A response to the part-time issue

EDITOR’S NOTE: This will be the first in a three-part series in which members of the USM community discuss their concerns regarding the part-time faculty situation featured in a Dec. 3 article by Steve Allan.

This week’s column is by Dennis Gilbert, president of the part-time faculty union. Next week’s will feature Don Anspach, president of the full-time faculty union, to be followed by a response from the Provost Joseph Wood.

Steve Allan’s story about part-time faculty at USM finally gave the most overlooked issue facing the University today the front-page attention it deserves.

But his headline, Do part-time professors add up to A complete EDUCATION?, leads the reader to expect an analysis of the role part-timers play in the university curriculum and community. Instead, the story delivers a series of interviews demonstrating that this most overlooked issue at USM is also the most misunderstood.

Consider Prof. Anspach’s comment that these two faculties teaching side by side “.never join forces because our issues are different.”

True enough, in regard to matters concerning our separate unions. But there are university-level issues affecting part-timers on which the full-time faculty sometimes does have a significant impact. For example, the part-time faculty is the only group at USM without a representative body acknowledged and supported by the University community. Part-timers’ concerns are represented exclusively by a single, non-voting seat on the Faculty Senate. Several years ago, the Senate itself voted unanimously to increase the number of seats to five, one from each of USM’s colleges. But because this measure required changing USM’s Governance document to acknowledge part-time faculty as faculty, the full-time faculty, in a university-wide ballot, struck it down by a margin of two-to-one.

Why? Perhaps this vote reflects an uneasiness among full-timers generally that the tenure system is being eroded and that part-timers around the country are unwitting agents of its demise. I believe that most full-timers are, in principle, sympathetic to the lot of their part-time colleagues, but a vote that limits part-timers from participating in the dialogue that shapes policy and determines priorities in their own workplace contradicts the free exchange of ideas on which the academy stands.

While Provost Wood cautioned that his responses to Allan were “extremely brief,” it is worth pointing out that any either/or description of the part-time faculty sustains the tendency among administrators to view a diverse and complex body of professionals to, for example, those who do use teaching as their primary income and those who don’t. Mr. Wood points out that some of us “teach to extend [our] professional experience.” For others, teaching is a way of putting one’s education to work somewhere outside commerce or government; of continuing to develop scholarly interests; of remaining engaged in a process of intellectual growth by participating in communities of letters, arts, and sciences. Part-timers spend much more time discussing the preparedness of their students and ways to do a better job in the classroom than they do grumbling about the lousy pay, whether it is their primary source of income or not. Mostly we’re concerned that our teaching reflect the quality of our training and the convictions we share about the essential role good higher education plays in our culture.

When President Pattenaude describes part-timers as “a very valuable, a great asset,” he may be referring to our education, qualifications, publications, and scholarship. But when he notes that we offer “expertise that might otherwise be difficult to provide through tenure-track appoints,” one suspects he is referring to, say, an attorney teaching a course at the law school rather than the majority of part-time faculty here, whose work is almost exclusively to teach the major share of the Core.

More to the mark seems his comment that “judicious use” of part-

timers offers “financial and programmatic flexibility.”

This “judicious use” philosophy is embraced by administrations across the country. The argument reads like this: because students must complete a successful course of Core studies before advancing to the major, and

because salaries and benefits claim the largest share of operating budgets, keeping the part-time/full-time ratio as close as possible to the Accreditation Red Line is good fiscal policy.

This sounds cynical only if you still think of a university as a community of scholars. If you favor the economic model, as most administrators, legislators, and citizens do, you appreciate the entrepreneurial elegance of preserving as much “financial and programmatic flexibility” as possible.

Economic-model-based discourse is something we must endure with equal insistence in fat times and lean, but it is especially counter-productive in times of crisis, when the “bottom line” mantra never fails to drown out the really creative ideas just when you need them most. This model may be useful on a regular business day, but it will never deliver the nationally-rated, regionally-celebrated University of Southern Maine that is supposed to be in the planning right now.

Steve Allan demonstrates why the model fails in the person of Briggs Seekins, the part-timer who accuses the university of “borderline fraud” for failing to inform students which of their professors are not full-time faculty. Under the scholarly model, Seekins is an independent thinker; under the business model, he’s a disgruntled employee. You know, those people who dump ball bearings into the crankcases of forklifts? You don’t want disgruntled employees dragging their feet around the shop – unless, that is, they generate a net gain in spite of themselves.

But it simply isn’t possible, under these conditions, to put Briggs Seekins, an award-winning poet with an M.F.A. from Syracuse, to “judicious use.”

In the end, Allan’s article fails to answer the question posed in its headline because those people he interviewed probably don’t know the level of qualifications and commitment the part-time faculty brings to the University, a situation that generates another, more unsettling question: Why aren’t part-time faculty better understood and more intelligently utilized as a scholarly and pedagogical resource?

President Pattenaude says “we” (USM?) are “treating employees fairly.” Does he really mean treating employees fairly or as fairly or unfairly as the next institution? USM could take the lead among public universities in developing the potential of its part-time faculty, but it can never do so effectively without acknowledging that union/BOT(UMS)issues like pay equity and job security are USM issues as well; that faculty issues like representation in the decision-making process and professional development are the business of all faculties.

Full-timers should be more willing to share leadership with part-timers and to cultivate, in the words of Prof. Cole, “the wisdom and experience of the part-time faculty.” Administrators like Provost Wood should use their creativity and influence to professionalize those “temporary” faculty who faithfully keep USM going year after year. President Pattenaude should be the strongest proponent – with the Chancellor’s Office, the Board of Trustees, and the Legislature – of the view that rewards, in this case excellence in teaching at all levels, are proportionate to investment.

Considering what stout service the University enjoys from its part-timers under current conditions, imagine the return they would bring if they were conceded a stature commensurate with their qualifications.

Dennis Gilbert

English Department