March-April 2001

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Coalition Issues Report on Part-Time Faculty

The Coalition on the Academic Workforce (CAW) released a report in November on the use of part-time faculty in the humanities and social sciences. The CAW is a group of twenty-five academic and professional associations, including the AAUP. With help from Roper Starch, a survey organization, the CAW studied departments in ten disciplines in fall 1999, compiling evidence of the heavy use of adjunct faculty and of what the report calls the "second-class status of part-time and adjunct employees in the academy."

Seven of the ten disciplines surveyed reported that full-time tenure-track faculty made up less than half of the instructional staff, with part-time and adjunct faculty accounting for between 22 and 42 percent. Graduate students accounted for between 15 and 25 percent of the instructional staff in most disciplines surveyed.

The smallest proportion of full-time tenured and tenure-track faculty were reported by freestanding English composition programs, just 14.6 percent. History departments reported the highest proportion of full-time tenured and tenure-track faculty, 53.2 percent.

In addition to asking departments to report on the numbers of faculty members in different categories, the CAW asked them to account for how courses were staffed. Introductory courses were least likely to be taught by full-time tenure-track professors. In freestanding composition programs, introductory courses were taught by full-time tenure-track faculty only 6.9 percent of the time; in philosophy, they were taught by full-time tenure-track faculty 54.7 percent of the time.

The report also documents the fringe benefits and pay received by non-tenure-track faculty. As might be expected, those employed full time received the best benefits, with almost all having access to some health benefits paid at least in part by the institution. Most also had access to retirement and life insurance and, in nine out of ten disciplines, to financial support for research and travel to professional meetings. Full-time non-tenure-track faculty typically received salaries in excess of $32,000 per year, enough to provide "a viable standard of living," the report concludes. But part-time faculty paid on a per-course basis fared far worse, rarely receiving benefits and usually being paid less than $3,000 per course. Even if they taught four courses a term, the report says, most part-time faculty could have earned "comparable salaries as fast-food workers, baggage porters, or theater lobby attendants." The CAW report is available on the American Historical Association Web site <www.theaha.org/caw/cawreport.htm >.

The coalition’s efforts are part of a larger movement to examine the academy’s growing use of part-time faculty, and its survey instrument was based on one developed by the Modern Language Association (MLA). In 1998 graduate student organizers in the MLA introduced a successful motion requiring the association to collect and disseminate data on part-time faculty in English and foreign-language departments. The MLA conducted the study in fall 1999, contacting about 5,000 departments and receiving responses from about 2,000. The results, available on the MLA’s Web site <www.mla.org>, show that institutions pay widely varying amounts to their part-time faculty members, ranging from less than $500 to more than $7,000 a course. The average per-course rate is $2,428 for English departments and $2,951 for foreign-language departments. "The results are especially useful, because they are listed by institution and so permit peer-group comparisons," says Ernst Benjamin, the AAUP’s director of research and one of the survey’s designers.

At the 2000 annual meeting of the MLA in December, a motion was passed calling for the association to establish a minimum acceptable ratio of full- to part-time faculty members and to publish a list of institutions that meet or surpass the minimum. The motion must be ratified by the MLA membership before taking effect.