Equity Curricula

Every other year, Campus Equity Week is observed to raise awareness of adjunct working conditions and other issues. This year at CUNY, we don’t just want to celebrate being adjuncts or settle for feeling honored. Let’s do something! The Adjunct Project at CUNY is creating what we call "Equity Curricula": lessons designed to be incorporated in classrooms in order to raise awareness among students and make a statement to our administration, as well as to accomplish real results.

Please scroll through these ideas, copy and paste them, and send them around your department to both full-time and contingent faculty. Feel free to let your administrators know that, as a concerned and dedicated teacher in your field, you’re helping your students make connections between the material and their real-life conditions: that is, you’re telling them the truth about their adjunct teachers’ working conditions.

This will be a joint effort. Please email me to add more departments and to suggest curricula incorporating important concepts in your discipline and adjunct issues.

Anthropology: After presenting the info in the general lesson, the main discussion question might be, "Using the principles we've covered so far, how would you assess the university culture?"

Criminal Justice:

Economics: Examine trends in increasing university reliance on adjuncts (see general lesson info), and discuss why this pattern has been established. Predict where these trends will take us at this rate in 2040. Also, have students read Ellen Balleisen's article, "Adjunct Pay: More Experience Means Less Money" to examine the effects of inflation on nearly stable salaries.

English:

• Business Letter: For those of us teaching composition courses, we can teach the business letter format together with persuasion in an assignment about adjunct teachers, and the result is the launch of a letter-writing campaign to the administration sincerely from our students. This is an amazing assignment because, for one, students learn best when they are writing to real-life situations, not for formulated, in-class projects (Matsuda, Bartholomae). And, two, this sort of assignment creates a critical awareness both of the system in which the students are studying and a process for changing it. (Thank you to Pam from UL Lafayette for that idea.)
• Research: I personally think it’s asking too much of students to require an end-of-the-semester research paper on adjunct issues; however, as you provide a model of research in class, your sample topic can be something dealing with adjunct issues. In other words, in case you don’t already do this, it’s a good idea to select a topic and demonstrate research techniques (e.g. brainstorming, formulating a research question, then a thesis, searching databases, fleshing out the argument with facts and statistics), and it’s good for this topic to be something that none of the students will choose but that you’d like them to know more about (global warming, female genital mutilation, etc.)

History:

This discussion assignment is appropriate for U.S. History or Labor History (thanks to Carl Lindskoog, CUNY). Begin by presenting the information in the general CEW presentation and follow up with discussion questions. Once the class has discussed the experience of “contingent labor” in American universities and at CUNY have the students fit this knowledge into historical context by reading the brief article “Fixing the Academic Labor Crisis: Lessons History” (located on page 2). Ask the students to think about the following things when reading the piece:

· What is the main argument?
· How does the author fit the contemporary experience of adjuncts and “contingent workers” into American history?
· Is the argument convincing? Why or why not?
· Based on what we have learned in this class, what other lessons from history might help us solve the academic labor crisis?

Mathematics:

Philosophy: Perhaps use the adjunct labor system as an example when teaching the problem of evil, heh heh.

Political Science:

Social Science:

Discussion questions regarding the definitions of equity and inequity:

· How does equity relate to concepts such as: justice, fairness, and a living wage?

· How does inequity in faculty salaries impact student life inside the classroom?

Student Reading:

From The Columbia Encyclopedia, Sixth Edition, 2007: Equity: principles of justice originally developed by the English chancellor. In Anglo-American jurisprudence equitable principles and remedies are distinguished from the older system that the common law courts evolved. One of the earliest functions of the king's chaplain (the chancellor) and of the chancery (the office that he headed) was to govern access to the royal courts by issuing on application the appropriate original writ . At first the chancellor had great discretion in framing writs, but in time he was limited to a few rigidly circumscribed forms, and in certain cases worthy claims could not be satisfied. From this inadequacy arose the practice of appealing directly for aid to the chancellor as the "keeper of the king's conscience." By the early 16th cent. a fairly well-defined jurisdiction was exercised by the court of chancery in rivalry with the common law. In the 17th cent. it was definitely established that the court of chancery would decide any claim to jurisdiction that the courts of common law disputed. The early chancellors purported to dispense equity in its original sense of fair dealing, and they cut through the technicalities of common law to give just treatment. Some of their principles were derived from Roman law and from canon law . Soon, however, equity amassed its own body of precedents and tended to rigidity. Equity, even in its more limited modern sense, is still distinguished by its original and animating principle that no wrong should be without an adequate remedy. Among the most notable achievements of equity were the trust and the injunction . Because the decree (final order) of an equity court operated as an order of the king, disobedience might be punished as contempt ; in legal remedies, on the contrary, the plaintiff was limited to enforcing his (monetary) judgment . The fact that equity trials were decided without a jury was thought advantageous in complex cases. The coexistence of different systems of justice and delays in the courts of chancery came to present such great procedural difficulties that in England the Judicature Act was adopted (1873) to amalgamate law and equity. In the United States amalgamation had begun with the New York procedure code (1848) drafted by David Dudley Field . Today only a few of the states have separate equity courts. Of the remaining states some divide actions and (to a lesser extent) remedies into legal and equitable, while the others have almost entirely abolished the distinction. Even in those states where law and equity remain unmerged, they are often handled by two sides of the same court, with relatively simple provisions for the transfer of a case that is brought on the wrong side.

Bibliography: See F. W. Maitland, Equity (1909, repr. 1969); R. A. Newman, Equity in Law (1961); H. G. Hanbury, Modern Equity (9th ed., ed. by R. H. Maudsley, 1969); G. H. Webb and T. C. Bianco, Equity (1970).

Definition of inequity, Oxford English Dictionary, Second Edition 1989: Want of equity or justice; the fact or quality of being unfair; unfairness, partiality. 1556 J. HEYWOOD Spider & F. lvii. 10 Equite, in all things..is a vertew pewre. Inequite, for wrong, no waie can make. 1682 J. SCARLETT Exchanges Pref. Aij, To discern between the justice and injustice, the equity and inequity of these Exchanges. 1876 BANCROFT Hist. U.S. VI. Index 614 Many of her statesmen confess its inequity and inexpediency. 1886 SYMONDS Sidney iii. 48 The inequity and the political imprudence of freeing great nobles from burdens. b. with pl. An unfair or unjust matter or action. 1857 J. PULSFORD Quiet Hours i. §1 Thine iniquities are in-equities. 1884 H. SPENCER in Contemp. Rev. July 38 Our system of Equity, introduced..to make up for the short-comings of Common-law, or rectify its inequities.

Sociology: See if you can look at the adjunct labor system through the lens of social stratification, group interactions, or work economy.

Statistics: Have students research the average and minimum cost of living in NYC. Then, using the info in the general presentation or PowerPoint, have them calculate how much debt adjuncts can expect to incur in one year, considering their average salary vs. that of full-time, tenure track faculty working the same amount. Also, have students consider how much work adjuncts do outside of class (preparation, grading, responding to student emails), and calculate how much the truly earn at an hourly rate. As another option, have students check statistics of increasing adjunct labor in the Digest of Education Statistics and project figures for 2040.

Urban Education: Compare ratios of adjunct to full-time faculty at lower income institutions and ivy-league institutions.