MTA Today - Winter 2013

By Sarah Nathan

T he MTA is ramping up efforts to address the inequities facing adjunct faculty members at the Commonwealth’s public colleges and universities.

Legislation aimed at providing health and pension benefits for part-time instructors, as well as increasing the percentage of undergraduate courses taught by full-time tenured and tenure-track faculty members, is one of six MTA-backed bills filed in the current session. The bill, sponsored by Representative David Sullivan (D-Fall River), is intended to “reverse the course” by restoring balance among faculty members and putting an end to overreliance on part-time instructors, said Massachusetts Community College Council President Joe LeBlanc.

The challenges facing part-time faculty members are well documented in Massachusetts and around the country. LeBlanc noted that at the state’s 15 community colleges, where the problem is most acute in the state’s higher education system, more than two-thirds of classes are now taught by part-time faculty.

The hiring of adjunct faculty members was originally intended to allow working professionals to offer their expertise in the classroom. As enrollment in public higher education has increased and the number of full-time teaching positions has remained stagnant, however, colleges have grown increasingly reliant on adjuncts without providing benefits to meet their needs.

Part-time instructors are paid by the course and are not eligible for health insurance. Moreover, they are not enrolled in the state retirement system or eligible to collect Social Security based on their teaching. Despite the fact that many instructors teach five or more courses per semester — the equivalent of a full-time course load — they do not receive the same pay or benefits as full-time professors.

“Luckily, I love what I do. If I didn’t, this would
be a really difficult job to manage,” said Patrick
Lochelt, an adjunct instructor who patches together
a modest living each semester
teaching eight English courses at
three colleges. “I come home with
stacks of essays to grade. I just dig
For eight years, Lochelt has
been dividing his time among
Northern Essex Community
College, Middlesex Community
College and UMass Lowell. In
addition to actual instruction
time, he spends about 20 hours a
week reviewing students’ work. Because he teaches
writing classes and requires each student to write
five essays, he estimates that he grades about 1,000
papers per semester.

While he knows how much effort he puts into his students and his classes, he has concerns about their future. Because part-time instructors are often stretched very thin, they aren’t always available

to students in the same way as full-time faculty members, who serve as advisers.

Higher ed faculty members see this as a significant issue because establishing such connections can contribute to long-term success — and at times may determine whether a student remains in school.

At Bridgewater State University, where there has been a concerted effort to increase the number of full-time faculty members, the number of full-time first-year students who stay in school is growing. At a recent Board of Higher Education meeting, Dr. Dana Mohler-Faria, BSU’s president, reported that the number of full-time faculty has grown by 27 percent since 2000. He said that as faculty-student ratios have improved, so has the retention rate for students of color and low-income students.

Lochelt said he tries to stay in touch with his students during the week, but is not always readily available because he is forced to divide his time.

“I do my best. I receive and send a lot of
e-mails, but I’m spread out among three campuses,”
he said. “If I were a full-time faculty member, I’d
have fewer classes and office hours. As adjuncts, we
just can’t do as much. It’s hard because I don’t think
a lot of people even know what an adjunct is or the
role we play in public higher education.”
In 2009, the MTA, the MCCC and five
instructors, including Lochelt, filed suit against
the state seeking health insurance coverage for
adjunct faculty members teaching multiple courses
on different campuses. In January, a Suffolk
Superior Court judge rejected the argument that the
Commonwealth was improperly denying adjuncts
access to state-administered health insurance. The
plaintiffs had argued that adjuncts met the definition
of part-time employees as outlined in state law and
should be treated as such.

“The state is just heartless when it comes to
this question,” LeBlanc said. “Many of our adjunct
faculty members face incredible hardships. They do
this work because they love it and receive abuse, no
benefits and small paychecks in return.”
The MTA and the MCCC recently brought the
issue to the attention of state Labor Secretary Joanne
Goldstein and Higher Education Commissioner
Richard Freeland. In an effort to illustrate the real-
life problems that some faculty members are facing,
the MTA and the MCCC collected and shared stories
about personal health care crises from 10 adjunct
faculty members.

One part-time instructor who wished to remain
anonymous for fear of reprisal spoke about having to
choose between paying his college loans or his health
insurance because he couldn’t afford both. While he
thought he had made a responsible decision, he said,
he is a relatively young person who is now harnessed
with a $100,000 medical bill for emergency surgery
that might have been prevented had he not been
uninsured and unable to afford regular visits to
doctors. Another faculty member noted that her
income as an adjunct goes almost entirely to pay
for her family’s health insurance. “I love teaching,
but the state is being fundamentally unfair toward
adjuncts,” wrote another instructor. “The state
mandates that every citizen in Massachusetts must
have health insurance, yet it denies this same
insurance to thousands of state employees.”
The MCCC is taking the fight to restore equity
and improve working conditions for adjuncts to
the bargaining table, where contract negotiations
for part-time faculty in the Division of Continuing
Education will begin soon. The DCE’s current
contract expires in June. In addition, the MCCC
launched an organizing effort last fall to increase the
number of part-time faculty members who joined the
union. The ongoing campaign has quickly proven to
be a success, with a 10 percent increase in members.

“Unfortunately, the problem of part-time
employment is not limited to our public campuses
or academia — there are workers in many other
industries who are struggling to hold on to full-time
positions and the wages and benefits that come
with these jobs,” said James Rice, president of the
National Council of Higher Education, the higher
education arm of the NEA. “There is certainly an
incredible effort all over to exploit workers.”
Rice recently participated in the Delphi Project,
a collaboration that is creating resources and
materials aimed at helping faculty and staff with
issues related to part-time instructors.

Information on the Delphi Project is available at www.thechangingfaculty.org. The MTA’s Center for Education Policy and Practice is finalizing a research paper on the topic of adjunct faculty members titled “Reverse the Course.” It will be available on the MTA website, www.massteacher.org, in the next few weeks.