Is Contingent Academic Labor at UA Accurately Represented?

by Carol Krismer

In 1994 the Legislature’s Joint Legislative Budget Committee reported on faculty workloads and recommended that regular faculty teach an increasing number of lower-division courses. The University’s success in meeting this objective is celebrated in the "UA Undergraduate Education (Hurwitz) Goals Report" wherein it states that, in 1997, regular faculty taught 76% of above-proficiency lower-division student credit hours.

However, several varieties of teaching workload reports exist. Teaching workload reports called "Undergraduate Education Goals Reports" attribute "SCH [Student Credit Scheduled Classroom Hours] for discussion sections . . . to the instructor for the lecture portion of the course," even though Graduate Teaching Assistants (GATs) usually actually perform all contact for these discussion class hours with students conduct these sessions. In addition, according to Decision and Planning Support’s "Teaching Reports Definitions," these teaching workload reports exclude the work of all graders and all lab components of courses (usually taught by GATs), and exclude "proficiency courses as follows: English 10X courses, Math 117 [through] 122, 100 level language courses, [and] Exercise and Sport Science and Physical Education 100 level activity courses" (courses predominantly taught by graduate students or adjunct faculty members)."

A different sort of "Teaching Load" report is available in the University’s Data Warehouse (www.iiw.arizona.edu/iiw/index.html)[access requires user name and password]. It is from this database, which records all instructional activity, that I obtained the information in the table shown below. Due to space constraints I list the percentages of SCH taught in 2001 for only a few departments. I include data about upper-division (UD) courses and total SCH taught in LD and UD courses in those departments as well. We can see that departments with high student enrollments [more than 15,000 of Student Credit Hours (SCH) in LD courses (shown in BOLD numerals)], also have the large majority of their LD courses taught by adjunct faculty (Instructor and GAT – percentages shown in BOLD). However, note that the point here is not that the faculty members in any given department are teaching too few units. For all we know, they are over-extended. The only point is that data supplied publicly by the university with respect to who teaches LD classes are misleading.

Percent~ of LD* and UD+ SCH# Taught by Different Categories of Teachers

and Number of SCH Provided in Selected Departments

Optical

Science

Optical

Science

Media Arts

Media

Arts

UD+

Math

Span/

Portug

Span/

Portug

English

Faculty

74 %

72 %

45 %

30 %

68 %

3 %

44 %

9 %

64 %

Instructor

16 %

0 %

5 %

45 %

50 %

24 %

18 %

10 %

23 %

20 %

GAT^

8 %

0 %

23 %

1 %

19 %

8 %

79 %

46 %

67 %

15 %

Other

2 %

28 %

0 %

9 %

1 %

0 %

1 %

Total SCH

314

336

3,646

3,587

36,070

3,730

19,215

5,685

33,287

10,642

~ Percents are rounded to nearest whole number for clarity

* LD = Lower Division

+ UD = Upper Division

#SCH = Student Credit Hours

^GAT = Graduate Assistant in Teaching

While these statistics provide some information,Thus it is difficult to be certain of assessthe full extent of contingent labor at the University of Arizona. For instance, while the number of graduate students employed who workas Assistants or Associates in Teaching or Research is reported in the Factbook, it is likely that many graduate students work under different classifications. Many graduate students work as classified staff, some may be hired as "instructors," and others as "professionals." Instructional staff listed as "Other-D" in Student Credit Hour (SCH) reports are people who "are not paid to teach but are teaching for whatever reason" and may include post-docs, research faculty, clinical faculty and professionals. Academic professionals are defined as "appointed, non-faculty employees who are involved with research or teaching programs . . . including librarians, cooperative extensionists and researchers." Doctoral candidates can be hired as Research Specialists as well as Instructors, and many graduate students work part-time as classified staff. .

Looking at the employee census for Optical Sciences will not provide any clear answers as to who works in what capacity, but it may help explain this statistical uncertainty. In the Fall 2000 semester, 32 masters students and 124 doctoral students were enrolled. I assume that a well-funded program such as Optical Sciences provides employment for all of its graduate students. However, Optical Sciences only funded 35.78 FTE (full-time equivalent) assistantships, approximately 71 half-time positions. Are 85 students without graduate level support or working outside academia? Or are they included among the 15.76 FTE "other" faculty and 29.87 FTE professionals employed by Optical Sciences? Yet another complicated case is The College of Fine Arts: 219 students are enrolled in masters programs and 81 in doctoral programs with only 40.58 FTE assistantships to split among them. Of course, the University may not employ many of these students, but since an MFA is a terminal degree, doctoral students are likely hired as instructors. Indeed, professionals without degrees are often hired because their "real world" experience is invaluable to the students. This is certainly the case in Media Arts, which relies heavily on temporary instructors, especially since it has no Ph.D. program. Spanish and Portuguese is a much easier program to figure out; it has exactly one, half-time assistantship for each of its 66 graduate students.

Another illustrative case is the 2000-01 UA Factbook’s claim that the University had 13,408 employees in the Fall of 2000 (www.daps.arizona.edu). However, this figure does not include equivalents for the 5,482 student employees, 1,223 temporary employees, and 588 employees who receive no salary, who are included in a different version of employee census for the Spring 2001. Some undergraduate students work as graders, tutors and lab assistants and, thus, must be considered part of the academic labor force. The bottom line is clear: a great deal of teaching and research at the UA is performed by contingent workers, but their contribution is not easy to quantify, leaving them at risk of enduring unsatisfactory working conditions.