Teaching Part-Time

A few months before the start of the Fall 2012 semester, part-time Eugene Lang writing professor Jennifer Baumgardner received an unexpected email from the administration. According to Baumgardner, she was not only informed that her class had been cancelled, but also that her contract at The New School would not be renewed.

 “I was very shocked, especially because I had already been given class times,” Baumgardner told the Free Press.

 Though Baumgardner — a widely published and successful author, filmmaker and feminist activist, who had taught at the university since 2008 — was not offered any details, she said that she was informed that the decision was not reflective of her performance. The move, Baumgardner assumes, was due to fiscal concerns held by the university administration.

 “As far as making me feel appreciated, this could have been handled better,” she said, referring to the unexpected email. “But I understand that budget shortfalls and bottom lines are real.”

 For years, the status of part-time faculty members at The New School, like many universities across the country, has been a source of contention and concern. Part-time professors make up nearly 80 percent of the faculty at The New School, yet earn disproportionately less than full-time professors, face tenuous job security, and often lack necessary resources and facilities.

The high number of part-timers at the university more closely reflects that of many community colleges, where part-time professors represent about 70 percent of the faculty according to AFT Higher Education statistics.

 For several years, part-time faculty, often referred to as “adjuncts”, pushed for a union contract. In 2005, they finally succeeded. The union, ACT-UAW, Local 7902, negotiated a collective bargaining agreement for most part-time faculty at the University — hours before they were set to go on strike.

In 2009, tensions rose again. The part-time faculty union led rallies calling for the reinstatement of a group of nine Fine Arts faculty members, who had received email notices that their contracts would not be renewed.

 In interviews and emails, the Free Press surveyed dozens of faculty members, both part-time and full-time, across all of The New School’s divisions, asking about their job satisfaction.  Many part-time professors expressed particular concern regarding job security, and therefore would not speak to the *Free Press*, or would do so only on conditions of anonymity.

“[Part-time faculty’s] level of job security varies,” explained Robin Mookerjee, assistant professor and co-chair of Eugene Lang’s literary studies department. “An adjunct who has been an employee for a certain amount of time can have a fairly high level of job security.”

 But with most of the university’s revenue coming from student tuition at a time of declining enrollment, the concerns of part-time faculty are not unfounded — in fact, they reflect a nationwide trend. Part-time faculty are often the first to go with budget cuts.

“It’s not uncommon for colleges to rely heavily on adjunct professors,” explained Audrey Williams June, a senior reporter at the Chronicle for Higher Education, in an email to the Free Press. “If there is an enrollment spike, adjuncts can be hired quickly to teach extra courses. If enrollment drops, adjuncts, unlike tenure-track faculty, can then be let go.”

 While some part-time faculty currently at The New School plan only to teach for a few semesters, others expressed a desire to teach long-term, or even to become full-time professors.

 “I think a significant proportion, perhaps even the majority, of part-timers aspire to and, therefore, continually seek full-time positions, myself included,” wrote James Fuerst, a part-time professor in Eugene Lang’s literature department, in an email to the Free Press. “It is the scarcity of those positions that has helped to create the oversupply of qualified part-time candidates to begin with, which in turn has made acquiring and retaining a part-time position increasingly competitive and difficult over the years,” he said.

The difficulties facing part-timers at The New School are not new.  In 2011, 1,555 of The New School’s 1,967 faculty members were part-time professors, according to statistics published in the The New School Fact Book that year. (The Provost’s Office puts out the Fact Book annually, a document that breaks down trends and statistics at the university.) According to Fact Books published over the previous seven years, the ratio between part-time and full-time faculty scarcely fluctuated.

 Other private universities in New York City employ significantly fewer part-time faculty. At New York University, about 47 percent of the faculty are part-timers, according to data provided by The National Center for Education Statistics. At Columbia University, the ratio is about 29 percent.

Maria Maisto, president and executive director of the New Faculty Majority, a national adjunct rights advocacy group, put the average part-time versus full-time ratio across the country at about 60 percent.

 Provost Tim Marshall, who declined to be interviewed for this story, noted in a two-sentence written statement that there might be a benefit to The New School’s large number of part-time faculty, many of whom simultaneously work other jobs in their field.

“The New School’s practitioner-teacher model,” wrote Marshall, “which accounts for many of our part-time faculty, is uniquely designed to allow students to learn directly from professionals who are active in their fields.”

“Our part-time faculty,” the Provost added, “are represented by the ACT-UAW Local 7902 and the Associated Musicians of Greater New York Local 802, with whom we work in good faith on issues of compensation, benefits and terms of employment.”

 National experts, at the same time, warn of a coming danger.  Maisto, of  the New Faculty Majority, told the Free Press that the high ratio of part-time faculty across the country “is symptomatic of an overall trend towards a corporate approach to higher education.”

Maisto said that part-time faculty are underpaid and underappreciated by colleges across the country. “We think it’s time for a national conversation about higher education and the role of faculty in that.”

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In January 2012, at a town hall in Pennsylvania, a college parent asked Vice President Joe Biden why college tuition had skyrocketed over the past few years. “Salaries for college professors have escalated significantly,” Biden replied.

 The statement prompted condemnation from faculty unions across the country, who argued that universities have only marginally increased full-time faculty salaries, and not even on the pace of inflation. Simultaneously, universities have increasingly relied on part-time professors, some who earn as little as $2,000 per semester.

 At The New School, full-time faculty have not received a salary increase in at least two years.

 In October 2012, President Van Zandt sent an email to faculty addressing salary concerns.

 “I cannot minimize the hardship of not having had increases for the last two years,” Van Zandt wrote. “As you know, at tuition-based schools like ours, enrollment directly affects finances. Given the current shortfall, we are unable to provide salary increases in this fiscal year.”

 A number of faculty members voiced concerns that salaries at The New School are not commensurate with the high costs of living in New York City.

“I am a full-time faculty member, but if you look up average salaries, ours are not very high,” explained Juliette Cezzar, assistant professor and program director at Parsons. “I think they are very close to the average of institutions across the U.S., but given the cost of living in New York, that means we are on the very low end.”

 According to the Adjunct Project of the Chronicle for Higher Education, which tracks part-time faculty salaries across the country, an average adjunct professor at The New School makes $3,000-$5,350 for a semester-long class.  New School administrators would not confirm the statistic.

 One part-time professor, who wished to remain anonymous, told the Free Press that he feels under-compensated for the amount of work he shoulders each semester.

 The professor, who teaches multiple courses each term, says he is considered “an adjunct.”  His schedule is packed, he reports, while full-time faculty in his department, he says, teach half the number of courses.  “This salary and course load inequity,” the part-timer insisted, “must be dealt with seriously at some point, university-wide.”

The administration declined to provide a statistic on how much of the university’s budget goes toward paying part-time faculty, or faculty in general.

Some professors noted that The New School is ahead of the national curve, as one among few universities that offer part-time professors healthcare benefits. As stipulated in its union contract, “Part-time faculty are eligible to participate in a health care plan and dental care plan if they have worked at the University at least one academic year and meet the eligibility criteria as outlined in the Collective Bargaining Agreement.”

Fuerst, a part-time professor in Eugene Lang’s literature department, told the Free Press that The New School’s compensation package is not necessarily the problem.  He said that while part-time compensation is not enough to live-on, it is still better than many other universities in the country – even many other universities in New York.

“Teaching part-time at Lang is a good deal, relative to context. It’s the context that’s grim,” he said.

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While low pay and poor job security may be drawbacks, most professors interviewed agree that their job is also highly rewarding.

“Most of the satisfaction I derive from my position stems from my experiences with students in the classroom,” Fuerst wrote in an email to the Free Press. “I consistently find myself impressed and inspired.”

The majority of professors interviewed across the divisions said that they appreciate the academic freedom afforded by the university and the departmental support available to assist professors in structuring their courses.

“In general,” said Kevin McQueen, a part-time professor at Milano, “there seems to be a lot of resources that are made available to faculty members to take on some of the more rudimentary development of courses in terms of designing syllabi, understanding different teaching methods and how to evaluate performance.”

Of the 27 professors surveyed by email, only three felt that they lack the requisite freedom to design their own syllabus.

“Teaching at Lang was incredibly gratifying because of the talented students it attracts,” Baumgardner told the Free Press. “I also loved that the teachers have full freedom to create the class as they see fit and that plays to individual strengths.”

But there were concerns about the lack of institutional resources.  Only five of the 27 part-timers said they had their own private offices, though several specified that they do not need one.

“Meetings with colleagues and students in hallways, especially when the conversation is of a sensitive nature, is really inappropriate and makes privacy virtually impossible,” explained a professor who wished to remain anonymous.

Several faculty expressed a hope that the University Center, set to open in January, 2014, will house faculty offices. Administrators told the Free Press that that is not the case.

Maisto, of the New Faculty Majority, said that the lack of private office space for part-time faculty, in addition to a lack of institutional support in general, raises legal issues for the nation’s institutions of higher education.  Students have a right to privacy when discussing sensitive matters with their professors. “It’s only a matter of time before there might be some legal action against institutions that don’t provide the right institutional support.”

This article was modified April 1 to clarify that full-time professors have not been afforded increases in salary