Composition Labor Issues

There's something about Spring that calls for agitation--Prague Spring, May 68, etc. As an undergrad at Rutgers, spring was the time for taking over Board of Trustees meetings, sit-ins in administrators' offices, and so on.

So here we are again. Most people, even administrators, are sympathetic to the unfairness of part-time, adjunct and full-time lecturer labor. Of course most people are sympathetic to the problems of world hunger....yeah, that sympathy goes a long way.

More than half the courses at Cortland are taught by such faculty, including virtually all of the composition courses and many of our general education literature courses. That's something like 70-80 sections per semester. Maybe more.

They want fair treatment, which amounts basically to fair pay and benefits. It's a longstanding problem in our field, so I won't bother to lay it out. Most of you are probably aware of it.

I am willing to agitate if that is the best means available to change the system. Recently I heard it would take $1 million more a year in the adjunct pay budget to create equitable pay.

I'm sure it's not easy. But it could be done if you had a strong enough motive for doing it. All we have is an ethical argument, which is not so motivating in these days of the "excellent," market-driven university.

However, here is some potentially compelling supporting arguments.

1. The College already has a proclaimed goal of reducing its reliance on adjunct labor. By increasing the cost of adjunct labor we build in a greater incentive to reduce our dependency.

2. In addition to raising the costs, the College could charge departments with developing strategies for reducing their dependency on adjuncts and full-time lecturers without impacting the quality of education. Some incentive might be attached in the form of seeing a percentage of that adjunct budget returned to the department in some other form.

I realize that ideally,one would like to offer every adjunct a full-time position. However, I do not believe that we are ethically obligated to that. If they were hired with the promise that some day they might have a full-time job, then I think that was unethical. I hope that was not the case.

However, I do think that we have an obligation to eliminate part-time work. So we must stop hiring more adjuncts and pay the ones we have a decent rate until they choose to leave. The argument has been made for creating more full-time lecturer positions. I am ambivalent about that as I think those positions are also unfair, especially in terms of long-term earning potential.

Let's put it this way. We could promote two adjuncts to lecturer positions, and the College would get an additional 8 sections taught per year (as the adjuncts move from 2-2 to 4-4). Right now, we're paying about $20G for the two adjuncts; we'd pay $64G for them as lecturers. Instead, we could hire one tenure-track faculty member at $44G, get 6 courses taught, but also have someone who could do advising and other service work for the college. Besides every lecturer we hire means more students in our department without faculty to do the service work an increase in students demands.

Promoting the adjuncts is more ethical on a local and short-term basis, with people that you know. But is expanding the class of full-time lecturers ethical on a broader or longer-term basis?

It's an ugly question. It's like asking whether it is right to feed starving people who will just procreate and create more starving people.

Ok. I'm agitated now.

The answer is that perhaps we don't go far enough. That instead of arguing for full-time lecturer positions, we should be arguing for tenure-track lines for which our adjunct colleagues might compete. Honestly though, if we created a tenure-track position in rhet/comp we would almost certainly end up hiring a non-local candidate b/c most of our adjuncts don't have PhD's and the ones who do don't have PhD's in rhet/comp.