The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit ruled Thursday in favor of Robin Meade, an adjunct professor who sued Moraine Valley Community College after they fired her for writing a scathing letter about the college to an international community college group. This decision reversed that of a lower court which found the college was within its rights to terminate Meade.
According to Inside Higher Ed, Robert O’Neil, free speech expert and professor emeritus of law at the University, said this decision will heavily impact the “status of growing numbers of adjuncts and part-timers, and their treatment by academic institutions.”
The latest court decision gives adjuncts more power in the realm of higher education and employment because it deemed Meade’s letter about the treatment of adjunct professors a matter of public concern, and also determined that Meade had a reasonable expectation of job security as an adjunct.
Institutions of higher education have faced increasing pressure from advocacy groups to pay their part-time faculty higher wages and offer them more job security. Not only are adjunct employment policies a matter of providing fair working conditions, but they also can impact student achievement. One of the claims Meade made in her letter was that Moraine Valley’s refusal to pay adjunct faculty for work outside of class, like tutoring, results in high failure rates in developmental classes.
Adjuncts should not have to live in fear that any outspoken criticism of their employers will result in their termination, especially when some improvements for adjuncts would also result in improvements for students.
Adjunct faculty have already won victories at certain colleges. Adjuncts at Tufts University voted to unionize in 2013, and adjuncts at Boston University have recently taken a similar initiative to vote on unionization. Tufts adjuncts have now approved a contract which will award them better job security and higher pay, as well as compensation for work outside the classroom.
This outside work would include advising, mentoring and independent studies. Guaranteed compensation for such work would encourage more adjunct faculty to offer these services to students, and in turn create more opportunities for students to improve their academic skills and investigate their interests in greater detail.
Some colleges may push back against these changes because of the cost. Hiring more adjunct faculty and paying them the bare minimum could be one way colleges cut down on costs, which might keep tuition lower. But these practices are not worth it if the students are also getting short-changed.
College administrations ought to be open to criticism from their employees who work closest with the students. A better working environment for all faculty will allow the college to better fulfill its mission of education. This court case sends a message to one particular college that it cannot suppress the critiques of its part-time employees by firing them, and also indicates a larger trend of change in the treatment of adjunct faculty and the value of their positions everywhere.
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