How The University Works

In an essential new tract for the majority of faculty who serve contingently, Joe Berry explains how sleazeball administrations game the social-service system to vacuum every last dime from your pocket.

It takes a village to pay for the ultra-low wages that most contingent faculty are paid. The math is simple: since paying someone fifteen or eighteen grand a year for a full-time load is well below a living wage nearly everywhere in the country, especially when that person has massive student loan debt, someone is supplementing the wage so the teacher can live. It could be a spouse, parents, a retirement fund, or another employer. Sometimes it’s human services, in the form of welfare or food assistance. The money “saved” by cheap faculty labor is actually paid in to the system by taxpayers, other employers, and family members.

Meanwhile, the funds that would otherwise be spent on faculty are spent on the plague of locusts called administrators: as the most recent data have it: full-time administrators now outnumber full-time faculty. That’s right: you read it correctly. More next week on the most recent NCES data and managerial cannibalization of the campus next week. (Cut to Charlton Heston behind his desk in the dean’s office, spitting out his canapes, belatedly having his epiphany: “I’m eating people!”)

In California, the majority of faculty successfully sued to confirm their eligibility for unemployment compensation while they’re laid off from their employers. Joe Berry, chair of Chicago COCAL and the author of the essential book on self-organization for faculty serving contingently, Reclaiming the Ivory Tower, has produced an essential new tract to help faculty win their rights to unemployment compensation. Co-authored by Beverly Stewart and Helena Worthen, you can download it for free.

There are obstacles to faculty obtaining their rightful compensation. Because state policies vary, some will present more difficult hurdles than others. But Berry and his coauthors suggest that often the largest barrier is the emotional and intellectual barrier raised by faculty themselves, who find it very hard to accept the reality of their situation–that they are, literally, teaching for love, and being compensated far less than a Wal-mart employee or waitstaff at Denny’s.

The second largest barrier is Jane Provost, who will try to save the campus a few extra dimes (amounting to less than her own pay raise) by providing faculty with misinformation about benefits eligibility, and by outright lies, telling the unemployment office that contingent faculty can expect re-employment, while sending legally binding letters to the contrary to the faculty themselves.

Because unemployment insurance is funded by the employers themselves, and employers with a high rate of claims will be asked to pay more, employers have a financial incentive to reduce claims. Most higher education employers, the pamphlet explains, could avoid this exposure by reducing their excessive reliance on perma-temping and provide faculty with legally meaningful assurances of re-employment. Instead most choose “to continue to employ the majority of their teaching staff on a contingent no-reasonable-assurance basis but argue in unemployment insurance appeals hearings that the employee does in fact have reasonable assurance, and thereby often block receipt of benefits.”

I’ve said before, and I’ll say it again: Why do administrators get paid more? Not to be smarter, work harder, or exercise leadership. The extra cash buys hot water to scrub this kind of dirt from their hands.

Jointly funded by AAUP, AFT, and NEA, the pamphlet includes information on individual states.

It also makes it clear that filing for unemployment insurance is more than a matter of individual compensation.

It’s a political act: as more faculty file–especially filing in co-ordinated campaigns–pressure is placed on both the employer and the state to acknowledge the hidden system of subsidies enabling the ultra-low wages paid to the faculty majority.

But like most political acts, it comes with the risk of retaliation. While this sort of retaliation is illegal, U.S. labor law is the corollary of its position on torture, and there are few real penalties to be paid for terrorizing a workforce with the threat of non-reappointment. Did I mention the dirty hands of administrators?

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