RE:            POLITICS OF SHAME AT MLA

SENT:        LEO PARASCONDOLA

TO:           TOPICA NTTF LISTSERV  AND WORKPLACE JOURNAL

DATE:        JANUARY 3, 2005

Ghosts and Shame
By Scott Jaschik

Part-time faculty members can't rely on administrators to do right by
them just because adjuncts deserve decent working conditions. So they
need to shame them into doing the right thing, according to members of
a panel Tuesday at the MLA's annual meeting.

The panel members and supporters of the adjunct cause wore pins of
ghosts during the meeting, seeking to draw attention to part-time
faculty members' "invisible status" at most colleges.

Several of the panelists said that they have grown increasingly
frustrated by their treatment, and by living -- in the words of Barbara
Brown -- "lifestyles of the poor and bitter."

Brown, who teaches languages and comparative literature at Central
Washington University, said "I'm teaching 17 to 19 credits a quarter
just to live inside."

So how can part-time professors get administrators to care?

Tim Davis, who teaches humanities at Columbus State Community College,
in Ohio, recently obtained a full-time position after working for 12
years as an adjunct at Columbus State and other colleges in the area.
"I felt it was very unfair that I was teaching 8 courses and getting
the same pay as others would for 2 or 3."

He applied for permanent jobs three times before being hired. While
Davis said he couldn't be sure why his third attempt was successful, he
noted that he was hired shortly after a local newspaper did a profile
of him, showing him organizing his files in his car and moving from
college to college. He suspects that the college didn't like the image
of having teachers with cars as offices.

"Shaming people into doing things is not the most friendly way to get
fair treatment," he said. "But only by pushing the envelope will things
get done."

Another participant shared an example of the shame strategy: Her
college president was on a call-in radio show. Part-time faculty
members called in, and gave the president statistics showing the
part-time faculty members were being paid at rates comparable to the
custodians. The president came through with some more money shortly
after that incident.

The shame approach can also have down sides.

Tina Whittle and Cliffton Price described their successful campaign at
Georgia Southern University to oppose a plan to have the course loads
of writing instructors increased from four to five a semester. Efforts
to have their department lead the charge against the plan stalled, and
administrators had various reasons (which Whittle and Price said
changed over the course of the debate) to defend the plan.

Whittle and Price only saw real progress when the Faculty Senate got
involved and sponsored a public screening of a documentary, Degrees of
Shame, on the abuse of part-timers. Following local news media coverage
of the screening, the plan was withdrawn.

But Price no longer teaches at Georgia Southern. He said that the
campaign, while successful, destroyed his relationship with
administrators to a point that it would have been destructive to stay.
"I couldn't work there any more," Price said. "I felt like I could have
strangled half the administration."