That question, raised at a recent gathering of adjunct faculty at The Architectural League’s Soho offices, highlights not only the precarity of part-time architectural educators—who now constitute 54 percent of all faculty members according to NAAB—but also the larger role of collective action in a discipline that has been so focused for so long on individual achievement. It’s a timely question. The adjuncts at The New School in New York, comprising 87 percent of the faculty, went on a 25-day strike in 2022 and succeeded in getting the largest raise in the school’s history and the first in four years, along with gains in health coverage and job security.
What should architecture schools, most of whom depend upon part-time educators, do to address the tremendous gap in the job security and pay between their tenured faculty and adjuncts? A new book, co-edited by one of us, addresses that question. The Organizer’s Guide to Architecture Education (Routledge, 2024) offers a characteristically architectural way of looking at the problem at different scales, from adjuncts organizing at the scale of a single school to their joining with other part-time faculty at the scale of the university or at another architecture school to their pushing for policy changes at the national scale.
Because many part-time faculty members also practice, architecture schools often use that as an excuse for the low pay and short-term appointments. The reality is many adjuncts depend upon their academic pay to compensate for the ups and downs of architectural business. But that excuse only heightens the tension that has long existed in architecture between higher education and the profession, not just over the schools’ preparation of students for practice, but also over the exploitation of practitioners by the schools. If anything, universities’ dependence on adjuncts reveals an unsustainable underbelly—institutions trying to control costs and moderate tuition increases on the backs of adjunct faculty in order to balance their budgets. As the group gathered at The Architectural League noted, this creates “architecture’s painful paradox: Within institutions of learning, the most engaged workers are the least supported.”
Adjuncts in architecture schools seem especially abused, given the amount of time that they are expected to give when teaching studios that meet two or three times each week for many more hours than the number of studio credits require. Nor do adjuncts have much choice in the matter. The full-time faculty determine the curriculum and the departmental leadership determine the pay, so both groups need to take responsibility for perpetuating the inequity of adjuncts having to spend so much time for so little pay. That responsibility also makes the claims of sympathy for the plight of adjuncts on the part of regular faculty seem more than a little hypocritical. Although teaching studio, in theory, does not require as much preparation time, every good teacher spends much more time than in class responding to student questions and other needs, which makes the low pay even more painful. Reciprocity—treating others as you would want to be treated—remains a bedrock tenet of ethics and the lack of reciprocity between full-time faculty and their adjunct colleagues is disgraceful.
The growing interest in collective action among adjuncts will undoubtedly affect the profession as much as the schools, given the impact that adjuncts have on the thinking of their students, who often face equally precarious employment options upon graduation. While unionization has historically not found much support among architects, the unionizing efforts especially among graduate students in higher education have already prompted action in the profession. An effort by The Architecture Lobby is underway to set up networked cooperatives within our field, exemplified by the WIP (Work In Progress | Women In Practice) Community, a peer network of women in practice established in 2020, and the WIP Collaborative, “a shared multidisciplinary practice of independent design professionals who work together on projects to improve the public realm.” A feminist critique of the profession—which attacks its ongoing impermeability for women for a variety of reasons—also applies to the plight of adjuncts, whose long working hours regularly stretch into the late afternoon/early evening and who are often expected to attend nighttime lectures. This timing can be difficult for parents who have children and want to be present for their evening activities.
Architecture schools could respond to the justifiable complaints of adjuncts by greatly reducing the workload of part-time faculty and aligning studios with university policies that require that the weekly hours required to teach a course match the credit hours. A nine-credit studio should require nine hours in the classroom, not double that, as so often happens.
Schools could also pay adjuncts more. On an hourly basis, most architecture schools compensate part-time faculty much less than their full-time colleagues, which is especially unfair when the two types of faculty are teaching in the same studio, doing the same work. As the adjunct pool has become increasingly diverse, that hourly pay inequity could also be a violation of the Equal Pay Act of 1963, which requires that men and women be given equal pay for equal work in the same place of employment, based on job content, not job titles. Other federal laws prohibit pay discrimination on the basis of race, color, religion, national origin, age, or disability. In the future, we may see adjunct faculty suing instead of striking, which is where collective action becomes particularly valuable.
Adjunct faculty members, who someday might want to teach full time, may not want to do anything that might hurt their chances. Collaboration with their peers at the scale of the university or with other schools can relieve the pressure on individuals. The New School strike also shows the benefit of architectural adjuncts joining forces with colleagues in other fields. It not only offers the power of numbers, but also reveals the very different financial models that exist in universities. While adjunct faculty in the arts or humanities may not have outside consulting practices, their fields often have more philanthropic support than architecture, which, as both a profession and an art, can seem too commercial for some donors and too academic for others. As a result, architecture schools depend upon tuition more than many other units in a university, which helps explain why getting as much tuition-generating labor for as little as possible has become so prevalent in our discipline. But, as to the question of: How can precariously employed adjunct faculty convincingly guide architecture students to stable careers? The answer is: They can’t.
Send your questions to ethics@archpaper.com for consideration in future columns.
Peggy Deamer is professor emerita, Yale School of Architecture and a founding member of the Architecture Lobby. She has practiced architecture for 45 years and is the author Architecture and Labor.
Tom Fisher is a professor in the College of Design at the University of Minnesota and the director of the Minnesota Design Center. A former dean of the college, he was also an editor at Progressive Architecture magazine for 14 years.
The views of our writers do not necessarily reflect those of the staff or advisers of The Architect’s Newspaper.
