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NEA Higher Education Conference

The 2008 conference is headed for Washington, D.C. and will be held jointly with the American Federation of Teachers Higher Ed Conference.

Mark your calendar for March 28-30, 2008, and plan to attend the NEA Higher Education Conference, “Building Alliances for Higher Education and the Public Good,” held jointly this year with the American Federation of Teachers higher education conference.

Friday’s keynote speaker will be John Podesta, president and CEO of the Center for American Progress and former chief of staff for President Bill Clinton. Charles Ogletree, noted author and professor of law at Harvard University, will address us at the Saturday luncheon.

The conference, which convenes in our nation’s capital during a presidential election year, will explore the pressures and trends affecting higher education institutions, those who work in them, and their unions.

For more information on the conference and to register online, go to www2.nea.org/he/conf.html.

A recent NEA Higher Education Research Update reports that the explosion in the use of part-time faculty has reached the stage where 67 percent of the teaching staffs in two-year colleges are part-time faculty members. Overall, the use of part-time faculty has increased from 33 percent of faculties in 1987 to over 44 percent in 2003 at all levels of higher education.

Not coincidentally, part-time faculty earn, on average per course, only 27 percent of what full-time faculty members earn. On average across all types of postsecondary institutions, part-time faculty earned $2,836 a course compared with $10,563 per course for full-time faculty in 2003.

“Part-Time Faculty: A Look at Data and Issues” uses data from the 2004 edition of the National Study of Postsecondary Faculty to create a “snapshot” of the nation’s professoriate in 2003.

Among the findings: faculty least likely to work part-time in 2003 were in engineering and agriculture (30 percent); those most likely to work part-time were in education (56 percent), fine arts (53 percent), and business (51 percent).

The Update also reports that even though administrations cite the need for flexibility as a reason for the large numbers of part-time faculty, part-timers in general have worked for their current employers only four or five years less than their full-time colleagues.

“Part-Time Faculty: A Look at Data and Issues” is available online at www.nea.org/he.

The 2007 Thought & Action, the NEA Higher Education Journal, was mailed to the home addresses of all higher education members in mid-November. This issue’s Special Focus, “Will the Past Define the Future?” features articles on the history of higher education and NEA’s prominent role in that history.