The Coalition of Contingent Academic Labor (COCAL) held its biennial conference in San Jose, California, in August 2018. It featured panel discussions and workshops for contingent faculty working in higher education and in K–12 institutions, and it included activists and union leaders involved in challenging precarity in the teaching profession. On its website, COCAL is described as “a grassroots coalition of activists in North America working for contingent faculty: adjunct, part-time, non-tenured, and graduate teaching faculty”Footnote 1; it is run entirely by volunteers. COCAL originated in the 1996 Annual Conference of the Modern Language Association and the first National Congress of Adjunct, Part-time, Graduate Teaching Assistants, and Non-Tenure Track Faculty, which were held concurrently in Washington, DC, that year.Footnote 2 COCAL’s members and the 150 attendees of this conference share common challenges in finding workable strategies to gain recognition and to secure fair working conditions for contingent faculty and staff in the United States, Canada, and Mexico.
The relevance of this conference to the APSA is that it dovetails with APSA’s ongoing efforts to acknowledge the challenges of and hear from contingent and adjunct faculty who teach political science. COCAL XIII also provided learning points specifically for APSA’s Committee on the Status of Contingent Faculty in the Profession. My role as a representative of this committee and as a first-time attendee was to learn from COCAL about the broader picture of precarity in the teaching profession and to convey lessons learned to APSA and the political science community.
Plenary Sessions on Working Conditions of Contingent Academic Labor
The first half of the conference featured panels on the working conditions of contingent academics—which, in COCAL’s definition, includes K–12 teachers and university professors—and current efforts of unions and other groups to lobby for improvement in wages and other recognition. Plenary speakers from various institutions in the United States, Canada, and Mexico were almost uniformly critical of the commercialization and corporatization of higher learning and education, as well as the inability of universities and schools to pay their contingent labor a fair wage or to provide equitable working conditions.Footnote 3 Jonathan Karpf, the conference chair, described the current landscape as “lamentable”; Ernesto Ortiz, executive committee member of Secretario de Trabajo y Conflictos Académicos del STUNAM, warned that in today’s higher-education campus, “[k]nowledge is turned into merchandise.”
In the first plenary, Karpf—reading remarks from Adrianna Kezar (University of Southern California)—highlighted how the average wage for adjunct lecturers for one course was $2,700, which yields an annualized salary equivalent to that of fast-food workers in America. Kimberly Ellis shared how 12,000 contingent faculty members in Eastern Canada went on strike to protest their working conditions in 2017, supported by their full-time colleagues and students. Malini Cadambi Daniel, National Director of SEIU Faculty Forward, cited a Berkeley Labor Center report stating that a quarter of all contingent faculty were on some form of US government assistance. Finally, Chandra Pasma of the Canadian Union of Public Employees (CUPE) briefed the audience on a forthcoming publication about contract faculty in Canada,Footnote 4 with statistics from CUPE’s research project. Pasma noted that more than 56% of university faculty in Canada are contract faculty across all teaching disciplines, and she emphasized that it was an institutional choice whether universities hired full- or part-time professors—even after considering government funding cuts.
Malini Cadambi Daniel, National Director of SEIU Faculty Forward, cited a Berkeley Labor Center report stating that a quarter of all contingent faculty were on some form of US government assistance.
The insights of and sharing by the panelists provided useful context on the working conditions for contingent academic labor. However, it would have been helpful if alternative perspectives on trends in higher education or opportunities for dialogue with guest speakers with positions in university administration or leadership also were provided.
Overall, the conference proceedings would have benefited from inviting other speakers representing a more diverse range of political, institutional, and personal perspectives beyond COCAL’s immediate focus.
Workshop and Breakout Sessions on Strategies to Improve Working Conditions
The workshop sessions in the second half of the conference provided useful learning points and strategies for individual contingent faculty members or for those considering unionization to negotiate fairer working conditions. The California Faculty Association (CFA)—the “exclusive collective bargaining representative for the California State University faculty, including tenure-track faculty, Lecturers, Librarians, counselors and coaches”Footnote 5—provided most of the workshop facilitators. They ran sessions on “How to Use Social Media Effectively to Run a Contract/Pressure Campaign” (Niesha Fritz, CFA Communications Specialist) and “Communicating with Reporters…and How to Write an Effective Press Release” (Alice Sunshine, CFA Communications Director); making masks and puppets for campaigns; nonviolent direct action; and using political pressure to improve contingent working conditions. In their workshop for the last topic, CFA Director of Government Relations Djibril Diop and CFA Legislative Director Mario Guerrero presented how CFA secured strong contracts for contingent faculty in the California State University system. CFA members, including contingent faculty, may receive wages pegged to full-time salary scales and even pensions, depending on their length of service at an institution. CFA also advocates strongly for universities to convert lecturers to full-time faculty instead of hiring new professors.
Learning Points for APSA and the Profession
The persistence and enthusiasm of the COCAL organizers in forging a venue for contingent faculty to meet likeminded colleagues and partners, as well as to educate one another about political action and activism, is a positive development. The current crisis facing academia in terms of precarity and contingency in employment for the majority or a large minority of faculty members, including in political science, is at its root a political, social, and economic crisis. It is timely for APSA and its members to seriously examine the state of the profession as it pertains to contingent academic labor in the teaching of political science and, more broadly, the repercussions of recent trends in higher education on society and our students. From this perspective, COCAL provides a potential model for interested political scientists to study the dynamics of political organization by contingent labor.
