The last 30 years have seen a substantial change in the composition of college and university faculties, including a significant increase in the share of instruction delivered by non-tenure-track, contingent faculty, both full time and part time.

Based on data from the U.S. Department of Education’s (ED) Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System, the U.S Government Accountability Office found that from 1995 to 2011, the percentage of instructional positions filled by contingent faculty increased from 57.6 to 71.6 percent across all types of post-secondary institutions. The number of full-time and part-time contingent positions more than doubled in this interval, while tenure-track positions grew by a little under ten percent.

These results are skewed by rapid growth in two-year and (for a time) for-profit institutions, which rely most heavily on contingent faculty. In four-year, nonprofit or public institutions, the share of tenure-track instructors dropped from over 50% to about 35%. The share of part-time instructors increased from 30% to almost 40%, and the share of full-time contingent instructors increased from somewhat under 20% to about 25%. By 2015, contingent faculty accounted for 61.4% of instructional positions at four-year institutions.

These shares have largely stabilized, though the share of contingent instructors nationwide declined through the decrease in the number of for-profit institutions after 2011. Relying on the same ED data, the American Association of University Professors reports that in fall 2019, full- and part-time contingent faculty accounted for 62.9% of all instructors across all post-secondary institutions nationwide. Across baccalaureate, master’s, and doctoral institutions, contingent faculty accounted for 56.2% of instructors.

Even at prominent research universities, tuition affects budgets far more than do research funds. Only patient-care revenues at institutions with hospitals approach the importance of tuition. Teaching faculty members are better at generating tuition than are the tenure-track faculty. They are paid less than the regular faculty and, because they have no research responsibilities, might deliver twice as many courses per year at a research university. The sustained growth in the ranks of teaching faculty makes good business sense.

The terms of non-tenure-track faculty employment vary greatly across institutions and sometimes include collective bargaining rights. Some full-time, non-tenure-track faculty members are on continuing contracts, but most are on fixed-term contracts ranging from one to a few years in length. Part-time faculty appointments are the least expensive appointments of all, but can offer students special professional depth and expertise that full-time faculty members cannot.

The 49,000-student University of Southern California (USC) has a larger share of contingent faculty than the national average. Materials circulated by the USC Academic Senate for the 2020–21 academic year show a full-time USC faculty of 4,822 across 21 schools, inclusive of part-time faculty members working more than half-time. Of these, 1,480 (31%) are tenured or probationary, i.e., tenure-track. The remainder are non-tenure-track personnel in teaching, research, practitioner, clinical, and librarian ranks. In addition, the university has 2,435 part-time and adjunct faculty members working less than half-time, typically delivering one or two courses a year.

What makes USC even less typical is that all of these different categories of faculty members are part of the USC Faculty Assembly, the electorate that contributes directly or indirectly to faculty governance. They are eligible to vote for and serve as the leadership of the Academic Senate and to participate in most university and senate committees, though only tenured faculty members participate in activities related to tenure decisions.

This is a relatively recent development. Prior to 2012, there were differences across USC schools in the governance roles exercised by full-time, non-tenure-track faculty members. These personnel were brought into the Faculty Assembly university wide as a result of a 2012 revision to the Academic Senate constitution. This change was driven in part by the continuing rapid growth in USC’s compliment of full-time, non-tenure-track teachers. This new super-majority voted to revise the constitution again in 2016 to also bring USC’s part-time faculty into the Faculty Assembly.

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USC’s central administration is enthusiastic about these changes, largely because it has quietly initiated and promulgated them. This is a managed outcome, the pursuit of which has been in the hands of a Vice Provost who has, since 1998, served as the senior liaison between the Academic Senate and the university administration. He has been the constant player amid an otherwise shifting cast of USC and Academic Senate leaders. As the result of this long-term focus, the USC administration has succeeded in diluting and diminishing the governance role of the tenure-stream faculty, reduced instructional costs, and made it infeasible for any of the USC faculty to unionize. The key has been asserting that all non-tenure-track faculty are engaged in shared governance, no matter how casual their connection to the university.

In National Labor Relations Board v. Yeshiva University, 444 U.S. 672 (1980), the U.S. Supreme Court found that Yeshiva University’s full-time faculty members are managerial employees excluded from coverage by the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA), making them ineligible to unionize and bargain collectively. The Court held that

The controlling consideration is that the faculty exercises authority which in any other context unquestionably would be managerial, its authority in academic matters being absolute. The faculty’s professional interests — as applied to governance at a university like Yeshiva which depends on the professional judgment of its faculty to formulate and apply policies — cannot be separated from those of the institution, …

The critical question for determining whether university faculty are employees or managers under the NLRA is whether they exercise effective control over central university policies. The faculty’s status as managers is a function of such faculty governance activities, and independent of academic tenure.

All USC faculty members are positioned as managers under the NLRB v. Yeshiva ruling, and thus ineligible for collective bargaining rights. Equally useful for the university administration, the tenured faculty now constitute a mere 20% of USC’s Faculty Assembly, yoked to a supermajority of contingent faculty members whose priorities are distinctly different from those of the residual, regular faculty minority.

Aside from experience gleaned during their own educations, the full-time teachers who constitute the bulk of this group have relatively limited knowledge of how a research university should best be organized to pursue and impart knowledge. They also suspect that the tenure-stream faculty members are paid too much, that they themselves are paid too little, and that the tenure system is an anachronistic construction leading to unfair outcomes. They take as prima facie evidence of the tenure system’s systemic unfairness that the market for academic talent did not lead them to tenure-track appointments.

It may be possible to exercise academic freedom without tenure, but not at the University of Southern California. USC’s full-time, non-tenure-track faculty members are almost all on fixed-term contracts, and are in effect fired and rehired every three years. Removing a non-tenure-track faculty member is largely a matter of not renewing his contract when it expires, USC Faculty Handbook assurances of academic freedom for all notwithstanding. USC’s contingent faculty quickly learn the merits of risk aversion. Consequently, despite the inflated number of participants, there is relatively little faculty governance at USC.

USC’s full-time, non-tenure-track faculty are accomplished, sophisticated scholars who deserve a role in faculty governance if they want it, though they should have the option to unionize and bargain collectively if they prefer. The University of Michigan, for example, has followed this path. Full-time teachers there belong to a union, while Michigan’s regular faculty fall under the Yeshiva ruling.

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USC’s part-time teachers working less than 50% time should not have a governance role, but still might want to unionize, though many or even most of this group are not at USC for the pay. Part of the benefit they receive from teaching is their professional connection to a research university of USC’s caliber. The university and the students benefit greatly from their work at USC, but the institution is not the foundation for their professional identities or reputations, and they do not typically know enough about how research universities are organized to reliably execute a governance role.

Most importantly, in no case should the governance role of USC’s tenured faculty continue to be submerged under a parliamentary avalanche of non-tenure-track personnel. The USC administration has no incentive to change its careful arrangements. It prefers a representative governance body in which the regular faculty is systematically outvoted by a much larger group whom the administration can influence with relative ease. Change will have to be driven by the tenured faculty if they want a credible governance role.

The constitution of the Academic Senate could be revised to create a bicameral body, one side of which would consist of the tenured and probationary faculty with the other consisting of the contingent faculty. Achieving this would be challenging. For different reasons, neither the non-tenure-track faculty nor the central administration want to acknowledge the differences between the roles, priorities, and responsibilities of the contingent and regular faculty; nor to acknowledge the crucial tie between tenure and academic freedom at USC.

A unilateral but more incremental alternative would be for the regular faculty to form an IRS 506(c)(6) tax-exempt nonprofit membership association that only USC’s probationary, tenured, and, possibly, emeritus faculty previously holding tenure would be eligible to join. Incorporation creates a permanent association identity that would make joining more appealing, though nonprofit membership associations have no collective bargaining power. Rather, this would be a forum that can authoritatively communicate to the administration the position of the tenured faculty on matters of importance to them, opinions formulated with academic freedom. Including the emeriti in such an organization would be useful because they can offer both experience and time.

An IRS tax-exempt designation would be useful if the organization has revenues, primarily dues. If, instead, costs were eliminated because all service to the organization was voluntary, then there would be no need to pursue tax-exempt status. It would be sufficient and simple to incorporate as a California nonprofit mutual benefit corporation.

Research universities’ national shift toward non-tenure-track teaching faculty is a broad market outcome that university administrators should try to decipher. Thus far, the only interpretation that they have offered with any frequency is implicit: Tenured faculty and full-time teachers are interchangeable in the classroom, and research universities need not alert students and parents that this replacement is rapidly underway.

Administrators understand that these substitutions conserve resources, though too often for more administrators. The faculty hiring practices of most research universities now have much in common with Las Vegas casinos. In gambling halls, a few expensive, labor-intensive stations (roulette, blackjack, craps, etc.) are located front and center to attract attention. These stations are surrounded on all other sides by a vast array of low-cost, computerized, capital-intensive gambling stations stretching out across the casino floor. The croupiers, stickmen, and dealers present an engaging image that helps entice gamblers through the doors, but these stations are loss leaders. The real money is made off of the low-cost stations.

At research universities, the tenure-stream faculty are the faces front and center on the casino floor, attracting tuition-paying patrons and their parents to the campus, and then on to the non-tenure-track slot machines in back. This casino model may be the best short-run means of harvesting tuition at research universities and, perhaps, of paying for the burgeoning administrative class surveilling the casino floor, but it comes at the expense of the research enterprise—and, ultimately, the very mission of research universities.

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