Information lacking in contingent faculty issues

In mid-September, Duke United Students Against Sweatshops presented a petition to President Brodhead’s office asking that administration remain neutral as contingent faculty unionize for better salaries and job security. Contingent faculty members are those professors hired for non-tenure track positions, often on year-to-year contracts. At Duke, a contingent faculty member earns about $57,000 a year, many thousands of dollars more than the national median of $31,000 according to PayScale Human Capital. While we grant that these professors have lower salaries and job security than tenured and tenure track professors, we nonetheless believe the campaign has much more groundwork to lay before it can begin to make demands about the status quo.

A first problem for the USAS campaign and faculty is organizational power. Given the large percentage of Duke faculty who are hired in non-tenure track positions, we would expect many more minds working towards progress in the form of concrete ideas and research. The petition’s request for neutrality from administration seems toothless. A better launch would have presented administration with a clearly laid out and research-backed overview of problems with the status quo along with a request to support the union that these faculty members are purportedly looking to form. This is not to say that the salary and job security differences could not potentially be an issue down the road but that the movement has yet to coordinate on exactly what it wants.

Unless specific policies are proposed or at least well-designed questions are asked, it is difficult to see the movement ever becoming more than finger pointing. One point raised in our interview with USAS’s campaign chair and a contingent faculty member was that these professors have little to no formal representation on University committees and governing bodies. This barrier notwithstanding, presentations and requests can still be made to the deans of Trinity and Pratt, the Arts and Sciences Council and the Office of Faculty Affairs. If a seat at the table is an issue, there are administrators whose job it is to attend to faculty development and tenure processes.

Moreover, if information is the campaign’s bottleneck, there are University offices that can release or begin collecting the data required for a more informed movement. In this respect, we believe that the administration should reach out and work with these contingent faculty members either individually or through some form of collective representation to identify if there is a systemic issue at hand. We see little downside to this transparency since the place of contingent faculty at Duke, while obviously not as comfortable as tenured and tenure-track professors, is still much better than it is nationally.

The movement—should it first coalesce into something more organized—should be able to make its case but so far has little to bring to the table. It is hard to say how many contingent faculty members are involved in making requests of the administration. We also raise the question of how a petition of roughly 400 signatures can expect waves at a university of 14,000 students and over 8,000 campus employees. Finally, it remains to be seen what exactly the demands of this movement are in terms of justified solutions and not simply problem identification. Non-tenure track faculty members account for 76 percent of instructional staff across the country according to the American Association of University Professors, and so if there is a case to be made on their behalf, we expect to it carry more force than what we have seen.