CAA News

The Coalition on Contingent Academic Labor (COCAL X) and the United Association for Labor Education (UALE) seek participation in the On Line Teaching Working Conditions Survey from all faculty members who teach online for the purpose of gaining information on wages and working conditions. The organizers hope that the results will lead to organizing for improvements. CAA encourages you to take the survey and to forward its link to any relevant lists or individuals.

The survey is for anyone teaching online in colleges or universities. The project committee aims to collect a range of working conditions: how much people get paid, how many hours they work, whether they have union representation, how many students they have in a class, and so on. When the committee collects enough responses to get a sense of what’s out there, it will categorize the examples as “good,” “bad,” and “ugly” in an attempt to establish some kind of standard of what decent working conditions for online teachers—who are suspected to be largely contingent—might look like.

If you do not want to give your name when completing the survey, simply type in random letters in the box for the first question. No names of individuals will appear in the final (or draft) report, and no raw data will be circulated outside the committee that is working on the project. However, the group does need the name of your institution, the one through which you are teaching the class with the working conditions that you are describing.

Please complete this survey even if you filled out the previous draft survey. The current one has been updated to reflect comments that the organizers received from those who took the previous survey.

For more information on the survey or the project, please contact Helena Worthen for COCAL X and UALE’s On-Line Teaching Working Group.

The results of a 2010 survey of contingent faculty members and instructors in American higher education, published today by the Coalition on the Academic Workforce (CAW), have confirmed much of what has been reported anecdotally: part-time faculty members demonstrate a dedicated level of commitment to teaching and to the institutions that employ them, but this commitment is not reciprocated by those institutions through compensation or other professional support. The findings also describe larger course loads for teachers, imbalances in compensation in relation to not only professional credentials but also gender and race, and minimal participation in academic decision-making. Further, contingent faculty face longer durations of provisional employment and slim prospects for career advancement, with schools failing to meet their preference for full-time status.

According to a 2009 government study, 75.5 percent of all faculty members at colleges and universities in the United States are contingent: that is, they hold part-time or adjunct positions, have full-time non-tenure-track jobs, or serve as graduate-student teaching assistants. Part-timers alone make up nearly half the total professoriate. The US Department of Education, however, has not kept statistics on contingent-faculty salaries since 2003, when it last carried out its National Study of Postsecondary Faculty. CAW’s comprehensive survey, administered in fall 2010, was conducted in an effort to provide meaningful data for this rapidly growing concern. Of the nearly 30,000 survey respondents, 1,102 were CAA members: 591 in studio art and design, 362 in art history, and 149 in art education. The CAW report focuses on the largest group of contingent faculty: part-timers.

CAA is a founding member (1997) of CAW, which is a group of higher-education associations, disciplinary associations, and faculty organizations committed to addressing issues associated with deteriorating faculty working conditions and their effect on college and university students in the United States. Specifically, CAW’s purpose is to: collect and disseminate information on the use and treatment of full- and part-time faculty members serving off the tenure track and the implications for students, parents, other faculty members, and institutions; articulate and clarify differences in the extent and consequences of changes in the faculty within and among the various academic disciplines and fields of study; evaluate the short-term and long-term consequences of changes in the academic workforce for society and the public good; identify and promote strategies for solving the problems created by inappropriate use and exploitation of part-time, adjunct, and similar faculty appointments; promote conditions by which all faculty members, including full- and part-time non-tenure-track faculty members, can strengthen their teaching and scholarship, better serve their students, and advance their professional careers.

Andrew Delbanco, the author of College: What It Was, Is, and Should Be (2012), stated that, in 1975, 60 percent of college professors were full-time faculty with tenure. The reasons for the accelerated shift toward contingent labor since that time are many. Decreases in state funding, capital expansion without commensurate revenue, increases in specialized knowledge requiring thousands of course offerings, and swelling student enrollment all have had a detrimental effect on faculty budgets, more so than on any other area of expenditures in higher education. Jane Wellman, who led the Delta Project on Postsecondary Education Costs, Productivity, and Accountability, affirmed these observations in a recent New York Times interview:

What the evidence shows is that we’ve done more to cut costs in the faculty area than elsewhere in the budget, and we’ve done it by bringing in more adjuncts and part-timers. So there’s a handful of professors with tenure, who don’t teach very much, and then there’s [a] lot of people who have no benefits who do more of the teaching. I think it’s probably hurting academic quality, especially at institutions where the students are not well prepared. The attrition [of students] is mostly in the first two years, and that’s mostly where the adjuncts are.

While no hard evidence has determined that an increase of adjuncts has diminished the quality of teaching in higher education, the CAW survey results clearly demonstrate pressure on part-time faculty due to not only expanding workloads and larger classes—especially for part-time faculty teaching at multiple institutions—but also expectations to be involved in academic decision-making without additional compensation.

Professors of studio art and art history are acutely aware of all these issues. Enrollment has risen persistently for art-history and studio courses for years, while tenured positions have diminished. The survey results do bring some slightly positive news: median pay for contingent faculty in studio art and design and in art history is $3,000 per three-credit course (the nationwide median is approximately $2,700). In addition, workers at campuses with a union presence earn more than those at nonunion schools. Compensation is lower, however, for survey respondents who identified themselves as black, although the number of African Americans who participated in the survey was low. Please visit the CAW website for details on these issues and more.

The CAW report will provide important data for discussions taking place in several of CAA’s Professional Interests, Practices, and Standards Committees. The Student and Emerging Professionals Committee will be addressing contingent-faculty issues at a panel at the 2013 Annual Conference in New York, which will include Michael Bérubé, president of the Modern Language Association and director of the Institute for the Arts and Humanities at Pennsylvania State University, who will present an overview of the Academic Workforce Data Center, a compilation of historical data of the growth of contingent faculty by universities. Bérubé will also discuss the need to nationalize the academic-job market. Jeanne Brody, an adjunct professor at Villanova University and Saint Joseph’s University, will summarize the ways in which adjunct faculty members are effectively organizing and advocating better treatment within the university system. Victoria H. F. Scott of Emory University will discuss the establishment of an Art History Society of the Americas, which would explore abolishing adjunct position types, raising salaries, collecting statistics, and setting policies to improve and monitor working conditions.

The Committee on Women in the Arts, which focuses on women’s issues in the workplace and beyond, will respond to survey results on gender. Although women make up two-thirds of all CAA members, they tend to occupy the lowest rungs of academia, while men continue filling the higher-ranking and higher-paid positions. To continue the discussion, the committee will present a panel at the 2013 conference, chaired by the artist and professor Claudia Sbrissa, on how the “feminization” of art history may have contributed to lower salaries and prestige for women.

Similarly, the Committee on Diversity Practices will discuss issues related to retention of faculty members of color during its panel at the 2013 conference.

CAA would like to thank the individuals who generously volunteered their time and expertise to develop and tabulate CAW’s survey: John Curtis, director of research and public policy, American Association of University Professors; David Laurence, director of research, Modern Language Association; Kathleen Terry-Sharp, director of academic relations and practicing and applied programs, American Anthropological Society; Craig Smith, director of higher education, American Federation of Teachers; and Robert B. Townsend, deputy director, American Historical Association.

The results of CAA’s 2012 membership survey, sent to all active individual members, are now in. Over 1,600 members responded to the survey, which was open from January 25 to February 10, 2012, and the results are very enlightening. Several highlights include these findings:

• Most CAA members (63 percent) joined when they were in graduate school
• Almost half (48 percent) are faculty members at two- and four-year colleges or universities
• The number-one reason why people initially joined CAA was to assist their job search
• Job postings in the Online Career Center are the primary reason why people retain membership, followed by networking opportunities afforded by CAA
• Most CAA members support a greater internet presence for the journals. About 72 percent would like an expanded online version of Art Journal, and 70 percent want to see The Art Bulletin on the web
• Advocacy for the visual arts was voted the most important CAA function, with 67 percent of respondents rating it as “extremely important.” The Annual Conference and the Online Career Center tied for second place, with 58 percent each.
• Only 17 percent of the CAA members who responded participate in CAA’s social networking on Twitter and Facebook
• After CAA’s own publications, the most-read art periodicals by members are Art in America, ARTnews, and Artforum
• The top-three advocacy issues for CAA members are government funding for the arts and humanities, freedom of expression and censorship, and intellectual-property rights (including the cost for image reproduction, fair use, and terms of copyright)
• The majority of write-in comments addressed the costs of membership and the conference, but other recurring themes include the need to broaden CAA’s focus to embrace a wider range of disciplines and areas of interest, the need for further advocacy efforts, and the need for greater support for adjunct faculty

CAA greatly appreciates the feedback of its members.

As a service organization, CAA recognizes that knowing and responding to the professional needs of its constituents is vital to ensuring the effectiveness of the organization. In 2011, CAA contracted the services of an expert consultant, Raym Crow of the Chain Bridge Group, to help determine the future of its publications and membership program. The information gathered in the survey, and the resultant feedback from Crow, will be used by CAA leaders to help determine its priorities and potential directions.

Earlier this month, CAA sent an email blast to 2012 Annual Conference attendees, asking for feedback on all aspects of last February’s event. Please complete the survey, which has several fields for open-ended answers, by Friday, March 23, 2012.

The survey asks you to identify yourself (artist, art historian, student, etc.) and your type of institutional affiliation and then to rate your experiences with various conference events and services—from online registration and the conference hotels to session content and Career Services activities. If you attended the Book and Trade Fair or used your conference badge for free museum admission, let CAA know. The survey also asks your thoughts about the conference website and how CAA can better deliver conference information.

The International Art Materials Association (NAMTA), an organization of more than 550 professional art-materials businesses, conducts a study of artists and art materials every three years and is asking all artists, art students, and art instructors to contribute by completing an online survey by Monday, April 2, 2012. The survey is open to American and Canadian artists, over the age of 18, working in any medium. CAA especially encourages art students at both the graduate and undergraduate levels to participate.

Prizes

For individuals: Two lucky survey participants are eligible to win $200 each in gift certificates to an art-supply store.

For schools: A gift box of art supplies will be awarded to the top five colleges that have the most students complete the survey. The gift box includes: Strathmore drawing pads, Golden and Liquitex acrylic paint sets, Winsor and Newton oil paint sets and brushes, a $100 gift certificate to Art Supply Warehouse, the Artist’s Magazine, and a book, Rethinking Acrylic.

Participants must register to receive the executive summary and to enter the drawing by clicking on the link on the thank-you page after submitting their completed survey. The drawing and executive summary sign-up is separate from the survey to keep the survey anonymous. All survey responses are anonymous and will only be reported as part of summary figures like totals or averages. Visit the website of Hart Business Research, which is administering the survey, to learn more about how to enter the drawing and competition.

NAMTA is donating $1 for each completed survey (for the first five hundred completed) to scholarships through the NAMTA Foundation for the Visual Arts.

About the Survey

The survey is the first phase of a larger study, titled Artists & Art Materials 2012, which will also include a questionnaire for retailers of art supplies. In the study’s second phase, Hart Business Research will analyze this survey data as well as data from the National Endowment for the Arts, various artist nonprofits, the United States Census, and individual artists’ websites to build a comprehensive picture of artists’ evolving activities. The report will be announced in summer 2012, accompanied by an executive summary that will be made available to all survey participants.

Last week, CAA sent an email blast to 2011 Annual Conference attendees, asking for feedback on all aspects of last month’s event. Please complete the survey, which has several fields for open-ended answers, by Friday, March 25, 2011.

The survey asks you to identify yourself (e.g., artist, art historian, or student) and your type of affiliation and then to rate your experiences with various conference events and services—from online registration and the conference hotels to session content and Career Services activities. If you attended the Book and Trade Fair or used your conference badge for free museum admission, let CAA know. The survey also asks your thoughts about the conference website and how CAA can better deliver conference information.

Earlier this year, the Coalition on the Academic Workforce (CAW) published an issue brief estimating 72.5 percent of all faculty members at American colleges and universities are contingent, that is, they do not have tenure or are not on the tenure track. Since no comprehensive national data exist for pay scales, benefits, working conditions, and involvement in departmental decision-making—let alone specifics on academic-based artists and art historians, and for university museum researchers—this figure cannot be verified.

For this reason, CAW has developed a Survey of Contingent Faculty Members and Instructors, which will examine compensation and working conditions, among other issues, at the institutional and course levels. The goal of the survey, which is live from September 27 to November 30, 2010, is to gather accurate information so that CAW may advocate more effectively at the local and national level.

As an active CAW member, CAA supports workforce equity through its Standards and Guidelines, advocacy efforts, and data compilation, and it urges all contingent faculty, instructors, and researchers to complete this survey and to alert others to do the same.

Open to full- and part-time teachers, graduate students (remunerated as teaching assistants or employed in other roles), researchers, and postdoctoral fellows, the survey is an excellent opportunity for CAW to count contingent faculty properly and record their working conditions. Survey results will be shared with you once they are compiled. This information will also contribute to a national database that will assist future advocacy work.

CAA specifically requested that the survey include distinct categories for artists, art historians, and related researchers, so that the visual arts will be fully represented. On an individual level, the conclusions drawn may help determine your working conditions in relation to national trends. Results will also inform specific CAA Contingent Faculty Standards and Guidelines, as well as future advocacy by CAA on your behalf.

Take the Survey of Contingent Faculty Members and Instructors now. If you have questions about it or about CAW, please contact Linda Downs, CAA executive director.

Read reactions to the survey in Inside Higher Ed.

Eager to serve CAA members and curious about the possibility of a new source for earned revenue, CAA recently formed a Task Force on Practical Publications. A committed group of educators, administrators, and staff members has begun studying a potential program devoted to practical publications.

For several years, CAA has considered publishing slim books of an instructional nature devoted to the practical issues so many members face. Questions these publications might address include: What options do scholars have for online publishing? How does someone lead a dual studio-art and art-history department as chair? If I am faced with teaching Baroque or Abstract Expressionism for the first time and it is not my expertise, how do I best tackle this unfamiliar terrain? CAA members confront these and similar problems so often. And we regularly invent ways to resolve them. A program of pragmatic publications that share good solutions or best practices at a modest cost might be a great boon to the field, or so CAA leaders and staff have imagined for some time.

Such programs are already in place at many learned societies, and revenue from sales creates a vital source of organizational income. As CAA maneuvers through a still-unsteady economic climate, it must continue developing new sources of support—earned and contributed—to thrive as an organization. In this context, the Task Force on Practical Publications developed.

This summer, the task force offered an online survey that queried the membership about the perceived viability of this prospective program, as well as a host of related questions. About six percent of CAA members participated, a number within the range of reasonable expectation. A healthy 85 percent of respondents believed that CAA members would purchase this kind of publication, if available, and 65 percent said that they would buy such publications for their own use. Both statistics are impressive, given that people made a positive judgment sight unseen. The responses are also constructive in giving CAA a clearer picture of what needs to be done.

You will learn more about the discoveries and recommendations of the Task Force on Practical Publications on the CAA website in the months to come. Please stay tuned!

Patricia McDonnell is director of the Ulrich Museum of Art at Wichita State University in Kansas and chair of the Task Force on Practical Publications.

According to a new report published by the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA), Americans who participate in the arts through the internet, television, radio, computers, and handheld devices are almost three times more likely to attend live arts events than nonmedia participants (59 percent versus 21 percent). Users of technology and electronic media also attend, on average, twice as many live arts events—six versus three in a single year—and see a wider variety of genres.

The report, called Audience 2.0: How Technology Influences Arts Participation, looks at who is participating in the arts through electronic media, what factors affect their participation, and the relationships among media-based arts activities, live attendance, and personal arts creation. Audience 2.0 has determined that media-based arts participation appears to encourage—rather than replace—attendance at live arts events. Among the conclusions:

• Education continues to be the best predictor of arts participation among adults, both for live attendance and through electronic media. Survey respondents with at least some college education were more likely than respondents with a grade-school education to have used electronic media to participate in the arts
• For many Americans—primarily older Americans, lower-income earners, and racial/ethnic minority groups—electronic media is the only way they participate in arts events
• The 15.4 percent of US adults who use media only to engage with the arts are equally likely to be urban or rural
• Twenty-one percent (47 million) of all US adults reported using the internet to view music, theater, or dance performances in the last twelve months. Twenty-four percent (55 million) obtained information about the arts online

Audience 2.0 expands on the research published in the NEA’s 2008 Survey of Public Participation in the Arts (SPPA). This survey, conducted in partnership with the US Census Bureau and released last year, is the nation’s largest, most representative study of arts participation among American adults. Since 1982, SPPA has measured American adult participation in activities such as visits to art museums or galleries and attendance at jazz and classical music concerts, opera and ballet performances, and musical and nonmusical plays. SPPA categorizes these as “benchmark” activities, providing a standard group of arts activities for more than two decades of consistent trend analysis. Audience 2.0 takes a closer look at how audiences use electronic media to engage in these benchmark activities.

In an agency first, the new report is being released only in an electronic format that includes multimedia features. Chairman Rocco Landesman’s video greeting is accompanied by a video commentary on the report from Sunil Iyengar, NEA director of research and analysis. Additionally, each chapter will open with videos from arts organizations that represent each of the benchmark disciplines tracked by the report. Arts organizations can use findings from Audience 2.0 to better understand their audiences’ uses of technology and electronic media.

As part of its ongoing analysis of SPPA data, the NEA is making raw data and detailed statistical tables available to researchers and the public. The tables highlight demographic factors affecting adult participation in a variety of art forms.

The magazine US News and World Report has just published its rankings of graduate programs in the visual arts, among other fields. The MFA rankings, completed in 2008 but only released this week, are tallied from a “peer assessment survey” of deans and high-ranking academics (two per school) administered in fall 2007. Two hundred twenty programs were analyzed on “academic quality” on a scale of one to five, one being marginal and five being outstanding. (Read more about the methodology.) US News and World Report received a 39 percent response rate from the art schools and programs it surveyed.

The top-ten schools ranked the best overall are:

1. Rhode Island School of Design
2. Yale University
3. School of the Art Institute of Chicago
4. Cranbook Academy of Art
4. Maryland Institute College of Art
4. Virginia Commonwealth University
7. California Institute of the Arts
7. Carnegie Mellon University
7. University of California, Los Angeles
10. Alfred University, New York State College of Ceramics

Read the complete list of the top twenty-five graduate schools in the visual arts and beyond.

Survey results also break down schools and programs into twelve specialties by medium, based on up to ten nominations per institution from administrators and top academics. (It is suggested but not entirely clear if lower-level educators gave the nominated schools a numerical rating for specialties.)

Here are the top-ranking schools for each specialty. Click on the specialty name to see the full ranking for that category:

• Ceramics: Alfred University, New York State College of Ceramics
• Fiber Arts: Cranbrook Academy of Art
• Glass: Rhode Island School of Design
• Graphic Design: Rhode Island School of Design
• Industrial Design: Art Center College of Design
• Interior Design: Pratt Institute
• Metals/Jewelry: State University of New York, New Paltz
• Multimedia/Visual Communications: Carnegie Mellon University
• Painting/Drawing: Yale University
• Photography: Yale University
• Printmaking: University of Wisconsin, Madison
• Sculpture: Virginia Commonwealth University

Since the survey was taken in fall 2007 and compiled the next year, one wonders why it took so long to publish the results. Also, the survey’s criterion of “academic quality” is not defined in the methodology. Further, the impact of the current global economic crisis on higher education (through enrollment, teaching loads for professors, and other issues) seems not to have been considered. Have prospective MFA students, for example, been favoring public institutions over expensive private schools? The survey does not say.

In addition, US News and World Report failed to include graduate programs in art history in its section on social sciences and the humanities—a grievous, unfortunate oversight.

CAA recommends that interested people consult its two directories, Graduate Programs in the Visual Arts and Graduate Programs in Art History, both of which are available for purchase today.