"They don't make much money, they don't have health benefits, and they don't have job security. So why do adjuncts keep showing up to teach in college classrooms semester after semester, year after year?"

The Chronicle sought to answer that question through a survey of more than 600 adjuncts at 90 institutions, and also through interviews with adjuncts who teach in the Chicago area. You can read about the survey findings here.

The survey of adjuncts, The Chronicle's report says, "gave us a detailed look at their educations--most do not have doctorates--and their compensation--annual salaries of $20,000 or less are the norm. Students are likely to pay more than that at some of the area's...

The On Hiring e-mail newsletter is on hiatus this week and will be back next week.

By P.D. Lesko

Over the past few months, I have been trying to discern a pattern to how the recession has affected adjunct faculty members. Are part timers being adversely affected by the strategies that colleges and universities are using to close budget gaps?

There are some broad similarities in how college administrators in several states are dealing with their financial crises. In California, Oregon, and Washington — states where more than 50,000 adjuncts are represented by the American Federation of Teachers and the National Education Association — it’s a contractual blood bath. Union contracts that have been touted by reporters as some of “best,” and that protect the non-tenured, are being used to get rid of adjuncts. In California, for instance, the California Faculty Association’s

By David Evans

When you are an administrator at an university where job candidates are not fighting to be hired, you tend to think about how to package what you and your colleagues do in a way that shows the virtues of your institution readily to prospective colleagues.

Every institution has some special qualities and amenities that should be helpful in attracting strong candidates. Some advantages speak for themselves: a spectacular campus, high levels of student achievement, huge endowments, or a great reputation. It’s no wonder that institutions with some or all of those qualities have a relatively easy time getting people to apply.

Institutions like mine — which I think can be tremendously attractive but whose attractions are, shall we say, not those of the academic mainstream — face more significant challenges in attracting the best...

My original academic discipline is English, so I was socialized to the hiring process fostered by the Modern Language Association — applications in October, conference interviews at the end of December, on-campus interviews in early-to-mid spring. For years (really, until I became a dean with responsibilities for disciplines with customs very different from my own) I was convinced that conference interviews were the way to go for hiring new faculty members.

I still think that conference interviews have a lot of advantages. Meeting candidates face-to-face is, I believe, considerably more effective than talking to them on the phone. Simply being able to read their body language, make eye contact, and interact directly provides a clarity that isn’t available by phone. The intensity of the conference-interview process, while exhausting, gives hiring committees the...

Every college and university where I’ve worked has included extra-departmental faculty members on search committees, though the rationale has been somewhat different in each place. It’s also important to note that all four of those institutions have been small and primarily focused on teaching.

Chosen carefully, such external committee members can have a powerful positive effect on the outcome of a search. From a candidate’s perspective, they can show that the institution as a whole is interested in each department’s hiring, and can lay the foundation for future collegial relationships.

From a departmental perspective, it is (or, more precisely, can be) extremely helpful to get a clear, external perspective on the various candidates. It’s almost inevitable that the disciplinary enthusiasms and schisms that operate in a particular...

I’ve written here a couple of times about how important it is these days for job candidates to carefully evaluate the financial circumstances of potential employers. A recent article in the Des Moines Register on the indebtedness of various private colleges in Iowa highlights, once again, how important it is to consider an institution’s overall financial health as part of your deliberations about potential offers.

Currently one of the conversations occurring in the state (and I’m sure in other states as well) concerns cuts in institutions’ TIAA-CREF contributions. While I wouldn’t say in the current economy that such cuts are an automatic indicator of serious financial problems on a campus, candidates should certainly ask questions about what’s behind...

“Colleges across the country are committing consumer fraud. … College boards and administrators are only able to pull this off because they have a ‘dirty little secret.’ That secret is that the faculty who are actually responsible for educating these students are underpaid part-time faculty and overworked full-time faculty.” That’s according to a recent post on the AFT Face blog.

I read that comment the other day, and thought the nod to “consumer fraud” was original. (There is nothing so dangerous as a flock of fleeced consumers.) The “dirty little secret” reference is hackneyed. Then I read the final sentence about “underpaid part-time faculty” and “overworked full-time faculty.” There they were, the...

Everyone knows that occasionally — or often — searches for new faculty members will fail. And they do so for a lot of reasons: weak candidate pool, poisonous internal politics, inability to close the deal with the chosen candidate, poorly defined job descriptions that lead to lack of consensus on the committee, and more.

Once a search has failed, the question is what to do next. Sometimes, the best option is simply to wait until next year and try again. But what if you need the courses covered, and there’s no one else to teach them? That problem can be particularly acute for last-minute searches, where you need to hire someone to staff courses that students need in order to graduate.

One of the hardest and most arduous things about being a department head, dean, or vice president for academic affairs is the contingency that comes with searches....

One of the issues that I’ve discussed off and on here for the past year has been the great disparity between graduate students’ socialization and the realities many of them will face on the academic job market.

Graduate school is generally focused on developing students’ research skills, with faculty members — especially at the most prestigious institutions — mainly interested in replicating their own career trajectories in their graduate students. There’s nothing abnormal or especially wrong about that, but it does lead many job candidates to have expectations about their careers that they will not be able to meet.

One challenge for faculty members at research universities who truly want to help their students find a niche in academe is that those professors generally have little or no experience at institutions other than...