unfairness of their substandard working conditions. Despite decades of
union representation, no transition from non-tenure-track to the
tenure-track status exists in Washington colleges. The creation of more
tenure-track positions will mean that many nontenured will lose their
jobs. The unions appear eager for this to happen.
Instead of
hiring new tenured instructors, a sensible and more feasible option
would be to establish a probationary period for current nontenured
instructors (as opposed to their perpetual probation at present), after
which they could be granted job protection through seniority. While not
tenure, it would enable a measure of job security and would not impact
the state’s budget. Those who squeal that state law should not intrude
into the turf of collective bargaining must reckon with the failure of
bargaining to achieve such elementary workplace provisions as equal pay
and job security.
The proper defender of workers is their union,
which should honor, not ignore, its duty of fair representation and
treat all those it represents fairly; it cannot play favorites.
President Joe Biden has made pronouncements against systemic racism,
which gives rise to the hope that egalitarianism will triumph over
elitism, and discrimination will be recognized and canceled even when
embedded as a norm.
When will Democrats and unions demand that
colleges and universities extend the same upward mobility and career
opportunities to their faculty that they offer their students?
Jack Longmate
has been an adjunct English instructor at Olympic College for more than 25 years.
