Dive Brief:
- The concept of multiple colleges drawing instructors from a hiring pool, as is popular in trade unions, has drawn recent interest from both administrators and faculty unions.
- One faculty union in the Washington, DC, area is already pitching the idea of drawing labor from a single pool to schools in its orbit, although it has received pushback from other unions in the area.
- The issue was discussed at a recent panel at a New York academic labor conference, reports the Chronicle of Higher Education. Among the challenges cited were the need for local schools to work together to create a jointly-administered center that could deal with the issue.
Dive Insight:
With more than 40% of all instructors now adjuncts, efforts to unionize have gained traction in recent years at colleges such as Duke University and several in the Boston area. Among their reasons for unionizing: low pay per course as compared to tenured professors and increasing workloads which make forging a sustainable living as an adjunct professor difficult for many instructors.
If that trend continues, schools may be dealing more and more with unions in their hiring processes as they look to fill non-tenured positions. However, there are concerns that the tiered instruction system is unsustainable in higher ed and should be the subject of more widespread reform efforts. Although if adjunct pools catch on with schools, instructors and unions may have more leverage to negotiate better terms.