Adjunct and Tenure-Track Professors Need One Another, Say Speakers at AAUP Meeting

Washington — Tenure-track faculty members and their adjunct brethren don’t have to be enemies, according to a paper presented here today during a conference held concurrently with the American Association of University Professors’ annual meeting.

In fact, the paper’s authors — Brenda Llewellyn Ihssen, a faculty member at Pacific Lutheran University, who works off the tenure track, and Pauline Kaurin, a former adjunct at the same institution who is now a tenure-track faculty member there — prove it.

However, their research urges tenure-track faculty members to team up with adjuncts to make the case that the contributions of both are “essential and should be treated as such,” Ms. Ihssen said.

According to their paper, faculty members who work off the tenure track are largely invisible in that they’re not viewed as the public face of an institution, they’re unlikely to participate in faculty governance, and the issue of their poor salaries and benefits isn’t discussed enough. If more adjuncts told their stories in a systematic way, they could be their own advocates and “build common ground with those who can advocate on their behalf but do not,” Ms. Ihssen said.

Ms. Kaurin, who said she has “survivors’ guilt” about landing her current position after a decade off the tenure track, said that while tenured and tenure-track faculty members do sympathize with the plight of adjuncts, they are “naturally and rightly” concerned that they will imperil their own careers if they speak out on adjuncts’ behalf. Meanwhile, some tenured professors see faculty members who work off the tenure track as “largely ungrateful and over-demanding,” Ms. Kaurin said.

At any rate, when it comes to the ethical obligations of tenured or tenure-track faculty members toward adjuncts, “silence is never the answer,” Ms. Kaurin said. Instead, if adjuncts are being exploited, recognizing the situation and acknowledging it is the right thing to do. —Audrey Williams June