Advocate Online

Why should NEA members in higher education who have tenure care about what happens with their non-tenure-stream colleagues? After all, few institutions are actively trying to abolish tenure for the tenured. And doesn't the existence of a growing group of contingent faculty, including grad employees, provide a buffer against layoff for the tenured?

Don't tenured faculty have better schedules, lower workloads, better class choices, and higher pay, as well as more research assistance and time, partly because of the increasing number of nonstandard appointments?

These arguments assume that the traditional perquisites of regular college faculty can be preserved and that the best way to do this is to acquiesce in the growth of contingent faculty.

This assumption is wrong. First, this strategy isn't working. The traditional perquisites of college faculty are being rapidly eroded. Tenure-denial rates are increasing. Individual administrative and departmental workloads are increasing for regular faculty.

There is pressure to publish more and/or teach more classes. Pay has not kept up with inflation over the past 20 years. Academic freedom and rights to our intellectual property are under attack. Many of our senior colleagues respond to these challenges by adopting the après moi le déluge attitude and counting the days until retirement.

This preservation by acquiescence assumption is also wrong because there is an alternative strategy that can work. It is an old idea, called solidarity, the principle upon which our local associations and unions were first organized as bargaining units. We need to extend this principle to include all of our colleagues, and indeed all campus workers.

We are all, from janitors to faculty, being more and more treated as interchangeable parts, to be replaced by any cheaper and more efficient model that comes along. We need to broaden our unity in order to effectively defend those aspects of higher education that are valuable for us as employees and for our students as learners.

One of the best opportunities to forge this unity is the upcoming Campus Equity Week endorsed by NEA. CEW hopes to spark local actions on hundreds of campuses to focus attention of the inequitable treatment of contingent faculty.

Joe Berry, a member of the Roosevelt Adjunct Faculty Organization, an NEA affiliate in Illinois, and midwest coordinator for Campus Equity Week, has been organizing contingent faculty for many years.

I'd like to say!

I applaud the article in the June Advocate on the syllabus. But I was surprised that the use of a syllabus is an "innovation."

I teach nursing at a technical college, and we have to develop curriculum syllabi for each course. I can't imagine not working without this "road map" for the course and with the student.

This way we know—usually—where we all are and what the expectations are. I sometimes put quotations at the beginning of modules to give the students some different thoughts than just the "topic of the day."

I also occasionally put in a cartoon or comic that refers to the module topic but lets the student see some humor in the topic.

We also included formative evaluation forms on our teaching in the modules. Sometimes the students fill them out and sometimes they don't. But I do request that students complete them so I can learn anonymously how my teaching and the course is going.

I agree that the syllabus is only as good as the person who takes the time to put a quality "text" together. Sometimes I have seen instructors just copy things out of the current textbook to get the syllabus done. Please continue to make your readers aware of the importance of these teaching tools.
—Cheryl D. AllenChuck Killingsworth
Fox Valley Technical College