How can tenured faculty improve things for contingent faculty?

In our April "how can we help you?" thread, a reader asks:

I am (hopefully) going to receive tenure in the coming year. I am thinking about what I want to do with that newfound security, and one thing I want to do is be a better ally to contingent faculty at my university. There are ways to do this that seem obvious to me, like participating in the picket line if their union ever calls a strike. But I'm wondering if anyone has advice about subtler things that could still make a difference. For example, at my university, permanent faculty receive computers from the university but contingent faculty do not. I am planning to try to motivate my department to fix this for our own faculty or object to the university's policy if we can't directly fix it. But I would love to read other ideas, if anyone is willing to share: how can tenured faculty help make things better for contingent faculty?

An excellent and important question! Do any readers have any helpful tips, experiences, or other insights?

Comments

[meta-helper]

Perhaps this is controversial, but I think full time faculty should aggressively resist projects and plans put forward by the administration that would +appear+ to benefit part-time faculty but in fact would have the opposite effect in the long-run. For exmaple, where I was, the admin. was going to allow part-time people to teach summer courses even with very low enrolments but then only pay them at a rate proportional to the students enrolled. This was replacing a system where all sumer courses were paid a basic rate. This "reform" was so obviously not in anyone's interest but the administration's.

[Ted Shear]

A while back, I wrote this blog post at Daily Nous encouraging TT faculty to forgo summer teaching since taking on a summer course is often taking a job away from contingent faculty living near the poverty line: https://dailynous.com/2020/09/11/tenured-tenure-track-profs-take-summer-off-teaching-guest-post-ted-shear/. If there is support for it, you could try making it departmental policy to give priority for summer teaching assignments to contingent faculty.

[adjunct]

Adjuncts know that no teaching job is ever guaranteed, but we often are kept in the dark about things that pile additional uncertainty on top of that.

Things vary a lot from school to school, so its best to ask your adjuncts what they need to know to plan under slightly reduced uncertainty. But here are a few things that could have made my life less uncertain at points:

- If you are pleased with an adjunct's work and plan to hire that adjunct in future iterations of a course, tell that adjunct.

- If you know that a faculty member is taking a leave or sabbatical and the near future and there will be more temporary work for a semester or year, tell your adjuncts.

- If you're working to hire a postdoc or VAP that will soak up a bunch of courses, tell your adjuncts.

- If an adjunct's course is unlikely to be canceled, even if enrollment is low, tell your adjunct.

- If the faculty is discussing reducing sections or eliminating a course, tell your adjuncts.

- If you are fine with your adjuncts making requests regarding the scheduling of future courses they are likely to teach, tell them.

- If you've already filed paperwork to assign courses to an adjunct, but are waiting on pro-forma administrative approval, tell the adjunct that the paperwork is in progress.

[StructuralChange]

If faculty at your university aren't unionized, become active in efforts to unionize. One of the most promising things in academia recently was TT faculty at Rutgers striking to help achieve better pay and benefits for contingent faculty: https://www.nj.com/education/2023/04/rutgers-and-unions-reach-deal-to-end-historic-faculty-strike.html

[striker]

In response to StructuralChange - of course you are right, but people must be aware of the law. I worked at a unionized state college in a state where it was ILLEGAL for state employees to go on strike. I knew this, as did all the people actively involved in the union. But a colleague who had nothing to do with the union said we should strike when some change affected her directly. We had to inform her about the law.