The Chronicle of Higher Education
September 17th, 2014
Part-time lecturers at Eastern Michigan University are protesting a decision by its administration to delay their first paycheck, leaving them among many adjunct instructors nationwide who find themselves facing long waits to be compensated at the start of each academic year.
Adjunct instructors at Delgado Community College, in New Orleans, are similarly facing financial hardship as a result of the college’s decision to extend their wait for their first paycheck from five weeks to seven, The Times-Picayune reported on Monday. The newspaper said administrators there had blamed the delay on new data-reporting requirements associated with the Affordable Care Act, but both adjuncts there and the American Association of University Professors have expressed doubts about that explanation.
More commonly, colleges blame such delays on the complexity of processing payroll information for all of their adjuncts at the beginning of each semester or term. Although a large share of adjuncts at any college have taught there for several years, the institutions’ administrations often enter all adjuncts into payroll systems whenever a new round of classes begins, to account for fluctuations in instructors’ workloads from one contract period to the next.