 Well good afternoon everybody. Early evening, late afternoon. Thank you all for being here. That's thank you to those present physically in this room and to lots of people online today. My name is Paul Lakeland. I direct the Centre for Catholic Studies and this event is one of three afternoon workshop sort of things this semester under the general heading of Just Universities Corporatization and the Catholic University. I'm not going to explain what corporatization is because one of our distinguished panel here will tackle that topic. On my left here, my immediate left is Professor Caitlin Merritt who teaches in the Religious Studies Department and to her left is Professor Gail Alberta who teaches in the Politics Department and they'll be picking up after me. I'm just going to say a few introductory things then hand it over to them for some comments and conversation and hopefully some questions from you as we go ahead here. A word to those of you online. You probably know this by now but obviously you can't just raise your hand and ask a question. This is a webinar format. It doesn't work like just a regular Zoom meeting but you can write a question in the Q&A box that you'll see on your screen and you can do that at any time during the talk that anything any of us say strikes you and you want to ask the question. Not wait till the end. You can type the question in and then one of the jobs I will have will be to pass the questions along at the end of our session to whoever seems likeliest to be able to answer them. So that's the format. We'll be here for about an hour if we get really excited. We might be an hour and five minutes but that's about it. Some of you, I see some students here and probably some online. So some of you will, a lot of the terminology here will be new to you. Some of you, it's old hat so either way you have to exercise a bit of understanding. So if I tell you that the background theoretical issue here is something called Catholic social teaching which has been around for 130 years in that format and even back at its beginning in 1891 it focused on labor issues. It focused on unionization. It focused on the right to free collected bargaining. He talked about a living wage. He talked about employer labor relations. It was very forward-looking document and since then there have been multiple further documents in that tradition, each one addressing the social context of Catholic teaching some way or another. So that's the topic. That's the theoretical background that will be discussed in all three of our sessions this semester. So next month we'll be looking at the question of how we serve the underserved. How does a Catholic private university manage to address that part of its mission that says we have to take care of those who are not able to simply by their way into whatever they want to by their way into or whatever. So the underserved population will be the topic for next month and the month after that it will be an issue of looking at racial justice on university campuses. This by the way this is not about Fairfield University. It's about Catholic universities in general perhaps Jesuit universities in particular and Fairfield shares in all of the problems and challenges of all these institutions but this is not narrowly focused upon Fairfield. So if that's what's happening in March and April then here in February we're going straight to the heart of that early Catholic social teaching document back in 1891 and we're asking about the implications of a concern for justice for workers in the context of a Catholic private university. Predominantly I guess we'll talk about the living wage. I'm going to leave it to these two to open that up but I will just say one thing on a campus like this or any other Jesuit or Catholic universities there are two groups of people for whom you have to have the most care in terms of making sure they have a living wage. One group who we will not be focusing on today are staff university staff everybody from those who empty the trash cans to the people who work in student affairs and so on. Those are full-time employees with benefits and it's clear there that the university needs to pay a living wage to those people. The other group who are the ones that we are more concerned with today are the people who are employed in the academic division part time. So what we sometimes call adjunct faculty or we sometimes call affiliate faculty and there are a number of other terms too. For the students here many of you have no idea when you take a class with someone whether that person is a full-time faculty member on a tenure track or a tenured or whatever or that person is an affiliate faculty member who is teaching one or two courses here or maybe more somewhere else and so on. Mostly you have no idea because it's not the quality of their teaching that is the issue. Those people represent a challenge to any private Catholic institution because the issue there is systemic when you're paying someone for a course how do you determine a living wage since you're not responsible for what other courses they might be teaching somewhere else and therefore you're probably asking yourself questions about things like how many of our faculty ought to be in this rather insecure position with a salary for a course and no benefits. There are or there were the data here is a little bit out of date but less than 10 years there were about 1.8 million faculty teaching in universities and colleges across this country 1.8 million about I think probably about six years ago of that 1.8 million 1.3 million had no access to tenure in the institution in which they worked and of that 1.3 million approximately half of them 700,000 of them held adjunct positions which means they got a course here they got a course there they got a course there good luck making a living and no benefits. So the issue of labor justice applies to staff and it applies the living wage issue applies particularly to these adjunct or affiliate faculty so as we go through this that's not the only thing we're talking about but that's probably where you're going to find the issues most clearly laid out. So I'm going to stop there for now I'm going to turn it over to Professor Alberta she'll be followed by Professor Merritt and then we'll see where we are with questions and comments and discussions as we go through the rest of the hour. Okay good. Thank you Dr. Lakeland. So hi everybody thank you for being here. I'm just going to start off with a brief overview of this idea of corporatization and how we kind of came to be in this position as a nonprofit group of institutions so this is going to be like a very broad it like an overview not specific to obviously Fairfield or you know any one particular college. So for the most part starting with Harvard as our nation's first institution of higher learning it really was considered you know a public good right that we were going to have these institutions that helped a better citizens right help the lives of individuals help better society contributed to knowledge things along those lines okay and that was mainly the model for many many years it's why most universities right are nonprofit and then we have as we kind of move through time we have a couple things happening that are important to keep in mind for the purposes of this discussion today one is the changes in the labor market for who gets to do what right as well as the policy changes that were made at the federal level as well as just some cultural shifts that occurred within the nation that changed universities into this more of a profit seeking orientation so first being you know if we all go way back in time right men were predominantly the ones who were in the workforce and providing women were covered under curvature laws which literally covered their legal existence and or got absorbed by their husband so most of the time we didn't see women actually working in the workplace and if they did they were unmarried women and that was pretty much the status quo until about then you know early 1900s where then we started to see where we have World War one followed by World War two men going abroad to serve that left factories empty right and and also a rise in more access to college institutions so the two things are going on at the same time and with that comes women entering the workplace and a change in societal norms of that married woman could also enter the workplace and not you know be a stay-at-home mom and you know child care provider and doing the housework and things along those lines that's a hefty responsibility don't get me wrong by any means and that is a huge contribution to not only the family unit but you know the society's whole but we see these shifts right so women are starting to enter the workplace and not just unmarried women we're starting to see married women entering the workplace we see technology on the rise so you have what you know we're called back then secretarial positions you had women serving in the factories while the men were you know abroad fighting in the war and things like workplace safety precautions right came out of the progressive era movement so now the workplaces became you know cleaner and more safe so women you know felt more comfortable going into those places and society felt more comfortable with women going into those places at the same time we have individuals attending universities and it starts to open up to and including women during this this process as well and so that you know occurs like you know the night early 1900s and kind of moving forward into about the 1970s and that's where we're going to see some major policy changes so in and around that era what we see is that the idea of colleges and universities and higher education being a public good something that is used for right helps shapes us grows us as a society etc etc it switches to a notion of it being a private good okay and if it becomes a private good then there is a consumer okay and and then there is profit to be had so and that came a little bit under you know the Reagan era you know as well he he really did jump on this and it it had a lot to do with to that again these cultural shifts were changing in the United States so we started you know access rates we started seeing more women go to college tuition costs for a lot of schools were relatively low and federal government and state governments paid a lot of dollars to keep these institutions up and running and this era was really emphasized policy wise with an idea of accountability and efficiency okay we started seeing those words come into play and then there became well how accountable are higher ed you know education institutions when you know we see their presidents making so much their coaches making this and professors are putting up this kind of research right there became this call by society for this accountability and so you have that coupled with a slow movement toward public perception of colleges becoming a private good okay something that then benefits the consumer which is our students right and that created some policy changes so then it became okay so if we start viewing colleges as this private institution or private good then someone's got to flip the bill so we can charge students more in order for them to come and then the state and federal governments stop paying for it and there's no call for this accountability in the same ways that there was so you kind of put all that together and you get kind of where we're at today so you get large in a growing number of individuals coming to colleges on student loans you get high student debt upon leaving colleges because the price of tuition is just skyrocketed okay it one study showed that since 1978 the cost of college has increased in absolute dollars by 1120 percent that's huge right and so with that if you have this consumer which is our students then you know the idea of the customer is always right right comes into play so that plays a role not only in faculty lives with things like rating and along those lines but then also about what is going to attract that consumer to our institution and then it became becomes almost like an arms race so what we see since 1980s and kind of pushing forward is you know oh we have a new lab at our school so our competitor is going to get a new lab we have a pool at our school oh well then now we're going to have a pool and a lazy river right so students so it becomes this arms race to continuously one up and become that shining institution but that takes money right and so where do you get that from and if your university doesn't have that money that means they're probably taking out debt for it so who gets to carry that burden can the consumers right you pass it on just like a retail agency would or any other corporation you pass it on to the buyers and the buyers are the students so there goes your tuition again and then at the same time we have this going on you start to see this emergence of rankings right and they're always around but the importance of them becomes even greater so the world news and report right and they do college rankings everything from the dormitory food to parking to student life to how awesome your professors are to tuition cost everything kind of gets asked right they send out surveys to students students answer those surveys from institutions across the nation they then look at things like graduation rates and tuition dollars and all these other things and all that data gets compiled into the rankings that come out every year so in order to keep right up on the rankings you got to have students who are going to give you good rankings which means then you're competing for good food good dorms the best dorm the most updated dorm right um the the best amount of services uh be it student life or uh rec centers or you know new parking spots facilities etc and so again kind of it almost fuels itself right in that way so then in order to deal with that right universities have to make that switch from oh we're not just here to contribute right to knowledge and society and cultivate you know our young our youth but now we need to make it all because now we have to pay back the money for that lazy river that we just put in next to our pool right or that private student parking ramp or the new dormitories that have you know all the the fancy features um and in order to do that then you start looking at how the university can start to reassess or adjust or the other word to use is cut right costs and um and a lot of times the easiest thing to do is where the the most money is well the most money tends to lie with who offers the services right the educators and so that's you know to go back to what Dr Lakeland was saying is that's where we start to see the shift you know the result of this is the shift to um contingent faculty okay you're still getting a phd uh to teach you you're just getting an ad like one tenth or lower of the cost right so you can either pay a full-time professor uh do you look at the average of what faculty make average nationally yeah for our salaries i don't have it off the top of my head for the odd kind of institution the average is probably around 110 okay so instead of paying for a full-time faculty so instead of paying 110 thousand for a full-time faculty you can uh get your students taught by a person with the same degree for like five or six k right so now you get to hire four or five people to teach a course um or teach four or five courses when full-time faculty like our institution we teach three courses a semester um so you get its cost savings right it makes financial sense from a business for-profit standpoint right um and that's kind of where the conversation that we're about to engage in is going to unfold is now we're in this place here's how we got there now what okay now that we're here um and i'm going to wrap that up and and the mic go it's kind of depressing i'm sorry this is also quickly turning into a game of hot potato which is always fun um so what we just set up right is there there's two main things that we can think about in this conversation as immediately relevant to the three of us sitting at this table the first is that because of these balance these balances of costs a class system emerges in a faculty system that is not necessarily based on credentials or experience but a big part of it is the luck of the draw is that are we yeah um so we have right kind of this just we'll work in some definitions too for a little bit when people think about the wine and cheese wood paneled life of the academic they're thinking about a full-time tenured professor that means that that is someone we'll just work across the table that means i know after fall um that person has contributed greatly to their university not just in the form of teaching but also in the form of research and publication and service to their university so it is not all daffodils and rainbows there's work that goes into it and that takes a while there's a process in which faculty members are hired and they are more often than not hired on what is called a tenure track so those people are given a carrot at the end of their labor conceivably and that they're engaging in a process that is going to give them job security a livable wage and academic freedom which is important besides that right people who are working towards that goal and are supported by the institution in their work towards that goal are called assistant professors more often than not and they're working towards tenures they're working towards that job security and that academic freedom and then the class that we're focusing on are these contingent or adjunct faculty and visiting professors also fall into this category as well and these are professors who are not even hourly employees they're considered part-time employees but they're really contract workers they are contracted from the first day of the semester to the last day of a semester to provide credit hours for a course and again they have the same academic background and often experience as assistant and tenured professors so they don't have job security they're hired from semester to semester there are adjuncts who go on unemployment in the interim because they don't have an income so when everybody else is quote-unquote on break these people might be on unemployment or they might have another job and they also don't have any job security they may not be invited back for another semester and then there are other things as well that they are maybe not having institutional affiliation to publish or research and they are also not serving the university adjunct faculty are not required to act as advisors to students for example or sit on committees or even necessarily attend faculty meetings so from an economic point of view there's certainly a trade off in terms of responsibility I'm going to put the Catholic theologian hat on and the other thing that I want us to focus on as a result of this class system that we all just talked about is that there is a lens through which to see this in terms of quantity which is important from an economic solvent point of view and then there is another lens to look at this through quality and that is particularly important at Catholic institutions grounded in Catholic social teaching so for Catholic social teaching right which did start in 1891 and has been around and has been talked about by many many popes and many many bishops and many many people including academics the question at the heart of this is where is the human being so if you notice almost everything that we've talked about so far has been about dollar signs and we have very rarely mentioned the human being so when we think about things like a living wage or what Catholic social teaching doesn't actually call a living wage but a just wage which is due to workers where is the human in all of that right when we think about things like working conditions is that just a matter of punching a clock or where is the human element in that and this is a very poignant conversation regardless of the conditions in which we are living but covid has also amplified this with realities like economic depression that's been associated with it as well as things like adjunct faculty not having access to medical benefits so they are asked to enter into a situation or an environment where their likelihood of infection is increased but they are not protected in any way and is it the role of the university particularly a catholic university to engage in that question so those are all kind of the things that we have floating around and I kind of want to toss it over to Paul a little bit but that idea of right that idea of where the human comes into this is what is at stake so Catholic social teaching right is rooted in the dignity of the human person a human person by the sheer factor that they are a human person is supposed to be protected and that falls into workers rights because catholic social teaching also posits that humans have a duty to work so part of your expression as a developed human being is to go out into the world and not only make yourself a better person and realize your vocation through your work but to also make the world around you better and yeah I guess I can add there so before I give it to Dr. Lakeland I'm going to I'm going to steal it back for a second so two things I want you to keep in the back of your mind while we continue this conversation just so we're all on the same page is the first being that it is very hard for us as individuals let alone a society to imagine that someone with a high degree be it a master's degree sometimes contingent faculty have a master's degree and more often right we have contingent faculty with a PhD and it's really hard for us to wrap our heads around the fact that someone can have a terminal degree terminal degree PhD MD or a jurist and be poor like that those two things seem not to go together right but yet they do and not just poor like colloquially speaking but like earning under the poverty line like that's a line in the sand yeah and in having to you know seek out other benefits right such as maybe food assistance or unemployment or you know yeah things along those lines so it I think that's half the battle right is that we need to accept the fact that a degree does not equal a position and money right a degree simply means that you're capable of those things and you've worked very hard and you've done very well and I'd like to say you're also you know fairly smart to do those things but it does not follow right it is not a guarantee and you know like I started off as an adjunct I'm back in the day years ago the second thing I want us to think about is how do we define what a living wage is which is I think a really important thing to talk about now I will let my the folks sitting on either side of me deal with it in like the Catholic social teaching aspect I will deal with it from the political aspect and since that is my wheelhouse and say at least this this has been a question that we have asked ourselves like all the time it's why we have a poverty line in the United States and back in the day how we decided what a poverty line is and to some degree this is the practice of determining that is reminiscent of this practice but you would have a basket of like a basket and you would go to the grocery store they would send people out from all over the right to the United States to various towns and cities and and stuff and they would put groceries in that basket for what they would assume would be a family of four okay and they would take they would then cash out take those receipts and determine how much you needed to make sure that you could have that basket of food okay and so that was kind of how this policy of the poverty line became now the reality is is the poverty line doesn't always reflect the reality right one can be just above the poverty line and still be very poor and impoverished okay so just because you met that that bar does it mean you know your life is grand and most time you're working multiple jobs so that is part one and then part two is the environment in which we've worked has changed so back in the day and when I say back in the day I mean like long time ago right the the men worked the women took care of the home and raised the children and the sons right were taught how to work on the farm etc etc and obviously this is ignoring a significant group experience right those who've been enslaved whose labor was for free but that was how it was and then so it was a it was a single earner income right and women couldn't do it anyways because they were covered under their husband and if it wasn't their husband it was their father and then we moved into this as we you know kind of went through the wars and women became more involved in the workplace and and these societal notions got more accepting then we see this dual earner income okay and that became very prevalent in the like late 19 the late 1900s where we saw this dual income becoming more and more of an acceptable thing and in some cases a necessary thing okay and then you add to that the trends with regards to what is a family and the trends to what are like you know when do we have children um are also vastly different right more often than not women are waiting longer to have until they're older to have children most I'm going to say most it's probably not a accurate word to use a decent amount of women in academia postpone any sort of reproductive anything until they get that golden ticket of 10 year because then they are secure right and in their um in their job um and and then just again also like what what is a household now too um you know whether it's same sex households or single parent households or multifamily households right that that notion changes so those things and then how many kids we have um you know my great grandfather was like one of like 12 or 13 or something like that my dad was one of nine and then there there's you know I have one so that number trickled down real fast right and and that's okay but then what does that mean right and as we kind of walk since other people don't other people have more so those are the things that I just want to throw out at you to keep in mind as these two take it over now with this you know the Catholic aspect yeah and I think that that is important because when the living wage was introduced along with many things in Catholic social teaching it did account for this idea that you were not just making money for yourself but you were making money to support your family um so it was reflective in this single income reality the other things that it includes is also that you won't be working all the time right um that you do have some semblance of fulfillment outside of your work as well and and this is kind of an interesting point that gives us a little bit of leeway into a future oriented conversation as well and whether that should play into labor conditions is that your wage should also allow you to save for the future go and you know what what Caitlin is quoting from here was written in 1891 when the Pope at the time said he talked about a living wage and he said it's a wage earned by one wage earner which is enough money to care for his spouse his children to have a decent place to live and to save a little bit for the future very few people even very few middle class people could manage that today but the the the extra thing I want to add which which sort of radicalizes the conversation just a little bit is to build on what Caitlin said about the importance of human dignity the dignity of the individual the absolute equality of all individuals before God and before the law is also added to that is the the important glass in Catholic social teaching that the individual is always already in a community not an isolated individual so if you look at corporatization or neoliberalism or whatever you want to talk about today is the stress on the individual individual rights the right to do my thing and so on and the Catholic tradition is considerably countercultural to that insisting that it's not the individual it's the individual in community so it's the shape of the community that is important and that leads to in many ways to my mind anyway is the the most important notion in Catholic social teaching today and that's the idea of the common good now the common good does not mean the utilitarian the greatest good of the greatest number it's not that the idea of the common good in Catholic social teaching actually comes from the Hebrew prophets and in today's understanding it's this that the common good of society this is the good of all measured by the quality of the attention you pay to the most vulnerable members of your society so globally we should be concerned for the two-thirds world who don't have enough to live on nationally we should be concerned with whatever it is 20 25 30 percent of people who live below the poverty line and you can ask that question about every single kind every single institution global national regional local or any university or any private university or any Jesuit Catholic university the principle of the common good is not debatable in Catholic social teaching if your if the structure of your institution is not doing its damnedest to protect the least to protect the most vulnerable members of your society then you are not following your mission you're not doing what you should be doing now come back to what I said at the beginning that's easy to say if it's difficult to do maybe it's easy to say when you're talking about full-time employees because you know your responsibility to them is to give them decent benefits and a decent salary when you start talking about affiliate faculty you don't control how the use of affiliate faculty relates to the individual affiliate faculty members quality of life you know they could be an international lawyer dropping into teacher course in the business school that doesn't matter so much but mostly they're not mostly they're exactly the way that Caitlyn describes them there was a study done by a Catholic justice organization about six years ago and the man who did it worked was a he taught foreign languages at Georgetown University so that was his context but he tried to figure out what would be a fair wage to pay per course to an adjunct faculty member and he came up with six thousand eight hundred dollars per course that would translate into about forty thousand dollars a year if you could imagine them teaching a full load three and three which I don't think most of us would consider to be a living wage particularly not if it had no benefits and at the time at which he made that calculation only seven percent of american catholic universities were living up to that mark now Catholic universities have no choice I mean they may make a bad choice but they have no choice if they are going to as we do proclaim our commitment to our mission and identity we have no choice but to try to address the issue of the common good how you address it is tricky one of the things that you can do which we haven't said yet and which actually I do believe here at Fairfield we are beginning to address is adjusting the balance or readjusting the balance between affiliate faculty and full-time faculty not necessarily tenure track faculty but full-time faculty visiting professors Caitlyn mentioned the visiting professors they're usually here for one two three years they are hired at what I think is a living wage and they have full benefits they don't have job security but they there isn't a single adjunct faculty member at Fairfield University who wouldn't kill for a job as the visiting professor they'd probably kill the the guys like me who get the wine and cheese and but uh so so we have a way to go here not just us everybody but we have a way to go but we know the way we have to go if we are faithful to the mission of the institution and that means a commitment to catholic social teaching we have to keep asking the question are we paying a living wage to our full-time employees by and large certainly at Fairfield by and large I'd say we are by and large I'm sure there are exceptions among the staff but more junior members of the staff junior means the ones who get paid less but who do the most important work like clearing the garbage you know if the garbage is not cleared you notice so for them it's are we paying them a living wage for our affiliate adjunct faculty is what can we do to be more just and to some extent at least to address the balance in the institution between full-time and part-time faculty in an ideal faculty of course everyone on the faculty would be full-time except for some who had particular skills to offer and didn't want to be full-time so they came in to teach a particular course you know which used to be the way when I was ahead of uh when I was the chair of the religious studies department 25 years ago we had one adjunct faculty member five years ago I think we had about 10 I think now we may have more like six or seven I think we are beginning to adjust and we should be not just because it's just it's just and just Paul did an excellent job of talking about the living wage just to address the second part of our the title of our talk is also working conditions right and the idea of um what an employee owes its institution and what an institution owes its employee um and I think this also sets up a really interesting conversation of when adjuncts do need to take a number of courses at a number of different institutions in order to support themselves financially that also puts them at a disadvantage excuse me in terms of their future career development so if someone is teaching a number of courses that may preclude them from doing their own research and publishing so that when they are applying for a full time possibly tenure-track job they may actually be at a disadvantage even though they may have five ten etc years of teaching experience the university may look more positively on someone with less teaching experience but more research and publications so by participating in this system they are almost disenfranchising themselves not just in the immediate present but also in the future as well the other thing that's kind of interesting from a catholic social teaching point of this is that the way to escape oppression is to become an oppressor in a certain point of view the idea that many institutions sometimes put adjuncts and full-time faculty at odds with one another is something that also should be discussed that hasn't ever been my experience but it is something you'll see this red book up here that some people who look at at this topic do talk about that in order to get into a full-time position that means that you do have the benefit of teaching less courses and there will be adjuncts who pick up the courses so that you can do your research so that kind of cyclical nature is also something that we don't need to go into much detail about but it's just something to kind of put out there that there's a lot going on this is not an easy situation to talk about or to say like oh well if they just did abc catholic universities would be fine this is very muddy and very complicated and that's why we're having conversations like this just to piggyback off of what they're both saying here i ran a couple numbers really quick based on Dr. Lakeland's average rate of salaries our knowledge of our average adjunct salaries across the nation just to give you an idea of how many courses that a contingent faculty member would need to teach in order to make what a full-time tenure-track professor makes that is 20 a year okay um that that's that's low-balling it's you by the way um so that equates to six or seven per semester if you can teach that in the summer as well if not that's at least 10 every semester okay i have i'm an assistant professor here um ten-year track and so i teach three classes a semester um paul you teach three yes classes no i'm i'm privileged i teach two that's because i run the senate for catholic studies yeah so i'm technically everybody teaches three on the right by the way those people you're talking about who'd have to teach 20 courses they still wouldn't get any benefits no so that's no benefits no health care that's no 401ks or four or one three b's um that is and that's also probably not going to be 10 courses each semester at the same institution right so back when i was an adjunct um back in the day uh also so long long time i'm not just kidding i'm not that far i was at three to four institutions at any given moment um the closest institution was about a 20-minute drive uh the farthest i drove to teach um was about an hour and a half one way um that's that's not wrong trip i'm and i would try and get five to six courses every semester to make just the the basics work um and then you know kind of continue on from there um so that just gives you an idea and it's not just the other thing that i want to highlight that maybe not be a misnomer to folks in this room or even our folks that are watching online but can be a misnomer in general is um i teach three classes that's you know three times three credit hours a piece three times three right we get nine oh you teach nine you you work nine hours a week don't we all wish right um the amount of prep that goes into your teaching for each lecture the amount of prep that goes into your course design and what readings you're going to have your students do the type of work you're going to have your students do when you're creating the course then actually doing the course and then and running it and teaching it you know in the classroom those you know three hours a week and then you follow that up with your grading your um getting ready your writing your exams your writing the prompts for essays right um all of that plays a role but we don't really think about it in that way so i um it was the other day when we were talking she did a quick and dirty analysis and it averaged out to be how much per hour less than two dollars an hour this is for this is not at Fairfield yeah adjunct faculty because they have the same like uh preparation requirements that the rest was to they may not be doing committee work but so if you look at the what they're paid and you figure out how many hours they have to put into it it comes out of two dollars an hour which is a little bit below minimum wage if you think just just the same now we're getting to the point where we probably should see if we have some more questions so i have one online here and i'm sure to be more but is there anyone in the in the auditorium has a question keith would you mind coming to the mic so that anybody online can actually hear you this is our and just to put the two-dollar thing in perspective that it is less than what your wait staff makes um so just think about that thanks so i'm Keith mask was on the director of campus ministry one of the things that i noticed missing from the conversation are labor unions and the church has a rich teaching and wants to embrace labor unions but also is has a horrible track record internally with labor unions so i wonder if you might talk about that yeah it does it does i remember uh this is 35 years ago now there was movement to to uh to to bring some of the staff and in those days we had many more staff who actually were hired by the university it wasn't sort of farmed out and the movement of labor unions to get on to to come to fairfield to organize labor i remember the director of human resources at that time saying at a public meeting there are strangers among us so this is the warning and what what father Keith says there is exactly right that in theory going back to 1891 we have a terrific record on the importance that the importance of labor unions and lately an abysmal record not here hasn't come up here lately but it's come up at a number of graduate institutions and some other catholic institutions that have simply tried to prevent unions being formed especially for adjunct faculty and in the bigger institutions for graduate students who are doing a lot of the teaching anyway and you know the role of the labor could you justify that please yeah so the role of the labor union just you know kind of think about it from this you know historical political context and by no means am I a labor union expert but it they serve they serve an important purpose right and one they they give us our minimum wage was like what is that word our minimum wage they um vacation time weekends off right labor day um work workplace safety okay all of these things that we kind of come to know we're part of not only the labor movement but also this you know this progressive movement um out of the you know the 1920s 1930s where we are trying to kind of reform a bunch of things and so they they do play a role and there is something to be said right about collective action if we get together there's power in numbers if we get together and you demand something it is vastly different than when a single person demands something um and so you know that is also you know one of the reasons why it's in you know then to put it in the private sector kind of or this private good corporate corporatization thing it is better for corporations in general to have fire at will employees right and because then if you're not performing right they can let you go if they can hire someone to do the same work just as good for less it works right um because their bottom line again is profit but when you transfer that into an institution of higher learning right and like our colleges and universities that be that could become problematic um because then you're not allowing your scholars to do their their work and contribute to knowledge and and teach the youth and and do those things so uh again just a different kind of perspective but yeah and as father keep mentioned unions are part of catholic social teaching um they are seen as a good in helping achieve that common good that professor lego was talking about um and we have seen some catholic universities that have embraced and used unions in terms of their contingent faculty as well as their graduate students which is also an an important population to acknowledge at some universities and then there are other universities you know at the very other side of that that have discouraged it but somewhere in the middle right we always have to remember that idea of community um and that this idea of working together and talking openly with each other and knowing where responsibility lies whether that does come in the form of a union or not is also at the heart of catholic social teaching um and that is maybe another way to think about it as well okay so I have a couple of things online here um one from uh professor Betsy Bowen in the English department and she says this she's always looking out for students she says this thank you all I think that was us mainly one point that may speak to students is that they too are being shortchanged by the system because affiliate faculty aren't being paid to advise write letters of reference serve on committees that get necessary work done there are fewer faculty available to support students in all kinds of ways parenthesis I know that some affiliate faculty do these things anyway but they're not obliged to then we have one question which is a huge one I don't know that we're going to have time to answer it but William Deegan asks this in your description of the issues the three of us what are your thoughts on solutions to these issues both from inside the university and from outside the university so I have a comment I something came in my head on Betsy's question that I think can relate to so one of the the things that was highlighted um by Caitlyn was that you know contingent faculty usually are not in department meetings right they're not usually part of the general faculty meetings I'm so you're not in the in the places where the decisions get made you know or as you know the Hamilton musical says you're not you know not in the room uh where it happens so I'm part of the answer to that for you know that question is the idea that universities as a whole needs to shift how we include contingent faculty and allowing them now I'm not saying exploit them more like being like hey so come serve on this committee and he asks we're not going to pay you for it um but if they have access to the table if they can pull their chair up to the table that means their voices getting heard and if their voices get heard that leads to policy change um ideally right or at least that's the circle um if you can't even sit at the table how is that ever going to start happening um now again I would not be for saying hey contingent faculty teach this class and sit on this committee and we're not going to pay you anything additional right part of and you know my position as an assistant professor or Paul's position as a full professor is that we do service right so part of our salary is understood to be we do research we do teaching and we do service um and so that's we have a seat at the table so um I think that's at least part of something that needs to change and another thing just to address about professor bowen's comment well two things excuse me um the first right again getting back to this common good thing if first of all it would be impossible to teach 20 courses in an academic year um like I don't there you couldn't um but to that end as well even right like one of the things to consider is at what point does pedagogy get compromised so if someone has to teach I think I heard once from a colleague that they were teaching something like nine classes at three different institutions and you know there are ways to fix this so maybe you're teaching six of the same section or something so you're only preparing you know three different lectures for a week instead of nine different lectures for a week anyway but that idea of quality of work right also plays both ways here are you putting out something that you're proud to say is your work but then are you also effectively doing what is being asked of you um so that idea of like of student engagement in this as well is also something to think about and and contributing to the to the common good someone who teaches less courses conceivably can focus on those courses and put more work into them and that's just going to contribute to the overall learning environment as well the other thing too I just want to quickly say is right more often than not students have no idea whether they're professors or adjuncts or not that shouldn't stop you from asking from a letter of recommendation if you have a if you have a relationship with a faculty member or of these other things but it is important to know why someone might say no it's not necessarily because they don't like you right it's because they maybe don't have the time or they're not compensated or and they're protecting their expertise in time um or things like that like there's other yeah the uh the other thing right is so we're looking at this from a corporate perspective right the idea that private institutions like universities have moved to more toward a corporate model so that means again there's a consumer and that consumer is our students okay um if the consumers rattle the cage and make noise and demand change you're paying for it right like the corporation will listen um in that sense that that's the corporate model so to answer you know another thing that to go back to that question is some of the change can come from the consumers of the product and that is the students um now how far that will go and or who will listen is you know a conversation may be very different day but um that's why for instance when you boycott right brands for doing x y and z or you choose not to I mean there's you know there's products from companies that I won't buy from because of something that either has happened they've stood for or whatever that goes against my beliefs right and so in my my personal values so I don't engage with that company so it's the same kind of thing um the other thing to think about too is and I'm gonna throw this this little nugget out there and see where it goes is the budget right um there are ways in a budget to redesign it so that there is there can be a little bit more of an equitable distribution right um so I think one of the things that Gerald Bayer points out in his book is like uh your um uh coaches or athletic directors at some universities right make a ton of money um and just moving a small percentage of that budget to the contingent faculty boost them up closer to this idea of a equitable and living wage so there there are solutions it's just you know having someone with the ability to to do that in a group pushing forward the change and um having institutions listen let me let me draw this to a close with a short anecdote about the power of the consumer 20 years ago the university was outsourcing its a lot of its uh janitorial staff to a company that wasn't going to pay particularly well and didn't like unions and the benefits were poor and actually it was the students who got hold of the story and among other things occupied Bellarmine for a night much to the annoyance of the senior administrators who operated there and eventually got it overturned that is they didn't get overturned but they got the company the outsourcing company to comply with the requirements that would mean that the people who were going to be outsourced would have pretty much the same salary and conditions they had had at the university but what strikes me as something to think about you should be think you should know whether your faculty are old dinosaurs like me or poor people running around on a bicycle from three different institutions you should know but when they occupied Bellarmine I've never forgotten this they hung a big banner out of the window and on the banner it said this was the students addressing the institution and it said practice the values you teach us to live by that was a terrific moment there's a great social socially conscious magazine journal in this country called Mother Jones and that year to everybody's amazement Mother Jones listed Fairfield University as one of the foremost politically active campuses in the country never since have we been there but for one shining moment we were you should think about all these issues and remember the common good thank you all for being here special thanks to Caitlin and Gail and see you in a month thank you and thank you online for all being here and paying such close attention