In response to the rising tide of labor unrest among part-time and untenured professors on college campuses across the country, the Illinois Board of Higher Education announced on Tuesday the results of a study claiming that most adjunct faculty members are content with the status quo. Full and part-time faculty members and their unions criticized the report as a self-serving attempt by the Board to bolster their positions on such issues as full to part-time faculty ratios, adjuncts? unions, and pay and benefit issues, that is short on data and long on unsupported assertions. The current push for improvements in the working conditions of part-time faculty hit home for the Board when adjuncts at the College of DuPage voted to unionize this past December, following massive rallies by educators? unions on campuses across the country in the last week of October (see WIT?s for December 7, 2001 and October 30, 2001).
See ROBERT BECKER, Chicago Tribune, February 5, 2002