Ellington

Student groups often lobby for international labor causes, but a visiting leader of a faculty advocacy group plans to highlight serious labor issues facing college faculty, both at the UW and at colleges across the country.

Nationwide, the numbers of employed adjunct college professors are steadily on the rise. However, this shift from full-time, tenured professors to adjunct faculty is not merely a national issue — it has also shifted to become an international predicament as well.

“Colleges have turned into sweatshops when it comes to their own faculty,” said Keith Hoeller, chair of the adjunct faculty committee of the American Association of University Professors (AAUP).

The international surge of adjunct college professors will be the focus of attention in Dr. Cary Nelson’s lecture, “The End of Education: Globalization, Contingency, and Academic Freedom.” Nelson, the recently re-elected president of the AAUP, will be delivering his speech tomorrow at 3:30 p.m. in Smith 211.

Since adjunct professors are paid significantly lower than full-time faculty, Hoeller compared them to immigrant workers. Adjunct professors also do not receive any benefits or health insurance.

Professors who only hold a part-time position have no job securities and are very vulnerable, Nelson said.

“And those who have no job securities have no academic freedom,” Nelson said. “And when there is no academic freedom, there is no shared governance. It’s all tied together.”

The issue is part of a trend in higher education in which colleges have attempted to save money by making cuts to their faculty’s pay rates. Also, the issue of adjunct faculty is not entirely clear-cut; many adjunct faculty are happy to teach part time or are simply not qualified enough to teach as a tenured professor, according to an article in The Washington Post.

Since 1915, the AAUP has actively represented college professors in the United States.

The number of adjunct professors is increasing while the number of those who are tenured is heading in the opposite direction.

“Over the last 30 to 35 years, the percentage of part-time professors has tripled, and the percentage of full-tenured professors has been cut in half,” Nelson said.

Adjunct faculty are also affected by international trends.

International institutions, namely the International Monetary Fund (IMF), are purportedly disrupting the AAUP’s principles of academic freedom, tenure and shared governance, which Nelson labeled as “the three legs of the stool that hold higher education.”

“When the IMF grants loans to developing countries, it requires colleges and universities to increase the number of part-time professors,” he said. “There’s less academic freedom, and it leads to corporatization or privatization and an increased reliance on businesses to finance education.”

As a result, some fields, such as humanities, have been greatly impacted. In Australia, for example, the government only supports collaborative research that has immediate social effect, Nelson said.

Hoeller said that the ultimate goal is to increase the role of adjunct professors on campus.

“Somehow we have to change this situation so that adjunct professors get equal pay and equal benefits,” he said. “Adjunct professors are a vast underutilized resource.”

[Reach reporter Kim Lee at news@thedaily.washington.edu.]