Interviewed by P.D. Lesko

Please tell us a little about yourself professionally.
Well, I’m an economist who has had the fortune of working in an interdisciplinary studies program for the past 17 years. Over that time, I have been able to teach and conduct research related to my twin interests in education and labor. My first research project examined the history of training in the US by looking at the conflicts that emerged between 1880 and 1940 between unions, industry and schools. In good measure, I was motivated then, as I am today, to know how training facilitates or obstructs the entry of less advantaged workers into the skilled positions. In this respect, my current research on part-time faculty simply develops those discussions in this new context. I’ve been fortunate to be awarded the Harry Bridges Chair in Labor Studies at the University of Washington, which has facilitated a world of wonderful connections and insights.

Could you please tell our readers a bit about your study, i.e. number of participants, number of schools examined, etc….. and how you decided to conduct your study “Effects of part-time faculty employment on community college graduation rates?”
Let me start with the second half of your question first. As I mentioned I have been interested in the intersection of education and labor for a long time. I’ve been particularly interested in community colleges because, today, nearly half of all entering students attend community colleges. More importantly, because they are low cost institutions, they tend to attract more “at-risk” students and thus have the potential to be important players in building a fairer economy. I taught at a Seattle Community College in the early 1980s and quickly became involved with several actions that a number of us took to improve our part-time positions. It struck me as immensely unfair that we were paid only for by the contact hour and, at rates much lower than those received by full-time faculty. The district had a rule that if you worked three courses in one quarter you would receive full-time pay, and miraculously, in my third quarter of work I managed to put together three courses across two campuses.

Whether it was the higher pay, or the activism, I wasn’t invited back to teach the following year. I’ve stayed in touch with part-time issue over the past several years, and it began to be clear to me that part-time faculty were arguing for equal pay for equal work, but were doing so, in part, by saying that they weren’t able to do their job well. I remember most distinctly, one day hearing a part-time faculty person say at a meeting that he felt afraid to grade his students strictly because he feared it would be reflected in lower class evaluations and that this would make rehire more difficult. It started to become clear to me that the equity pay issue among part-time faculty was likely also an educational issue. But, if faculty were going to get anyway to pay any attention on this score we had to see if there were any measurable affects to reliance upon part-time faculty. So, I began to think about how one might go about measuring effects and realized that there were only a limited number of measures one could use. Grades, test-scores and graduation rates were among the chief candidates. Of these, graduation rates seemed the most reliable, and also the most accessible measure across a large number of schools.

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