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Concerns Emerge in Faculty Poll
By Hans P. Johnson
In the inaugural American Faculty Poll, sponsored by TIAA-CREF, full-time professors on the nation’s campuses expressed scant regret about their job choice. Yet in the poll’s findings, released in February, faculty members noted several concerns about the profession, from occasional incursions on academic freedom to failure to attract minority colleagues. The poll also suggested that older, more established members of the professoriate are beginning to tune into adjuncts’ anxiety about the proliferation of part-time appointments.
The respected National Opinion Research Center, based in Chicago, conducted the survey by telephone over the course of the last year. Its pool was 1,511 full-time faculty members nationwide. Over 90 percent said they were satisfied or very satisfied with their career selection. The most often cited positive attributes of the faculty role were flexibility and independence.
Nine out of ten respondents reported teaching at institutions with tenure, which seven in ten said they already possessed. Approximately two in ten said they held probationary appointments. About 45 percent of those surveyed strongly agreed that academic freedom violations are rare on their campuses, but just as many said that pressure on faculty members that compromises their liberty as teachers or researchers is a somewhat more frequent phenomenon.
Just over one-third of the respondents were women. Yet, while two-thirds of all those surveyed said institutions had taken sufficient steps to attract and retain women, only about half expressed a similar sentiment about professors of color, who made up only one in seven respondents.
The chief worries of full-time professors revolved around students’ waning sense of engagement and lack of preparation. Yet in the section of the poll where respondents volunteered remarks about other matters on their minds, a number mentioned recent AAUP priorities.
A significant number, for example, voiced concern about the rising number of adjunct faculty. The increasing corporate organization of and ties to higher education captured the attention of other respondents. Among their concerns, according to poll adviser Irwin Polishook, is the "bottom-line" focus of some campuses’ curricula through which "people felt they were training students for a particular job." Polishook is the recently retired president of the Professional Staff Congress at the City University of New York.
In all, 68 percent of the respondents generally lauded the successful integration of software into coursework, but on the voluntary response section some noted concerns about the rapid rise in distance education programs.
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