You Can’t Eat Prestige

Katrina Blomdahl, AFL-CIO Voice@Work communications specialist, has some news for parents with kids in college or headed there: You’re paying a lot of tuition money but not a lot of it is going to teaching salaries. Read Blomdahl’s report:

I take a simple view on organizing graduate employees and non-tenure track faculty in higher education. Nobody casually prepares to teach university-level courses, and nobody should be casually paid for it.

On March 7, 2006, Ciara Kehoe of GET-UP (Graduate Employees Together—University of Pennsylvania), AFT’s six-year organizing campaign at the University of Pennsylvania, published a report revealing what organizers at the AFT, UAW, National Education Association, Communications Workers of America and the American Association of University Professors have been saying all along. The economy of the modern American university is highly dependent on the exploitation of the “casual” labor of non-tenure track teaching staff and graduate student employees.

Kehoe’s report is a real eye-opener for teachers, students and parents. For example, parents who send their kids to the University of Pennsylvania might be surprised to know that of the $32,364 per year they pay in tuition and fees, only a small fraction goes to teaching salaries. Kehoe explains the “data [in her report] suggest that the undergraduate experience at Penn may be overpriced.”

Chances are, parents are also unaware of Kehoe’s research findings that find a mere 40 percent of lectures and seminars are taught by tenured or tenure-track faculty in the U-Penn’s undergraduate School of Arts and Sciences.

According to Kehoe’s class-by-class analysis of U-Penn’s course schedule, the remaining 60 percent of these classes are taught by graduate employees and non-tenure track teachers, who comprise the invisible, “casualized” class of university teachers who work for little pay, and oftentimes no benefits or job security.

For non-tenure tracked teachers at the university (and this designation includes a dizzying array of titles, including lecturer, part-time faculty, adjunct professor and several iterations in between), the low pay and semester-to-semester job insecurity amount to little more than piece work.

It’s not hard to recognize these teachers on campuses across the country, not just at U-Penn. They’re the ones holding office hours in the cafeteria and dragging their books and laptops around in wheelie carts because they don’t have regular access to secure office space.

These are the teachers dubbed the “freeway flyers,” by Eric Wee in a 2002 Washington Post article because of the way they are forced to take part-time teaching gigs at several universities at one time.

Wee writes:

Since each college offers them only a few classes, they cobble together four, five or even nine courses a term at two, three or even five campuses.  They might be classified as part-timers, but their teaching loads are very full time.

For graduate student employees, particularly at the Ph.D level, teaching at the university while studying is often a requisite part of their formal training. But it is also how they support themselves through their seven or more years of study. Universities engaged in anti-union rhetoric are fond of reminding graduate students that teaching at a prestigious university is a privilege and an honor, and that their status as “employees” is trumped by their status as students.

In 2004, the Bush-appointed National Labor Relations Board overturned its previous ruling and denied graduate employees at private universities federal labor law protection of their freedom to form a union, essentially agreeing with university administrators who argued that graduate student teachers are primarily students.

But this hasn’t stopped the campaign at U-Penn. After all, graduate workers at private universities are free to form unions if they have enough power to get university employers to sign what’s called majority verification in which workers sign cards to indicate their support to join a union. And the student employees at U-Penn believe it can happen, through building support for their union from the ground up.

So, support the grad students, and non-tenure track faculty organizing in your community, and let them know that you understand what Columbia University graduate student employees mean when they say: “You Can’t Eat Prestige.”

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