Web Letters: Higher Education Takes a Hit

Flex faculty! This is a accurate description of contingent faculty. However, the really unfortunate part is that it does not describe the massive contribution that contingent faculty make to a high-quality college education.

Contingent faculty generally teach the lower-level courses with the largest group of at-risk students.

The cost savings to colleges is not going to be there unless they provide contingent faculty with the same support structure they provide full time faculty.

The inadequate support system worked (kinda) with contingent faculty when they were a minority of the college students.

Bless contingent faculty for their dedication to students.

At UTB, we have gotten serious about how we support them.

Betsy Price

Brownsville, TX

New Faculty Majority may be a new name, but it is only a new chapter in a movement that has been building over the past decade, much of it facilitated by the Coalition of Contingent Academic Labor's international conferences in Canada and the United States every two years.

When I was handling public relations for the California Part-time Faculty Association in early 2000, I sent press releases to The Nation about A2K---Action 2000--an organizing effort that brought together all the unions representing and organizing non-tenure-track faculty in the California community colleges in a 40,000-signature petition drive and a demonstration on the steps of the Capitol in Sacramento. Since then, there are at least ten new bargaining units representing part-time faculty in California community college districts, and those in other districts where part-timers are part of existing wall-to-wall bargaining units are receiving much better representation by their unions, with statewide officers and influential statewide committees dedicated to addressing their issues.

The term New Faculty Majority was coined by the president of my own union, Bob Samuels. Our union at the University of California has achieved some of the best job protection in the nation for UC lecturers, all off the tenure track. The Cal State union, which also represents tenure-track professors, has done the same.

New Faculty Majority Day is April 30, and there will be rallies and events at multiple campuses in California and across the country.

Sandra Baringer

Valley Center, CA