next »

[conjugate]

Another voice in the ongoing fuss about the growing dependency of colleges and universities upon adjuncts.

http://chronicle.com/article/Value-Students-Then-Value-/48881/

Many of the author's remarks seem very valid for the teaching-oriented institutions at which he works.  Research universities, however, might find reliance upon adjuncts more defensible.

[hipgeek]

I'm just waiting for people to respond and call this author a whiner and jerk, but I get him. 

Students are shocked when they find out how little adjuncts get paid.   Like the author, I love teaching, but I'd love it a little more if the pay were better.   

[mad_doctor]

I agree, but the nuance here is that colleges really do value students, just not the quality of their education.

In 30 years tenured professors will be an uncommon sight on university campuses.  The AAUP reports that in the last 30 years alone the proportions of tenured faculty have decreased from 36% to 21% of the total number of faculty, tenure track faculty have decreased from 20% to 10%, while nontenured faculty have increased from 13% to 19%, and part time faculty have increased from 30% to 50%.  The US DOE confirms these stats while providing additional information that strongly suggests the growth in enrollments and revenues has been achieved by slowly replacing tenured and tt faculty with non-tt and pt faculty.  Overall, the trends show a strong bias against tenuring faculty - as I mentioned in another thread, it seems that, as a group, admins all across the nation are tenuring fewer and fewer faculty every year.

[cgfunmathguy]

I agree, but the nuance here is that colleges really do value students, just not the quality of their education.

In 30 years tenured professors will be an uncommon sight on university campuses.  The AAUP reports that in the last 30 years alone the proportions of tenured faculty have decreased from 36% to 21% of the total number of faculty, tenure track faculty have decreased from 20% to 10%, while nontenured faculty have increased from 13% to 19%, and part time faculty have increased from 30% to 50%.  The US DOE confirms these stats while providing additional information that strongly suggests the growth in enrollments and revenues has been achieved by slowly replacing tenured and tt faculty with non-tt and pt faculty.  Overall, the trends show a strong bias against tenuring faculty - as I mentioned in another thread, it seems that, as a group, admins all across the nation are tenuring fewer and fewer faculty every year.

Enrollment growth can be achieved (and usually is) without replacing faculty. In fact, ADDING faculty (mostly non-tt) in response to enrollment growth is common. The tenured/tt numbers don't change (in an absolute sense) while the percentages decline. Given the fact that administrators are often fearful that the enrollment surge is temporary instead of permanent, why would they hire a new tt line in response to enrollment growth
instead of a non-tt line that can disappear when enrollment declines later?

Another variable to consider in this situation is the trend in recent years (until the economy tanked) to reduce student-professor ratios. To reduce this ratio, you need more faculty. These additions depend on many factors when looking at tenured/tt vs. non-tt hires.

Finally, please understand that revenues are monies coming into an institution. I have yet to see an institution raise more money by cutting faculty. What this does is actually reduce expenses, and if revenues stay the same, then profits are increased. Growth in revenues actually comes from increased giving, increased earnings on endowments, and increased enrollment. Rarely (I would guess, never) has an institution managed to increase donations or enrollments by announcing "Hey, look! We just cut tenured/tt-line faculty!" In fact, many alums would suspect something was terribly wrong and would stop giving if that announcement was ever made.

[mad_doctor]

Fair enough - I should have said "while slowly replacing tenured and tt faculty".

There's no arguing with the data, though - the trend is there.  If the trends continue, in 30 more years there will be very few tenured and tt faculty on university campuses. 

BTW, I'm not sure I agree that alums would think it's a bad thing to cut the number of tenured and tt faculty.  I know a lot of alums think it's wrong that they seldom see ft tenured & tt faculty in the classroom, so they might just shrug and say, "Why should I care? I never had a real professor when I was in college anyway - all I ever saw was grad teaching assistants, adjuncts, and pt faculty.  So, no love loss on my part..." 

[jackofallchem]

I think if colleges valued students, they would return the adjunct position to where it should be and get rid of most of them.  When I was in college, apparently sometime in the paleolithic, adjuncts were brought in when they had some experience that added to the department (Dr. Thag, who develops new blowgun technology, teaches a night class and brings a new dimension to a department that is heavily spear and hand axe oriented) or when there was a temporary vacancy.  Now, they are being used to permanently staff general classes. 

I do understand the university's desire to be more flexible with staffing, and understand that in changing times, things might need to change.  However, I think the reliance on adjuncts borders (or crosses the line) into being unnecessarily abusive to the faculty involved and is not good for the quality of the education.  There is no real need to make sure you can reduce the amount of faculty at a moment's notice.  Enrollment trends do not usually reverse immediately, and temporary trends can be weathered.  The use of adjuncts because of this reason is only justified by the laziness and incompetence of the administrators who invoke it.

Hiring non-tenure track lecturers on medium term (5 year or so) contracts would meet the administration's need to be flexible while giving the faculty involved both some stability and allow time to find other employment should their position be eliminated.  Imagine 5-year contracts that can be renewed in the middle of year 4.  This would allow the administration to downsize faculty size while still giving the faculty member over a year to find another job.  When a position came up for renewal, they would just have to decide then if they needed the position for another 6 years or not.    Would this be as cheap as adjuncts?  No, but the added costs wouldn't really add that much to the cost of an education.  At my institution, adjuncts are less than 15% of the teaching load and the cost of the faculty salaries/student comes to ~$3900/year.  If we eliminated adjuncts completely, it would probably rise by ~$700/year.  This is not a huge increase in a $22,000/year total cost and could probably be met by eliminating the rowing team.

[cgfunmathguy]

Wow, where did you get those numbers, Jackofallchem? When I was a quasi-department chair at my last school (a CC, btw), the numbers worked out like this.
     Full-time faculty member (new) with a master's degree = $40K salary + benefits = ~$60K
     Part-time faculty member with a master's degree = $600/sem hr taught to a max of 12 sh = $7200 max

Most of my part-timers taught 6-8 hours. To replace two of them (costing $9600 max) adds ~$50K/year to the budget to teach 15-16 hours/semester. To eliminate my adjuncts entirely would have cost the college an additional $100-150K/yr. For some subjects, no courses would have been taught if there were no adjuncts because the load for a full-time faculty member wasn't there.

At the CC, our enrollment fluctuated enough every semester that sometimes I had more courses than instructors and the next semester I had more full-time faculty than load. The semester before I became chair, we hired two new faculty members to start my first semester as chair. I had enough load in fall for everyone, but come spring, I struggled to find classes for all of the full-timers. The next fall, I was told to cut adjuncts, even though I had more students than class seats available, and most of my faculty were already teaching overloads. That ended as soon as my dean pointed out the stupidity of turning away students because no seats were left for them. If I didn't have adjuncts for the enrollment fluctuations, I couldn't have done my job properly--no laziness nor incompetence involved.

We were on annual contracts that were renewed in December. With the way our enrollment fluctuated, a five-year contract for someone would have been murder. I would have lost good experienced people because their contracts would have ended as enrollment dropped while the new hires would have continued on because they had another four years. Yep, sounds great. Let's get rid of that experienced "deadwood."