Editor’s Note. At each annual meeting the Professional, Teaching, and Research Divisions, and the AHA Committee on Women Historians, sponsor sessions on issues that are central to a committee’s work and to the interests of many of our members. The 1985 Annual Meeting in New York City saw five sponsored sessions; the reports, submitted by the session chairs, were published in the March 1986 issue of Perspectives except for the one that follows below. Questions, comments, or requests for further information should be directed to session participants, or sent “in care of” to the AHA’s national office (400 A St., SE, Washington, DC 20003).
Joint Session with the AHA Committee on Women Historians
Problems and Prospects of Part-time Academic Employment for Historians
MODERATOR: Karen Offen, Center for Research on Women, Stanford University, and AHA Committee on Women Historians
PANELISTS:
Joyce O. Appleby, University of California, Los Angeles
Carl E. Prince, New York University
Esther Katz, Institute for Research in History, New York
Anna K. Nelson, now American University
COMMENT: The Audience
From the perspective of the chair, this session (sponsored by the AHA Committee on Women Historians) was very successful. It ran smoothly and elicited a worthwhile discussion of the several types of issues raised for the historical profession by the phenomenon of part-time employment in academia. Some thirty-five to forty persons were in the audience, including a majority of members of the Professional Division, our president-elect, and a range of historians including some twenty persons who had engaged in part-time teaching or were considering it, one college-level department chair and one high school departmental chair. Each of the panelists made an effective presentation and the hoped-for interchange with the audience materialized. Thanks to Esther Katz, who was also on the local arrangements committee, we were able to tape the entire session for future reference.
Panelists addressed the problem of part-time academic employment for historians from several perspectives. Joyce Appleby, a member of the AHA Council, emphasized that part-timers have come to constitute a permanent feature of the instructional program in many colleges and universities, and in fact represent some 25-30 percent of the teaching force nationally. Her concern has been the development of strategies that our professional association could effectively use to encourage history departments to improve the status of part-timers. She thinks that the most productive strategy is to insist on the way in which enhancement of part-timers’ situations, both contractually and collegially, would contribute to a department’s teaching effectiveness.
Carl E. Prince, department chair at New York University, discussed measures taken at NYU during the last seven years to develop the situation of part-time teachers, both in the graduate and undergraduate programs. NYU now has forty adjunct teachers in history. Few of the most effective measures cost money; they include the formation of a departmental committee to monitor the status of part-time faculty, inviting part-timers to colloquia and social activities, and an informal “adoption” of several of the most promising part-timers with an eye to their career development and eventual placement in full-time positions. He noted, however, that pay was still a serious problem, no fringe benefits were available, office space was poor, and that adjuncts still faced some discrimination in the university, as for example, in not being admitted to the athletic center.
Esther Katz, from the Institute for Research in History (New York), de scribed the findings of the Institute’s recent study of “latch-key academics.” She noted that few of those surveyed in the New York area were trying to make a living as part-time faculty; nor were they young, unemployed PhDs. Thus, few fit the profile that had emerged in the earlier literature. She also criticized the earlier literature for its ahistoricity, its primary emphasis on cost-effective ness, etc. Most of the part-timers surveyed did teach introductory courses and few believed themselves to be acknowledged by their respective departments as professionals.
Anna K. Nelson, who has made a career as an adjunct teacher at George Washington University, presented a personal perspective on her part-time employment in a large urban history department. She, too, emphasized that no one can currently expect to earn a living wage at part-time teaching, and that part-time faculty are almost always doing something else, whether raising a family, or engaging in some other type of employment or activity. She underscored the pleasures (the teaching itself, and the fact that no tenure/promotion committee was setting her research agenda) and the perils (no financial support for research, uncertainty about the parameters of courses assigned, possible damage to self-esteem) of part-time teaching. She raised a number of sticky issues facing part-timers, including the possible perception by younger tenure-line faculty that part-timers may constitute a threat to the positions of full-time faculty, the necessity of changing the assumption in the profession that there is only one way to be a professional historian, and the relative neglect in departments of the implications for curricular excellence of using qualified part-time professionals.
The audience discussion elicited several types of information, including one announcement of positions in western civilization for 1987 from a New York area university. Of particular interest to all present was the information that pay for teaching a semester-long course ap pears to range from $600 to $3500 per course. It was generally agreed that part-time wages were, in most cases, starvation wages. Questions were raised concerning formal review of teaching for part-timers, problems that develop when departments themselves do not control hiring (as in institutions that have significant evening or continuing education programs separate from the day faculty), and the “consumerism” in education more generally. One instance was cited in which easy grading seemed to be the main criterion for rehiring part-time faculty.
Suggestions included mobilizing the assistance of accrediting agencies on be half of part-timers’ concerns; unionization; passing on suggestions to deans and “middle-managers” in higher education; establishing awards for teaching that include or specify temporary faculty (UCLA does this); consideration of “minimum” ceilings for remuneration of courses (possibly set forth by departments on behalf of their own graduates in letters to neighboring institutions [NYU does this]); making pay for part time courses at institutions in a given area public and thereby embarrassing those institutions who are on the mini mum end into raising their per-course pay; prorating pay for part-timers based on full-time pay and course loads; and attempting to address the more general question of how higher education is funded.
Karen Offen
Center for Research on Women, Stanford University, and AHA Committee on Women Historians
