Part-time profs face full-time struggle

Posted by Stew Corbett News, This Week's Edition Saturday, March 13th, 2010

brian Campbell’s first experience as part-time professor was not the happiest one. The University of New Brunswick offered Campbell a job to teach three courses during a summer intersession. He thought this would be the beginning of his teaching career – something he describes as being a long-term goal.

“I quit my job at Starbucks and started working on all this stuff and then no one signed up for my classes. And they all got cancelled and because I hadn’t been offered the contract unless there were enough students, I had nothing.”

Since his lease expired around the same time as the whole incident, Campbell and his wife decided to travel across the country to try and find a new city to make a new start. The couple eventually settled in Vancouver but only a couple weeks later Campbell got a call from Craig Proulx, an anthropology professor at St. Thomas University.

“He said they needed somebody to teach [a course] here in Fredericton,” says Campbell. “Of course I had to do the applications like anybody else. I got the job pretty fast and ended up moving back [to Fredericton] after two or three weeks in Vancouver.”

After teaching one course for the winter semester of the 2009 academic year, Campbell’s temporary contract expired and he was back where he had been a few months before. Luckily a few courses opened up for the following spring semester. Campbell applied to all of them and he managed to get the job for one of them. This contract also lasted for one semester but Campbell was unable to get a contract for 2010 winter semester because there were no positions opened.

“That’s the ropes of the part-time, non-union lecturer. Constantly re-applying for the same jobs,” says Campbell, alluding to the issue of job security.

Although Campbell was never a unionized member of the faculty, other part-timers face the same problem.

Moira McLaughlin is another part-time faculty member at St. Thomas University and is also the vice-president of the Faculty Association of the University of St. Thomas (FAUST). She knows all about the problems part-time professors face every year.

“Job security is the biggest thing [that the union fights for], so that you don’t have to wait each year until April or May to find out if you’ll work next year or not,” says McLaughlin. “The university has been using the same part-time faculty member for several years that they must obviously need them and so therefore they should have permanent positions.”

In a survey addressed to part-time professors on what they wanted their union to bargain for, 56 per cent of participants said it was very important that the union should argue for more permanent positions to be created for long-serving part-time faculty members. It was the most sought after of all the demands listed in the survey.

McLaughlin has been teaching as a part-time professor in Fredericton for over 30 years. She started out teaching part-time at UNB and eventually moved up to STU in 1987 to help them start a physical anthropology program. McLaughlin received her Master’s in anthropology from the University of Tennessee and had Canada Council grants to go to the University of Toronto to get her PhD. She was at U of T for two years doing research but was unable to complete her dissertation.

Dr. Patrick Malcolmson is the vice-president academic at STU and is the chair of the Committee on Appointments, Promotion, and Tenure (CAPT). He acknowledges the tough situation part-time professors are put in but says hiring part-time professors is not always so cut-and-dry.

“If our enrollment goes up this year from 2,400 to 2,600, we’re probably going to hire a lot more part-time faculty,” says Malcolmson. “But we won’t know that until the numbers come in April and May. Then we’ll know where the students are registering and where we need the profs.”

Malcolmson says depending on the numbers of students enrolling, the school could be recruiting more and more professors throughout the summer. According to section 7 of the collective agreement between the STU administration and FAUST, the effective date of appointment of a professor is July 1.

Malcolmson also says in some areas it is possible to have some foresight of how many part-time professors the school will have to hire in a year. There is a provision in place to extend a contract to two or three years to allow professors to get a better plan of what they’re going to do.

McLaughlin says that she and many other part-time professors are trapped in a situation of being unable to be considered for a promotion to a full-time tenure track position. Since McLaughlin’s field of study is only offered at a handful of universities in the country, she would have to take two years to complete her dissertation and would lose her position at STU.

“Many part-time faculty members here are able to do or finish their PhD’s down at UNB but my field is not down there,” says McLaughlin.

The closest school that offers physical anthropology is the University of Toronto but they have a two-year residency requirement. McLaughlin says that leaving her position at STU and doing research in Toronto for two years is not financially possible.

According to McLaughlin, there are no advantages of being a part-time professor, unless it is your own personal preference or if you have another job. Aside from being a part-time professor at STU and an executive on the faculty association, McLaughlin also travels to Sackville, New Brunswick once a week to teach a course at Mount Allison University. brian Campbell also has a second job to fall back on, albeit one that is somewhat outside the academic community.

“I have the largest e-Bay business [of video games] in New Brunswick,” says Campbell. “I had a lot of foresight with this because I’ve always known the difficulties of getting a teaching job.”

Despite going through the constant loop of applying for temporary teaching positions, Campbell notes a bright side of going through the experience of being a part-time professor. Receiving his PhD is Campbell’s next long-term goal and he sees the teaching experience he does have as a way of getting there. In order to apply to get your PhD, it is important to have teaching experience and publications out, sometimes even both.

“It also gives me more experience when I get there and helps me realize this is what I want to do as opposed to, you know, throwing my dreams out the window and doing something else altogether,” explains Campbell.

Still, McLaughlin feels the PhD is overrated and the administration at STU and in universities across the country use the percentage of their faculty with PhDs as something to make their institution look better. In the part-time collective between the administration and FAUST, there is a list of criteria that a part-time candidate must fulfill. The first criterion states in brackets that in most cases the minimum requirement for academic credentials is a Master’s degree while preference is given to those candidates who hold a PhD. In the case of the full-time collective agreement it is recorded in the statements of standards.

“If you can take your full-time faculty membership and show that every single person has a PhD than that looks better than saying 80 per cent of your faculty is PhD,” says McLaughlin. “There might not be any meaning to it. These 100 per cent PhDs might be lousy teachers, lousy researchers, I mean anyone can get a PhD. You just have to put your nose to the grindstone on one tiny little topic, satisfy your supervisor and get it done.”

McLaughlin says this administration totally buys into this mentality and has no hope for the new interim President Dennis Cochrane to change any of that. She says these administrations have drifted away from being academics and have started running universities as if they were corporations. Patrick Malcolmson disagrees with this perspective.

“I think that a corporation is run on the basis of making a profit and I think that our school is not motivated by the profit motive,” says Malcolmson. “We have a very minimal budget surplus in any given year and any budget surplus we ever have we put back into the university. There’s no corporate dividend or anything like that.”

Andrew Titus, another part-time professor, has been teaching part-time at both STU and UNB for five years and is in the process of getting his PhD. He thinks the administration’s demand for PhDs is just a general trend over the years.

“Of the roster of professors who were here 20 years ago, probably 15 per cent of them had PhD’s and over the course of a couple of years they were sort of strong-armed into getting PhD’s,” says Titus. “Those who were on a tenure track position but didn’t have tenure yet were told you have to get your PhD before we give you tenure.”

One thing McLaughlin doesn’t think students realize is that the majority of part-time professors don’t have sufficient office space at the university. At the latest round of negotiations, the faculty union managed to get five dedicated part-time offices with three professors assigned to each office. This accommodates 15 of the 55 part-time professors, says McLaughlin. The rest share two computer labs. McLaughlin feels fortunate that she is able to use the anthropology lab as her office as well as a classroom. In the bargaining survey, 63 per cent of the professors who participated answered that more office space was of somewhat importance to them.

“If you’re a prof it’s demeaning and it’s really difficult to do your work because it’s all at home and you need have to remember to haul the right things with you,” says McLaughlin. “And there’s no place to store things, like exams. So I don’t think students quite understand how much more difficult it makes your job because of that.”

Aside from the lack of space part-time professors are given, McLaughlin doesn’t think students understand the fight they have to go through each year just to know if they will have work the next school year or not. Something McLaughlin doesn’t think students realize is how well-qualified their part-time professors are.

“A third of our unit already has their PhD’s. Some of them are like me who almost finished but didn’t quite. And some are like me and have enormous amounts of experience,” says McLaughlin, adding she is one of the best forensic workers in the country because of the work she has done.

There are also different tiers of part-time professors, and not all part-time professors are allowed into the faculty association. This is something that the faculty association is trying to make the administration change.

“We’re the only university in the country that excludes some people and lets others in. And these people are excluded because they’re teaching only one or two courses,” says McLaughlin. “Well, if you’re teaching one course here, you deserve the same protection as anybody else.”

Patrick Malcolmson says he didn’t know if St. Thomas was the only school in Canada that excluded some from the faculty association or not.

When it comes to money, McLaughlin doesn’t believe part-time professors should get the same amount of pay as their full-time counterparts but she still believes part-timers should be paid more for what they do.

“A full-time teaching load is five courses, and I teach six. And I get less than half of what a full time faculty member will get,” says McLaughlin. “Although a full-time faculty member has research commitments and service commitments so, you know, they deserve to get what they get.”

McLaughlin also says even though part-timers are not obligated to do research throughout the year, they all still do it anyway because if you don’t research then you can’t teach. Not being able to attend department meetings is something else McLaughlin thinks excludes part-time professors from the life of the university.

Andrew Titus thinks that in order for part-time professors to feel more involved in the community, hanging out in the cafeteria would probably be the best thing you could do.

“Talk to your students more often. Engage them on a more serious level. Give your teaching everything you’ve got instead of considering it to be a job,” Titus says. “As far as I’m concerned, teaching is not a job, it’s a vocation. It’s a life, its deep down inside you.”

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McLaughlin also says the fight that the faculty union takes up with the administration in regards to part-time professors also has a lot to do with students and their needs. Since every organization has the right to hire and fire employees, faculty can’t argue that much for keeping the administration keeping jobs, but they can argue to keep courses open.

“When they start cutting courses, they reduce your flexibility; they reduce your opportunity to study things. That’s why the union fights it, we fight it on behalf of students,” says McLaughlin.

Patrick Malcolmson says that due to the lowest government funding in the province and the lowest tuition in Maritime provinces, the ability to hire more professors and provide more students with more courses is ultimately hampered.

“On the one hand students want low tuition fees; on the other hand students want more professors. Well the only way you can get more professors would be for the government to give us more money and for us to charge more tuition,” says Malcolmson.

This balance of tuition, government funds and hiring professors is a triangular problem that unfortunately is present in most universities in North America.

By the end of June, the contracts for part-time professors will expire and Moira McLaughlin and the other members of the faculty association will return to the negotiating table and argue for both part-time and full-time professors. McLaughlin says full-time professors have made progress over the years dealing with the administration but says there’s still a long way to go for the part-timers but says she is willing to do her part.

“It’s a way of life for me, it’s a passion. I can’t even imagine not being involved in the union in some way,” says McLaughlin. “I just come from a world where the union was the only way to protect the little people.”

The faculty association is now in the process of taking their case of including all part-time professors in the union to the labour board of New Brunswick.

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