In a post last week on the responsibility of professors to combat “adjunct-ization,” two commenters weighed in and pinpointed key issues facing tenured faculty in departments that use lots of part-timers.

Joseph Foster (#26) doubted that secure faculty can do much to change the situation. When it comes to hires of all kinds, he stated, “Even dept heads have relatively little control over that. A dept doesn’t simply get a lump sum budget to allocate as its head and senior faculty please. Tenure track lines belong to deans and often even not to deans but to provosts or the equivalent. When a TT line is vacated through resignation, retirement, or whatever, the department often has to fight to keep that line. And fight tooth and nail though it may, the answer may be ‘no.’ In fact, departments often have no real control over how much they get for adjunct lines either but have to make a case with a dean or even a provost.”

A few comments later, Glenn Ward (#29) made a separate point, identifying a crucial educational stake in the trend. “When a university relies too heavily on adjuncts,” he wrote, “they’re doing more than exploiting temporary employees: they are clearly neglecting their responsibility for educating undergrads.” Ward didn’t elaborate on the quality of adjunct teaching. He argued instead against emphasizing research so much that professors neglect to train the next generation of (in this case) scientists.

Still, Ward’s point might pose a tactical answer to Foster’s skepticism, and it charts a pathway for professors to militate against the thinking that converts tenure-retirements into permanent adjunct slots. As professors see more and more of their departments’ courses handled by adjuncts, they must realize that the quality of teaching and mentoring threatens to slip. This isn’t because of the quality of the adjunct teachers, but because of the quality of their working conditions. Most of the time, they have low pay, no benefits, no security, little involvement in faculty life or student life, little regard from regular faculty, sometimes less from students (who might sense their teachers’ uncertain status), no chance to work with students through later grades . . . What adjunct wouldn’t say that a regular post would improve his or her teaching? And what administrator would claim that these are the conditions in which a school wants its teachers to teach?

Here is the vulnerability in the administration’s adjunct policy: not the plight of adjuncts, but the education of freshmen. In truth, the interests of first-year students stand at the summit of university calculations. Or rather, an administration never wants to appear as if it didn’t care deeply, deeply, about undergraduate instruction. Foster is right that deans and budget folks make the final decisions, and many of them look to save money wherever they can. But not one of them wants to face the charge of compromising the freshman classroom, or seeing a note of wariness creep in to various guides to colleges about teaching quality at this school.

If a department took a stand against adjunct-ing on the grounds of ensuring good teaching conditions in the department’s freshman courses, then, how would administrators respond? If the department chairs and directors set the issue on the table every time they met with deans and provosts, if professors started writing articles and op-eds in the student paper about the problem, if they contacted state legislators, trustees, alumni groups, and journalists interested in higher education in the state, would administrators seek to punish them?

Not if the actions were undertaken in the name of the entire department. The position must come off as a departmental one, or at least as a statement issued by several of the most secure and respected figures in it. And it’s not about personnel, but about guaranteeing that the teaching conditions for every teacher of any class in the department foster superior teaching.

Would administrators just say, “Well, put more of your tenured faculty into those freshman courses”? Maybe, but I presume departments using lots of adjuncts aren’t seeing falling enrollments, and the response could be, “Oh, Dean X, so you want us to deplete our graduate course offerings? Maybe we should bring in the dean of the graduate school on that decision. Or, do you want us to deplete our course offerings in the major? Maybe you can talk to our juniors and seniors next month when course offerings come out and we don’t have enough spots to allow students to meet all their major requirements. Or, do you want us simply to double our class sizes? Perhaps when U.S. News & World Report calls to get data for next year’s ranking, you can tell them that you decided to raise the student-to-faculty ratio at our school, one of the important measures in the listing.” And so on.

All of this presumes, of course, that tenured faculty care about the working conditions of adjuncts, and also about the effect those working conditions have on the learning of students.