“Working Poor” Adjunct Faculty Challenge Vice President Biden on College Costs Claim

Jan. 23, 2012 - PRLog -- At a January 13 event in Doylestown, PA, Vice President Biden asserted that skyrocketing tuition rates can be blamed on professors’ salaries, claiming that professorial pay has “escalated significantly” to $100,000.

In response, the nonprofit higher education advocacy group New Faculty Majority, which works to improve the quality of higher education by improving the working conditions of the 75% of the faculty that now work on temporary appointments, quickly launched a petition on the popular petition website Change.org to publicly correct Mr. Biden’s statement.  The petition, which collected 1000 signatures within a week of being posted, points out that 60.5% of all faculty are technically classified as “part-time” even if they teach as many courses as professors on full-time contracts, explains that the actual average annual salary of the majority of college professors in the United States is $25,000 or less, and that those professors who do not have access to independent personal income usually qualify for public assistance.

In trying to make sense of Biden’s statement, Matt Williams, Vice President of NFM and a former adjunct professor in communications and former Director of Forensics (Speech and Debate) at The University of Akron, observed that the Vice President was comparing salaries in two fields, English and the law, that are on opposite ends of the spectrum in terms of average compensation and the average circumstances of their faculty.  “More important than the specifics of the Vice President’s mistake is how it seems to prove that the administration is out of touch with the reality of what is happening in American college classrooms, even as it has claimed to make higher education access and success a priority.”

The petition exhorts potential signers to “tell Vice President Biden: don’t blame faculty the high cost of college; most are ‘working poor.”  The quoted phrase refers to an admission by a prominent college administrator that "Wal-Mart is a more honest employer of part-time employees than are most colleges and universities," and that higher education has created a faculty comprising “a highly educated working poor.”  The petition points out that independent analysis of college costs by the nonprofit Delta Cost Project has concluded that “over time there has been a gradual shift of resources away from instruction and towards general administrative and academic infrastructure.” It also reports that “institutions enrolling the most students spend the least on their education.”

In the petition NFM  invites the Vice President to attend an upcoming national Summit meeting on faculty working conditions, to take place in Washington DC on January 28, to “educate [him]self about the real working conditions of the majority of the faculty at colleges and universities in this country, and to commit to working with professors, students, legislators, and colleges to end the exploitation of adjunct faculty in the United States.”

The Summit meeting, first of its kind, will convene higher education stakeholders including faculty, students, parents, administrators, community groups, government officials, and others interested in learning more about how to forge practical solutions to the crisis.  It will take place in Washington DC in the middle of an adjunct unionization election at American University.

“We probably really should thank the Vice President for the gift of this gaffe,” said Maria Maisto, President of NFM and an adjunct in English at Cuyahoga Community College in Cleveland.  “In all seriousness, it’s obvious that he cares deeply about education, and about its cost.  I’m sure that he’ll be shocked to learn that so many faculty members are in such drastically different circumstances than he assumed.  Sometimes it takes that kind of a jolt to propel constructive action.   We would be delighted to have him attend our meeting.”

New Faculty Majority has gained traction since forming in 2009 to fight to improve the quality of higher education by improving the working conditions of its nearly one million adjunct and contingent faculty.  The organization's affiliated foundation has recently received grants from the the Marguerite Casey Foundation, the Ford Foundation, the French American Charitable Trust, the Rockefeller Family Fund, the Discount Foundation, and the Tides Foundation to advance its work, which includes research, raising public awareness of the conditions under which the nation's contingent academic workforce is laboring and helping to organize adjunct faculty and their allies into a viable movement to resist the steady disinvestment in faculty by institutions and state legislatures.   NFM's objective is to increase the quality of higher education by transforming the substandard working conditions and status of contingent faculty.  Its slogan, long a rallying cry of activists who have worked on the issue for decades (the cartoonist Garry Trudeau drew a series of strips about adjunct working conditions as far back as 1996), is that "A teacher's working conditions are a student's learning conditions."

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New Faculty Majority: The National Coalition for Adjunct and Contingent Equity is an independent national non-profit (501(c)6) organization supporting adjunct and contingent faculty in all disciplines and at any public or private university, college or community college in the US. Membership in NFM is open to any person interested in improving higher education by improving the working conditions of the majority of its faculty. Its affiliated 501(c)3 (pending) is the New Faculty Majority Foundation

NFM is dedicated to improving the quality of higher education by advancing professional equity and securing academic freedom for all adjunct and contingent faculty. For this purpose, NFM engages in education and advocacy to provide economic justice and academic equity for all college faculty. NFM is committed to creating stable, equitable, sustainable, non-exploitative academic environments that promote more effective teaching, learning, and research.