While spe­cif­ic goals var­ied among activists, most adjuncts orga­niz­ing around the event are demand­ed bet­ter pay, more job secu­ri­ty, and access to benefits.

Yes­ter­day, adjunct fac­ul­ty mem­bers at over 100 col­lege cam­pus­es car­ried out coor­di­nat­ed demon­stra­tions as part of Nation­al Adjunct Walk­out Day. Adjuncts aimed to draw atten­tion to low pay, exploita­tive work­ing con­di­tions, and a lack of job secu­ri­ty. They orga­nized walk­outs, ​“teach-ins,” and ral­lies to push for part-time aca­d­e­m­ic work­ers’ rights and greater visibility.

“Our two main pri­or­i­ties are pay equi­ty and the job secu­ri­ty of mul­ti-year con­tracts,” said Joel Smith, an adjunct and orga­niz­er in the Uni­ver­si­ty of Ari­zona Eng­lish depart­ment. Uni­ver­si­ty of Ari­zona adjuncts par­tic­i­pat­ed in the walk­out by tak­ing their stu­dents to an on-cam­pus plaza for a demon­stra­tion and dis­cus­sions about adjuncts in high­er education.

Adjuncts, also referred to as part-time or con­tin­gent fac­ul­ty even though they often teach full-time course loads and reg­u­lar­ly have their con­tracts renewed to teach the same class­es year after year, have become the under­class of high­er edu­ca­tion. They typ­i­cal­ly lack basic ben­e­fits and employ­ment secu­ri­ty and are paid a small frac­tion of what their full-time col­leagues make, both annu­al­ly and per course.

While the word adjunct lit­er­al­ly means ​“a sup­ple­men­tary rather than essen­tial part,” adjunct fac­ul­ty are an inte­gral part of the new cor­po­rate mod­el of high­er edu­ca­tion that has come to dom­i­nate acad­e­mia in recent decades. As col­leges have increas­ing­ly cut back on tenure-track appoint­ments since the 1970s, adjuncts, as well as grad­u­ate stu­dent teach­ers who also typ­i­cal­ly work for low pay, have picked up the slack.

Accord­ing to the Amer­i­can Asso­ci­a­tion of Uni­ver­si­ty Pro­fes­sors (AAUP), 76 per­cent of col­lege instruc­tors in the Unit­ed States are no longer in tenure-track posi­tions. Forty-one per­cent of fac­ul­ty, accord­ing to the AAUP, are adjuncts.

As the ranks of adjuncts have swelled and pay has failed at many col­leges to even keep up with infla­tion, adjuncts have been orga­niz­ing for years, push­ing for bet­ter work­ing con­di­tions and rep­re­sen­ta­tion. They are union­iz­ing in increas­ing num­bers, as well as engag­ing in grass­roots orga­niz­ing to raise aware­ness of the issues adjuncts face.

The media and pub­lic have tak­en note. When an 83-year-old long­time adjunct, who was not renewed for her adjunct posi­tion at Duquesne Uni­ver­si­ty, died on the streets after bouts of can­cer and qua­si-home­less­ness in late 2013, adjuncts and their sup­port­ers point­ed to her as a sym­bol for sys­temic exploita­tion. Sto­ries of adjunct exploita­tion became com­mon­place in the news, and social media became an incu­ba­tor for online activism, with hash­tags like #NotY­ourAd­junct­Side­kick used to keep the dis­cus­sion public.

Nation­al Adjunct Walk­out Day arose from that online activism. The event was ini­tial­ly pro­posed by an anony­mous adjunct in the writ­ing pro­gram at San Jose State Uni­ver­si­ty. In an inter­view, the ini­tia­tor, cred­it­ed only as ​“aka Nation­al Adjunct,” said that adjuncts at SJSU were not even earn­ing min­i­mum wage once they cal­cu­lat­ed all the hour spent work­ing in and out of the classroom.

Accord­ing to the Chron­i­cle of High­er Education’s Adjunct Project, adjuncts report a medi­an of $2,987 per three-cred­it course nation­al­ly, though the AAUP puts the aver­age fig­ure clos­er to $2,700. (In my own adjunct days, I was paid as low as $1,550 for a three-cred­it-hour course.) Because adjuncts can spend sev­er­al hours work­ing out­side the class­room for every hour they spend teach­ing, this often breaks out to around, or even below, the nation­al min­i­mum wage.

Mean­while, the aver­age salary for full pro­fes­sors at pub­lic doc­tor­al insti­tu­tions was $126,981 in the 2013 – 2014 school year. Accord­ing to the Insti­tute for Pol­i­cy Stud­ies, aver­age exec­u­tive com­pen­sa­tion at pub­lic research uni­ver­si­ties nation­wide in 2012 was $544,554 and ris­ing. The growth in admin­is­tra­tive spend­ing has far out­stripped growth in mon­ey spent on instruc­tion year after year. At the Uni­ver­si­ty of Ari­zona, some adjuncts say only 24 per­cent of rev­enue is spent on instruction.

“This is going on on every sin­gle cam­pus in Amer­i­ca,” the anony­mous NAWD ini­tia­tor said. ​“And why hasn’t some­thing nation­al been done about this?”

While there has been no coor­di­nat­ed nation­al action, at least until now, union groups have worked to coor­di­nate adjunct orga­ni­za­tion on a broad­er scale. Over the last decade, SEIU has helped union­ize 22,000 adjuncts across the coun­try through their Adjunct Action pro­gram that employs a ​“metro strat­e­gy,” tar­get­ing mul­ti­ples cam­pus­es in an area simultaneously.

By some reports, as many as 25 per­cent of adjuncts nation­wide may now enjoy some form of union rep­re­sen­ta­tion. Adjuncts at union­ized schools often report high­er pay, such as Tufts, which pays adjuncts at least $6,000 per course, well above the nation­al aver­age. Accord­ing to NYU Local, union­ized adjuncts at NYU made at least $5,000 per course in 2013, where­as nonunion­ized adjuncts on the same cam­pus were often paid as lit­tle as $2,500 a class.

How­ev­er, not all states allow pub­lic work­ers to union­ize and right-to-work laws can kill adjunct unions before they get off the ground. Smith not­ed that at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Ari­zona, the path to union­iza­tion was not clear because of state right-to-work laws.

Union­iza­tion is also no panacea. Adjuncts at San Jose State Uni­ver­si­ty, as the anony­mous ini­tia­tor of NAWD notes, are rep­re­sent­ed by a union that has helped adjunct fac­ul­ty mem­bers gain access to health ben­e­fits and mul­ti­year con­tracts, perks few adjuncts enjoy. And adjuncts at Chicago’s Colum­bia Col­lege recent­ly vot­ed to dis­af­fil­i­ate from their nation­al union, the Nation­al Edu­ca­tion Asso­ci­a­tion Asso­ci­a­tion, because they felt their rep­re­sen­ta­tion was lack­lus­ter. Nonethe­less, stag­nat­ing wages and ris­ing infla­tion have result­ed in a sit­u­a­tion in which adjunct fac­ul­ty mem­bers still strug­gle to make ends meet, accord­ing to the NAWD initiator.

While yesterday’s demon­stra­tions were referred to as ​“walk­outs,” adjuncts, or at least the vast major­i­ty of them, did not aban­don their stu­dents in the class­room. Instead, many held ​“teach-ins” and invit­ed stu­dents to attend the demon­stra­tions in order to edu­cate them about adjunct exploitation.

Mick Par­sons, part-time lec­tur­er at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Louisville and one of the orga­niz­ers of the Louisville Teach-in, a joint move­ment between adjunct fac­ul­ty at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Louisville and Jef­fer­son Com­mu­ni­ty and Tech­ni­cal Col­lege, said that just walk­ing out of the class­room would be a missed oppor­tu­ni­ty to edu­cate stu­dents about why the cur­rent sys­tem of high­er edu­ca­tion is such a problem.

“We would pre­fer that every­one was onboard with the issues. Just walk­ing out would not edu­cate peo­ple about the rea­son for [the demon­stra­tions],” Par­sons says.

Uni­ver­si­ty of Louisville admin­is­tra­tors did not respond to requests for comment.

Accord­ing to Par­sons, the same uni­ver­si­ty sys­tem that exploits adjuncts is detri­men­tal to stu­dent suc­cess. The pre­car­i­ous con­di­tions under which adjuncts toil can affect even the best instruc­tors’ abil­i­ty to per­form their jobs, accord­ing to Kathryn Laf­fer­ty, anoth­er Louisville Teach-in organizer.

The Louisville Teach-in, like oth­er demon­strat­ing adjunct groups, aimed not just to make their case to stu­dents, but the larg­er pub­lic and law­mak­ers, as well. In Louisville, adjuncts pub­li­cized the event in their com­mu­ni­ties and to mem­bers of the press. They also extend­ed invi­ta­tions to col­lege admin­is­tra­tors and local pol­i­cy­mak­ers to attend the out­door rally.

Smith report­ed also invit­ing admin­is­tra­tors to the Uni­ver­si­ty of Ari­zona demon­stra­tion in an effort to fos­ter a col­lab­o­ra­tive spir­it. At the ral­ly, demon­stra­tors pre­sent­ed an open let­ter to UA Pres­i­dent Ann Weaver Hart aloud. Though invit­ed to the walk­out, she did not attend.

Smith did note col­lab­o­ra­tion with the admin­is­tra­tion, though, and pos­i­tive com­mu­ni­ca­tions between adjunct orga­niz­ers and admin­is­tra­tors in the days lead­ing up to the event. ​“We’re hop­ing to work with admin­is­tra­tion and raise aware­ness about the plight of the adjunct,” Smith said.

Tom Miller, Vice Provost of Fac­ul­ty Affairs at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Ari­zona, reaf­firmed the spir­it of col­lab­o­ra­tion, say­ing that the adjunct sit­u­a­tion ​“is not expe­ri­enced here as a con­flict between admin­is­tra­tion and fac­ul­ty. I think it is expe­ri­enced here as a chal­lenge fac­ing all faculty.”

Though tenure-track posi­tions at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Ari­zona are in decline, the admin­is­tra­tion has been work­ing to reduce reliance on part-time fac­ul­ty by con­sol­i­dat­ing part-time posi­tions into full-time, ben­e­fits-eli­gi­ble posi­tions off the tenure track. The admin­is­tra­tion is also work­ing with the fac­ul­ty sen­ate to exam­ine the use of mul­ti-year con­tracts as a way to sup­port non-tenure-track faculty.

“We have reduced the num­ber of part time adjuncts, … rec­og­niz­ing that this is not an effec­tive way to sup­port our stu­dents, and mov­ing peo­ple into full­time posi­tions,” Miller says. ​“This is in direct oppo­si­tion to the nation­al trend.”

But adjuncts at oth­er uni­ver­si­ties report­ed some fear of retal­i­a­tion and appre­hen­sion over par­tic­i­pat­ing in the walk­outs, which may be the real rea­son Nation­al Adjunct Walk­out Day quick­ly became Nation­al Adjunct Teach-in Day. Retal­i­a­tion would be easy to exe­cute and dif­fi­cult to prove. With­out tenure or mul­ti-year con­tracts, most adjuncts have no job secu­ri­ty. Dis­miss­ing an adjunct from employ­ment is as sim­ple as not assign­ing them cours­es for the next semes­ter. In some states, pub­lic work­ers are explic­it­ly barred from walk­ing out and could face fines, though there has been no evi­dence of this actu­al­ly hap­pen­ing to adjuncts.

John Mar­tin, chair of the Cal­i­for­nia Part-time Fac­ul­ty Asso­ci­a­tion and an orga­niz­er of a teach-in at Butte Col­lege says, ​“I have not heard of any actu­al quote-unquote walk­out.” Nor did any­one else con­tact­ed for this arti­cle, includ­ing the NAWD ini­tia­tor. Mar­tin not­ed that, ​“You can’t ask teach­ers who are depen­dent on their low wages to walk out.”

While the pre­car­i­ous nature of adjunct work might have kept some from par­tic­i­pat­ing, with adjuncts from over a 100 col­leges rep­re­sent­ed in North Amer­i­ca, Europe, and Aus­tralia, clear­ly many were not deterred from engag­ing in some organizing.

“The fact of the mat­ter is we only have one-year con­tracts,” Smith says. ​“Adjuncts are always feel­ing pre­car­i­ous and appre­hen­sive at this time of the year because their con­tract is about to end any­way. The pre­car­i­ous nature of this work is why we are hav­ing this event.”