Fighting to be Fired (But Only with Just Cause)

The Unionization of Nontenure-Track Faculty

In the last thirty years, the share of nontenure-track faculty appointments in higher education has increased dramatically. According to the American Association of University Professors, 96 percent of all new faculty appointments in U.S. colleges and universities in 1969 were tenure-track; by the 1990s, only half of new appointments were tenure-track, and only half of these positions were full-time.

The increase in nontenure-track faculty has been gradual, but its cumulative effect is profound. According to a recent study by the American Federation of Teachers (AFT), just over half (51 percent) of all faculty at four-year institutions were nontenure-track in 1998, of whom 69 percent were part-time and 31 percent full-time. In the two-year college system, nontenure-track faculty were even more prominent, constituting 75 percent of all faculty (83 percent of these part-time). In aggregate, the percentage of nontenured faculty, including graduate student instructors, reached 68 percent in 1998. The era in which most teachers in U.S. higher education were either tenured or had a reasonable prospect of tenure is over.

In this article, we look at the situation of nontenure-track faculty where we teach, the University of Michigan. We explain why the university’s approximately 1,500 nontenure-track faculty formed a union, the Lecturers’ Employee Organization (LEO), MFT&SRP/AFT, AFL-CIO, and briefly outline what we achieved in our first collective agreement, ratified in June 2004. We argue, first, that the conditions under which nontenure-track faculty typically work are problematic-not only for those who do the work, but for the university and society-and, second, that the best way to respond to these problems is to organize inclusive, democratic unions.

Lecturers 101

The men and women who have filled the gap caused by the growth of student demand for higher education and the stagnation of tenure-track job creation are called many things: adjuncts, instructors, lecturers, visiting professors. At the University of Michigan, most nontenure-track faculty are called lecturers, a term we use throughout this article. Thirty years ago, most lecturers were hired on a temporary basis to teach a course or two. They were young Ph.D.s, filling in for a professor on sabbatical before finding their own tenure-track positions, or experts with full-time jobs hired to teach a special course, or visiting faculty with tenure elsewhere. Adjunct positions like these still exist, but in the system that has emerged over the last thirty years, they are no longer the norm.

At the University of Michigan, lecturers are employed primarily to do classroom teaching on the university’s three campuses-Ann Arbor, Dearborn, and Flint. University data indicate that lecturers account for about half of all undergraduate teaching, measured by student credit hours, on the Dearborn and Flint campuses. Lecturers in Ann Arbor ac...