Not All Full-Time Faculty Members Feel Like Professionals, Study Finds

February 13, 2012, 5:13 pm

Full-time, non-tenure-track professors feel as if they’re constantly straddling two worlds: that of professor and that of “detached observer,” a recent study found. Such faculty members are more of an occupational class than a professional body, concluded the co-authors of a report on the study, John S. Levin, a professor in the Graduate School of Education at the University of California at Riverside, and Genevieve G. Shaker, an administrator in the School of Liberal Arts at Indiana University-Purdue University at Indianapolis. The authors wrote that institutions need to do more to keep full-time non-tenure-track professors from feeling like outsiders, including giving them more authority in curriculum and instruction decisions, and giving them more research support and professional-development opportunities. The study is based on in-depth interviews with 18 faculty members who work in English departments at three public research universities.

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eudaimon

Good luck with that. Preventing outright humiliation and acts of retaliation against them by tenured faculty would be a promising start. Those non-tenure stream faculty who feel like they are “detached observers” got it good, relatively speaking. Many non-tenure faculty go home and weep because of the daily mistreatment they receive from faculty members who enjoy a degree of legal impunity normally reserved for diplomats.
categorical

Not surprising. Don’t treat them like outsiders. Get rid of the caste system and join the modern world.
graddirector

18 faculty members??? really? While the recommendation sounds reasonable, saying that this is based on a “research study” is bogus with such a small “N”
tardigrade

The authors wrote that institutions need to do more to keep full-time non-tenure-track professors students from feeling like outsiders, including giving them more authority in curriculum and instruction decisions, and giving them more research support and professional-development opportunities.
squacky

An interview-based study. Sample size is less relevant than other elements of study design.
wilkenslibrary

Sympathetic as I am to the plight of full-time NTT faculty, I have to observe that, in most departments at most institutions, part-time faculty are even more removed from being integrated into the community. Call us colleague, invite us to meetings, involve us in curriculum development, and all the rest, but most of all, find a way to pay us for the time we would happily spend on these activities if we could afford it.

Betsy Smith/Adjunct Professor of ESL/Cape Cod Community College.
spinnaker

Most of the tenured people I know want all other faculty to be seen, and to see themselves, as subpar, although there are clear exceptions. This explains a lot.
I don’t see how this will ever change as long as there is tenure, but I would love to be proven wrong someday.