Contingent Faculty Across the Disciplines

Academe, Nov/Dec 2006 by Jacobe, Monica F

Here are the latest developments for contingent academic labor around the country.

At a recent conference, I met a woman who has been a visiting professor at her institution since 1998. She was hired before she finished her dissertation and thought the job would be a twelve-month stepping stone to a better position in a more geographically desirable location. Eight years later PhD in hand, she is still there with a renewable yearly contract, a husband who is tenured in the psychology department, and two children. She said that she, unlike her tenure-track colleagues, doesn't feel pressured to publish or meet performance standards for tenure. Moreover, her university accommodated her need for maternity leave, and she feels secure in her job. But is she secure? By definition, this woman is one of the many "contingent" faculty members-full- and part-time non-tenure-track professors-increasing in number at universities around the country.

In 1999, the Coalition on the Academic Workforce (CAW), a group of higher education and disciplinary associations concerned about the dramatic rise in contingent faculty, surveyed staffing practices across eleven humanities and social science disciplines. The surveys found "compelling new evidence about the use and treatment of part-time and adjunct faculty, highlighting the dwindling proportion of full-time tenure-track faculty members teaching in undergraduate classrooms and providing solid evidence of the second-class status of part-time and adjunct employees in the academy."

This project aimed to develop more complete information about the main classes of contingent faculty, a goal participating organizations certainly achieved. They collected comparable data from anthropology, cinema studies, English, folklore, foreign languages, linguistics, history, philology, philosophy, composition, and political science. Most of the professional societies that gathered data released independent reports. In addition, Robert Townsend, assistant director for research and publications at the American Historical Association (AHA), wrote a report comparing all the disciplinary data for CAW, which is available at http://www. historians.org/projects/caw.

The comprehensive report showed a growing use of contingent faculty in most disciplines-but it also revealed inequality between part- and full-time contingent professors. Full-time faculty participated in departmental decision making and received support for professional development almost across the board, while part-time faculty saw little of these benefits, to say nothing of access to health insurance and technology.

This 1999 collection of data remains the only large-scale examination of part- and full-time nontenure-track faculty in the disciplines. In fact, since the 1999 surveys, little or no comparable data on contingent faculty have been gathered in the disciplines, although CAW organizations have continued to pursue the problem of contingency on a smaller, more fractured scale. (see "Disciplinary Research on Continent Faculty" on liages 47-49.)

When CAW distributed the surveys in spring 1999, the department of the eight-year "visiting professor" described above believed her to be on a one-year visiting contract and would have included her as such on its forms. It would do so again if the survey were repeated. Is she the only one? Has her institution even noticed the inequity of her situation, and would it care if it did?

An Upward Trend

In their independent reports, the associations involved in the CAW surveys use different terms to describe contingent positions, which makes comparison difficult. Data were gathered on five staffing categories: full-time tenure-track, full-time non-tenure-track, parttime tenure-track, part-time nontenure-track, and graduate student faculty. In its report, however, the American Sociological Association places graduate students in a "supplementary" faculty category and groups all categories of full-time faculty together for statistical analysis, including those considered contingent by the collective CAW report. AHA publications discuss full- and part-time faculty only, regardless of their tenure status, while several associations use both "contingent" and "part time" in their publications without distinguishing tenure status.

A cross-disciplinary analysis of data gathered since the CAW disciplinary surveys indicates that the recent rate of increase in part-time appointments is minuscule compared with previous years. However, full-time contingent positions are rising dramatically. The 2004 National Study of Postsecondary Faculty, which reports on staffing data gathered by the U.S. Department of Education in fall 2003, provides the most current numbers available on contingent positions across disciplines, as shown in the table accompanying this article.

In a 2003 issue of New Directions for Higher Education called "Exploring the Role of Contingent Instructional Staff in Undergraduate Learning," Ernst Benjamin, a former AAUP general secretary, suggests that administrators find these full-time contingent positions attractive because they allow institutions to maintain the advantages of contingent academic labor (for example, lower costs and higher flexibility) along with a full-time workforce. Yet even though these faculty members contribute to the life of their departments and the education of their students outside of the classroom, they are still contingent. Their growing use-along with a continuing dependency on part-time contingent positions-should concern faculty on all sides of the tenure line, college and university administrators, and anyone else worried about the quality of higher education and the academic workplace.