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The Challenges of Managing Adjuncts

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By Jennifer Jacobson

Stanley Bazan invites them to a departmental breakfast once a semester. Stephen M. Watt offers them the opportunity to teach an upper-division course in their specialty once a year. And John P. Zomchick gives them a formal evaluation every year -- just like the tenure-track faculty members -- "so they feel they're treated as professionals in the same way."

All three professors are department chairmen faced with the challenge of managing adjunct faculty members. What they have found is that there are no set rules. How the hordes of non-tenure-track professors are treated differs by department and by institution, with many department heads often saying they have little influence over how much adjuncts are paid and whether they receive benefits.

But some critics say department heads often have more power than they realize to go to bat for adjuncts, and have a responsibility to use it. Department heads can refuse to hire additional adjuncts or can push to offer adjuncts one-year or multiyear contracts, instead of just employing them by the course, these critics say. And department leaders can also push for the creation of more full-time positions, which many adjuncts are qualified for and want.

Mr. Zomchick says his English department at the University of Tennessee at Knoxville has taken a number of steps to make sure its non-tenure-track instructors -- especially the 33 full-time adjuncts who receive benefits and one-year renewable contracts -- feel more included in the department. For example, it instituted a review process that applies to both tenure-track and non-tenure-track faculty members. The idea is to demonstrate that the department values both groups and to make sure the adjuncts "are teaching as well as they ought to be," he says. Should the department get hit with budget cuts, he says, it can then use the reviews as "a fairly transparent method for determining who gets rehired." (The department also employs 41 tenured and tenure-track faculty members and 17 part-timers, who don't receive benefits and are paid by the course.)

This year, his department increased the travel allowance for each full-time adjunct from $1,000 to $1,700 -- which is about 75 percent of what tenure-track professors receive for such expenses. Also starting this year, Mr. Zomchick awarded course release time to four contract faculty members. Instead of teaching four courses a semester, they will be allowed to teach three -- without taking a pay cut -- and use the time off to design a new course or work on their research. Part-timers are filling in for them.

In this, his first year as chairman, Mr. Zomchick has also started a monthly departmental colloquia series "with the intent of reaching out to lecturers and making them feel part of the intellectual life of the department," he says. To that end, he has tried to keep the topics of "general interest"; for example, the department has held a talk on classroom decorum so adjuncts would "feel it would be useful to come."

Mr. Zomchick says he's sympathetic to the plight of adjuncts for one simple reason: "They teach a lot for us, twice as much as we do."

Academics on the tenure track spend a lot of time talking about the plight of disenfranchised groups at home and abroad, but confess to feeling hamstrung when it comes to academe's own mistreated population. That irony is not lost on many chairmen, who feel forced to rely on adjuncts for budgetary reasons and powerless to improve their lot.

"It's a national problem," says Ronald M. Schrader. "We're certainly not trying to exploit people."

But the associate professor and chairman of the mathematics and statistics department at the University of New Mexico says his department of 33 tenured and tenure-track faculty members needs the cheap labor of adjuncts. So it employs eight lecturers, who receive benefits, work on annual contracts, and earn an average salary of $40,000. It also employs about 30 part-time instructors hired by the semester mainly to teach precalculus courses. They do not receive benefits or a contract and are paid $2,700 a course.

The department does not have the space to offer all of its adjuncts a private office. "What we have is an old dorm that we managed to get some remodeled space in, not very close to the department," he says. "We have them packed several to an office over there." Those offices, he says, are equipped with phones and computers.

While Mr. Schrader knows who the part-timers are and tries to have a "cordial relationship" with them, he himself does not interview them when they are hired. That job belongs to the non-tenure-track, full-time lecturers who coordinate the precalculus courses taught by the part-timers.

Most of the lecturers came from the part-time ranks, and the department's creation of those contract positions was a "conscious effort for us to do something" for them. "But it costs," he says, adding that the department has proposals on the table to create even more full-time lecturer slots. "Lecturers cost twice as much per course as part-timers do, and tenure-track faculty cost many times more per course. Nobody is really trying to treat these people the way they end up getting treated. It's just economic."

Many adjuncts have heard that line before, says Karen Thompson, a lecturer in English at Rutgers University at New Brunswick. Chairmen, she says, will say that only the university's budget limits them in what they can do for their adjuncts. And while she acknowledges that chairmen don't have unlimited office space and money to give adjuncts, "budgets are always a process, and if teaching and education are a priority, then administrators and chairs would find the funds," she says. "They find the funds if there's a problem with athletics."

Many chairmen, Ms. Thompson says, care "a great deal" about the working conditions of their adjuncts, but don't realize they can help. "They feel insecure in the hierarchy in their institution even though they have tenure and are chairs," she says. "They worry that they can't talk back to certain administrators and say, 'I really need money to have quality people. I just can't put a body in front of the classroom.'"

Although she would like to see departments create more tenure-track lines in areas such as composition -- a subject taught by many adjuncts -- if universities don't have the money to do that, they should at least try to convert as many part-time positions as they can into full-time ones and give adjuncts contracts, health benefits, and better pay, she says.

Gary Sue Goodman advocates the same strategy. The director of composition at the University of California at Davis, she has been a lecturer there for nearly 20 years. Many chairmen, she says, are "less constrained by budgets than they are by prejudice and the status quo" when it comes to advocating for adjuncts. "There is a very strong prejudice against teaching faculty -- that if they were any good they would have tenure."

Even so, she says it is not only their responsibility, it's also in the interest of department heads to improve the working conditions of non-tenure-track faculty members. Supervising part-time instructors who are moving in and out of the department, she says, requires much more effort than managing long-term, tenure-track faculty members.

Chairmen, she argues, should act as mediators, pushing the higher-ups in the administration to push the chancellor to negotiate for union contracts, "to cut good deals instead of stalling." At the very least, department heads have a basic obligation to provide offices, phones, and computers, Ms. Goodman says. "That, to me, is just a given," she says. "I know that is not a given for many people. It should be."

Some department heads seem to think that going the extra mile for adjuncts simply involves holding once-a-semester meetings to orient adjuncts to the institution or to let them know where supplies are located in a department's office. But Jill Carroll thinks little of that approach. "It's always nice to know where the copy machine is," says the adjunct lecturer in Texas and a columnist for Career Network. "That's garden-variety maintenance. At bare minimum they need to provide office space. I've been at universities where we were required to go to get-to-know-you meetings like that ... and still didn't have offices, e-mail accounts, phone extensions, nothing."

A lot of these meetings, she calls "hollow, compensatory little things to make [departments] feel better because on some level they know they haven't given us the tools to do our job."

The management department in the Ancell School of Business at Western Connecticut State University, however, takes such meetings seriously. Once a semester the department holds a breakfast of bagels and sweet rolls for adjuncts and tenure-track faculty members, usually on a Saturday so that everyone can attend.

"The first thing we do is an introduction so everyone can match a name and a face," says Mr. Bazan, an associate professor of management and the department's chairman, who also invites the business librarian to the breakfast to provide adjuncts with an overview of library services available. Then the discussion turns toward administrative details, like reminding people where the copy machines are. The department then discusses "more meaty areas," Mr. Bazan says, such as the extra-credit policy and fostering and evaluating class participation.

Toward the end of the breakfast, adjuncts and tenure-track faculty members break into groups, called "course caucuses," each one led by a tenure-track faculty member who teaches the same classes as a lot of adjuncts.

Frederick E. Tesch, a professor of management in the department, started the breakfasts when he was chairman in the early 1980s. "A number of adjuncts were calling me, asking me questions," he says. "It seemed like I was answering the same questions over and over. I thought if I could get them together I could do this all at once." And "it was a good way to introduce the full-time people to the part-time people."

Ultimately, though, chairmen themselves, with or without a once-a-semester breakfast, set the tone for the treatment of adjuncts in a department. "If there are a cadre of exploited people on the faculty, then the entire department is diminished by their exploitation," says Mr. Watt, the chairman of the English department at Indiana University at Bloomington, which employs about 10 non-tenure-track instructors who receive benefits and work on one-year contracts renewable for three years. The department has so few adjuncts, he says, because it relies heavily on its graduate students, some 130 of whom serve as teaching assistants.

To Mr. Watt, it's "absolutely crucial that these positions have career enhancement built into them." That's why he pays his adjuncts an average salary of $32,000, gives them office space, and allows them to teach three courses a semester, one of which is an upper-division course in their specialty. "If you just line them up to teach a course and don't give them any support, it does them damage and the institution damage because you're saying, 'We don't care about you as a professional,'" he says. "'All we care about is getting our lousy courses taught.'"

To avoid falling into that mind-set, "it does require from time to time that you have to take a stand against a dean," he says. "It does mean you have to draw a line in the sand and say, 'We understand these are difficult financial times, but there's a line where we will not cross in hiring non-tenure-track faculty.'"

Luckily for Mr. Watt, he didn't have to draw a line in the sand after his department recently lost five tenure-track faculty members to retirement. The department wanted to replace all five with tenure-track faculty members, and won permission to do just that. It's hiring five tenure-track professors this year.