Brandeis adjunct and part-time contract faculty members are in negotiations with administration after forming an official union in late May.

 The union’s first session did not include any negotiations. It consisted of the faculty planning and presenting their goals and philosophy to the administration. They have since had three sessions total (one being their opening session, in which they planned and presented their goals and philosophy, and two negotiating sessions with the administration) according to Nina Kammerer, Senior Lecturer at the Heller School in the PhD Program. The union plans to have five more negotiating sessions throughout the course of the fall. Kammerer said the sessions have been “productive” and that they have had “wonderful participation” at the sessions that have already commenced.

 Adjunct faculty member and artist-in-residence in the Fine Arts Department Christopher Abrams was heavily involved in this process. Abrams was on the union Communications Team, crafting messages to the rest of the faculty and dealing with some of the social media messaging. Abrams said the faculty members “successfully, overwhelmingly voted in favor of forming a union.”

 After the union became official, they were able to start identifying their goals and figuring out what they wanted to bring up with the administration. “I am on what’s called the Contract Action Team, which is what we’re calling essentially the Bargaining Committee,” Abrams said. “We meet periodically and… identify some of the initiatives and talk about what the… big goals are.”

  “We’re about to sit down for our fourth meeting… in a couple of weeks,” said Abrams. “Of course there’s always give and take, there are priorities that we’ve kind of established, and there are priorities that the administration has established… and we agree and disagree, but I will say that overall they’ve been very friendly, they’re very amicable meetings.”

 Although they are united by many of the same desires and fall under one umbrella title of “nontenured faculty,” adjunct and part-time contract faculty members differ slightly. Adjunct faculty are hired on a course-by-course basis, meaning they are offered a certain number of classes that they may or may not split between semesters. For example, Abrams is an adjunct faculty member and this year he was offered one class in the fall and one in the spring.

 Contract faculty are hired based on a contract of at least one year, sometimes multiple years. None of these faculty receive the same benefits that tenured faculty receive, and they have much less job security.

 The continuing negotiations at Brandeis come soon after adjunct faculty at Bentley University reached an agreement with their administration in mid-July. According to a New York Times article, the agreement, which was three years in the making, improved teaching conditions and wages, gave more consistency in teaching assignments and established a formal process for addressing workplace conflicts for Bentley adjunct faculty.

 Brandeis faculty have similar goals that they hope to achieve with the administration. “There were things as basic as salary competition, benefits, things like that… access to teaching resources… access to teaching grants,” Abrams said. “As adjunct and part time faculty we don’t have access to the same sorts of resources that someone who’s tenured or even full time would have.”

 Kammerer lamented that although she is earning less than tenured professors, only twice has a university she worked for paid for her attendance at a conference (something that tenured faculty would get support for). “We are committed academics… we do the same things as everyone else on less money and less support and with much less security,” she said.

 Kammerer also feels that the improvements they are hoping for are very in line with Brandeis’ social justice mission and would greatly benefit students. She views these negotiations as an opportunity for the university to “embrace in this venue its social justice mission” and become a model of social justice not only locally, but nationally. “It’s about many things, the negotiations are about many things, but one of them is the fact that our working conditions are the learning conditions of the students, and that a just contract will contribute to our ability to pay more attention, to do what we love to do and to do it with our full attention, because we are better paid, have more secure jobs and better benefits than we’ve had.”

 Overall, the negotiations are going positively and the faculty involved is looking forward to making progress.
“We are pleased at the seriousness and the time commitment of the administration, and I personally am very optimistic because as I said, I profoundly believe that what we are doing is totally Brandeisian,” Kammerer said. “And I’m proud of that because I love teaching here… and I’m happy to be part of the union and I feel that doing that is… part of my commitment to Brandeis and to its values.”