Obama's Community College Initiative gives hope but needs change

Gabriel Arana at http://www.prospect.org/csnc/blogs/tapped_archive?month=07&year=2009&base_name=is_obamas_community_college_in">The American Prospect gets what's wrong with the community college system:



His solution is more unionization is great, but legislation is required to end the worst abuses of adjunct faculty. Such legislation should include:

• every college or university have at least three-fourths of their faculty members be full time, tenure track
  
  
• that part time faculty get the same pay per class as their full time peers with the same qualifications and length of service
  
  
• that part time non-tenure track faculty be offered at least proportionate benefits compared to their full time tenure track peers

These are necessary not only for the welfare of the faculty but of students. Faculty who are racing around from campus to campus to make ends meet are less likely to be available to students outside of class.

Further, while unions are the best way to raise workers income, no one should have to negotiate their way out of discrimination and unequal compensation. That should be a matter of law. It is also difficult to negotiate when two classes of workers have been created because the employer can always say that giving to one takes away from another.

Here's my comment I posted on the article:



The author's point on the http://equalpayforequalwork.blogspot.com/2009/04/administrators-think-like-bank-faculty.html">corporatizing of higher ed is also dead on. Wall Street just came close to destroying the world economy--why exactly should we apply that not just failed but deadly toxic model to higher education?

I was a graduate teaching assistant who taught undergraduate music courses while working on my PhD. I know this article is about community colleges, but I think the same mindset can be observed in smaller four-year colleges as well. I taught adjunct at a small four-year college in south Kansas City, Missouri, for two years while applying to that ever-elusive, tenure-track position at a university. No such luck.

But I remember making $85 for a one-hour course with one student who needed the class for graduation. That's for 16 class meetings! Fortunately, I had other classes and was able to squeeze the one student in between those classes, so there wasn't a need to drive out to the college to make my $5.31 an hour.

I asked about why it was so little in renumeration, as it had been much more a few years later. I was told it was because the administration felt some professors would take on one student for "readings" and would then meet with that student twice: once at the beginning of the year to outline what the student would do, and then a second time at the end of the semester to see the final project. The administrators thought the professors were taking advantage of the situation by attempting to meet with the student as little as possible. However, the subject I was teaching required at least 16 meetings...

Anyway, during this time I applied to dozens of positions, received a few interviews but no offers, and then moved on to an entirely different profession...

:kick: