Maria Maisto is the president and executive director of the New Faculty Majority and NFM Foundation.

Higher education has been defunded, and colleges have shifted resources away from instruction. Seventy-five percent of the faculty are essentially underpaid temps, have few rights and many (unpaid) responsibilities. Institutions and policymakers have emphasized college completion, but ignore the critical role of faculty in student success. Adjunct organizing may be the only defense against the devolution of college education into a credentialing system with little academic integrity or practical value.

After decades of deteriorating conditions, adjunct organizing is the best route to meaningful improvement in the quality of higher education.

Studies show a "union difference" leads to better faculty working conditions, student outcomes and economic efficiencies. Because faculty working conditions are student learning conditions, students benefit from bargained improvements, which can ensure, among other things, that teaching evaluations are rigorous and fair, and lead to the retention of the best educators.

They also ensure that faculty have appropriate places in which to meet students and time to spend with them without having to run off to other jobs; that adjunct professors are able to provide recommendations and references for school or work; and that adjunct professors have access to professional development, allowing them to stay current in their fields and teaching practices.



Adjunct unionizing also strengthens institutional mission. Adjunct organizing at Georgetown University helped it remain true to Catholic social teaching on labor. Bargaining their first contract, Georgetown adjuncts and administrators coherently connected academic values to labor concerns, improving the tradition of shared governance.



Do all faculty unions achieve what is best for adjunct professors and their students? No. Problems of institutional culture that pervade higher education can be replicated within unions. But these problems can be overcome when adjuncts organize to effect positive change. After decades of deteriorating working and learning conditions, adjunct organizing — "acting like a union” in diverse legal, political and professional environments — provides the best route to meaningful improvement in the quality of higher education.





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