The session presentation was titled “Optimizing the Use of Part-Time Faculty.” Titles like that make me queasy, because “optimizing” people generally goes well for those doing the optimizing, and badly for those being optimized. I spent Memorial Day weekend at a conference of the National Institute for Staff and Organizational Development, in Austin, Texas. It’s the first time I’ve attended (well, exhibited at, actually) that conference, and I can tell you that few disciplinary meetings offer the quality of the sessions at NISOD.

Jim Hammons, a professor and program coordinator in the Higher Education Leadership Program at the University of Arkansas, led the session on optimizing part-time faculty members. Unlike the sparsely attended sessions on part timers that are held at other big conferences, Hammons’s room was jammed with program directors, department chairs, deans, provosts, and college presidents.

Hammons, a fan of the Socratic method, questioned his audience: Who were they? How many part-time faculty members were they responsible for? At one point, as he spoke about best practices in hiring, he asked a simple question: “How many of you check references of part-time faculty applicants?” In a room of 50, five hands went up. Hammons was nonplussed, but I was stunned. Hammons explained that many a disappointing hire could be avoided by simply checking references. Well, duh! You can’t get hired to sling coffee at Dunkin’ Donuts without having your references checked, but evidently you can find a post at your local college teaching astrophysics part time without having a prior employer vouch for your teaching.

Granted, the statistical sampling of employers at this meeting was in no way scientific. But I think Hammons may have stumbled on one reason why the “quality” of part-time faculty members suffers, and turnover is problematic, at some colleges. Hiring processes directly affect the quality of hires, and part timers are routinely hired through less than optimal practices. Perhaps, then, recent studies concerning the “problems” associated with the overuse of non-tenure-track instructors are less about their qualifications and more about the unstudied hiring practices of the institutions.

So while national education unions employ academic researchers to document the impact of part-time faculty members on higher education, and while those same unions call for the use of fewer part timers in order to improve the quality of higher education, perhaps the answer has been staring us in the face all along. We need to drastically retool and improve hiring practices when filling positions off the tenure track.

I’ve actually thought for many years that higher-education unions ought to pursue a bargaining strategy of, say, requiring all hires off the tenure track to have terminal degrees, or requiring those same hires to be put through most of the same rigorous steps used when hiring on the tenure track. To have bargained, instead, for retention based on seniority has been a monumental failure for part-time faculty union members. That bargaining strategy, after all, was crafted for a 1930s assembly-line worker. At the moment, thanks to the use of that outmoded yet widespread strategy, unionized part timers in Washington, California, and Oregon are bearing the brunt of forced layoffs. Easy come, easy go.

As for Hammons’s workshop, he outlined best practices for hiring part-time faculty members that include a multistep hiring procedure, a comprehensive orientation for part timers, written job descriptions, evaluation, as well as mandatory professional-development programs. If that sounds radical, well, it’s not. As Hammons pointed out, it’s how most large corporations in our country find, train, and retain all of their employees — both full and part time.