ACT-UAW supports a strong role for part-time faculty in all facets of academic life and faculty governance. In other words, we seek a meaningful voice in the present functioning and future direction of the institution as a whole. This has nothing to do with usurping managerial functions. It has everything to do with serving students, building collegiality, and fostering a vital, diverse academic culture as the indispensable foundation for the New School's ongoing contributions to scholarship and the arts.

The union applauds recent moves by the Faculty Senate to assert an empowered faculty voice, including the promotion of a strengthened, independent role for the Provost's Office. It is encouraging to note that part-time representatives on the Faculty Senate have been central to this effort; as of Fall 2009, the Senate has 10 representatives from the part-time faculty as compared with 16 who are full-time. At the same time, the union is gravely concerned that part-timers, who currently constitute more than 84% of the New School's total faculty, are too often excluded or marginalized from the most basic functions of academic life beyond the walls of the individual classroom.

Strong academic leadership is vital to any university that aspires to an identity as more than a corporate-style knowledge delivery system. The backbone of academic leadership in such an institution must be effective, democratic faculty governance that promotes the involvement of as many faculty members as possible in the institution's academic culture understood in the broadest sense. Such a culture requires widespread faculty engagement in activities including the advising and mentoring of students as they embark on scholarly and artistic careers; the planning and shaping of curricula to further well-articulated program goals; the restructuring of programs and departments as well as the reconfiguration of the larger institution in light of new developments in scholarship, art, pedagogy, and technology; and the key political task of asserting an effective voice for the faculty as a collective body with a unique perspective on what constitutes the good of the institution, distinct from and complementary to the perspectives of President, Provost, deans, trustees, staff, and student body.

A flourishing academic culture simply cannot be sustained when the vast majority of the faculty are treated as second-class academic citizens. This happens, for example, when part-time faculty are denied a vote in divisional governance bodies; excluded from or vastly under-represented on curriculum committees; deprived of input into or even information concerning restructuring plans; or are asked to function without the most basic tools for developing ongoing connections with students, such as access to space for private meetings.

There are many ways in which such circumstances damage the university's academic culture. Students experience degraded learning conditions when most of their teachers are unavailable for mentorship roles. Full-time faculty grow exhausted from bearing the entire burden of committee work for their programs and schools even though they constitute only a small fraction of total faculty; they may also grow cynical when they perceive the economic calculation that appears to underlie some administrators' preference for overloading salaried faculty in preference to paying part-timers for additional duties under the union contract. The university loses out on a deep pool of part-time faculty talent, including untold creativity and expertise that could contribute to building existing programs and shaping new academic initiatives. "Divide and conquer" becomes a viable administrative tactic, with the faculty encouraged to view itself not as a single collegial entity but as an uneasy collection of academic haves and have-nots. Academic freedom suffers as an enfranchised few have less and less access to the thinking of the silenced majority. The historically progressive role of the New School in creating an educational model free of the rigidity of traditional academic hierarchies--without which the university could never have attained its existing reputation--goes by the wayside in favor of a system all too familiar in higher education today, whereby adjunct faculty are seen as a service class to be exploited and discarded.

We recognize that there are important differences between the roles of part-time and full-time faculty members at the New School, as well as within the ranks of part-timers themselves. Part-timers are unionized and full-timers are subject to a system of rank and tenure that carries its own set of concerns and obligations. Some part-timers will always have a relatively limited role centered on the teaching of a single course or courses. Others have spent years or decades serving the institution in a range of capacities above and beyond their dedication to classroom teaching. They must be encouraged to continue, even as new faculty who are well situated to take on similar responsibilities must be encouraged to join them.

The stakes are nothing less than the re-invigoration of an optimally productive, truly sustainable academic culture at the New School.