by AAUP–Penn
Penn is not only a school (and a medical system, and owner of $3.2 billion in untaxed property in Philadelphia); it is also a workplace for 40,000 people, including faculty, staff, and healthcare employees. This total increases if we add 3,000+ full-time PhD student-workers and thousands of postdoctoral researchers required to teach or work in labs or clinics to earn their stipends, and even more if we add subcontracted campus workers. What are the labor conditions of the tens of thousands of people whose work makes Penn work? That question concerns us all if we believe that a university should be a great place to work as well as to learn and that workers across job categories deserve a voice in the place where they spend most of their time. As a faculty organization AAUP-Penn advocates for the university workers employed in teaching and research, though our commitments don’t stop there.
AAUP-Penn is a membership-based organization that stands for shared governance of the University, fair working conditions, and community justice. We are Penn’s chapter of the American Association of University Professors (AAUP), and we define faculty as broadly as possible to include everyone who teaches or does research regardless of rank or title. We came together in 2020 to reject the austerity measures that the Penn administration imposed (including budget cuts, staff layoffs, and hiring and PhD admissions freezes) at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic and to call for more transparent institutional decision-making that gives us all a voice in decisions affecting our work and in policies affecting the city. Our key areas of focus this year have included a labor solidarity task force, housing justice (with a task force focused on the struggle to save the University City Townhomes; see: UC Townhomes), workplace safety advocacy to prioritize the most vulnerable under pandemic conditions (see: COVID-19 at Penn), and the “Who Teaches at Penn?” project, which aims to answer an urgent and fundamental question about instructors’ terms of employment.
As one of more than 500 local chapters of AAUP (newly partnered at the national level with the American Federation of Teachers), and as a member organization of Higher Ed Labor United (a coalition of more than 135 higher ed local unions and organizations representing more than 550,000 workers and 300,000 students), AAUP–Penn is also part of a broader effort to build solidarity among academic workers across ranks and institutions. We are part of a movement that fights for debt-free education for all, equity and job security in higher ed, and against adjunctification, corporatization, defunding, and the power of unelected boards of trustees. We are especially concerned about the rising trend of replacing stable faculty jobs with short-term, low-wage adjunct hiring, and about the exploitation of adjuncts and other contingent, “non-standing,” or non-tenure-track faculty at Penn.
Adjunctification has reached crisis levels across higher education. The majority of those now teaching at U.S. colleges and universities are non-tenure-track: 3 in 5, according to the AAUP’s national research staff, and by some estimates closer to 70%. At the most basic level, this means that they have no job security. Like the mounting $1.6 trillion educational debt burden on students, this trend of replacing tenure-track positions with short-term contingent teaching contracts is largely the result of systematic defunding of higher education at the state and federal levels. Only about one-fifth of funding for public universities actually comes from the states those universities serve; the costs get passed on to students and cut out of instructional budgets in the form of downsizing of academic programs, layoffs, and outsourcing of teaching labor.
But even at fabulously wealthy private institutions like Penn that can easily afford full-time faculty with fair pay and benefits, hiring adjuncts has been increasingly normalized over the past few decades. Adjunct appointments originated with the goal of allowing universities, on an exceptional basis, to hire someone already employed in another profession (say, a prominent lawyer or novelist) to teach a course without needing to join the regular faculty. But this category is now much more often used as a loophole for filling basic teaching needs at low cost and turning academic employment into temp work. At Penn, you may not see the term “adjunct” used, but you will encounter contingent faculty—who are not eligible for the protections of tenure—teaching under a confusingly wide range of titles: most often “Lecturer” but sometimes even titles such as “Professor of Practice.” Some of these faculty have longer-term contracts than others; some have taught at Penn for decades. Others may be teaching three language courses at Penn and two at another school, commuting between campuses, and just barely making ends meet.
This casualization of academic labor is exploitative as well as harmful to education and research. AAUP–Penn sees it as a threat to the future of universities as intellectual communities. It means that graduate students in many academic fields working toward PhDs have the slimmest chance of finding stable employment as professors. Many consequently end up choosing between years of being overworked and underpaid or simply leaving the profession—at great cost to them, their students and colleagues, and entire fields of study. It means that the majority of instructors at many institutions are shouldering heavy teaching loads for low pay, often with no healthcare or retirement benefits, no job security, and no say. A recent national study by AFT on adjunct faculty working conditions reports that a third of those surveyed earn less than $25,000 annually; more than half lack employer-provided health insurance; 40% struggle to cover basic costs of living, and nearly 25% have needed public assistance. Such precarious employment conditions are a labor issue and an educational issue. Overworked instructors and high levels of faculty turnover obviously impact teaching and advising. Our working conditions are students’ learning conditions.
Adjunctification also exacerbates existing inequities; it disproportionately impacts women and faculty of color. (To cite just one example among many: in Penn’s School of Social Policy and Practice, which has a higher proportion of women faculty and faculty of color than most schools at Penn, 86.7% of instructors are contingent.) It raises issues of academic freedom too. The tenure system established by the AAUP national organization in 1915 was implemented to enable faculty (once they had earned job security through 6+ years of creditable teaching, research, and service) to teach and conduct research without the threat of being fired for political reasons. Lacking this protection, contingent faculty are implicitly not free to determine what they teach, say, or publish since they can be fired without due process for any reason. In addition, adjunctification erodes the already weakened structures of workplace democracy for faculty at all levels. Since non-tenure-track faculty are excluded from Penn’s Faculty Senate (an undemocratic policy that AAUP–Penn has challenged), increasing the prevalence of contingent hiring directly diminishes the proportion of faculty who have even a limited voice in institutional decision-making.
Since Penn is one of just three universities that declined to provide data on the status and wages of non-tenure-track faculty to the U.S. Department of Education, it has been challenging to determine the ratio of contingent faculty who teach here or to calculate their average pay. If the University’s own “Facts” page is accurate in its headcount of “standing” (tenure-track) and “associated” (non-tenure-track) faculty, this means that the salary data they have released excludes at least 46% (and likely way more) of Penn’s instructional workforce. AAUP–Penn’s “Who Teaches at Penn?” task force is currently collecting and analyzing data on working conditions, contracts, and pay for all Penn instructors; look out for political education and advocacy in the months ahead based on the stats we’ll be able to reveal.
Our chapter fights for a better workplace, and some of our key campaigns in the coming year focus on contingent instructors. All Penn employees deserve benefits including healthcare, family leave, and retirement, but a large number of adjunct lecturers (paid on a per-course basis) receive no benefits at all. We think it is shameful that Penn could require anyone to work on campus during a pandemic without providing medical coverage if they get sick at work. And it is shameful that faculty or staff can devote decades of their lives to teaching at Penn without receiving retirement contributions from their employer, leaving them without the means to retire after many years of service. Through research, advocacy, and action, we aim to call attention to the unstable and unfair working conditions of contingent faculty, shine a light on gendered and racial gaps in pay, promotion, and workload at all ranks, and organize for more equitable conditions of employment for everyone.
Our Labor Solidarity campaign aims to build ties with other campus employees, including the frontline and essential workers who keep Penn running, often with no overtime pay or adequate compensation under the inequitable two-tier wage system. Existing unions on campus include AFSCME DC47 Local 397 (Penn Museum Non-professionals); DC47 Local 590 (Penn Library Workers); DC47 Local 54 (Penn Dining Service Workers); IUOE Local 835 (Penn Facilities Workers); Teamsters Local 115 (Penn Housekeeping, Grounds Workers, and Transportation); Teamsters Local 929 (Bon Appetit Dining Workers); SEIU 32BJ (Allied Universal Security Officers); and PSOU (Penn Security Officers Union). Members of AAUP–Penn have stood with a coalition of campus workers in Teamsters 115 and PSOU at rallies during the summer of 2022 in their fight to end the two-tier system and earn equal pay for equal work, and we have stood with other local unions such as the Philadelphia Museum of Art Union in fair contract rallies. By contributing to strike funds, creating cross-union alliances, publicly supporting grad and faculty organizing, and participating in direct action, we will continue to stand in solidarity with organized labor and support workplace democracy on campus, in Philly, and everywhere.
Over the past two years, AAUP–Penn has also advocated for COVID-19 mitigation measures on campus and accommodations for immunocompromised and disabled employees and students; rejected the unpaid extension of teaching time particularly for adjunct lecturers who teach the most; challenged the central administration’s unilateral decision-making and called for real shared governance; co-sponsored a proposal for equity in benefits for LGBT employees; advocated for visa and legal support for international employees and students and aid for displaced scholars; gathered data on the working conditions of everyone who teaches at Penn; stood with our neighbors fighting eviction from the last affordable housing in the area; and called for Penn’s accountability to the West Philly community and hosted teach-ins on racial justice in housing and education, including payment of PILOTs (see: PILOTs).
Anyone employed in teaching or research at Penn should join our chapter, including standing and contingent faculty, graduate student-workers, postdocs, librarians, archivists, and technicians whose work is substantially involved in research and teaching. AAUP–Penn leadership includes adjunct and grad members and librarians alongside tenure-track faculty.
Students, staff, campus workers, and community members, in addition to faculty, are welcome to contact us about issues and priorities for collective action at aaup.penn@gmail.com. To learn how to get involved, visit our site: aaup-penn.org.
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