Rutgers Needs to Make Fairer Choices
Adjunct Faculty Like Me Need Equal Pay, Job Security, Health Benefits
Rutgers University President Jonathan Holloway has deferred.
After praising the university’s successful sports teams and touting several legitimate successes undertaken under his short tenure at Rutgers’ helm, he responded during his response to numerous adjunct faculty members at Tuesday’s Board of Governors session to demands from adjunct faculty that we be allowed to merge with the full-timers’ union by passing on our questions and deferring to his lawyers.
David Letwin, a adjunct union executive board member who teaches at Mason Gross, described adjuncts as being subjected to an “exploitative arrangement” that “makes stable, sustainable employment seem like an impossible dream, while exacerbating broader gender and racial inequalities” at the university and within society as a whole.
“There is no possible budgetary justification,” he said during a Zoom statement to the Board of Governors, “for denying fair terms of employment to PTLs, who are as committed and as qualified as our full-time peers. Although we teach roughly 30% of the courses at Rutgers, our total salaries comprise less than 1% of the budget at a university with an endowment valued, as of Dec. 31, 2021, at $1.98 billion.”
This is a choice, of course, and not the inevitable result of a budgeting process outside of Rutgers’ control.
"The money is there to remedy the problem,” Letwin told the board. “Please stand with Rutgers’ primary mission and support just working conditions for Rutgers adjuncts.”
Kevin Keogan, who serves as the interim Newark vice president for the Rutgers adjunct union, also questioned “the choices and priorities reflected in Rutgers recent fiscal budgets,” in particular, “the lack of funding for my fellow adjuncts who provide crucial labor without fair compensation.”
“All budgets must distinguish between necessities and discretionary spending,” he told the board. “Rutgers is a public university with a core mission–to provide quality, higher education to its students. Rutgers should do whatever is possible to provide all faculty with a stable work environment, fair wages and benefits, so they can focus on teaching students. This is not the case for poorly paid adjuncts who have to re-apply for their positions every semester, and are offered no health benefits.”
Keogan, like Letwin, asked the Board of Governors to press Holloway to accede to our union’s democratic will. Holloway’s response? Crickets.
As one adjunct colleague of mine said to me afterward, “apparently great leaders defer.”
None of this comes as a surprise. We submitted more than 1,100 signed cards to Holloway’s office on May 18 with a letter asking him to accept the merger. We spent about three months actively working with our members to win support for the merger and our goal of a single faculty — #OneFaculty — that can negotiate as a single entity and end the university’s practice of pitting different bargaining units against each other. Holloway — again, not surprisingly — has yet to answer, which is what drew us to Winants Hall on the New Brunswick campus on Tuesday for the Board of Governors meeting.
There were about two dozen of us there, including adjuncts (known as part-time lecturers), students (both graduate and undergraduates), and non-tenure faculty. We handed out fliers and a letter to board members explaining our demands.
The board members were cordial as they entered the building, most taking our letters, some chatting briefly. The letter, which I helped draft, describes how the state’s “flagship university,” which “provides a quality education to almost 70,000 undergraduate and graduate students,” enforces academic inequity not just among its educators but between us and the administration, which has grown in size and salary in recent years.
The inequity shows up in our paychecks — which are a fraction of the per-class wages paid to our full-time colleagues, even though we perform the same work. Overall, the university — like most across the country — has engaged in what has been dubbed “adjunctification,” though a better description might be “casualization” or “gigification.” We teach a third of the classes. Another third are taught by non-tenured full-timers. Just 30 percent are taught by tenured faculty — an almost complete turnaround accomplished in just the last couple of decades. Adjuncts are the flex-piece of the university faculty. We are numbers on a spreadsheet, and watch as our jobs come and go as enrollment ebbs and flows.
This is bad for us and for students. As we stood outside Winants, tour groups of incoming freshmen passed by, some stopping. We explained why we were there and what adjuncts are, discussing how our lack of job protection and fair pay affects them. The intersection of pay inequality and insecurity is bad for academic inquiry and classroom discussion; it is bad for the student-mentor relationship for which we strive and from which students greatly benefit.
As Letwin told the board, “the quality of education provided to students suffers when their teachers are treated as disposable, second-class members of what President Holloway calls ‘Rutgers beloved community.’”
I think the students understand this, even if the administration refuses to. As we talked to the students, several asked good questions. A few were appalled at how we are treated, perhaps at what it will mean for them. But self-interest often leads to community interest and activism, and student support will be important as we move forward, as is the support of the rest of Rutgers’ workforce and the community as a whole.
Our demands are simple and fair: a contract, as Keogan says, that provides “a healthy work environment that treats all faculty fairly and equitably.”
“Rutgers’ budget,” Keogan said, “must reflect the basic principles of equity and fairness so that we have the resources and stability necessary to provide the best possible education for our students.”