Adjunct professors fight for equality

LIZ LAVIN DEPUTY EDITOR EAL723@CABRINI EDU

No job security, no benefits and pay that has been referred to as a “poverty wage.”

Sounds like a job a college student would hold, right? Wrong.

The people employed in these jobs are on college campuses but not as students. They are adjunct instructors, instructors who teach part-time and colleges across the nation rely on them every year so they can offer a variety of courses and keep their classrooms full.

Technically, adjunct instructors do not work full-time for the institutions that employ them; therefore they are not eligible for the higher salary and benefits their full-time counterparts receive.

There are approximately 500,000 adjunct instructors employed by higher-education institutes around the country, according to Keith Hoeller, cofounder of the Washington PartTime Faculty Association and member of the American Association of University Professors.

Hoeller and other adjunct instructors across the country, in- cluding Doug Collins and Dana Rush, two adjunct professors in Washington, have started a fight for equal treatment for adjuncts; their argument is they do an equal amount of work as their full-time, tenured counterparts, so they should receive equal treatment.

In any other profession, two people doing the same job would be paid the same without question, Collins said. “For some reason, in academia, [unequal pay] is tolerated. We do the same work as our colleagues but we do not get equally compensated.”

When Collins first started teaching as an adjunct, he says it did not take long for him to realize that the union did not have his best interest in mind. When it comes to the full-time, tenured faculty’s interests over the interests of adjuncts, “nine times out of 10 the union will come down on the side of the full-timers,” he said.

Rush agreed, citing the union as the major roadblock in the way of better treatment for adjuncts.

“The union continues to tell us that we have representation

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Fitz led the University of Dayton for 23 years. He is nationally known for connecting Catholic social teaching to the surrounding community of Dayton. Like The University of Dayton, Cabrini College has been working in a community partnership with Norristown, a local urban area. The Cabrini College Wolfington Center feels that this similar connection the two institutions share will bring much insight for growth in new general curriculum and engagement in the