That certain quarters of the academy–humanities departments, most social sciences departments, and many graduate programs (social work, education, and to a lesser extent law)–are ideologically imbalanced is not news. A decision in an Iowa court, however, exposed the difficulty in addressing the problem. The case, which received extensive coverage in the Des Moines Register and […]
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It probably had to happen. The conversion of campuses into luxurious spa-like retreats started at elite and well-heeled institutions and has now spread to smaller, lesser-known colleges. The newest student residence at Saint Leo University in Florida houses nap pods, an electronic gaming area with four flat-screen televisions, a workout area and an arcade complete […]
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Professors with tenure have lifetime appointments that can only be revoked after some egregious transgression, summarized by such formal labels as moral turpitude, gross negligence or dereliction of duty. In effect, the only tenured professors who get the sack are those who have robbed a bank, raped a co-ed or pistol-whipped a colleague. Why would […]
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Some two-thirds of America’s college students are taught by adjuncts, and now the battle is on over whether these low-paid, low-status workers should be unionized. Adjuncts, also called contingent faculty, are teachers hired without tenure, paid a small fraction of those on tenure-track positions, (typically $2700 per course, with minimal benefits). All three college faculty […]
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The Chronicle recently featured an article about the Adjunct Project, a program put together by a University of Georgia adjunct named Joshua Boldt “asking fellow adjuncts to enter information about their pay and working conditions.” Adjuncts are often underpaid. They also generally do not have research or service expectations, and they are almost never hired […]
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The cheeky blog Edububble offers a modest proposal: Since college tuition is so high, why not skip the campus middleman and “hire your own professor” as a private tutor? You think you can’t afford that? You’re wrong. While it’s true that hiring a $300,000-a-year academic superstar from Harvard would break the bank for most students […]
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Ever heard of the New Faculty Majority? That’s a euphemism of sorts, but an accurate one, for adjuncts and other non-tenure-track teachers who now account for 70 percent of all college instructors. The group is three years old and met for a premiere “summit” in Washington, DC. on January 28th in conjunction with the annual […]
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Many in the academy, whether on the left or right, will agree that in the late 1960s, a fundamental change took place in the balance between student demands and faculty authority. At about the same moment when many schools began eliminating comprehensive examinations to assess the competence of students in their major subjects, these same […]
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For a variety of reasons, but mainly because of cost, tenure has become a focus of debate in recent months. Given the trends in hiring and working conditions, though, one wonders why, for the fact is that tenure has been squeezed into an ever-smaller portion of the instructional employee population for years. Two charts in the Chronicle […]
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If you are a college student today enrolled in four classes during any given semester, it is likely that only one of your teachers is employed by your school in a permanent position that comes with a middle-class salary, job security, and benefits. The other three are contingent faculty, often called “adjuncts”; they have job […]
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For years now, a sad, steady flow of articles, books, and studies has documented the rise of the “disposable academic,” the growing underclass of poorly paid, uninsured PhDs who do the bulk of college teaching but have no real chance of ever landing a secure academic job. This is a tragedy, the argument goes, not […]
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What do we do about the adjunct problem? Everybody knows it exists, and everybody agrees on its elements. Well-qualified, talented, and conscientious people teach multiple courses, sometimes on different campuses, at a few thousand dollars per course. Add up class prep and grading hours and their labor sometimes falls below minimum wage, and they don’t […]
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Here is what Andrew Hacker, co-author of Higher Education? How Colleges Are Wasting Our Money and Failing Our Kids and What We Can Do About It , says about tenure in a recent interview in Atlantic Monthly: Here’s what happens. Academics typically don’t get tenured until the age of 40. This means that from their […]
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The New York Times Room for Debate page hosted a forum last week entitled “What If College Tenure Dies?” As the preamble rightly notes, the question follows from an increasing shift in university personnel away tenure and tenure-track lines and toward adjuncts and lecturers hired on temporary contracts. The numbers are stark: In 1975, 57 […]
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The Chronicle of Higher Education has a story this week by Robin Wilson entitled “Tenure, RIP: What the Vanishing Status Means for the Future of Education”. It announces a study by the U.S. Dept of Education due out in the fall covering employment in higher education. Its findings regarding tenure are dire: Over just three […]
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Last December, I wrote in these pages about allegations of racial discrimination in tenure denial at Emerson College, which had prompted the school to set up a three-person commission charged with reviewing those allegations. The panel’s report has just been released, and the good news is that the panelists “noticed no overtly racist or prejudiced […]
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In testimony to how far out of touch the AAUP has become from the people who pay the salaries of college educators, the organization is now demanding that colleges and universities convert currently serving adjuncts into tenure-track professors. The plan would bypass the national searches that normally accompany creation of new, tenure-track positions. There’s some […]
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Here’s a fun job: adjunct professor, as described by University of Akron adjunct Maria C. Maisto writing in a Sept. 10 manifesto in Inside Higher Education: I teach English composition — one of the most labor-intensive teaching assignments out there. This semester I’ll have to respond to 85 students on two different campuses and almost […]
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By Maurice Black & Erin O’Connor Review of John C. Cross and Edie Goldenberg’s Off-Track Profs: Nontenured Teachers in Higher Education. (Cambridge: MIT Press): 2009. According to the AAUP, 48 percent of faculty are part-timers, and 68 percent of all faculty appointments take place off the tenure track. The American Federation of Teachers (AFT) cites […]
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Two weeks ago a state district judge in Denver issued a ruling that makes it next to impossible for a college in the Colorado state system to revise its faculty handbook so as to make it easier to lay off tenured faculty members in the event of a reduction in employment force, even when state […]
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In early December, the Board of Regents of the Kentucky Community and Technical College system agreed to vote in a few months on a proposal that may have far-reaching effects on higher education. The proposal would end the practice of offering tenured or tenure-track posts to new faculty hires. Is this a crack in the […]
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How would you like to be a full-time adjunct professor? Here’s a snapshot of the life, excerpted from a Washington Post magazine profile, published in 2002, of Larissa Tracy, a 28-eight-year-old woman with a doctorate in English literature from Trinity University in Dublin teaching five or six courses a semester on a part-time, non-tenure basis […]
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