One doesn’t need to go far in the academic press these days to read about the widespread decline in tenure-track faculty lines, which are being replaced at best with renewable-contract positions and at worst with an assortment of often-exploitative strategies to use contingent faculty members. This trend has clearly been exacerbated by the financial crisis of the past several years, but it has pretty obviously taken on a momentum of its own that will continue, even if the economy and higher-education funding are restored to some halcyon level from the past.
There are all sorts of reasons for this decline. For one, contingent and contract full-time faculty members are cheaper, on a per-course basis, than tenure-track faculty members. That equation presumes, however, that teaching courses is the only thing that faculty members do, and anyone who has spent any time in a college or a university knows that’s not true. Another reason is that it’s much easier for administrators—either at the institutional level or in a statewide system—to do what they want if the plurality or majority of faculty members don’t have the stake in the institution that a tenure process provides.
I don’t think, though, that many small private colleges are reducing or eliminating the proportion of tenure-track faculty members they employ, and I have some theories about that. Most important, though we certainly watch money very carefully, most of us at small private colleges do not have a strictly utilitarian theory of higher education that requires the teaching of the largest number of bodies for the lowest cost. Our “selling point” is the amenities that come with the experience of a small college, and one of the main amenities we provide is extensive contact with full-time, essentially permanent, faculty members. This differentiates us in the marketplace, and it is a factor that is probably going to become more important in the next few years, as budget cuts at the state level are going to continue their strongly negative effects on public colleges and universities.
As far as I can predict, my own institution is never going to eliminate tenure. The expectations on faculty members here and at colleges like ours are such that the only way realistically to ask faculty to meet them is to provide the security and future commitment of the tenure track. We’ve actually converted two full-time, nontenure-track faculty members to tenure track in the past year and have aggressively been hiring to take advantage of the poverty of the academic market right now.
So many things are in flux in higher education that it’s hard to tell what the next shape of the industry will be. Many critics of small private colleges argue that they are somewhat retrograde institutions, not very efficient, and not current with what students need. I am sure that some of these criticisms are true, but if the institutional strength that comes from a large cadre of secure faculty members is retrograde, I’m glad to be a throwback.
Follow On Hiring through your favorite RSS reader:
6 Responses to What’s Happening to Tenure?
cwinton - October 15, 2010 at 4:32 pm
I would not term small academic institutions inefficient, unless one is going to restrict the definition of inefficiency to accounting terms. Like many other enterprises, academic institutions are constantly seeking a balance for best use available resources, which is different from maximizing or minimizing some measure. For best functioning, a computer must have resources that are not in use much of the time, and the same thing is true of a trauma center. Likewise, buildings must have adequate down time for maintenance, faculty must have adequate time to maintain what makes them valuable in the first place, and students must have adequate time to absorb what they are attempting to learn. Ironically, very little criticism is directed at the vast resources now being consumed for the purpose of so called accountability, which is a driving factor in the enormous expansion of university administrations in recent years. I hope those so eager to deep six the concept of tenure give some thought to what this particular author is saying.
vernaye - October 15, 2010 at 6:51 pm
That’s very naive. I worked at a small college in the States where only 6 out of the 70 faculty were tenured or tenure-track. The college’s constitution stated that they were required mainly to sit on certain committees, etc. In other words, “tenure” existed only in the most absolutely minimal sense. These people could be fired, as it turned out, just as easily as anyone else – for “financial contingency,” which could be interpreted any way that the administration liked. Needless to say, the faculty was bullied mercilessly by the admin and I left what was a toxic environment. That college, however, has no intention of following a genuine model for tenure, and I am sure that many others will follow suit.
libartphil - October 16, 2010 at 11:31 am
I think that this is right except under some extraordinary circumstances. The primary reason is that without tenuring faculty will not be willing to commit to the degree that small liberal arts colleges require. Without that commitment to students and the institution, the distinctive benefits of a small liberal arts college decreases. Thus, the colleges that take this route had better be able to transform themselves into small private universities with large adjunct stables to teach lots of non-residential programs.
duchess_of_malfi - October 16, 2010 at 12:01 pm
Evans’s university and my medium-size state university are almost identical in terms of students’ 25th/75th percentile ACT scores, first-year attrition, and percent in-state. His school had 21% full-time contingent faculty in 2008-9 while mine had 35%. But I think the main differences are size and environment. My school has 7 times the number of students and 10 times the number of faculty; it also costs less than half the tuition price. Student and parent perceptions of the institutional types are quite different. All in all, I don’t think that instructor type is the most powerful market differentiator if we assume a well-informed consumer–although the idea of a profound difference in numbers could certainly be used in marketing whether or not it was accurate.
Evans wrote: “I don’t think, though, that many small private colleges are reducing or eliminating the proportion of tenure-track faculty members they employ…”
According to the 2004 National Study of Postsecondary Faculty, this is the breakdown of:
% full-time/part-time faculty and % of full-time who are contingent by institutional type (Table 1, Table 10):
Public doctoral 78/22 10 Private nfp doctoral 68/32 9
Public master’s 63/37 12 Private nfp master’s 45/55 8
Private nfp baccalaureate 63/37 8
The heaviest users of part-time faculty and full-time contingent faculty are public associate’s degree institutions. The data above do not compare by size within type, but if those data exist, I would appreciate Evans’s sharing them. This is not my research area, I am new to it, and I’m sure there are sources I have overlooked.
I have not been able to find average stay for TT/T faculty at all or by institutional type, so I don’t know if private-college faculty at large or small institutions are “essentially permanent.” But turnover among PT faculty might not be as rapid as Evans thinks.
“Most part-time/adjunct faculty members are not newcomers to their positions—more than 40 percent have been on their campuses 11 years or more, 32 percent have been on the job six to 10 years, and only about one in four has been on the job five years or under. A majority say they expect to work in their current institutions for at least five more years.”
AFT National Survey of Part-Time/Adjunct Faculty (2010)
Re: Impact on student instruction:
“Simple comparisons of students with full-time faculty members to those with adjuncts are likely to be biased because students who take adjuncts differ systematically from other students. The paper provides evidence that students sort by instructor type based on observable characteristics.” “The analysis suggests that the impact of alternative instructors varies by discipline. However, taking a class from an adjunct often increases the number of subsequent courses that a student takes in a given subject and may also increase the likelihood that the student majors in the subject. These findings contradict assertions by groups that the use of adjuncts reduces student interest. The estimates also suggest that adjunct instructors are especially effective in fields that are more directly tied to a specific profession, like Education and Engineering, although they also had relative positive effects in the Sciences.” (p. 24)
Bettinger, Eric P. and Bridget Terry Long (forthcoming). “Does Cheaper Mean Better? The Impact of Using Adjunct Instructors on Student Outcomes.” Review of Economics and Statistics.
Other studies have found that working conditions for part-time and full-time contingent faculty matter more to student outcomes than contingent/non-contingent status alone.
11161452 - October 18, 2010 at 11:06 pm
I suppose it depends on the philosophical approach of the people in charge. After I resigned from my SLAC position, a successor was hired as tenure-track, but after he was already on campus for a semester, the president and his cabinet decided to yank the position out of tenure-track status in favor of full-time visiting. What got back to the department (of three people) was that the president did not want any one department to be “fully-tenured” as my area was during my last 6 years there.
kyprof - October 23, 2010 at 12:50 am
Well, 11161452, you have it just right. It does depend on the people in charge–and all of the rosy pictures must surely be at institutions with goodmanagers who are effective. But that is a crap-shoot. The good managers can be replaced with the bad on a whim. And there’s nothing to say the replacements will be all that enlightened.
Collegial governance is message. Tenured professors don’t produce neat, tidy, corporate structures and decisionmaking. But, you know, surely we aren’t just producing round pegs for the round holes of 2010. Surely we are producing round pegs for the round holes that will emerge in the future. Surely that requires a faculty the the cachet to produce thinkers who are flexible in the fact of acclerating change. That takes more than a purely instrumental view of higher education–as vocational training.