CHAPARRAL

Full-time Faculty Retirements Boon or Bust for Adjuncts?

As many of you are aware, a retirement incentive was announced last spring for full-time faculty, classified staff and administrators. The amount of the retirement bonus increased with the number of full-time employees who signed up to take this golden handshake. The deadline for declaring one’s retirement was October 1. Many full-time faculty have decided to retire as of this December and take advantage of the generous offer from the district.

     How does this situation affect adjunct faculty? The positions vacated will initially help prevent what might otherwise be large layoffs of part-time faculty in the next year or two. When the college budget is bad, it is part-timers who are cut from the payroll to help balance costs. This year’s state budget for community colleges, while not horrible, gives only a .68% COLA, and our own district has very little new money to pay for the enormous growth in our student enrollment. Inflation in our infrastructure costs, such as heat, air conditioning, supplies and salary raises, make each academic year more expensive than the last, while no (or very little ) increase in allocations are coming from the state budget, and next year’s budget will probably be worse. These retirements of highly paid full-time faculty and administrators will help cushion the blow to adjunct faculty jobs.

     In fact, the departure of so many full-time faculty may provide even more teaching hours for adjunct teachers. While some of these retirees may return to teach part-time, STRS limits retirement earnings from teaching to only $29,500 per year. Therefore, many courses will be left open for staffing by part-time faculty. Current adjunct faculty may pick up more teaching hours, and new part-time faculty may need to be hired. The benefit that the district sees is that former expensive full-time salaries and benefits (such as medical and dental coverage) are saved until a new full-timer is hired to replace those who have retired. This round of new hiring is supposed to happen within a year, but with the college budget so tight it may take one to three years to replace all those full-time positions left vacant.  Some lucky adjuncts may see this as an opportunity to finally get that coveted full-time job, but for many others the specter of new hires can bring substantial loss of teaching hours. The new full-time hire may not even come from the ranks of those adjuncts who are currently teaching in the department, which will mean that current adjuncts who have received additional assignments may have to give up some or even all of their work hours to provide for the cost of a new full-timer’s salary and benefits.

     How are these part-time hours going to be cut? Is every adjunct faculty member in the department going to lose hours equally? Is seniority going to be considered, or is ageism or favoritism going to rule? Currently we have no policy in place, other than very weak rehire rights, to determine who gets which teaching assignment, for how many hours, or who loses out. We also need to consider that many of the extra professional duties which were performed by these retirees will fall on the shoulders of the full-time faculty left in a department. Are adjunct faculty going to be coerced, encouraged or even required to take on unpaid hours of departmental work, in exchange for a veiled promise of a bigger adjunct assignment or even a soon-to-appear full-time position?

     These are questions that we adjunct faculty need to ask and come up with answers to before the future arrives. I welcome your comments…&

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