Laura Bird has held many respectable titles during her 20-year teaching career, from chair of the English department at one university branch campus to an assistant professor at two other schools. Currently, she supervises graduate students at Northern Illinois University and coordinates a university writing program.
Yet at age 47, with a Duke University doctorate degree and seven years service at NIU, she barely earns $21,000 a year.
There are many others like her: David Williams, who has a doctorate in English, doubles as a musician on nights and weekends to support his family. Bonnie Adamson has a master’s degree but at times has had to resort to bagging groceries to make ends meet.
They are all part of what some college experts call a growing underclass of university instructors. With master’s degrees and sometimes doctorates in hand, they work as full-time employees but sometimes make little more than minimum wage–eking out an existence for decades as temporary help.
And the truth is, if they were to quit their jobs tomorrow, hundreds of other academic professionals would be lining up to take their places.
Not to be confused with graduate teaching assistants–whose battle for higher wages has made national headlines recently– instructors are not students. Rather, they are highly educated teachers caught in low-paying positions due to fierce competition and the further erosion of well-paying university jobs.
The conditions facing such instructors have been spotlighted at NIU because more than 100 such instructors are in tense salary negotiations with university officials. They say they are waging a battle for more money, and a little respect.
Bird, a case in point, moved from Georgia to Illinois and rural DeKalb County when her husband got a tenure track job in NIU’s English department. With her academic and professional credentials, she thought she would also move on to a tenure track job soon.
But that opportunity never has come–nor has it come for many other instructors, some of whom came to the university as long as 30 years ago.
“Once you take a job as an instructor, you get ghettoized here,” Bird said. “They have had tenured positions for which instructors have applied and have not even been given interviews.”
As for the current labor battle at NIU, the instructors and university officials have argued across the bargaining table five times but are still far apart.
Instructors say it is too early to determine whether they will walk off the job. But considering the flood of applications on the administration’s doorstep whenever an instructor’s job is open, it appears NIU officials have little incentive to bow to instructor’s demands.
At issue are the instructors’ inarguably low salaries: an average $24,200 a year. That compares with an average salary of $41,400 for an NIU assistant professor and $48,600 for an associate professor. According to a recent national survey by the Washington-based Chronicle of Higher Education, with starting salaries as low as $19,000, NIU instructors also are among the lowest paid in the nation.
Only one state public university, Southern Illinois University at Carbondale, pays its instructors less, an average salary of $23,200. That campus unionized less than a year ago.
NIU instructors are hired on a yearly basis to teach mainly freshman English and math courses, but at times they also have taught everything from poetry to women’s studies.
They say they want their salaries eventually raised closer to the state average of $26,800. For now, at a negotiating session Friday, the union asked for a 6.3 percent hike, but the university said its bottom-line offer is 3 percent.
NIU’s officials, for their part, say instructors know the nature of their low-paying jobs when they take them. Steve Cunningham, NIU’s associate vice president for administration and human resources and the university’s lead negotiator, says university salaries are increasing only slowly at all wage levels. Instructors are not unique.
Cunningham also said he believes the union’s mantra of being mistreated “is a bit of a public relations device.” He said since 1993, continuing instructors have received pay increases of 18.3 percent.
“This is a lean year for the university, and we don’t plan to treat any employee group different,” Cunningham said, noting that the university received just a 3 percent hike for salaries in its state budget appropriation.
Cunningham also disputed instructors’ claims that they carry a heavier teaching load than tenure track faculty. Cunningham said professors have additional duties, from research to writing books to participating in faculty committees.
Meanwhile nationwide, more and more universities are hiring low-paid temporary teaching staff instead of bringing on more expensive tenure track faculty. In Illinois, a Board of Higher Education survey recently showed that most of the state’s 12 public campuses use full-time instructors to some extent. NIU has one of the highest percentages, at about 12 percent.
Universities began using instructors frequently in the late 1980s and early 1990s when enrollments peaked. Instructors over time have moved into the ranks permanently, their numbers snowballing from a decade ago.
Mitch Vogel, president of the University Professionals of Illinois, which represents several unions, including NIU, said instructors have become more vocal as their numbers have grown. Instructors, in many cases along with tenure track faculty members, have fought for higher wages at campuses across the state, from Chicago State and Northeastern to Governors State, Eastern and Western Universities.
Vogel said instructors, along with part-time and other temporary workers, will hold their first conference Feb. 21 in Chicago. The conference will be aptly called “A Gathering of Roads Scholars,” reflecting the transient lives many of these teachers face due to the patchwork of jobs they hold during their careers.
NIU’s fight has been propelled by several vocal instructors, including Williams, an English instructor. With drawing pen in hand or with an equally biting humor poured into e-mail messages on his computer screen, Williams has taken the union’s arguments into the high-tech world of cyberspace on a faculty Internet chat group called tompaine, named for the famous revolutionary writer.
He also has chronicled the stories of instructors in a series of cartoons, where instructors are always the butt of the joke. In one, a middle-aged female instructor meets a tenured professor on campus just before summer break.
The professor proclaims happily, “This summer I will be off doing research in London, Madrid and Rome–how about you?”
The instructor responds: “I’ll be off–working at either McDonald’s, Burger King or Taco Bell.”
The changing landscape of university jobs has sent many workers looking to unions for help. Seven out of the 12 state public universities have some sort of teachers union. NIU is the only campus where instructors are unionized but the tenure track faculty is not. That fact in itself has made the NIU fight even more difficult.
Meanwhile, Charles Larson, president of the faculty senate, agrees that NIU’s instructors are woefully underpaid but said “the question is how do we correct that?”
