Grad, I suspect that the short answer to your question is that tenured faculty members, among others, are the beneficiaries of the relative exploitation of adjunctive labor – i.e. their relatively higher salaries derive partly from surplus-value extraction from adjunct faculty. This is why, ejrd, one may suggest on Lockean grounds – as Marx did in the case of factory labor – that adjunct labor contracts are immoral. They expropriate from creators the creation that rightfully belong to them under the appearance of exchanging equals for equals.

Of course, many tenured faculty members also support the organizing efforts of adjunctive faculty members, and those who do not would be enlightened by contemplating academic social structures behind a veil of ignorance.

A teach-in makes sense. A walkout doesn’t. For one thing, I’m teaching in a prison on the 25th, and many other adjuncts will not be teaching at all that day. Perhaps next time it should be a week-long event, or rethought from scratch.

At one of my jobs, I have a union. And at all of them I have a piece of aper that purports to be a contract, though if you don’t have a union it’s quite likely your “contract” is not legally binding. (All of the non-Union contracts I’ve ever signed to adjunct have given the administration the power to treat adjuncts as at-will employees, which is precisely not aN employment contract. They’re pieces of paper that make conscientious people feel responsible, not legally binding promises.)

I think John Protevi has the right idea. The problem is one of awareness, which I think both the walkout and tenured/tenure-track professors dedicating class time to discussing the issue will help address.

Perhaps institutions are reluctant to improve the conditions for adjuncts because they (stubbornly) do not perceive the conditions for adjuncts as constituting a problem. It is the reasoning that some business owners use to argue against paying employees more: if one employee leaves, there is a myriad of other people whom will be more than happy to work for the same pay (and possibly even less pay) than the employee that left. The willingness of people to take on the position, with all of its accompanying conditions, allows for the institution or business to have the false, face-value assumption that people are happy to take on such positions.

When one actually looks at the particularities of the situation though, a much more gloomy truth is illuminated: there is a great number of people willing to take on adjunct positions not because they are satisfied with the accompanying conditions, but out of desperation to secure some position in academia in hopes that it will serve as a stepping-stone to a tenure-track position. The walkout, as well as discussions lead by more permanent faculty, serve to dispel the former assumption (that is so ready-made for adoption by Western capitalist society) and bring attention to the fact that, for adjuncts all across the nation, the struggle is real (pardon the terrible pun, I couldn’t help myself).

As far as the case goes for reprimanding those adjuncts who take part in the walkout under the guise of a breach of contract, let’s call it what it is: an attempt to stifle freedom of speech. The contracts signed are pervasive by virtue of their very nature (the exploitative conditions offered and the capitalizing on the academic job market and correlative desperation of those applying for adjunct positions that enable the exploitative conditions offered to be widely accepted by applicants) and using the work expectations agreed upon to stifle a single-day act of protest I think only makes the contracts even more pervasive. An adjunct can miss one class for various other reasons and it is acceptable, but when they miss one class in the name of protesting their exploitation, it is grounds to not rehire them.

One might say that there are other avenues for adjuncts to be heard but, quite frankly, their concerns have already been voiced in the past and nobody with the power to change anything seemed to give a shit. I think the walkout is a wonderful way to let the adjuncts’ lack of a voice be heard and bring due attention to the issue.

Whenever I hear tenured professors asking “What can I do?” it seems to me there is an obvious measure that no one discusses: admit adjuncts (and grad student instructors for that matter) into your union.

If you really want to support them, support their right to unionize, and support them at the bargaining table. These aren’t easy tasks and they require getting involved in the union and dealing with administration—neither of which are things I’d count as “fun”.

But really, until this happens, it seems like all you’re really giving are kind words. Kind words are nice, symbolic showings of support reassure, but I’m skeptical they will make any changes here. If, however, faculty unions lobbied for things like increased pay and better (read: any) health insurance for adjuncts then, I would think, changes could be had.

Are there any reasons not to do this?

I want to highlight an important point from Neal Herbert’s story: when you’re an adjunct your performance as a teacher either doesn’t matter at all or only matters in a negative way. Even if you’re lucky enough to work somewhere where your tenured/TT colleagues treat you with respect, that respect can’t translate into better job prospects if the institution is going to continue to rely on part-timers to fill its teaching needs. It’s not just that after years of working hard for low pay while earning our PhDs we graduate into working even harder for low pay. It’s that when push comes to shove the work we do isn’t valued and isn’t leading anywhere.

Like Neal, I won’t be walking out, but I support those who choose to do so. My reasons are slightly different – given the way my classes are scheduled (and all the snow days we’ve had), walking out would just make it harder to do my job to my own satisfaction. And I don’t think I’m likely to do much good for myself or others by walking out. But that calculation may be different for people at different institutions, or for people who will benefit psychologically from walking out as an expression of their own importance and/or dissatisfaction.

To those who are opposed to walking out (or proposing to penalize those who do) on contract grounds: Would you be similarly scrupulous (or penalizing) if the reason for cancelling class was to present at a conference or attend a job interview? To attend a lecture on campus? To attend an out of town wedding?

Anon Grad: You do realize that at many universities, it is only the non-tenure track who can legally be unionized as the rest of us have been declared “management” by the NLRB or the relevant state in the case of state universities. So many of us don’t have a union to let people in. At GU, the only union is adjuncts. (Personally, I think we should form a non-legal union anyway. But that’s probably a longer debate.)
Neal: I am very sympathetic to your general account here, but I think students are more important than you make them out to be. In particular, they often have substantially more power than tenured professors to set policy. It varies with the economics of the university, but remember that we often have no role at all in decisions about hiring conditions – and given the realities of the market, can pretty easily be replaced. Students, however, pay the bills, or a substantial portion of them. Because of this and the general need to compete for students – again things vary school to school – an organized student movement often worries administrators more than an organized faculty one. My students have won on lots of issues that cost substantial money to Georgetown. Over the last 20 years: a unionization movement for food service workers, an anti-sweatshop policy for licensed apparel, a living wage standard for all employees including out-sourced on campus, a women’s studies major, an anthropology department, a justice and peace major, an african american studies major, etc. I don’t think any of that could have happened without organized, committed, widespread student support.
So I wouldn’t be so quick to dismiss the utility of a properly run teach-in on this issue.

Universities don’t rely on adjuncts because tenured faculty don’t retire early enough. If an institution is consistently hiring multiple part-tmers to fill their teaching load for the core curriculum, the problem is not that there’s no room for new teachers. It’s that they’re unwilling to pay for those teachers. And I’ve seen no evidence to suggest that the universities that engage in such practices are working with sufficient foresight to be incentivized by cost savings three decades down the road.

To add on to what ejrd said, the problem is not that there are too many TT faculty, but that administrators and presidents have decided to shrink the number of TT lines to save money, and instead rely on adjuncts to fill in the gaps. That this is also a time when tuition is rising well beyond what inflation would call for, public and private university presidents are making salaries commensurate with corporate executives, administrative bloat is out of hand, and schools insist on building amenities like stadiums and gyms to compete for students tells you all you need to know about how education is understood in the modern university.

Yeah, I saw that. It is hopeful, and might change things, but as I understand it, it hasn’t yet. And it certainly hasn’t yet led to the existence of more unions among Tenure/TT faculty.

I’m curious about John Protevi’s comment: “I will devote 15 minutes of my class that day to a teach-in on financial issues in public HE in the States, emphasizing that “the working conditions of teachers are the learning conditions of students.””

As a tenured faculty member, I’m tempted to do this sort of thing myself. Students are most often clueless about the structure of the academic system, and it might help things a little if they knew more about the tenuous positions of some of the people who teach them.

However, I’m also worried by an opposing line of argument, which is this: By what right do I interrupt my teaching of (this quarter) Introductory Logic or Early Modern Philosophy for a 15-minute lecture on financial issues in higher ed? That is in no way part of the topic of the class, and it seems that a student in the class could quite rightly complain that I am shirking my duty to teach that topic. (Mark Lance almost touches on this worry when he comments that he’ll hold a teach-in too, when he adds that “luckily I teach a course on nonviolent social movements, so it is directly on point.” OK, good. But what about in a class where such a topic is entirely OFF-point?) Putting it bluntly, the students are not there in order to hear me talk about whatever random topic I feel deserves their attention that day.

I suppose any student who didn’t like it could just “tune out” for that 15 minutes, or leave class early. But then it seems like that student has just as much of a complaint against me as if I had simply decided to end class early on that day for no particular reason. (And presumably I would indeed be at fault if I did that.)

I’m teaching a section of contemporary moral problems that day, and I’m planning on devoting the day to a discussion of precarity and employment, focusing on higher ed but also inviting them to reflect critically on their own experiences. I’m also considering offering to do the same in the class of any adjuncts in our department who are planning to participate in the walk out.

I think the power of students should not be underestimated — though I completely understand what Neal is saying, there’s a difference between students views about the value of your teaching, and students knowing enough about how your labor is undervalued in such a way (as well as being collectively organized enough) that they can act on it. I have seen multiple university administrations substantively change course in response to student concern. There are budgeting problems to be sure, and students do not have control over this, but we may have the power to influence how administrators prioritize budget items (both because we are increasingly treated as consumers, and thus, many administrators are increasingly concerned with customer service, and because student unhappiness with university direction can cause public relations problems which can in turn affect the budget), and we may have the power to influence fundraising efforts, etc.

Gary, activism of any brand gains its power from interrupting traffic. In the case of a teach-in the traffic interrupted is the normal content of the class. If students are glad for the interruption then they stand to become activists themselves; conversely, if they are annoyed about the interruption then their ire will help raise awareness. As they say, any publicity is good publicity.

While Mark Lance does indeed have the convenience of avoiding the interruption altogether, you can’t be an activist unless you’re willing to break some rules. It may well be that his course on non-violent social movements is not the only class of his that meets on the 25th, in which case he’s in the same boat as anyone else.