How can adjuncts go from part-time to the tenure track? Not by applying for jobs at the colleges where they’re already teaching, writes gbrown on The Chronicle’s Forums. Her contingent colleagues should wise up, she says, and realize that most colleges won’t “buy the cow if [they] can get the milk for free”—or at a steep discount, anyway.
She sympathizes with their plight: “it’s unfair. But it’s also a reality. It sucks to be an adjunct and get paid cr@p. It sucks that the people who pass you in the hall and say ‘hello’ do not respect you enough to at least give you an interview.” But the only way to move up is to move out, the now-tenured gbrown writes: “I had to widen my search to get what I wanted.”
Fiona, another tenured academic poster, seconds that advice. It’s especially true for adjuncts working at research universities like hers, she says, which may have a clause in their faculty handbooks “forbidding ‘inbreeding’”—that is, hiring their own graduates on the tenure track.
A poster who goes by larryc worries that many adjuncts have the mistaken impression “that there is an implicit understanding that they are on the track to get on the tenure track at the institution where they are teaching. Fairly or not, the opposite is more often the case.” He goes on to note:
It is particularly sad when the adjunct is clearly (to everyone but himself) not qualified for a TT job. At my old school we had one long-time adjunct, a middle-aged guy with an M.A. from a nearby school, who applied for every TT job that opened up and complained bitterly when we hired someone else “just because they have a Ph.D., when I have all this teaching experience.” This went on for the dozen years I was there, while the adjunct cobbled together a $12,000-a-year salary and lived with his mother and waited for the next TT job to open up at our department. Some of us tried to gently point out that it was never going to happen, but it was like water off a duck’s back. People believe what they want to believe.”
Zharkov, however, cautions others against blaming the victims: “We shouldn’t just blame adjuncts. All too often, they get vague suggestions and hints that there is the possibility they’d get hired to TT jobs. Sometimes ‘promises,’ which are subsequently broken. So deans, chairs, and TT faculty share some of the blame.”
He advises adjuncts who aspire to tenure-track jobs “to network with the people making hiring decisions. If someone has a decent teaching record and is generally well liked, then getting a face-to-face meeting with the chair or dean or both should be pretty easy. Most people want to be helpful, and they can give good advice about the job market in general and how hiring works at that particular school.”
While it’s rare for adjuncts to get their feet in the tenure-track door on many campuses (it’s more common at community colleges, other posters note), lightning does strike on occasion, zharkov writes.
One thing an adjunct can do to improve his/her chances is to publish and stay professionally active says gbrown:
One adjunct told me today that if they’d hire her full-time, she’d start going to trainings [sic] and department meetings. I immediately thought, “If you were going to trainings and department meetings, maybe someone would consider you material for a f/t t/t job.”
Read the whole discussion and share your thoughts.
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21 Responses to Somehow Getting on Track
jffoster - September 30, 2010 at 8:07 am
In general, it’s not going to happen, where _it__ refers to “adjuncts go[ing] from part-time to the tenure track”. the economic demography of higher education prohibits it. Colleges and Universities simply can’t afford to turn all those adjunct positions [let alone the Graduate TAships] into regular faculty, i.e. tenure track positions. Agreed that we ought not dismiss the situation nor our adjunct colleagues by simply blaming the victims. But a careful reading of the original post and of the inset quotes (and some of the posts on the original forum) shows that sometimes the adjuncts victimize themselves through inability or unwillingness to grasp the nature of the world they live in.
gtolsen010255 - September 30, 2010 at 12:06 pm
In education and government we are particularly adept at never acknowledging the truth….perhaps the two best descriptors of education/government today is liberalism and elitism. This translates into the worst of cronyism/nepotism with family and friends getting very high-paying jobs (like the art school article in the chronicle)without having the merit. For more than 30 years I have watched as colleges and government implode with rampant abuse from cronyism/nepotism in which friends and family with none to little experience and education get high-paying jobs and then destroy everything, but in government and education it doesn’t matter if you can’t do the job, because everything is the students’ faulty anyways…..so the story goes. I have watched as family and friends with only a bachelor’s or high school degree and less than one year experience get hired over people with more than 15 years of exemplary work experience and Ph.D.s within education and government; and I have watched as these family and friends destroy programs and hurt students….that is the truth the adjuncts need to know…..it is much like living in the incestuous backwoods such as in the movie Deliverance…..but in education and government what we will end up with is our own destruction as the rest of the world surpasses us….
duchess_of_malfi - September 30, 2010 at 12:55 pm
The discussion of part-time faculty objectives and options on that thread, and in general in fora discussions of part-time faculty, tends to ignore the two-thirds of part-time faculty who do not seek full-time faculty employment and the ways in which the one-third who do are different from the rest of the group (Monks 2009). Possibly with the best intentions, people give bad advice. Part-time faculty members are more likely to be roped into providing free non-teaching work to their colleges than they are in having that work benefit their job prospects at those places. I suspect that the figure of the clueless, unqualified adjunct trying desperately for a tenure-track job is popular for reasons that reflect something different from actual prevalence.
tuxthepenguin - September 30, 2010 at 1:05 pm
The only problem with adjuncts in this situation is that they’ve never been on the other side of the hiring table. There are probably at least 10 applicants for every position who think they are guaranteed to get the job. There are a lot more than that who think they are a perfect fit for the position.The simple fact is that the job market is competitive. The same problem occurs with applicants of all types. I’ve seen candidates go from “first choice” to “not in a million years” because you could see that they believed the job was theirs, as if we were going to do whatever it took to hire him/her. They started to make demands before we had even met some of the candidates.No matter the situation, you can’t expect anything from a particular department until you have an offer in hand. I know of an individual who turned down TT jobs to work as a visitor at a different school, on the basis that he expected a TT offer in the future. Five years later, he was still waiting.
swmoore - September 30, 2010 at 1:09 pm
This is simply untrue at our institution. We treat adjuncts equally with all applicants and sometimes look for them because they have become a known quantity through their service to us. We have put these individuals through orientation(s) and have had time to mentor them. We have had time to assess their work. We know if they will follow instructions and Policy & Procedure. If they are dedicated enough to suffer through low pay with no office provided and remain committed to our mission of student service we feel they might be able to do just as well or better when we start to pay them and provide them with an office. We do also look at credentials such as 1) graduate degrees from accredited colleges 2)prior teaching experience 3) industry experience 4) college level student service experience, and other credentials. Many of our current fulltime employees started here as high-performing adjuncts. Of course, we also get to observe poor performers this way and eliminate those individuals from the pool.
jon_margerumleys - September 30, 2010 at 1:47 pm
Adjuncts getting hired onto the tenure track at the institutions where they work does sometimes happen–I’m living proof. I started as an adjunct, became tenure track, and now ten years later I’m a tenured full professor. So the dream _can_ come true. I think it’s fair to tell adjuncts how the culture works at their institution. My sense is that department chairs know which way the wind blows and could inform adjuncts accordingly.Jon
chroniclebarnacle - September 30, 2010 at 1:57 pm
Gab- not so with me. I was hired on as an adjunct and served in that capacity for a year until a full time opening came available. I applied and beat out 15 other applicants. I like to think that the university was able to assess my work as an adjunct which may have positively impacted their opinion of me during the search process. I like the practice of adjuncts becoming full time as it allows for a sort of preview of the candidate over time. We do this routinely as it turns out. If you don’t like them as an adjunct, you surely won’t like them as a full time tenured faculty member!
hoppingmadjunct - September 30, 2010 at 4:10 pm
For years this episode was my sustaining fury: when new full-time lines opened up in a department where I’d taught on both full- and part-time contingent contracts for a decade, the chair was so plagued by adjuncts asking for recommendations that she declared a new policy and circulated it on the department list serve, putting it in actual writing that she wouldn’t write letters for serving faculty for these new positions, though she’d be happy to write for us if we were applying elsewhere. Not only that, but when I took what seemed to me to be incontrovertable evidence of this egregious inequity to my union (whose leadership had dismissed proposals for PT-FT conversion on the grounds that PT faculty “can always apply for full-time jobs when they’re posted”), the Executive Board, which was composed almost entirely of either serving or former department chairs, unanimously voted not to present my evidence or raise my issue to management. The current two-tiered faculty system is not really about education: the top tier’s a club, and like any club it’s got its circular rules and procedures for self-protection and self-perpetuation.
softshellcrab - September 30, 2010 at 5:06 pm
At my school it is simple. If you are not a Ph.D., you are not going to get onto a tenure track. And in my area, business, Ph.D.’s are not “a dime a dozen”. Quite the opposite, there has been a shortage, with rising salaries and salaries now toping well over $100,000 for new Ph.D.’s and ABD’s. If the adjunct had the kind of credentials to be Ph.D., they might well get hired. We HAVE had a smattering of adjuncts who had or later acquired terminal degrees who did later obtain tenure track jobs. Also, many adjuncts have been hired for temporary 2 to 8 year stints as visiting faculty, with an office and all benefits just as good as what tenure track faculty get, but getting about half the money and having to teach a lot more (but not required to publsih or serve on committees, etc.).
softshellcrab - September 30, 2010 at 5:14 pm
@ #7 ChroniclebarnacleYes! I agree. When we hire in my department, if it is a job the adjunct is qualified for, typically a 2 to 8 year job as visiting faculty, we definitely favor adjuncts who have shown themselves to be good teachers. It just makes sense, and why not reward those who have faithfully taught for us? The problem is many adjuncts don’t want a full time, temporary job, especially the “temporary” part. But if they want it, and they have done a good job as an adjunct, they are generally heavily favored.
clayfabulous - September 30, 2010 at 5:38 pm
Having worked in a Community College for a few years, I would suggest that the transition from adjunct to tenure at the collegiate level can be a smooth one. Every institution has its own policies of course and some adjuncts are never going to get that full time post no matter what. I’d like to think that the playing field is even – but that isn’t ever the case. Sometimes being a known quantity can be the worst thing for a prospective hire. I think the author makes good points for the most part. But casting a blanket over every institution isn’t terribly accurate.
jffoster - October 1, 2010 at 7:11 am
No 8,”hoppingmad”, Nobody is OBLIGATED to write you a recommendation letter. From the perspective of you, you are not ENTITLED to a recommendation.
eudaimon - October 1, 2010 at 1:01 pm
The situation of adjuncts is complicated by the diversity of persons in adjunct positions. Some derive their primary or sole income from the adjunct position and are trying to get a tenure track position. Some have full time employment outside of academia and are doing adjunct work for different reasons. In both groups you have persons with M.A.s or Ph.D.s, some with publications, and some without.The work of adjuncts raises some sensitive topics. Adjuncts are often grossly underpaid, work in less than acceptable conditions, and have no job security. TT faculty, by contrast, are relatively well paid, secure in their employment, and have the ability to participate in governance. TT faculty can mistreat adjuncts in the most egregious ways with absolute impunity. I have witnessed bullying, abuse, and adverse actions that you rarely find in the private sector (which is the sector in which I have worked for 15 years). Now, the issue at hand is the prospect of an adjunct being hired into a TT position. I agree with some of the comments above that note the differences in formal qualifications between many persons in adjunct positions and those in TT positions. However, there are a few things that need to be said. First, adjuncts often do an excellent job in carrying out their responsibilities. So the question arises, if they can do the job well and are doing the job well, what does an outside candidate bring? If the answer is more publications or a Ph.D., then the question arises as to whether these qualifications are essential to the position. Further, adjuncts often have Ph.D.s, but are often not seriously considered for TT positions. I have witnessed this more than once. Finally, I have seen nationwide searches result in the hiring of persons who are not only terrible teachers and marginal scholars, but are abusive to people with less power than they and act in ways that are likely to incur legal liabilities for their institutions. All this leads me to believe that academic hiring is more like the induction into a club that is shielded from any pressure to serve the interests of any other stakeholders than it is an attempt to find a person who can carry out a wide range of responsibilities for the sake of an organization and its constituents. After all, one does have a lot of people doing the latter for a fraction of what they deserve.
rear_view_mirror - October 2, 2010 at 10:35 am
Comment #13: I don’t think I’ve ever heard it put so well.
kathrynsimon - October 3, 2010 at 3:05 pm
The sad truth is it very rarely happens. Recently I decided to go a university wide meeting for news on the development of new depts only to find out that I had been sent the notice as a courtesy but all who were there were full time and rather embarrassed at seeing me. A few years back when there was not enough money to hire full times for a new dept this was not the case …keeping this in mind I went. When I saw that the meeting was solely for the initiated I left, bored.
rear_view_mirror - October 3, 2010 at 6:45 pm
jffoster, the objection was that the chair refused to consider recommending anyone for these positions, not that she would not recommend hoppingmad adjunct specifically.
jffoster - October 4, 2010 at 7:30 am
Thank you, Mr. Mirror (16). I should have written in Southern instead of Yankee. I’ll try again. Nobody, especially a chairman who may have to later judge applicants, is OBLIGATED to write YALL a recommendation. From the aduncts’ perspectives, YALL are not entitled to a recommendation. Some universities make a practice of not even promoting / tenuring their own regular faculty assistant professors, let alone adjuncts.
rear_view_mirror - October 4, 2010 at 9:55 pm
Agreed that we ought not dismiss the situation nor our adjunct colleagues by simply blaming the victims. But a careful reading of the original post and of the inset quotes (and some of the posts on the original forum) shows that sometimes the adjuncts victimize themselves through inability or unwillingness to grasp the nature of the world they live in.Um, you just blamed the victim.
jffoster - October 5, 2010 at 7:52 am
Mr. Mirror, Learn to read and to distinguish generic from specific. I said we shouldnt “dismiss…by SIMPLY blaming the victime.” But sometimes the victim IS partly or entirely to blame, and while one might not want to blame THE victim categorically, one might well want to blame A victim.
rear_view_mirror - October 5, 2010 at 8:20 pm
Plenty of blame to go around. Adjuncts are often to blame for taking care of themselves poorly and/or for wishful thinking. The people who employ them are often to blame for being incredibly stingy, callous and excessively self-interested.
jffoster - October 6, 2010 at 6:53 am
We agree.