I detest Adjunct Teaching Awards, Term & Adjunct Teaching Awards, Distinguished Adjunct Teaching Awards, Outstanding Adjunct Faculty Teaching Awards, and Adjunct Excellence Teaching Awards.

Don’t misunderstand me. Non-tenure-track faculty members deserve to have their hard work, teaching skills, and outstanding abilities in the classroom recognized and rewarded. We just need to stop the ridiculous practice of teaching-award apartheid.

Across higher education, institutions have teaching-award programs for which only tenure-track and tenured professors may be nominated, and then there are the other teaching-award programs — for the other faculty members. You know, those other professors whose teaching jobs are so different from those of the tenured and tenure-track professors (eyeroll).

Here’s what I think: Adjuncts could compete for teaching awards head-to-head with their full-time counterparts and beat the mortarboards off of them. Part-time faculty members teach. That’s what they do. And, as we all know, inside the classroom, teaching experience is crucial to the overall quality of a course.

I suppose some readers will be exasperated at my complaint, and point out that it’s better to give a “special” award to adjunct faculty members than to ignore their monumental contributions in the classroom entirely. Forgive me my obstinacy, but I have never been able to get behind the “something is better than nothing” logic where adjunct faculty members are concerned. That logic always seems to be used when giving the shaft to a large group of disempowered people.

At the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor on March 31, a lecturer named John Bacon will deliver the Golden Apple Award lecture. The Golden Apple competition, sponsored by the Students Honoring Outstanding University Teaching (SHOUT), “honors faculty who strive not only to disseminate knowledge, but to inspire and engage students in its pursuit.” The competition is open to faculty members on and off the tenure track. There are 1,200 lecturers at Michigan, and the Golden Apple competition is the only one of its half a dozen teaching-award competitions that pits adjunct instructors against their tenure-track counterparts.

So why the Jim Crow-like treatment? For one thing, teaching awards are readymade publicity for institutions. Bestowing the Fezziwig Award for Faculty Excellence on a part timer whom the dean may be forced to lay off next semester is not good publicity.

The answer to this quandary is obvious. University teaching awards and cash prizes should go the best teacher, regardless of appointment type.

Editor’s note: P.D. Lesko is executive editor of AdjunctNation.com, and will blog occasionally for On Hiring. Share your thoughts and questions about her posts in the comments section below.

Categories: General-interest, Faculty-hiring