Today, the AFT releases American Academic: The State of the Higher Education Workforce 1997-2007. The report documents the ongoing growth of contingent faculty in higher education and the continuing shift away from tenure-track positions. The data available from the most recent ten years show not only a continuation of these trends, but a significant expansion. For example, in community colleges, only 17 percent of the instructional workforce is tenured or on the tenure track, and the proportion of full-time tenured and tenure-track faculty members at public comprehensive universities dropped by nearly 13 percent during that ten-year period. 

"The faculty trends revealed in this report represent a staffing crisis that threatens the quality of our nation's colleges and universities," said AFT President Randi Weingarten. "The truth is, disinvesting in faculty is unfair to contingent faculty, many of whom are miserably compensated. It also shortchanges students, who may have less access to a part-time professor who has to teach at several institutions to patch together a living."

The report , which is the first of an annual report that the AFT will be producing on the higher education workforce, provides more details on the instructional workforce as well as information on the non-instructional workforce in higher education.

Key findings from the report include: 

• The number of full-time tenured and tenure-track faculty members declined from approximately one-third of the instructional staff in 1997 to just over one-quarter in 2007.
• The increased reliance on contingent faculty and instructors is manifested in all sectors of higher education, although the mix varies by institutional type.
• Even if we focus just on full-time faculty positions, the trend toward hiring off the tenure track prevails.
• The number of noninstructional staff grew by 24 percent from 1997-2007, with the most significant growth in the category of professional staff, which increased by 50 percent.
• The number of administrators, the majority of whom were full time, also increased by a substantial percentage.

Read American Academic: The State of the Higher Education Workforce 1997-2007 (pdf) and explore the national data or find out about the staffing levels at any institution in the country at AFT's Higher Education Data Center. 

Update:  Now you can read the full press release on American Academic.  Also check out today's stories about American Academic in Inside Higher Ed and The Chronicle of Higher Education.   And check out the new ED BEAT blog over at Learning Matters who also picked up our new report.

 

The news about Denison University's initiative to hire more tenure-track faculty rather than use adjunct faculty to cover leaves and sabbaticals will surely draw a lot of statements that start out with "Yeah, but . . ." (as some of the comments at Inside Higher Ed have already modeled for us).  And certainly caveats are in order. 

Denison, with only a couple thousand students and a couple hundred faculty members, might not be seen as  your "typical" school. Currently adjunct faculty members who cover leaves at Denison are paid a more equitable salary than most contingent faculty, so the expense of the change isn't as dramatic as it would be in other situations. And, obviously, getting grant money to create more full-time jobs is not a strategy that is going to get us too far in the long run. 

That said, there are parts of this article that are important to note and should not be dismissed as merely exceptional.

Inside Higher Ed reported yesterday on a new study out of Washington State that was originally focused on the impact of statewide articulation agreements on transfer rates.  While the researchers didn't find evidence that those articulation agreements were as key to student transfer rates as some have argued, they did find that investing in a full-time faculty matters.

While the study did not find the expected impact for articulation agreements, it did find another characteristic that matters: the percentage of tenured faculty members. For every 10 percent increase in the share of tenured faculty members at a community college, students were 4 percent more likely to transfer to a four-year institution. Many community colleges rely on non-tenure track instructors for much of the teaching, and Gross said the finding suggested that there are educational benefits for not doing so.

Yes, but I think the key words are missing.  I think they meant to say that community colleges rely on horribly underpaid and under-supported non-tenure track faculty.  I am going to guess that if institutions would actually invest in all of their faculty--full- and part-time alike--we wouldn't see these correlations.

How many times have we heard this? FACE is a great idea, but you don't really think colleges and universities can do this, do you? I mean it is expensive, right? True. Implementing the goals of FACE would take careful and thoughtful planning and a long-term commitment to creating a stable, full-time instructional workforce. Apparently, Elon University knows that. I would like to think of them as an example, rather than an exception.

Being a part-timer describes conditions of employment: It's not a statement of identity. I am, first and foremost, a teacher. When I was going to school to prepare for my career, my goal was to teach in a community college. The fact that, in order to do so and survive, I had to accept multiple part-time assignments should not have affected my understanding of who I was and what I wanted to accomplish.

Unfortunately, it did. I'm still discovering how big of an impact this has had on my self-image, but as I prepare for my first year of teaching as a full-time, tenure-track instructor, I'm already stunned by the change. Soon after I accepted the offer, one of my critics wrote, "This position could have gone to a part-timer instead," and I began to realize that there would be a change in the way others viewed me. I'm just beginning to understand how big of an impact that will have on how I view myself.

Okay, so we have posted a couple times already on our own Phil Jack's move into a tenure-track position, but just one more time. You should check out Phil's piece over at Inside Higher Ed today.  I imagine now that he is writing for the "trade press" that we will have to plead with him to post here at FACE Talk!

Last Thursday, I accepted a full-time, tenure track position at Green River Community College. Since then, I have been struggling to find a way to express the things I'm feeling right now.

It's been twenty years since I landed my first job as a "part-time" English instructor, so this is a huge personal milestone for me. It's tempting to say that I have finally accomplished my goal, but that sounds too much like I've reached the end of my journey. My journey hasn't ended; I've simply merged onto another highway.

Quite a bit of activity out there on the tubes. Here are a few items of interest.

• Frank Donoghue's "end of the world as we know it" interview is stirring up quite a few responses. Brandon over at Siris thinks Frank has it right and, well, that isn't necessarily a bad thing. Sisyphus has a somewhat more personal response, although as usual there is always a lot of insight inside all of that angst.
• Mr. Bousquet is getting some more attention for his fine book, How the University Works. Gregory over at Adjunct Advice, who was kind enough to interview us here at FACE Talk, has an interview with Marc up. And Adjunct Whore was kind enough to lend here space to Mr. Whore for commentary on HTUW.
• Finally, a bit of news. The Orlando Sentinel is reporting on the $32 million dollar cut that Florida State is preparing and notes that "Students can expect to see larger classes, more graduate assistants and adjunct faculty teaching instead of full-time faculty, and less availability of computer labs."

What else?

Well, I imagine if you are a FACE Talk reader, then you are interested in these issues and already know that Inside Higher Ed had an interview today with Frank Donoghue of Ohio University on his new book, The Last Professors: The Corporate University and the Fate of the Humanities. You probably also know that it (the interview that is, since no one has actually read the book yet) has stirred up quite a bit of conversation over at IHE (much of which has devolved into the "why do faculty get tenure when no one else does" discussion).

Donoghue has been working through this theme for some time. In 2004, he authored an article for AFT's first volume of American Academic entitled "The Uneasy Relationship between Business and the Humanities" (pdf) although he seems to have become decidedly more pessimistic about the future.

So this thread starts over at Narratives where Adjunct Whore foolishly celebrated getting a tenure-track position at the same institution where her partner works after a policy shift regarding partner hiring.  Then Marc Bousquet made the mistake of suggesting this was a good thing, which resulted in a thread of comments where AW's hiring as a partner became symbolic for a whole number of other things. Consequently, AW rightly pointed out that the overlaying sentiment of the comments were, well, hard to swallow for someone who has worked as hard as she has to achieve her goals.  And MB weighed back in with a couple of good suggestions about how to think about the whole thing.

My reaction to this whole dust-up discussion, if you can't guess already, is that it would be nice if we spent more time focusing our energy as enthusiastically where real change is needed rather than spending our time tearing at each other internally (and yes, I have read my Nietzsche, Foucault, etc. and know the value of institutional critique).  The bottom line for me is that a situation such as AW describes where an apparently qualified and talented person (I don't know AW) gets a tenure track position is a good thing.  Does that mean that all is well in the world with a host of other things--faculty diversity, far-reaching domestic partner benefits, the treatment of contingent faculty by BOTH administrators and full-time faculty?  Of course not.  And goodness knows that I am not just saying we should all just get along. 

But I am saying that it seems we spend endless amounts of energy on attacking each other's good fortune, or sincere attempts at incremental change, all in the name of ___fill in "pure" cause___ that we shoot ourselves in the collective foot.  Seems like there might, just might, be a more productive path.

Cue Bobby McFerrin music.