By AAUP Penn Chapter
AAUP–Penn is an organization of faculty (inclusively defined) that stands for shared governance of the university, fair working conditions, and Penn’s accountability to the Philly community. We came together in 2020 to reject the Penn administration’s austerity measures during the 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. As a chapter of the American Association of University Professors, we are also part of a broader effort to build solidarity among academic workers and to advocate for debt-free education for all and for the economic stability of higher education 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 across U.S. educational institutions, and about the exploitation and instability of adjuncts (aka contingent, non-standing, or non-tenure-track faculty) at Penn.
Adjunctification has reached crisis levels across U.S. higher education. Approximately 70% of those now teaching at U.S. colleges and universities are non-tenure-track. Like the mounting debt burden on students, this trend of replacing tenure-track positions with cheap labor is largely the result of systematic defunding of higher education at the state and federal level. Only 8-15% of funding for public universities actually comes from the states that 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 academic labor. But even at 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 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 being used as a loophole for filling basic teaching needs at low cost and turning academic employment into temp work. At Penn, you may not always see the term “adjunct” used in faculty titles, but you are likely to encounter contingent faculty, who are not eligible for the protections of tenure, teaching under a confusingly wide range of titles: most often “Lecturer” or “Senior Lecturer” but sometimes even titles such as “Professor of Practice.” Some of these faculty have greater job security than others and may even have been teaching at Penn for decades. Others may be teaching three courses at Penn, two at another school, and one more at a third school, commuting between campuses, juggling academic calendars that don’t line up, 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 our profession. It creates a situation in which 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 for low wages or simply leaving the profession—a grievous loss to them, to their students and colleagues, and to entire fields of study. It means that the majority of instructors at many institutions are shouldering heavy teaching loads for low pay with no health care or retirement benefits, no job security, and no say. Their unstable employment (in many cases on a per-course basis) is both a labor issue and an educational issue. Overworked instructors and high levels of faculty turnover obviously impact teaching and advising as well. Our working conditions are students’ learning conditions. Adjunctification also exacerbates existing inequities in academic hiring and promotion; it disproportionately affects women and faculty of color. In addition, it erodes the already weakened structures of workplace democracy for faculty at all levels; since non-tenure-track faculty generally lack the right to participate in faculty governance (a policy that AAUP–Penn has challenged at Penn), increasing the percentage of contingent hiring directly diminishes the proportion of faculty who have a voice in institutional decision-making. We do not even know what the ratio of contingent faculty is on our own campus because, as we recently learned from the AAUP national office, Penn is one of just six universities in the U.S. that declined to provide this data to the Department of Education, but we will be pressing for answers.
Our chapter fights for a better workplace at Penn by campaigning for benefits for contingent faculty and by challenging policies like the extension of teaching time without pay. In spring 2021 AAUP–Penn circulated a petition against the unilaterally imposed extension of class periods under the new schedule, which cumulatively increases the workload of those who already teach the most by up to 35 hours of added instructional time without compensation. The Penn administration’s refusal to clarify whether classes are meant to last the entire length of the new published class schedule or to end 10 minutes earlier (as was always the case in past years) is likely to cause confusion for students as well. In response, we have issued a “best practices” statement designed to protect the interests of both students and faculty. As you will see, we recommend that instructors teach no more than 50 minutes in a 60 minute block or 80 minutes in a 90 minute block, and that students not expect them to do otherwise.
Some of our key campaigns in the coming year will focus on the needs of contingent instructors at Penn. As a starting point, we will press for pension contributions for lecturers; we think 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. More broadly, we aim to call greater attention to their unstable working conditions. Through research and advocacy, we also aim to shine a light on gendered and racial disparities in pay, promotion, and workload at all ranks, and to organize for equitable employment and for faculty’s rights to participate meaningfully in institutional governance.
Anyone who teaches or does research at Penn regardless of title can and should become a member of our chapter, including standing and contingent faculty, graduate student workers, postdoctoral fellows, and librarians, archivists, and technicians whose work is substantially involved in research and teaching. The chapter’s leadership includes adjunct and grad members (including representatives of GET-UP) alongside tenure-track faculty. Non-members can reach out to us with inquiries or requests for support at aaup.penn@gmail.com. We welcome students, staff, and community members as well as faculty to contact us about issues and priorities for collective action. To learn about how to get involved, visit our site: https://aaup-penn.org.
Asian American Studies | Table of Contents | Cultural Houses
Penn Disorientation Guide 