Students help adjunct faculty in fight to form unions

• Adjunct faculty usually sign contracts on a year-to-year or semester-to-semester basis.
• Tenured and tenure-track faculty only represent around 30%25 of all professors.
• Students see the working conditions of their contingent faculty as intimately linked to their own education.

Students walking near the library quad at Northeastern University last Thursday came face-to-face with an unusual form of student activism: a flash mob.

"It's time for adjunct, adjunct rights," the students sang to the tune of Michael Jackson's Thriller.

"We're building up momentum, the fuse is set alight."

The performers, members of the on-campus club Progressive Student Alliance, were dancing in support of Northeastern's contingent faculty members, who are organizing to form a union.

"It honestly confuses me that I am paying about $50,000 for tuition and my professors are making poverty wages," says junior Daniela Gonzalez, a member of the Progressive Student Alliance.

"We know that adjuncts' working conditions are students' learning conditions," she added.

Contingent faculty — sometimes referred to as adjunct faculty — are waging unionization campaigns across the country in hopes of securing better pay, benefits and job security.

In these efforts, faculty have found a critical ally in students, who are taking action on at least a half dozen campuses this semester.

Unlike tenured and tenure-track faculty — who only represent around 30% of all faculty, according to 2011 data from the American Association of University Professors — contingent faculty sign contracts on a year-to-year or semester-to-semester basis, and often must work at multiple schools to piece together a living wage.

Students see the working conditions of their contingent faculty as intimately linked to their own education.

"As students, it really is in our best interest to get involved in the long run because they are the ones that are educating us and providing us with the knowledge we need to succeed ourselves in the future," says Nellie Ruiz, a senior at the University of La Verne, where contingent faculty publicly announced their intentions to form a union last week.

Ruiz is helping to put together a coalition of student groups on her campus – from sororities to honor societies to progressive activist groups, who will stand in solidarity with the contingent faculty members in the coming months.

In some cases, students are taking a more even-handed approach.

Before he graduated this May, Ian Metz used his position as student government president to promote dialogue on the union issue at Pacific Lutheran University.

Metz won't take a public stance for or against faculty unions, but he wanted to get involved because he sympathized with some of the concerns of the contingent faculty and supported their right to self-determination.

"My primary focus for getting involved was to provide the opportunity to faculty to make the appropriate decisions for themselves," Metz says.

School administrators, meanwhile, caution that many professors have no experience being part of a union and might ultimately find themselves disliking some aspects of it, such as dues.

Donna Gibbs, a spokesperson for Pacific Lutheran University, thinks a contingent faculty union might ruin the "culture of collaboration" among faculty.

"We can't imagine that dividing our faculty like this can improve the quality of teaching and learning," she says.

Even if professors are able to successfully form a union, they still must negotiate a contract with the school — a process in which students can play an indirect role as well.

At Tufts, where contingent faculty voted to join the Service Employees International Union in September, Spencer Beswick says he and other members of the student-led Tufts Labor Coalition are gearing up for on-campus actions in the spring, when contract bargaining is expect to start.

During the unionization fight, the Tufts Labor Coalition handed out flyers, circulated a petition, wrote an op-ed for the school newspaper and designed buttons and stickers for students to wear around campus.

Beswick, a junior, says the contract negotiations campaign will look very similar.

"We are trying to get student support so that when they go into negotiations early next semester, we will be able to provide a strong backing of student support of those negotiations," he says.

Jonathan Dame is a senior at Boston College.