On the Rails

Abstract

The national leaders in the fight for contingent faculty rights are not well known. This is no surprise: we are talking about the leaders of loose coalitions of (mostly) unorganized and invisible faculty members, people unseen and unacknowledged even (or especially) by their own nominal departmental colleagues in the tenured ranks. It is only in the last two or three years that they have begun to become visible—and audible— as advocates for reform in higher education. Only rarely does the mainstream media (that is, outside the confines of the higher-ed press) feature the perspective of adjunct faculty: we can point to a New York Times story on J. D. Hoff of CUNY, a pair of PBS stories by (now former) adjunct professor Joe Fruscione, a searing Washington Post editorial (“Adjunct Professors Fight for Crumbs on Campus”) by Colman McCarthy, and of course the coverage of the life and death of Margaret Mary Vojtko.1 But we are counting on the fingers of one hand here. Very few people outside the precincts of academe know of the work of Joe Berry, president of the Coalition of Contingent Academic Labor (COCAL) and author of Reclaiming the Ivory Tower; or Maria Maisto, president of the New Faculty Majority (NFM); or Robert Samuels, president of the University of California-American Federation of Teachers and author of Why Public Higher Education Should Be Free; or Robin Sowards (also on the board of the NFM), who helped lead the fight to organize adjunct faculty at Duquesne as part of the Adjunct Faculty Association, affiliated (as is appropriate for Pittsburgh) with the United Steelworkers of America.