Contingency and the Common Good

This week’s blog will focus on an important and overlooked trend affecting the quality and integrity of higher education in America and worldwide—the move to a largely contingent faculty. Most people do not realize approximately 70% of the faculty are off the tenure track (50% part-time, approximately 20% full-time). In the early 1970s, these trends were reversed with 80% on tenure track and only 20% off the tenure track. Today, three out of four hires are off the tenure track. The public, policymakers, and even tenure-track faculty, staff, and administrators are usually unaware of or at least ignore this reality and its implications for student learning. Why you ask are the trends regarding non-tenure-track faculty and their working conditions problematic and what can we do about it? Well, that is the issue that will be addressed in each posting this week. Today, I outline the problem. But, I begin with a little background about who non-tenure-track faculty (NTTF) are.

NTT faculty themselves are highly competent individuals that bring needed expertise and value to higher education. NTTFs can bring in outside knowledge of various professional and technical fields, they tend to focus on and value teaching, and they are highly trained. They come for different reasons—some are professionals working in fields like journalism providing their practical expertise to the classroom, some are retired professionals or academics, and others have halftime roles in other fields and they supplement that income with teaching. However, in recent years the fastest growing and largest percentage of non-tenure-track are “aspiring academics”—individuals who want a tenure-track position, but who came to the academy as the labor market changed in the last 20 years and were unable to obtain these shrinking jobs. There are many more non-tenure-track faculty at community colleges (averaging 80%) and fewer at four-year institutions (averaged 55%) or research universities (averaging 65%), but the numbers are generally high across all sectors, public and private. There are more in certain disciplines such as the humanities than in the sciences, but areas such as math are rapidly shifting to all non-tenure-track faculty. Non-tenure-track work with the most vulnerable students who end up in remediation and work at open-access institutions with large numbers of first-generation college students. If you need a better overview about NTTF faculty as well as a summary of key research on them, here is the perfect resource.

So given the many contributions of non-tenure-track faculty, what’s the problem? These faculty are generally ignored by the institution and not given the basic resources, pay, job security, professional development, or feedback to be successful and are treated in ways that make it feasible to create quality teaching. Let me provide a few examples. Two recent surveys by the New Faculty Majority and Coalition on the Academic Workforce have found that NTTF are typically hired to teach within a week and often days before a class, with not enough time for quality preparation. They are haphazardly hired, often not for classes that best fit their expertise, and are given few materials to guide their work (say a sample syllabus) and any sense of departmental or school goals and objectives. They are often excluded from professional development and evaluation processes. Needed materials for courses—case studies, resource texts—are often denied or not provided. They typically make so little per course that they have to teach at multiple institutions and end up late for class and frazzled based on part-timers having to commute. But the situation is better for full-time non-tenure-track faculty that often have better pay (although lower than tenure-track), some benefits, and are usually scheduled earlier for classes and sometimes included in professional development. NTTFs dismal situation has been well documented, but campus leaders and even faculty colleagues seem not to care—even when it is apparent this must affect the quality of education and student learning. Now study after study documents that these poor circumstances are affecting student graduation and transfer as well as faculty ability to engage in high-impact teaching practices like active learning, student-centered teaching, and learning communities, which we all know improve student learning. What will it take for academic leaders to take responsibility for this issue? There are many circumstances that make this complex to deal with and which I will address in the next posting—declining state budgets, decreasing support for tenure as an employment model, the slow embrace of non-tenure-track faculty by unions, and declining support for higher education. Yes, money and politics will make it difficult to achieve the necessary reform, but the disparities need to be addressed.

About the author

Adrianna Kezar is an Associate Professor of Higher Education in the Rossier School of Education and Associate Director of the Center for Higher Education Policy Analysis (CHEPA). Her work focuses on higher education leadership, governance, and equity.