A Report from COCAL 2012 Mexico City

When a Mexican COCAL activist said, in the opening words of the conference, “I have walked together with these strangers…I believe this is how we become comrades,” it stuck an ironic note because one thing that was nearly impossible for COCAL attendees in Mexico City to do was walk anywhere.   To be fair, he was referring to his preconference work with the organizing committee, but it was a different story for the people who arrived from the United States and Canada the first day of the conference.  The closest hotel to the conference at UNAM (Universitario Nacional Autonoma de Mexico) was at the other end of a huge campus, across a couple of freeway interchanges, and situated next to one of Mexico City’s largest shopping malls.  Conference attendees were transported back and forth from the two hotels to the conference by tourist bus.

The Coalition of Contingent Academic Labor has been holding conferences every two years since the 1990s; this was its tenth conference, and its first in Mexico.  The neoliberalism that Mexican faculty activists have been decrying was prominently articulated in the Starbucks, Dominos, McDonalds et al of the shopping mall, the wall around the country’s national flagship campus, and the absence or inacessibility of public space, green or otherwise. 

But on the upside, the contingent faculty movement for better teaching and learning conditions in higher education seems to be taken seriously by the Mexican academic establishment.   After the informal morning presentation by young activists from Occupy Wall Street and the student strikes in Quebec and Puerto Rico, conference attendees were greeted by UNAM Chancellor Jose Narro Robles and several union leaders at a three-course lunch in the garden of the Academic Club.  The faculty union, by the way, has not only an office on the UNAM campus: it has a whole building.  AAPAUNAM (Associacion Autonoma del Personal Academico) represents several categories of faculty from full professorsto profesores de signatora (equivalent to non-tenure-track lecturers in U.S. parlance).  Most of the conference was held in the facilities of ABBAUNAM, but some of it took place in the building occupied by another campus union, STUNAM, representing a variety of other academic and administrative workers. 

Eighty percent of teaching at UNAM is performed by part-time faculty, according the the brief documentary film La Educacion Acual en Mexico, distributed on DVD to all conference attendees.  “Professors can’t teach in their spare time, but that’s what people seem to expect,” said Bertha Guadalupe Rodriguez, Secretary General of  AAPAUNAM, commenting on the need of some instructors to teach as many as eight courses per day for a monthly salary of about $50 per course. 

The dire situation of what the Mexican educators call the academic precariat was further illustrated by a lecturer from Korea, where two lecturers have been living in a tent across the street from the National Assembly for five years to protest the low salaries and lack of job security for their colleagues, who comprise 40% of higher education faculty in Korea.  According to Kyung-Ae Oh, lecturer salaries average $442 per month, as compared to $5,564 per month for tenure-track professors, contracts last for only six months, and most are forced into retirement at age 50.   Apparently suicide has also become a leading form of protest in Korea, with eight lecturer suicides since 1998.  Oh says that following a suicide in 2007, part-time lecturers gained pay-in access to occupational health and safety insurance and unemployment compensation.  After the most recent suicide in 2010, academic employers and the government now assume part of the costs of national health insurance premiums and pension contributions that lecturers formerly had to pay themselves.  Lecturers are part of the national pension system, but not the better-funded teachers’ pension system in which tenure-track faculty participate.

One thing that distinguished this conference from many previous COCALs was the significant presence of young academics: not only the protest leaders who spoke the first day, but a large cadre of local graduate students and instructors, some of whom produced not only the DVD but a new COCAL logo and a graphically and historically sophisticated tourist brochure covering Teotihuacan, the central historical district, Coyoacan, and Chapultepec.  One of the most silent among them, after spending most of the conference waiting patiently in the wings to present speakers with honorary souvenirs, shapeshifted into a Michael Jackson impersonator at the closing dinner, performing a well-received rendition of “Billie Jean.”  This was toward the end of the second night of live music, comprising a total of what appeared to be four different bands playing marimba, mariachi, salsa, and Nueva Trova.

Many meetings of non-tenure-track faculty in the United States have been fogeyish in comparison, focusing on retirement options and ways that aging instructors are getting screwed out of equitable pensions and Social Security benefits.  The problems in those areas are serious and complex.  But the complaint being heard from young Mexican professor Bladimir Juarez Duran was that departments are having difficulty retaining talented graduate students because older professors will not retire and thus no jobs are becoming available.   He lamented that these professors are no longer current in the methodology and terminology of their own discipline and thus enrollments are shrinking because students are not interested in taking classes from them.  A professor in the audience responded that this is because retirement benefits in Mexico are so poor. 

Progress for the academic precariat generally is difficult to gauge.  One report on the Vancouver regularization model, basis for the New Faculty Majority’s Program for Change, by which non-tenure-track faculty in this two-year college system in British Columbia have access to equal pay and job security, consisted basically of refutation of objections that have been raised to implementation of the model in other institutions.  In the United States, it appears that California’s two public 4-year university systems continue to lead the way in salary and job security protections, with Jonathan Karpf of the California State University union reporting full parity pay of lecturer work with the salary schedule of tenure-track professors based on degree and years of experience.  (CSU lecturer appointments are solely teaching  appointments without a research and service component, so a full-time semester course load for a lecturer is five courses whereby that for a professor is three or four courses).  An attendee from Quebec commented that per-course salaries there (around $8,000 Canadian dollars) were in compliance with the recommendations of the new Modern Language Association of a minimum part-time salary, calculated per semester course, of $6,920.

Reports from other Canadian universities were not so positive.  A union staff representative from the University of Victoria commented that the Vancouver model didn’t seem to be gaining much traction at her institution, and the most frightful report heard by this attendee was the that of two “tutors” from Canada’s first accredited online university, based in Alberta.  In a presentation entitled “Deskilling of Academic Labour at Athabasca University,” Natalie Sharpe and Dougal MacDonald described the recent conversion of on-line class cohorts of thirty students per “tutor” into a call center “student support” model wherein floating tutors get paid by the call.  Sharpe says there has been no objective research to demonstrate a pedagogical improvement, though administrators have apparently been relying on customer satisfaction surveys to justify the model.

Learning outcomes, ideally assessed by measures other than student satisfaction, were a pervasive subtext to the conference, given the prominence accorded to outcomes assessment in the United States ever since No Child Left Behind turned SLOs (student learning outcomes) into a political football.  Conference attendee Hugo Aparicio commented, “Our work is not quantifiable,” resulting in an inability to justify equitable compensation.  Aparicio teaches at City College of San Francisco, which has recently had its accreditation threatened for spending too much money on instruction (92%) as opposed to administration, and for inadequate assessment of effectiveness in improving SLOs.  The Accrediting Commission for Community and Junior Colleges of the Western Association of Schools and Colleges (WASC) issued the CCSF report at a time when most scholarly observers criticize administrative bloat as one of the major financial problems facing higher education.

Though specific models for improving contingent faculty salaries and working conditions were discussed to some extent, notably the aforementioned Program for Change and the Modern Language Association’s new Professional Employment Practices standards for non-tenure-track faculty, the general trend of the conference seemed to be in the direction of broader economic and political analyses. The writing of twentieth century Marxist philosopher Ernest Mandel was quoted by several speakers.  New York Occupy activist Zoltan Gluck cited Mandel’s prediction that the continuing development of capitalism would need fewer high quality intellectual producers and more specialized producers for purposes of capitalist production (i.e. academic piecework), thus putting the social sciences and humanities into crisis.  But the speaker then pointed out that Mandel’s prediction overlooked the parallel explosion of graduates in these fields in the universities coupled with a crisis of unemployment and underemployment.  As a result, Occupy and associated university tuition protests, he said, has changed the political discourse around student debt, now known to total $1 trillion in the United States.

As “neoliberalism’s self-appointed elite” continue to seize control of academic resources (Many Ness, City University of New York), the alliance of university students and the academic precariat exemplified at COCAL X appears to be gaining traction.  The superficial contradiction between the desire of students to pay lower tuition and the desire of their instructors to earn a living wage with dignity seemed well understood by conference participants to be part of the shell game of the economics of austerity. 

- Sandra Baringer, Ph.D.

Lecturer, University Writing Program

University of California, Riverside