For release: December 11, 2006
Contacts: John Curtis , 202-737 5900, ext.143
Monica F. Jacobe, 202-737 5900, ext.104
Washington, D.C. — In a new report released today, the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) provides new data to document the increasing predominance of non-tenure-track faculty in America’s colleges and universities. The AAUP Contingent Faculty Index 2006 provides data specific to individual college and university campuses on the number of full-time faculty with and without tenure, the number of part-time faculty, and the number of graduate student employees. Together, the categories of contingent faculty—both full- and part-time faculty whose positions are not on the tenure track—comprised 65 percent of all faculty in 2003, and their numbers continue to grow. Because academic freedom for contingent faculty members is not assured, and because contingent instructors are generally not provided with the level of institutional support required to deliver a quality education, the emergence of a contingent faculty represents a fundamental change in the nature of higher education.
The new report draws on figures submitted by institutions to the US Department of Education’s IPEDS database for fall 2005, and makes those data easily accessible at the campus level for the first time. The Index is divided into three sections: An article “Consequences: An Increasingly Contingent Faculty,” by John W. Curtis and Monica F. Jacobe details the working situations contingent faculty face under various employment conditions, and the consequences for the quality of higher education of an increasingly contingent faculty; aggregate tables provide a breakdown on the use of both full- and part-time faculty by institutional category at the national level; and four appendices provide institution-specific data on over 2,600 colleges and universities. The objective of the report is to provide comparable data at the campus level, enabling faculty, students, administrators, governing board members, and the general public to participate in local discussions about the impact of contingent faculty employment on the quality of higher education.
The American Association of University Professors is a nonprofit charitable and educational organization that promotes academic freedom, tenure, and due process in American higher education. The AAUP has about 45,000 members at colleges and universities throughout the United States.