Fairness and the Fate of the College
by Terry Mulcaire, Regular Faculty, English
Department
Last spring, when I was reading my colleague Terry Ehret’s statement in favor of the changes that had been proposed to AFA’s constitution and bylaws, I found that Terry’s characteristically lucid and well-informed writing had the odd effect of crystallizing my reasons for opposing the changes that she was writing to support. I found myself reflecting, first, on how lucky SRJC is to have Terry and so many other gifted adjunct faculty work here, and second, on how bitterly unfair it is that she and so many others are employed, relatively, as second-class citizens. And it struck me that the best possible redress for this unfairness would be to hire these fine teachers as full-time faculty—this college, or any college, would be enriched by adding such people to its full-time staff. But as we all know, the number of full-time positions, as a proportion of teaching positions overall, here and everywhere, is not growing. The absolute number of full-time faculty in the English department over the last ten years has shrunk by about 25%, for example; I understand this is not representative, but it’s a striking example.
At the same time, the proportion of part-time positions is increasing. Terry pointed out, in passing, that adjuncts in the near future may teach more than 50% of classes here. She and others have also pointed to the College’s failure to hold the line on a ratio of full-time to part-time instruction. Given our current budget and political climate, 50% seems not just plausible, but possible, even likely. As that growth trend continues, the unfairness that denies excellent, more than qualified college teachers full-time employment, relegating them to “second-class” status, will grow correspondingly.
Is it possible to view this development as anything other than a bad one, both for the teachers and for the health and future of SRJC and of higher education in general?
Much of AFA’s recent discussions of fairness have focused on questions of local, in-house equity at SRJC. These are important questions, but we will not answer them adequately if we fail to consider the larger context and source of the unfairness we’re dealing with. It’s not local; it’s the policy of our employers. For the sake of simplicity, let’s say we are all employed by the state of California. The part-time faculty population has been growing because it has been possible for the state of California to spend less money by paying part-timers relatively less in wages, giving them little or no benefits, denying them job security, and denying them pay for work outside the classroom. Bluntly, the part-time population has been growing because the State has been able to get away with treating part-timers unfairly, relative to full-timers. Full stop. There is no positive educational rationale for that growth, only the naked economic rationale of paying less for the same throughput (to borrow a term from Alfred Chandler's study of the 19th-century factory) of students through the system. But that naked cost-cutting masks itself, to some extent, with the assumption that there is no educational price to be paid for replacing full- with part-timers, no cost to the school, as it were, in cutting the cost of faculty. In short, the assumption is that something can be had for nothing. Lower price! Same quality!
I propose that this assumption is false, and I am distressed by the extent to which it is underwriting our current discussion of fairness. Terry Ehret makes it clear that the proposed changes to AFA’s constitution and bylaws are a response to the proportional growth of the part-time faculty. In a strictly local context, they may be a reasonable response to that growth. But they do nothing to redress, or even acknowledge, the fundamental and growing unfairness driving that growth, because the source of that unfairness is not to be found locally. Instead, the proposed changes will amount to a ratification of that growing unfairness and a readjustment of our local politics and compensation to accommodate ourselves to the cost-cutting imperatives being imposed on us by the State. Clearly, however, these changes will do absolutely nothing to ease the pressure to cut costs. Instead, they will seek to distribute that pressure more equally among all faculty, and this will point us to a future in which the basic unfairness of the current part-time position will, in the name of fairness and equity, have become the general condition of all faculty. Along with a deeply held (and admirable!) commitment to equality, the prime values of this faculty will be cheapness and productivity of labor.
In short, we are dangerously mistaken to consider issues of fairness between full-time and part-time faculty without recognizing that the proportional growth of the part-time faculty, which has brought these issues to the fore, represents a major threat to the educational quality of this institution. While I recognize that this is an empirical question as well as a question of logic and principle, I doubt that the quality of education to be had at SJRC is not worse than it was when the ratio of full-time to part-time was at historic lows. And I see no reason to doubt that it will be worse still should the proportion of part-time teaching reach 60% or 70%. This decline will not be the fault of our part-time faculty, as individuals or as a body. It will be the consequence of large-scale institutional and structural changes in the composition and compensation of the faculty that have been happening before our eyes for years now, but which, I fear, we are failing to recognize and understand. Without such recognition and such understanding, we will not only certainly fail to stop the decline of this institution; we may unwittingly end up aiding and abetting it. And that will be our own fault, all of us.