A new "visionary" book on academic staffing is out. Managing Adjunct Part Time Faculty for the New Millennium is intended to help administrators who "will experience increased challenges due to the continuing growth in numbers of adjunct and part-time faculty." Like so many business-oriented-higher-education-management-advice books, the problem is "complex," with many variables and considerations. Now, I don't mean to be overly quick to judge, but the introduction, "A Vision of the Future-From the CEO" by Roy A. Church (um, he is actually a college president), gave me a pretty good sense of the direction in which things are going here.

In the new world, "the institution of tomorrow will be a more exciting place," although apparently the way for this futuristic organization to get ready is to employ the cutting edge Total Quality Management theory to consider a whole host of issues. One fundamental issue in all of these concerns, according to Church, is how contingent faculty will feel:

one very important consideration is the need to maintain an environment in which all participants feel that they are an integral part of a human endeavor and not just a cog in the system.

At the same time, apparently these "not cogs" need to be pieced together to create "one faculty."

Traditionally we have viewed faculty as full-time tenure tract, earning seniority and benefits. With increasing numbers of support personnel traditionally given titles such as adjunct and part-time, future institutions may be required to consider "one faculty" made up of many contributors to the instructional process, including: full- and part-time instructors, specialists, consultants, project developers, curriculum developers, etc.

Now, of course, I would say that one way to develop a system in which a student's educational experience has coherence is by having faculty involved in multiple aspects of the college, which all impact the student's experience: curriculum development, teaching, learning new knowledge in the field, etc. And that might, of course, mean compensating faculty to do this work, but then again, I am probably one of those "rampant reporters of abuse" in the higher education staffing system.

The literature is also rampant with reports of "abuse" of part-time faculty and misuse by institutions of higher education. There is, however, evidence that most adjunct are happy with their institutional roles and would like to become more involved in the institutional mission. If, in fact it is found that there are inequities, then the inequities will need to be identified and addressed.

Good point. Someone ought to point out abuses - why didn't we think of that?  Perhaps we were confused by all of those happy adjunct faculty members out there?

Here is an idea for the new millennium: what say we create good jobs and support those who are committed to making a living by working with college students to expand their knowledge and skills? Sure classes, colleges and education as a whole might change as our technologies, communications, and cultures change, slide and shift, but I am going to bet that having a corps of committed and professional educators is an idea that will transcend time. We should stop acting like exploiting contingent faculty is a brave new world cultural development and admit that it is based in a philosophy of teaching on the cheap and is within our control to change.