[Update: I didn't realize that these rules (and the story) are acutally seveal months old when I posted this. That said, we haven't as far as I know discussed them here, so I'll leave the post up to facilitate that.]
There has been talk for some time suggesting that the Affordable Care Act might have the effect of forcing colleges and universities in the United States to start providing health-care to many, or even all of their part time instructors. For some, this has seemed like a very promising possibility, since it might alter (perhaps radically) the fiscal calculus that has tilted in favor of ever-increasing use part-time instructors at most American institutions.
Corresponding to this, there have also been fears among those working as traditional, half-time adjuncts and even more those working those who had full or nearly full time contingent contracts that their courses would be cut or their positions eliminated. Obviously, in the grand scheme of things, we all want adjunctification to end; but if the effect of destabilization were simply to force all adjunct positions to be maximally precarious, that would, at least in the short term, be movement in exactly the wrong direction.
Accordingly, people have been waiting anxiously for the Obama administration to issue their rules for calculating how many 'hours' part-time instructors are actually working for the purposes of determining their eligibility for ACA.
They're out. And the best short characterization of them that I can think of is that the administration has imposed a set of rules that effectively neutralize any possibility that ACA will significantly affect the way universities use adjunct labor. Details and a few remarks below
In case you're fishing for it, the key grafs in the linked article describing the substance of the rules are these
Rules the Obama administration announced say that a “reasonable” way to tally hours for part-timers is to assume that they work an hour and 15 minutes on activities such as grading assignments and preparing lessons for every hour spent on classroom teaching. The administration also declared that instructors should be given credit for time they are required to spend in “office hours” for students or in faculty meetings.
The rules indicated that more federal guidance could come in the future and that colleges could determine other ways to count the number of hours adjuncts work.
The last paragraph explains why some adjunct advocates, such as Maria Maisto at New Faculty Majority, are talking in somewhat hopeful terms about this as the beginning of a longer conversation; but the rest of it explains why the university administrators in the article are also quite pleased.
In any event, what becomes clear is that ACA--and its subsidies to lower income insurance purchasers--will now effectively become a subsidy to institutions of higher education that seek to continue hiring faculty in precarious conditions. This has always been one of the dangers of ACA, namely that it backstops a general move throughout the economy toward more precarious forms of labor--and higher education will, with these new rules, walk in step with this larger movement.
Recent Comments