 "Photo: The Current")
 "Photo: The Current")
No job security. Little pay. Few raises. Few, if any, benefits. No vacations. No sabbaticals.
These are the conditions under which roughly 70 percent of Green River's faculty work and live: the adjuncts.
And a few of them are, and have been, attempting to fix the system – the system they call "part-time apartheid: separate and unequal."
THE BATTLE
The battle for more rights for adjuncts has been fought almost continually, and on many fronts, since almost immediately after the conception of the two-tiered system, the splitting up of non-tenure and tenure track instructors.
Over the past two decades, Keith Hoeller, adjunct philosophy instructor at Green River, has been among those fighting it.
He has written dozens of articles on the subject of faculty inequality, and has written bills intended to bridge the divide after realizing in 1994 that he was only earning 40 percent of what his full-time colleagues were earning for teaching the exact same courses.
Two years into his fight, he was joined by Dana Rush, another long-time adjunct instructor at the college. Rush has taught astronomy and physics at Green River for over two decades.
It has, at times, been a struggle, with victories few and far between. But, the two say, they will keep going.
"If you don't stand up and work for change, nothing ever improves," said Rush.
"There would be no American Revolution and no civil rights movement if people left."
THE NUMBERS
According to Hoeller, it all started with the "devil's bargain" of 1973. An oil embargo led to increasing gas prices and put the economy in a tailspin, so in order to save money colleges needed to cut labor costs, meaning less tenured faculty and more adjunct faculty.
"The use of adjunct faculty is higher education's way of outsourcing," he said.
To deal with the burdening costs a deal was made between college administrators and tenure track faculty, according to Hoeller – as long as colleges did not reduce or lay off tenured faculty, the school could do whatever it wanted to the contingent faculty.
In 1975, 54.9 percent of all instructional staff nationwide was contingent – staff not on the tenure track – of which a little less than half, 24 percent, were part-time instructors. In 2009, the most recent year for which data is available, more than 40 percent of the 1.34 million instructors in the nation were part-time. More than 75 percent was contingent.
The numbers at community colleges differ greatly, but adjuncts outnumber full-timers by more than two to one in a lot of them, especially the larger ones. 317 of Green River's 448 instructors are adjuncts.
Full-time instructors now see themselves as an island in an ocean of part-time instructors, according to Hoeller.
The reason the numbers are the way they are now, Hoeller said, is simple. Money. Government spending as part of the budget has fallen continuously; in 1973, at the time of the bargain, 16 percent of general funding went to education. Now, it is down to less than 10 percent.
JOB INSECURITY
This has given colleges an incentive to increase the amount of adjunct faculty, who currently get paid only 60 percent of what full-timers do and whose contract, which is renewed on a quarterly basis, allows colleges the flexibility they say they need to deal with budget decreases and fluctuating student populations.
Hoeller, however, sees this as a mere excuse. "10 percent people who are part-time – that would be flexibility. But three-fourths – that's exploitation," he said.
Still, Hoeller and Rush do not entirely blame colleges for responding to a system that encourages, if not requires, this sort of behavior. The system, they said, is being kept alive by state unions and the tenure process.
A SELF-PERPETUATING SYSTEM
When the time comes to divvy up class sections at most colleges, full-time instructors get first pick, and can choose to teach more classes than the three required in their contract – a process called moonlighting. Then, it is up to department heads, who are all full-time faculty and union members, to assign the remaining classes to the adjuncts.
This makes adjuncts fearful of "rocking the boat," said Hoeller. Especially those who want full-time positions.
To be put on the tenure track, adjuncts need to apply for a highly competitive open full-time position. Their faith ultimately depends on the full-time faculty who then make the decision. Without support from their peers they cannot build a career, leading many to stay silent on an issue they feel strongly about.
IMPROVEMENT TOO GRADUAL
While the state union has managed to lessen the gap between adjunct and tenure track salaries from 40 to 60 percent, Rush and Hoeller believe it is not increasing fast enough. "They say it has gone up 20 percent, but it has taken them 40 years. Is that the best you can do after 40 years?" Rush asked with a smirk.
At the beginning of Rush's career Green River's only astronomy teacher 20 years ago, he was teaching two classes a quarter and earning $13,000 a year. For the same work, Rush now makes $22,000, an improvement of only $9,000 over two decades.
This slow increase in salary is caused in part by a lack of what are called increments – steps at which an instructor gets a raise. Adjuncts at Green River receive 5 possible increments. Full-timers have as much as 20.
Although Green River is more friendly toward adjuncts in terms of increments - some colleges offer none at all - Hoeller thinks they are so small that he has dubbed them "dinkrements."
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