Is Your College Overpriced and Fraudulent?

Joining the United Auto Workers may not be best solution to the problems of part-time faculty members at our best colleges, known as adjunct faculty, but it may at least call attention to the overpriced and fraudulent practices of many of our institutions of higher education.

The tenure system is causing the problems of the adjunct faculty and the teaching assistants (TAs). Colleges are reluctant to hire them as full-time employees, not only because full-timers are more expensive but because they are almost impossible to get rid of.

While part-timers organize at Emerson, the full-timers are holding fast to their perks. On the same day that teaching assistants went out on strike out in Washington, the faculty at Northeastern University rejected a proposal to make it possible, after several reviews of a faculty member, to remove incompetent professors. The faculty made the usual, fatuous claim that such a possibility would endanger "academic freedom."

The latest action in Massachusetts occurred in April when adjunct faculty at Emerson voted to unionize and join the American Association of University Professors.

That union has targeted Massachusetts for organization of those part-timers, who usually get paid about half of what permanent faculty get paid per course, receive no insurance or retirement benefits and are not eligible for tenure. Half of the professors at Emerson are adjuncts, and two-thirds of faculty hired nationwide from 1995 to 1997 were not tenure-track appointments, the Boston Globe reported.

The Emerson victory was the latest in a movement to unionize the proletariat of the academic world. Last year, teaching assistants at New York University voted to join the United Auto Workers. Over 600 graduate students at Brown petitioned the NLRB for a union election in May. TAs at other private colleges, including Brandeis, are following.

TAs at the University of Washington, also organized by the auto workers union, voted to go on strike on the last day of classes, holding final exams and semester grades hostage. City bus drivers honored the strike, refusing to take passengers into the campus.

Like the adjuncts, the teaching assistants complain that they do most of the work for their professors, are underpaid and have little time to devote to their own studies.

The interest of the colleges is clear, they are trying to keep costs down. But what about the customers? Do they believe that adjuncts and TAs do as good a job as permanent faculty? If they do, then the permanent faculty are grossly overpaid. If they do not, then they are paying a lot of money for a cut-rate product produced by sweated part-timers.

The sad fact is that, except at a handful of very competitive institutions, most customers don't care very much about the quality of the education they receive. They want fast and easy degrees, at the lowest possible price. Thus college personnel policy (and curricula) are driven by consumer demands.

Permanent faculty at private colleges and universities are not allowed to join unions. The Supreme Court has held that the National Labor Relations Act regards them as part of management. Many faculty at public institutions are unionized. But in both cases, faculty are protected by the academically sacred "tenure" system.

Paul Moreno is Assistant Professor of History at Hillsdale College.