The debate over working conditions for adjunct faculty was recently reignited by the death of Margaret Mary Vojtko on September 1. Vojtko, who had a long career as an adjunct professor at Duquesne University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, died penniless after being fired from the university in the last year of her life. Her story served as a reminder of what has become a massive underclass of underpaid contingent labor in academia. Dan Kovalik, senior associate general counsel of the United Steelworkers, wrote an article in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette that brought news of Votjko’s death to a wider audience. Kovalik has been working with Duquesne adjunct faculty for several years, helping them organize a union and fight for better working conditions. At the time of Votjko’s death, he was assisting her in a legal fight to keep her job and her independence. I spoke with Kovalik in his office in the United Steelworkers building in Pittsburgh. Moshe Marvit: Can you describe the working conditions of adjunct faculty? Dan Kovalik: As I’ve come to learn, and I didn’t realize it until about a year and a half ago when adjuncts approached us to organize, the conditions are just abysmal. The folks that came to me at that time were making $3,000 for a three-credit course. So say you teach a load of two courses a semester, and you have two semesters a year, then that’s $12,000 right there. No benefits. Maybe you get a summer course in there, so maybe you make $15,000 per year. That’s barely enough to live on, especially if you have a family. I know a guy who teaches seven courses per semester to make ends meet at three different universities. They call it a “milk run.” It had always been my perception that going into the academy would be a great life. You would get a good salary; you would get benefits; you would get the benefit where your kids could go to school for free there or at a reduced rate. Adjuncts don’t get that. I’ve come to learn that 75 percent of all faculty around the country are adjuncts. It’s this kind of dirty secret of the academy. Meanwhile there are just a few at the top who are doing well. It looks a lot more like the corporate world than like nonprofit education. MM: And has it been like this for a while, or has it become worse over the last several decades? DK: The phenomenon of adjuncts has been around for a while—since the 1970s. But two things are new: the overreliance on adjuncts and the CEO-like pay for the president of the university along with a handful of administrators. So you have the president making anywhere from $700,000 at Duquesne University to over a million, plus benefits and other nice goodies, at bigger universities. And then you have a handful of administrators—provosts, some vice presidents, and deans—making a couple of hundred thousand or a quarter of a million dollars. Again, at the bigger universities even more. And then you have the 25 percent full faculty that make a decent salary and receive benefits. And I don’t begrudge them that. What they make is nothing compared to the administrators. And you have this huge peasantry of adjuncts that are making poverty wages without benefits. MM: Some adjuncts have chosen to organize. How successful have these efforts been in getting a union in place, getting a contract in place, and improving working conditions? DK: It seems to me that most are not unionized, but there have been some successes. Georgetown recently recognized an adjunct union and is in the process of negotiating a contract. The University of San Francisco, which is Catholic, negotiated a contract. On several other campuses—I’m having trouble remembering all of them—adjuncts have gotten contracts and sometimes been able to double their salaries and get benefits. It definitely improves things when they get unions, but it’s kind of a slow and steady process. We had an adjunct conference in April, and there was a guy from SEIU who talked about how they were organizing regionally in Washington, D.C., and they’ve been very successful with that. Again, I think it’s a place that’s ripe for organizing, but there are a lot of unorganized adjuncts. [...] MM: What do you think the solution is here? Your description sounds like the current system is unsustainable. With highly-paid administrators and the two extremes—tenured faculty, who have decent pay and strong job security, and a growing class of adjunct faculty, who make little and have no job security—do you think the whole system needs to be reformed? DK: They have to start getting away from this two-tiered model. They have to find a way to bridge the gap between this poverty-stricken group and those that are doing well. That can’t be allowed to happen. What that compromise solution is going to be, I’m not certain. But I think they can’t have a system where they come to rely on this cheap workforce because it’s not only unfair to the adjuncts, it’s unfair to the parents who must wonder where the heck their money is going. They’re also destroying the academy. Because as this happens, more and more students are going to ask, “why would I get a PhD? You want me to have a PhD to teach your students, yet why would I do that? Because it seems to me if I get a PhD, I’m going to end up making poverty wages. I can do that now without a PhD. I’ll go to Starbucks and do it.” They’re destroying their own system, and they’re going to wake up and realize that students and parents have decided that there’s no use for the university anymore.

