Return to The CPFA Forum Opening PageRemarks on "Defining the Professional Expectations of Full-time and Part-time Faculty Conference"
Dear Colleagues,
First, CPFA and the organizers of the conference on "Defining the Professional Expectations of Full-time and Part-time Faculty" want to express our appreciation to the De Anza Academic Senate, the Foothill Academic Senate, and the Foothill-De Anza District Faculty Association, for their support. The success of the conference was very much a function of our ability to keep the registration costs low and their support helped to make this possible.
The Conference was a great success measured by the number and strength of positive comments received from everyone at the conference we have had an opportunity to talk with since Saturday. We will be doing a follow-up evaluation survey and will share the results of this with you when we have them.
The conference was opened by Susan Rines, Conference Organizer and Northern Regional CPFA Representative, who introduced Martha Kanter, De Anza College President. Martha welcomed everyone to the campus, and then gave an impassioned defense of the role of community colleges and the threat we face from narrow conservative ideologues who are more interested in the job training we do than the development of human potential that is our true mission. Susan then introduced Mary Ellen Goodwin, CPFA Executive Council Chair, who welcomed the participants and gave a brief summary of the conference goals, tying them to the CPFA Mission Statement and the importance of career professional educators, noting the contradiction between professionalism and contingent employment structures. Mary Ellen then introduced Chris Storer who took over as facilitator for the morning program.
President Kanter was followed by Jane Buck, President of the American Association of University Professors, who argued that the work we were doing was at the core of protecting the profession from the ongoing assault on tenure, the unbundling of the profession, and the general corporate takeover of higher education during the past 30 years.
Linda Collins, Past President of the Academic Senate for California Community Colleges, built on Jane's analysis with more detail of the particular situation in the CCCs, with references to the Senate paper, ěPart-time Faculty: A Principled Perspectiveî (copies of the paper were supplied to all conference attendees. It is available on the Academic Senate Website). She noted many of the other related attacks on higher education, including recent changes to the accreditation standards, the accountability movement, and the power of the new for-profit institutions and distance-education providers, painting a powerful integrated picture of the forces we are fighting and the key role the use of contingent faculty has played in their strategy, and why stopping the overuse and abuse of contingent faculty is key to rebundleing the profession and undoing the damage that has been done.
Alisa Messer, Vice President of the Community College Council of the California Federation of Teachers, then began to actively engage the attendees, exploring the current state of negotiations at the various districts represented. Various examples were discussed in the context of the issues and ideals represented in the earlier presentations. In particular, the San Francisco City College process was discussed in some detail since they were committed to achieving a 100% parity definition.
Chris Storer noted that, most especially, he was gratified by the level of understanding and knowledge evidenced in the dialogue throughout the conference. Some of the attendees arrived with perceptions that seemed to not yet fully appreciate the importance of these issues, perhaps not fully understanding that the "parity definitions" were really about defining our vision of what our profession should be. Chris believes that by the end of the day everyone had come to deeply understand that this task, set to us by the Board of Governors, is not just about getting more compensation for part-time faculty. Rather, it is truly about the faculty's having a real opportunity to undo some of the damage to our profession, our institutions, and our students, damage that has occurred over the past 30 years as faculty work has been unbundled and degraded by the increasing corporatization of higher education under the guise of cost cutting forced by underfunding.
It was clear that many districts are trying to define the professional expectations of part-time faculty as only 75% of those of full-time faculty, or even less. It was also clear that none of the districts have presented any justification for this. They are merely thinking of how they might be able to use some of the PT Compensation Fund money for other purposes than PT faculty salaries. Administrative positions regarding professional expectations have no relationship to what is good for students or to the quality of the institutions in general. Clearly, the idea that students deserve the equity of having faculty members who are equally supported by the institution has not entered their minds.
The conference was aided considerably by the presence of union and Academic Senate participation from San Francisco City College where there is strong faculty commitment to the basic principles that faculty professionalism should not be unbundled, and that the professional expectations of part-time faculty should be a load based 100% pro-rata percentage of the professional expectations of comparable full-time faculty members. The SFCCD senate and union have been in joint deliberations much of this term, working out the details of how to make this happen without breaking up the work of faculty into bits and pieces that can be checked off on a timed punch card. They recognize that the work of faculty professionals is a constantly shifting response to the changing needs of their students, their departments and divisions, their institutions, and their disciplines. The pattern of work today may differ from the pattern tomorrow and will certainly differ from year to year as the focus of a professional career and the needs of their institution changes. They also recognize that the circumstances of part-time contingent employment place different demands on faculty members and that while, for example, the concept of a 40% full-service faculty member may not lend itself to academic senate service, it may lend itself better to pedagogical research or curriculum maintenance or community service and outreach or program review or?
Within all this, they also recognize that they are facing their administration's desires for "accountability." Consequently, they are developing arguments to point out that, on average, all faculty put in far more than a 35 or 40 hour week and that the real effect of the kind of accountability administrators think of will actually result in less work, less efficiency, less productivity, less quality, and lowered morale.
So where do we go from here? Most, if not all, by the end of the conference agreed that it is very important that we all begin such joint deliberations among senate and union leadership as soon as possible. It also seems important that these discussions be expanded to include all senators and union executive council members to insure there is broad faculty understanding of and commitment to the positions faculty leadership supports. It is also clear that administrations have not informed or educated their boards of trustees about these matters and it is very important that local academic senates develop their legally mandated advice to boards on the relevant academic and professional matters involved in definition of the professional expectations of faculty. Such senate advice to boards should be based on a broad and thorough deliberation of the issues.
To this end, it seems that the ideal next step might be to plan district or college senate meetings sometime before Christmas with at least an hour or two devoted to a discussion of these issues. It might be wise and useful to invite local union executive councils as a whole to such a meeting.
Please email Chris Storer if you have any questions involving any of these issues. You can email him at storerchris@fhda.edu.
Ciao,
Chris
