The American Federation of Teachers is facing head-on the issue of supporting both tenure-track faculty and part and full-time non tenure track colleagues at U.S. post-secondary institutions.

Faculty and College Excellence, or FACE, is a three-pronged nationwide campaign by AFT affiliates that lobbies for introduction of AFT-developed model legislation into state legislatures, encourages collective bargaining to establish working standards and promote good practices and focuses on unionizing contingent faculty.

Craig Smith, associate director of higher education for the 1.4 million-member union, which also represents 160,000 higher education faculty, professional staff and graduate employees, told the Bulletin the AFT initiative has so far managed to get model legislation introduced in 11 states.

Although no state has yet adopted new laws based on the model, several jurisdictions are considering the proposition at committee levels, while other states such as New Mexico and Oregon have put together commissions to study staffing at their post-secondary institutions.

According to the FACE web site, “colleges and universities in the United States have increasingly turned away from filling full-time tenured jobs. In 1960, 75 percent of college faculty members had full-time tenured positions or were on a tenure track. Today, fewer than 30 per cent of the instructional workforce in colleges and universities hold full-time tenured or tenure-track jobs. At the same time, hundreds of thousands of non tenure-track faculty members — especially part-time/adjunct faculty — have been hired and then denied such fundamentals as proportionate salaries, decent benefits and paid office hours.”

The state-by-state campaign strives to create more full-time faculty positions, while at the same time attempting to improve working conditions for part-time staff. A further focus of the campaign is helping part-timers win full-time positions.

General principles enunciated in the model require public colleges to ensure 75 per cent of classes in each department be taught by full-time academics, that preference be accorded to part-timers in applying for full-time positions and that pay and benefits of contract part-time staff reach parity with that of full-timers.

CAUT’s policy statement on fairness for contract academic staff states: “CAUT believes that excellence in education is best assured through the secure continuing appointment of career academics. CAUT opposes the increasing use of contingent labour to fulfill ongoing staffing requirements. Underfunding and administrative flexibility are not sufficient grounds for hiring contract academic staff as a substitute for continuing appointments.”

“American academics are facing many of the same difficulties confronting Canadian tenured faculty, regarding chipping away at full-time complement and the increasing use by university administrations across Canada of contract, part-time teachers,” noted CAUT executive director James Turk. “It’s heartening to see the massive efforts by the AFT to combat and solve the problems they face.”