The steady rise of contingent faculty appointments and the growth of administration in higher education present a significant threat to academic freedom and shared governance. That’s the conclusion of studies on contingency and administrative growth in the AAUP’s Annual Report on the Economic Status of the Profession, 2020–21.
Some key findings on contingency and administrative growth:

• In fall 2019, 63.0 percent of faculty members were on contingent appointments; 20.0 percent were full-time contingent faculty members and 42.9 percent were part-time contingent faculty members. Only 26.5 percent of faculty members were tenured and 10.5 percent were on the tenure track.
  
• From fiscal year 2011–12 to fiscal year 2018–19, the numbers of staff classified as “management” increased 12 percent per FTE student, real average salaries increased 7 percent, and salary outlays per FTE student increased 19 percent, including an extraordinary 24 percent increase in real salary expenditures per FTE student in public colleges and universities.
  

As we note in the report, contingent appointments are the least secure, lowest remunerated, and generally least supported faculty positions. Most faculty members who are paid per course section do not receive retirement or medical benefit contributions, and in most states, adjunct faculty members do not have rights to unemployment insurance. Faculty tenure is the only secure protection for academic freedom in teaching, research, and service.
The prevalence of contingent faculty appointments also means that shared governance in higher education is increasingly at risk. Without adequate numbers of full-time tenure-line faculty members, many institutions now appoint administrators to committees that govern areas formerly within the sole purview of faculty committees. 
This deep imbalance between the rise of contingency and the rise of management, particularly the exorbitant rise in high-level administrative salaries, requires urgent action. Governing boards, legislators, and other policy makers must provide funds for a substantial readjustment of academic salary levels to avoid irreparable harm to the US higher education system. Additionally, the AAUP holds that full and part-time faculty members, regardless of rank, are to be considered eligible for tenure and the protections it affords. Faculty teaching, research, and service must remain the focus of higher education.
You can read the full report and view charts of our findings on contingency and administrative growth here.
Next week, we will discuss the report's findings on rising institutional debt and share resources from our New Deal for Higher Education campaign on this issue.
The AAUP Research Department

After six days on strike, the AAUP chapter at Oregon Institute of Technology successfully settled their first collective bargaining agreement. The new CBA includes significant improvements across a range of issues that inspired the faculty to unionize in the first place: workload, compensation, academic freedom, and more.
This victory is an important step forward for higher education, the AAUP, and the academic labor movement. 
We congratulate the faculty on their new contract and their successful strike, and we thank the AAUP membership for showing your support in your messages, comments, and social media posts.
In Solidarity,
Christopher Simeone 
Director, AAUP Department of Organizing and Services

Please visit the  website below to read a recent bog entry published May 6, 2021 in the blog of Academe by CA-AAUP Secretary/Treasurer and National University AAUP Chapter President,  Alex Zukas
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 https://academeblog.org/2021/05/06/egregious-administrative-action-under-the-cover-of-covid-19/?

Campus police forces are not immune to broader injustices in US law enforcement, and these injustices intersect with core AAUP concerns over shared governance and academic freedom. That’s why I agreed to serve on a working group charged with drafting a report on the role of police on campus. 
We looked at the appropriateness of higher education institutions’ having their own police forces and considered the impact of systemic racism on campus policing—as well as the role of campus police in perpetuating systemic racism and inequities. We found thatcampus police forces have expanded and militarized at an alarming rate, and that there are clear tensions between the AAUP’s core values and the existence and function of campus police forces.
Our goal is to encourage and enable AAUP chapters to work in coalition with other publicly minded groups to transform campus safety into something more just, accountable, and effective, up to and including reorganizing campus safety in toto. Accordingly, we recommend changes needed to ensure that campuses are safe and welcoming for diverse peoples—especially those who are Black, Indigenous, and people of color—and provide tools for chapters to use when assessing the state of policing on your campus and organizing for change.
Download the report here. See questions we suggest chapters ask themselves to get started. 
—Megan Horst, Portland State University
Chair of AAUP Campus Police Working Group

I'm writing to share with you the results of the AAUP’s 2020–21 Faculty Compensation Survey, released today. Real wages for full-time faculty decreased for the first time since the Great Recession, and average wage growth for all ranks of full-time faculty was the lowest since the AAUP began tracking annual wage growth in 1972. After adjusting for inflation, real wages for full-time faculty decreased at over two-thirds of colleges and universities. The number of full-time faculty decreased at over half of institutions. 

Average pay for part-time faculty members teaching a three-credit course section in 2019–20 varied widely between institutional types, with average rates of pay ranging from $2,611 per section in public associate’s institutions without ranks to $5,760 per section in private religiously affiliated doctoral institutions. (Part-time faculty pay data is collected for the prior year as institutions generally cannot provide employment data on part-time faculty until the end of the academic year). 
The survey also asked about the wide range of actions taken by US colleges and universities in response to financial difficulties stemming from the COVID–19 pandemic. At a time when many institutions were already struggling to balance their budgets, many lowered their expenditures by implementing hiring freezes, salary cuts, fringe benefit cuts, furloughs, and layoffs. 

• Nearly 60 percent implemented salary freezes or reductions.
• About 30 percent eliminated or reduced some form of fringe benefits.
• Over 5 percent did not reappoint or terminated contracts for at least some tenure-line faculty.
• Over 20 percent did not renew contracts or terminated contracts for at least some non-tenure-track faculty.
• Almost 10 percent implemented furloughs for at least some faculty.
• Over 50 percent took some other action for tenure-line faculty. The most common action described was some type of early retirement program.
• Almost 30 percent took some other action for non-tenure-line faculty.
• Almost 50 percent implemented tenure-clock modifications for at least some tenure-track faculty.

Although part-time faculty have surely been disproportionally impacted by the COVID–19 pandemic, the fact that data on part-time faculty were collected for the prior academic year, 2019–20, precludes in-depth analysis of how part-time faculty have been impacted this year. 
You can see the complete survey results here.
--Glenn Colby, AAUP Senior Researcher

What’s New with Academe?

Our April newsletter offers a preview of selected articles and book reviews from the forthcoming spring issue of Academe as well as a selection of recent posts from the Academe Blog. The spring issue, which will be published in full in May, focuses on the campaign for a New Deal for Higher Education and builds on the work of Scholars for a New Deal for Higher Education, a group founded last year by Jennifer Mittelstadt. Visit https://www.aaup.org/academe to read more about the Scholars for a New Deal and the work of the faculty activists who are mapping out a new vision for the future of higher education.

The AAUP engages in advocacy and legal work on a range of issues affecting higher education, and we are pleased to report that this winter there have been positive developments in a number of areas. While much work remains to be done to ensure widespread access to quality higher education for all, these developments are good news for the higher education community.

Coronavirus Relief Package. Last week, President Biden signed into law a $1.9 trillion coronavirus relief package, which includes an additional $40 billion in aid for higher education. Institutions must spend about half of the money to help struggling students with living expenses and the technology needed for remote classes. It is still unclear whether undocumented and international students will be eligible for relief. The law also provides dedicated support to historically Black colleges and universities, tribal colleges and universities, Hispanic-serving institutions, and other minority-serving institutions to address the disproportionate effect of the pandemic on those institutions and the students they serve. The AAUP, along with coalition partners, is advocating for a New Deal for Higher Education that would significantly reinvest in our nation’s colleges and universities.

Graduate Employee Unionization. In a major victory for graduate employees at private universities, the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) announced last week that it was withdrawing a rule proposed in late 2019 that would have barred graduate assistants from engaging in union organizing and collective bargaining under the protection of federal law. The AAUP has long supported the bargaining rights of graduate employees and has submitted amicus briefs in cases on this issue as well as submitting comments opposing the 2019 proposed rule and demonstrating both that graduate assistants are employees with the right to unionize under the NLRA and that unionization advances their academic freedom.

Deferred Action on Childhood Arrivals (DACA) and Immigration Reform. As one of its first acts, the Biden administration issued an executive order to preserve and fortify the DACA program, which allows undocumented immigrants brought to the United States as children to remain in the country legally and expands access to higher education by providing eligibility for in-state tuition and state-funded grants and loans to participants. In 2017 the Trump administration sought to terminate the DACA program, despite overwhelming opposition to this move from the higher education community. Lower courts prevented the termination of the program, and ultimately the US Supreme Court, in a case in which the AAUP joined an amicus brief supporting the DACA program, found that the Trump administration’s attempt to terminate the program was unlawful and allowed it to stand.
The Biden administration has also proposed comprehensive immigration reform legislation to strengthen and improve the immigration system, including expanding and making permanent the DACA program and providing a pathway to citizenship for Dreamers. The legislation could also ease the enrollment of international students, as the AAUP has advocated.

Travel Bans. On Inauguration Day, President Biden also repealed various travel bans that barred or severely limited the ability of students, exchange scholars, and other visitors from a number of predominantly Muslim countries from entering the United States. The Trump administration had issued four orders banning travel from certain countries. The AAUP and the higher education community overwhelmingly opposed the travel bans, and courts prevented the implementation of the first three. However, in a case in which the AAUP joined an amicus brief in opposition to the travel bans, the US Supreme Court upheld the fourth version of the ban in 2018. The Biden administration’s proclamation revokes the travel bans, finding that they are “a stain on our national conscience and are inconsistent with our long history of welcoming people of all faiths and no faith at all.”

LGBTQ Discrimination. Another executive order issued on Inauguration Day extends federal nondiscrimination protections to discrimination based on gender identity or sexual orientation. The order builds on the Supreme Court’s landmark 2020 ruling in Bostock v. Clayton County, Georgia; the AAUP joined an amicus brief in this case, arguing that workplace discrimination based on LGBTQ status is unlawful. In the case, the Supreme Court extended protection of a federal law banning employment discrimination based on sex to individuals who identify as lesbian, gay, bisexual, or whose gender identity differs from their sex assigned at birth. Reversing the Trump administration’s approach, the Biden order extends this protection to discrimination based on sex forbidden by Title IX and other federal anti-discrimination statutes and regulations.  

Race in Admissions. On February 3, the Biden administration dropped a lawsuit brought by the Trump administration against Yale University that had accused Yale of discriminating against white and Asian American applicants in its admissions process. This lawsuit was one of many brought in a concerted effort to end the consideration of race in college admissions. The AAUP has repeatedly joined amicus briefs supporting the ability to use race as one factor in university admissions. While the dropping of this suit indicates that the administration will take a more balanced approach to the issue, private parties are seeking to bring a case to the US Supreme Court in efforts to outlaw such consideration.  

Racial Equity. Last fall, the Trump administration ordered federal agencies and federal contractors (potentially including colleges and universities) to end trainings that address topics like white privilege and racism. The AAUP and many others in the higher education community spoke out about bans on racial equity training. President Biden reversed the Trump order and replaced it with a new executive order requiring federal agencies to assess their equity and diversity activities.

Student Debt. With coalition partners, the AAUP is calling for the cancellation of student debt for borrowers who have unjustly shouldered the burden of financing higher education the last forty years. The Department of Education has extended through September 2021 a moratorium on federal student loan payments. In response to concerns that debt cancellation could trigger damaging tax consequences for borrowers, last week’s coronavirus relief law includes a provision that says if student debt is cancelled, the value of the amount forgiven will not be taxed by the federal government.
Far more work remains to be done, but we are heartened by these first steps and look forward to continuing to advocate for equity and access in higher education.

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