Defining and Recruiting a New Model Faculty

My university has a large adult-education program located at 14 sites across Iowa. It is staffed largely by adjunct instructors, partly because of the geographical and programmatic distribution of the sites, partly for financial reasons, and partly because using adjuncts seems to be standard — and, therefore, unquestioned — operating procedure.

I would like to employ more full-time faculty members in this program. Some of them could and should come from our home campus; if our programs on campus and at the sites are indeed comparable, it makes sense for instructors to overlap more than they do now. Any staff restructuring, however, would require creating multiple new full-time positions that have teaching at our off-campus sites as their primary responsibility.

If we were to define these positions as tenure track, which would be my preference, we’d need to redefine faculty work and tenure standards. For one thing, faculty members would have to travel extensively between or among sites spread over a large geographical area. For another, those faculty members would likely not be subject to normal institutional service requirements, as they probably would not live near the campus, but rather close to one of the sites they would staff.

In other words, we would need to re-imagine faculty work in a way that is fair and equitable both for home-campus faculty members and for any colleagues hired under a new model. Prospective faculty members would need to rethink their own work to manage time on the road, as well as discontinuous workdays. Done right, both the institution and such faculty members could enjoy great success, but devising a plan to enable such success, and recruiting the right people to be part of that plan, promises to be an interesting challenge.