Higher Ed Focuses On Faculty Staffing Issues

OFT's Darold Johnson, Terra Faculty Association President Jack Fatica and Jerome Webster, Terra Community College vice president. Photo by Jeff Bates

OFT members from Ohio colleges and universities joined forces with other higher education representatives in October to host the nation’s first statewide meeting on academic staffing. The full-day Summit on Academic Staffing in Higher Education focused on the decrease of full-time faculty and an overreliance on part-time graduate assistants and adjuncts.

“The summit allowed for a focused and open discussion about the use, and abuse, of graduate students and part-time faculty in place of full-time faculty in our higher education classrooms. It elevated the attention that is needed to try to improve the staffing situation,” said Jack Fatica, president of the Terra Faculty Association, Local 4719, who was involved in planning the event.

Part-time graduate assistants do more and more of the work, with inadequate stipends and few if any benefits. Amy Hubbard, with the Graduate and Employee Student Organization (GESO), which is affiliated with OFT, said the old notion of graduate assistants serving as apprentices is being replaced by a model that treats them as a source of cheap, casual labor.

The summit builds on a 2008 AFT report, “Reversing Course: The Troubled State of Academic Staffing and a Path Forward,” which offers ways to correct this situation. AFT’s FACE program (Faculty and College Excellence) seeks to achieve full equity in compensation and greater job security for contingent faculty, and ensure 75 percent of undergraduate classes are taught by full-time tenured faculty.

Next steps agreed to by participants of the one-day Ohio summit:

• Replicate the summit on local campuses to raise the awareness around staffing issues and continue collaboration
  

• Mobilize support for Senate Bill 129 which would include part-time graduate assistants among those who are allowed to organize under Ohio’s collective bargaining law
  

• Address these issues in the state’s 10-year strategy for higher education
  

• Interest stakeholders in generating data around staffing issues
  

Fatica said one of the most impressive aspects of the summit was the collaboration among the three unions representing higher education. The summit was coordinated by higher education members from three national faculty organizations - AFT, NEA and AAUP. Representatives worked as one unit in planning and presenting information about a concern in academic staffing that is seen on both a state and national level, he said. State legislators and representatives from the Ohio Board of Regents attended and spoke during the summit.

United Faculty/COTC President Ken Ollish and Owens Faculty Association President Dave Matheny with state Rep. Debbie Phillips. Photo by Jeff Bates