The Adjunct Issue Moving Forward

In today's New York Times Education Life section is a short article entitled "The Case of the Vanishing Full-Time Professor." For those of us working in higher ed, especially in disciplines with lots of freshman sections, there is no "case." It's a simple matter of money, and the trend has proceeded for years. As the article notes:

"In 1960, 75 percent of college instructors were full-time tenured or tenure-track professors; today only 27 percent are. The rest are graduate students or adjunct and contingent faculty -- instructors employed on a per-course or yearly contract basis, usually without benefits and earning a third or less of what their tenured colleagues make. The recession means their numbers are growing."

Well, perhaps the recession is raising the pace, but not by much. The temptation to cut costs by hiring three adjuncts instead of one tenure-track prof is too strong for adminsitrators to resist whether times are tough or times are good, especially if it happens in a department in which prestige matters less and less to the university (that is, just about anything in the humanities).

The article is important, however, because it means that the adjunct issue may be rising in visibility off campus. It is hitting the rankings fields, for instance, and that may play out with parents and prospective students. The article again:

"Colleges tend to play down the increasingly central role of adjuncts. This fall, the American Federation of Teachers complained that some top-ranked universities exaggerated the percentage of full-time faculty to U.S. News & World Report for its rankings. U.S. News declined to investigate.

"Another source is the 'Compare Higher Education Institutions' search tool at A.F.T.'s Higher Education Data Center (highereddata.aft.org). These are the stats that colleges report to the federal government."

Adjunct advocates who want to change the system might find the parent groups a potent ally. After all, colleges like few things worse than bad publicity, especially when they see it hit the applicant pool. From what I've seen, all the talk about a "living wage" and humane working conditions doesn't carry an ounce of weight with administrators. Maybe some newsletters sent out to high school career counselors that target the adjunct practices at the lead institutions in the state would have a different impact.