Adrianna Kezar: A Critical time to support non-tenure-track faculty

Pullias Center co-director Adrianna Kezar voices her support for the right of non-tenure-track faculty to collectively bargain.

by Adrianna Kezar 

At the Pullias Center for Higher Education, we firmly believe that public engagement is a responsibility of scholars and part of quality scholarship. With the recent news about the challenges adjunct faculty unions are facing at USC and at other institutions around the nation, we’ve felt compelled to engage with the bigger issues regarding the rights of non-tenure-track faculty, both on our campus and beyond.

For many years, we at the Pullias Center have championed non-tenure-track faculty on college and university campuses through the Delphi Project on the Changing Faculty and Student Success, which provides tools and resources to help create new faculty models and better support faculty off the tenure track to enhance higher education institutions. The project has long recognized the value of adjunct, contingent and part-time faculty—and the need for campuses to support them. Our research shows that faculty need a set of supportive policies and practices ranging from professional development to orientation to support to attend conferences to keep up in their fields in order to support student success. They need a living wage, benefits and involvement in decision-making, particularly with the courses they teach.

The Delphi Project has a long track record of supporting non-tenure-track faculty across the country as well as at USC toward achieving these ends. We also strongly believe that if institutions do not provide the needed support for non-tenure-track faculty to thrive, then organizing is a natural outlet for this group to obtain what is necessary support for them to execute their work and help students succeed. Many campuses have worked in cooperation with their faculty to change working conditions, but at other campuses, collective bargaining has been necessary to make changes a priority. As a project, we support the right of faculty to collectively bargain.

We at the Delphi Project stand with non-tenure track faculty both at USC and beyond in organizing to support themselves. We stand in solidarity with like-minded groups on other campuses who are also working to support non-tenure-track faculty, even when their administrations and leaders might appear not be supportive of that goal. Through the Delphi Project, we hope to further open a dialogue about how to shift academic culture so that we do better by our non-tenure-track faculty and how to address the challenges and contradictions within our own institutions.

Adrianna Kezar is a professor of higher education at the University of Southern California and co-director of the Pullias Center for Higher Education.