Contingent faculty, who are temporary or part time instructors, face many challenges at Fort Lewis College and other academic institutions, including low salaries, which has the potential to interfere with their ability to teach effectively. Across the nation, institutions are becoming more reliant on these part time and temporary faculty members as a source of less expensive and more flexible labor.
Less permanent faculty members do not have the same protections and benefits as permanent faculty, Barbara Morris, provost of Academic Affairs said.
“Contingent faculty include our adjuncts, who are paid by the course on a temporary basis,” Sarah Roberts-Cady, a political science, philosophy and women’s studies professor at Fort Lewis College said.
Adjuncts, among other contingent faculty, do not have the security that tenure and tenure-track professors have, Roberts-Cady said.
Non-Salary Based Issues for Contingent Faculty
Besides facing issues regarding their compensation, adjuncts also may have to deal with a lack of office space or recognition on their department websites, Roberts-Cady said.
The American Association of University Professors put together a guide for department chairs in order to help address some of these issues, Michael Dichio, political science and philosophy professor and AAUP attendee said.
The guide outlines ways that department chairs can help make their adjunct faculty recognized on their websites and on WebOPUS, as well as recommends methods of finding office space for adjuncts, Dichio said.
Recognition of these issues is the first step towards solving them, Dichio said.
These issues are more solvable, compared to the issue of compensation for contingent faculty, Roberts-Cady said.
Problems with Salaries at FLC
Faculty salaries are calculated by averaging out what other instructors of the same rank and departmental make at their institutions, Roberts Cady said..
The issues that adjuncts at FLC face in relation to their pay are comparable to the issues facing other contingent faculty across the nation, Roberts-Cady said.
“I do think that our administration has made a good faith effort to make our salaries be on par with our peers, but because there's some injustices with our peers, we’re duplicating that.” Roberts-Cady said.
FLC administrators have done studies on pay throughout the region and have increased compensation for its faculty as necessary, Morris said.
One of the concerns that contingent faculty at FLC have is that the cost of living in Durango has not been calculated into the salaries that they are currently paid, Roberts-Cady said.
“There’s no question that our tenured and tenure-track professors are being paid living wages,” Roberts-Cady said. “There is question over whether our adjunct faculty is being paid living wages and that's problematic.”
The Challenges Facing Adjuncts
Kate Smith, an adjunct faculty member and sociology instructor at FLC, does not believe that she is being paid a living wage, she said.
Smith taught at the University of Colorado in Colorado Springs for 15 years and has been at FLC for two years now, she said.
“The pay that I am recieving, at this time, is not commensurate with my years of teaching and my educational background,” Smith said.
Being an adjunct faculty member can result in facing several challenges other than unjust compensation, Roberts-Cady said.
Some of these challenges are heavier teaching loads, having to commute between multiple positions at different institutions, and lacking basic support, Morris said.
“I have known some people who will teach two classes at one college, maybe two classes at another college and maybe teach two classes online just to make a sustainable wage,” Smith said.
Smith said her life has been impacted as she struggles to balance the everyday living expenses in Durango by doing what she loves, which is teaching.
“Being that Durango has a higher cost of living than other places of the same size, I do not find myself making a living wage,” Smith said.
As less money is put towards educational institutions, colleges and universities are forced to adjust their budgets, and an effective way of doing this is to hire more contingent faculty, Roberts-Cady said
“It's part of the structure of academia that's problematic,” Roberts-Cady said. “We have a group of laborers that's pretty exploited.”
The Benefits of Permanent vs. Contingent Faculty
One of the solutions that colleges and universities rely on to help solve resolve their financial issues is hiring increasing numbers of contingent faculty, Dichio said.
In 2007, FLC’s permanent faculty accounted for 81.02 percent of the school’s workload, Morris said.
In 2015, permanent faculty at FLC accounted for 71.23 percent of workload contributions, she said.
“A norm has developed that adjunct faculty help costs, for whatever reason. I’m not sure why,” Dichio said. “Most of our adjunct faculty have the same qualifications as us if not very similar and it doesn't seem to make a lot of sense from the perspective of the employee that the pay would be less.”
This system works for colleges and universities because they can still employee qualified and experienced people with less expense to the institution, Smith said.
Stretched Too Thin
Colleges and universities employ increasing numbers of adjunct faculty because it helps the college solve a budget problem, Roberts-Cady said.
Adjuncts can supplement teaching staff when permanent faculty have received course release or are on sabbatical, Morris said.
“When you have faculty members who are paid inadequately and therefore have to have multiple jobs to survive they end up being stretched pretty thin,” Roberts-Cady said. “I think our adjunct faculty are awesome teachers, but anyone, even an awesome teacher, can be stretched too thin.”
As contingent faculty attempt to juggle more classes in order to support themselves they have less and less time to dedicate to their students, Dichio said.
Being stretched thin may make teaching harder but it doesn't affect the quality of education that students get at FLC, Smith said.
“There are a large number of colleges that are hiring part time faculty, it, to my knowledge, does not affect the education of students but it does affect the livelihood of part time instructors,” Smith said. “To my knowledge students still receive a quality education.”
Suggestions for Improvement
Smith recommends that this issue be addressed by changing the way in which administrators decide the pay of contingent faculty at FLC, she said.
“It would be helpful if administrators are able to pay part-time instructors according to the number of years they have taught, according to their ratings from students, and from the input from faculty in their department and base their pay on those three criteria instead of just offering a standard set wage.” Smith said.
The local chapter of the AAUP is focusing on addressing some of the issues that adjuncts face, Roberts-Cady said.
“We’re advocating for adjuncts’ salaries in the budgeting process, which is just starting right now,” she said.
The AAUP showed a film about the problem of adjunct pay and brought faculty together for a discussion about it in the fall, Roberts-Cady said.
Bringing the eye of the public to the problems facing adjuncts and contingent faculty is one of the goals of the AAUP, Roberts-Cady said.
“The first step is to make public the problem, make people aware that adjunct faculty are paid very, very low wages for work that is intensive and requires a very high amount of training, I think that's problematic,” she said. “The second thing is figuring out how universities and colleges can manage a budget without exploiting that labor.”