The AAUP seems delusional. Like they've forgotten that the reason why universities use adjunct faculty is because adjunct faculty is cheap. If there really was a chance of people being organized enough to seriously fight for adjunct rights, it would be disaster:

a) some colleges would close
b) some would have to double tuition
c) the rest would merely double class sizes

And you know what? The sort of long term staff who comprise the majority of adjunct faculty still wouldn't get tenured. The jobs would have to be properly advertised and then fresh doctoral students would get the posts.

I applaud the AAUP for recognizing a problem. Faculties currently are not stable. Comment #1 is an excuse to pay people below minimum wage and could only have been uttered by someone who thinks they benefit personally from the system. Surely there are other options for making college education possible than increasing the percentage of faculty members hired "part-time" to teach a higher load than tenure-line faculty for sub minimum wage. As it stands, most college classes are taught by adjuncts or graduate students. The quality of life of these workers matters--and it should matter to everyone. There are other ways for a college to save money (ahem, expensive facilities and athletic programs) than contracting more and more faculty for low wages/no benefits.

Just think, ladder faculty would be able to spend more time teaching and researching and less time administering programs, participating in committees, and overseeing contingent faculty if a relatively higher number of instructors were on the ladder. That seems like a win-win.

I think it will take many different voices, the AAUP being only one, to make real changes.

amnirov is partly right: the entire rationale for "contingent" faculty is exactly the fact that they are contingent and can be laid off at a moment's notice. But, empirically, amirov is wrong when he asserts, "If there really was a chance of people being organized enough to seriously fight for adjunct rights, it would be disaster ...".

All contingent faculty in the CSU (the largest public university system in the country) are eligible for full membership in the California Faculty Association. They are organized enough to "seriously fight" for adjunct rights; however, this does not extend to tenure. Contingent faculty in the CSU have the right to three-year, renewable contracts--as long as the university has funding, contingent faculty are guaranteed courses. Of course, if there is a funding deficit, which has been the case the last two years, the contract does not need to be honored.

One last point: when amnirov speaks of a "disaster," he conveniently leaves out the effects on contingent faculty. Some might argue that it's a disaster to lose your job with little notice after teaching for 5, 10, 20 years in the same institution. Well, hundreds of contingent faculty have faced that fate in the CSU system over the past couple of years. Why is their fate--in amnirov's view--no less disastrous? Are they not people, too?

Universities and colleges have become corporatized to an intolerable extent. It's a mindset and means of campus governance that justifies paying athletic directors and coaches of big draw sports exorbitant salaries and reserving tenure and plumb positions for researchers who more often than not put classroom teaching second.

This report at least reminds the burgeoning layer of campus administration of the root problem with liberal arts education today.

Research shows again and again that colleges with high proportions of at-will faculty have lower graduation rates. The whole "flexible-labor" scam might work for maquiladoras and sweatshops, but it doesn't work in academia or any other knowledge-intensive organization. As the president of SAS (the NC_based software firm) says, "SAS's greatest resource leaves the parking lot every day. My job is to make sure they come back." And SAS is extremely competitive. AAUP shouldn't have to get involved. Top universities will invest in their core faculty, not buy it on the cheap.

We got on this slippery slope when what are now viewed as research universities used raw graduate TAs much as adjunct faculty are being used today. That kind of indefensible practice was reformed by requiring instructors to have some kind of credential (graduate degree or graduate hours) to justify putting them in front of a classroom, leading in turn to widespread acceptance of employing adjunct faculty for this purpose, many of whom were hardly more credential worthy than the TA's they replaced. Unlike TA's, any school can hire adjuncts, and virtualy every academic administration was quick to realize the money that could be captured for other purposes by using this tactic. If adjunct faculty ever manage to get organized, it will be interesting to see how administrations put the genie they released back in the bottle.

AAUP can call as much as they want for tenure for everybody. The sad truth is that the public education system simply does not have enough money. Administrators are hardly malicious in their quest for more part-timers at the expense of full-time tenured faculty. But states do not provide enough funds to their universities (and have not been doing that for quite a while) and admins have nothing else to do. Our education system is but a small part of the country's economy and the whole country is going broke very fast.

All you have to do is look at the recent stories in this paper on the rise of administrative numbers and salaries to conclude that a reversal of this trend would open up plenty of funds to put adjunct faculty on the tenure tract. The only "disaster" might be for the administrative ranks. A disaster that is long overdue.

#8, state appropriations are in a free fall and this is a fact. Essentially, legislators are forcing universities to earn money elsewhere (from donors, research, athletics, etc.). If you force HiEd institutions to operate as corporations then do not be surprised that the class of managers emerges. Put blame where it belongs, on the taxpayers and their elected representatives.

I am not convinced that the rise in adjuncts is solely financial. I suspect the rise corresponds with a rise in incompentent, inflexible administrators who balance instiutional budgets the easy way- and ensure that their jobs remain secure by not undertaking the risk that investing in human capital obtains. Just hire more low wage adjuncts. Increase the class size- it's called "faculty efficiency." Cut faculty pay and job security by getting rid of tenure. So much easier than really trying to balance a budget by diving into the details to see where the money really goes and how to get the most out of the existing budget.

The traditional college/university model is broken. Tenured full-time faculty who teach a few upper division or graduate classes, perform esoteric research in increasingly specialized fields, whose value added in student achievement (knowledge and skills attained) is presumed to be immeasurable and therefore inscrutable, and who serve on faculty governance committees seeking to perpetuate the status quo with a mutually dependent administration--all constitute a system that is structurally and economically obsolete. The unsustainable rapid increase of costs in higher education is becoming constrained as the value of endowments falls, parents and young adults refuse to pay or finance outrageous tuition, taxpayers rebel at the increasing expenses per student at public universities, and the value of the traditional degree from sub-prime institutions is recognized as irrelevant rubbish in the job market. Higher education in its present form will not be fully underwritten by taxpayers, private grants and donations, student tuition, or by additional tax-exempt borrowing. All of the expedients of hiring low-pay adjunct instructors, increasing class size, lowering standards to beef up and retain enrollment, cancelling classes that do not meet enrollment minimums, suspending unprofitable programs, offering distance learning Internet classes, etc. have been utilized to keep the current system on life support. The day of reckoning has arrived.

It's important that AAUP help push forward the fight against the gross inequities between tenure-line (research) and lecturer (teaching) faculty, but the solution they propose is wrong. Tenure is dying, and I say RIP. It has lost its primary justification (freedom of speech issues are rarely employment issues on campus any more, and when they are, there are other, adequate venues for redress). The main function of tenure these days is to give dead-weight faculty the job security they do not deserve. No, we don't need tenure, or more of it, any more. What is needed is an end to the two-tier system that values research over teaching, awarding pay, benefits, and status along these skewed lines. Annual contracts will be just fine, if the pay is right.

The flip side of cnatathenson's comment, of course, is that tenure for teaching-track faculty wouldn't necessarily have to be expensive. Job security might be worth as much as a pay raise.
I think there's plenty of reason to think that freedom of speech is very much under threat these days, too...

How could tenure not be expensive? What you pay isn't so important as the fact that you might be locking up a job for decades, and that without good policies for removing (or even remediating) someone who becomes ineffective. I don't mean to turn this into a debate on tenure, however. My point is there are plenty of viable ways to improve the status of lecturers without emulating this (dead) model. Besides, for the AAUP to ask for tenure is akin to saying, please don't take us seriously. It's an idea that is DOA to any administration. Right or wrong, it's useless.

@cnathenson:

It's not useless--it can be used as a demand to be negotiated down from. Three-year contracts and a pay raise for "senior lecturer" or the like would be better than what we have now, for instance.

Annual contracts are not fine if the pay is right. Frankly, it's a lot cheaper for the university to give us three-year or five-year contracts than it would be to increase our pay. But more job stability allows teachers to refine courses, make more community connections which can enrich a classroom, and participate more in the life of the institution.

Most universities don't see huge fluctuations in enrollment, and thus in teaching needs. This means that the "need for contingent faculty" line is bunk. The university does need some labor flexibility, but nowhere near the amount provided by the actual number of lecturers these days. What the university needs is cheap teachers. They figure they can keep them cheap if they hold over them the threat of dismissal.