The Economy and Adjunct Hiring

By P.D. Lesko

Over the past few months, I have been trying to discern a pattern to how the recession has affected adjunct faculty members. Are part timers being adversely affected by the strategies that colleges and universities are using to close budget gaps?

There are some broad similarities in how college administrators in several states are dealing with their financial crises. In California, Oregon, and Washington — states where more than 50,000 adjuncts are represented by the American Federation of Teachers and the National Education Association — it’s a contractual blood bath. Union contracts that have been touted by reporters as some of “best,” and that protect the non-tenured, are being used to get rid of adjuncts. In California, for instance, the California Faculty Association’s contract calls for faculty to be cut first by appointment type, and then by seniority within that appointment type. As a result, adjuncts represented by the union are the first to lose their jobs.

The same contract clauses can be found in AFT-NEA contracts used at colleges and universities throughout the Pacific Northwest. As a result, in Washington State, one adjunct activist wrote, “Although the unions have bargained strong contracts for their full-time members, they have failed to provide ‘fair representation’ to their part-time professors. … The unions have failed to bargain any job security.” This chicken has come home to roost as the Governor of Washington cuts funding to the state’s colleges and universities. Adjuncts represented by the AFT-Washington and the NEA are being dismissed, and finding their class loads reduced or reassigned to full-time faculty who want overload courses.

You might just think that the same thing would happen with or without the union contract, particularly in light of the announcement that The University of Nevada at Reno is “eliminating 279 jobs because of a 15 percent budget cut that slashed the university’s state funding by $33 million in the next two fiscal years. … Provost Marc Johnson says a large number of part-time faculty will be replaced with full-time faculty who will teach bigger classes.” There is no faculty union at the University of Nevada at Reno.

However, an equal number of colleges and universities seem to be increasing their adjunct faculty populations in order to deal with budget cuts. In Tennessee, the state Board of Regents is poised to increase the number of adjuncts employed at the colleges and universities throughout the state. The decision is meeting with some resistance from tenure-track faculty advocates, but a member of the Board of Regents was quoted as saying that “adjuncts are excellent teachers and bring real-world experience to the classroom.”

So what does the future hold for adjunct employment?

In the short term, and certainly at institutions where union contracts call for adjuncts to fall on their swords before everyone else, there will be unavoidable job loss. But I believe that will be temporary: The full-time faculty members represented by those same unions simply won’t agree to increased teaching loads over the long term.

Some colleges and universities are choosing to fill teaching slots with visiting faculty members and other temporary full-time appointments of Ph.D.‘s. They are hired into “limited-term” positions — so many butterfly strips to cover cuts in so many budgets. The logic is that in two to three years, when the average “limited-term” contract runs its course, there may well be money for a tenure-track hire. In the meantime, at least there is a full-time faculty member with a terminal degree in the classroom.

In the long-term, I believe the percentage of courses taught nationwide by adjuncts may dip slightly over the next 18 to 24 months. The total number of non-tenure-track faculty members won’t drop more than 5 percent. Student enrollment, after all, increases in times of economic recession. Someone has to teach them, and unless tenure-track professors are prepared to have their course loads eventually doubled or tripled, it’s going to be adjuncts and non-tenure-track full timers.