Faculty Groups' Joint Conference Focuses on Pay Issues and Diversity

The Chronicle of Higher Education
By AUDREY WILLIAMS JUNE
Washington
Monday, March 31, 2008

At the joint higher-education conference of the National Education Association and the American Federation of Teachers here over the weekend, about 750 people gathered to talk about the bread-and-butter issues of both unions: job security and equal pay for adjuncts, academic freedom, tenure, and collective bargaining.
But the agenda for the meeting, which ended on Sunday, also reflected a sharpened emphasis on the role unions can play in promoting diversity among faculty and staff members.
"Diversity is inevitable. It's going to happen," said Henry Lee Allen, a sociology professor at Wheaton College in Illinois who spoke on a panel that examined the views of unionized faculty members of color on the issues of workload and productivity on their campuses. "The question is how it's going to happen and who's going to lead it," he said. "Are we going to be proactive or reactive?"
Mr. Allen, who has studied various education issues for the National Education Association over the years, said his research shows that "unions matter, but they could matter more" in the lives of ethnic-minority faculty members who say they are trying to cope with a variety of job-related issues, among them post-affirmative-action backlash, the tenure process, and the syndrome of believing that jobs are being handed out to "unqualified minorities."
Unions have to do their part to translate the conversation about the importance of a diverse faculty into terms the public and lawmakers can understand, said Dierdre Glenn Paul, president of the Montclair State University Faculty, Professional Staff & Librarians Association. For instance, a case for diversity could be made by talking about how majority colleges could better retain students of color if such students could see themselves reflected in the faces of faculty members, librarians, counselors, and others who are on the campus to help them get an education, said Ms. Paul, a professor in the early-childhood, and elementary- and literacy-education department at Montclair State.
Special Issue on Diversity
A newly released issue of the American Federation of Teacher's higher-education-policy journal, American Academic, was discussed at a workshop on promoting faculty diversity. The issue features articles that examine diversity in its many forms—race, ethnicity, gender, and physical ability. Presenters during the workshop talked of historically black colleges, whose faculty members are among the most diverse in higher education; the struggles of professors with disabilities; and how women, who now earn about half of the doctoral degrees awarded in the United States, are less likely than men to be tenured faculty members.
"For those of us committed to promoting diversity in our universities, let's really take a look at our tenure processes," said Catherine Hill, director of research at the American Association of University Women Educational Foundation. Ms. Hill is a co-author of an article in the journal that focuses on women whose tenure fights played out in the courts.
At the federation's annual higher-education meeting last year (the two organization's meet separately every other year), some members requested that the union make faculty diversity and affirmative action "more of a central issue" for the union, said Craig P. Smith, deputy director of the AFT's higher-education department. The journal issue on faculty diversity is one part of a multiyear effort by the federation to do so.
The federation's executive council has also formed a group charged, in part, with determining what steps academic unions can take to promote diversity among faculty and academic staff members. The federation also plans to publish a journal issue dedicated to exploring the effect 30 years later of the Supreme Court's landmark 1978 ruling on affirmative action, Regents of the University of California v. Bakke. Charles J. Ogletree, a professor at Harvard Law School, spoke passionately about the Bakke decision and its consequences during a luncheon address at the conference.
Ms. Paul, an African-American, publicly thanked the federation's Higher Education Program and Policy Council for what it had done so far to take members' diversity-related concerns into consideration.
"They are making good progress, and I'm pleased with that," Ms. Paul said. [To read the entire article, go to: http://chronicle.com/daily/2008/03/2309n.htm?utm_source=at&utm_medium=en ] (Subscription)