There have been ongoing negotiations between the University and graduate employees in an effort to come up with a fair and equitable contract for both sides. The graduate employees are organized and have made their presence known through demonstrations all over campus. However, another group of academic professionals has not received that recognition – adjunct faculty members.

The benefits, pay, and working conditions vary greatly amongst different members of University faculty because not every instructor at the University is full time. Adjunct faculty do not have the guaranteed work that their full-time colleagues receive.

“Most faculty in the majority of post-secondary classrooms are adjuncts,” said Joe Berry, non-tenure track instructor at the University of Illinois in the Chicago Labor Education Program Extension, part-time instructor at Roosevelt University, and author of “Reclaiming the Ivory Tower: Organizing Adjuncts to Change Higher Education.”

Berry said that there are no set time commitments for adjunct faculty.

“The situation varies from whole year, multi-year, to (contracts that are) per course and per hour, really the academic equivalent of day labor,” he said.

At the University there is yet to be an adjunct labor movement that has “gotten off the ground,” Berry said.

Many adjuncts have more than one teaching job at a time, and most work for multiple institutes, especially in major metropolitan areas such as Chicago, Berry said. University of Illinois-Chicago has 1,112 part-time faculty members, whereas the Urbana campus has 850 part-time faculty, according to the Illinois Board of Higher Education.

“Our teaching conditions are the students’ learning conditions,” Berry said.

He said that if adjuncts don’t have security of employment they cannot help but have a lack of preparation. He also said that the mercurial nature of adjunct life “eliminates the possibility of informal contact” on which undergraduate education depends.

Adjunct professors generally teach entry level courses, 100 to 200 level courses, said Tobias Higbie, assistant professor in the University’s Institute of Labor and Industrial Relations.

“It’s very enrollment sensitive,” Higbie said.

If a class has fewer students than expected, a professor would lose out on the opportunity, he added.

“It’s piecing together your living (as a teacher),” Higbie said.

He said that an adjunct will earn from $600 to $1200 a course at an average institution (but significantly higher at the University).

“You can’t live on that,” Higbie said.

He said that in many cases a single adjunct will work for the same university over a series of years, and potentially stay with one university for many years. He said that this results in adjunct faculty that work for a university as much as full-time professors, but don’t get near the benefits or security of a full-time professor. He said that when this happens, the adjuncts can become “second-class citizens” in an institution.

“How long can you carry on the University’s principles when you’re exploiting certain sections of your workforce?” Higbie asked.

Higbie said that the University should be a “model employer,” and not simply follow what corporations are doing.