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AAUP Research Cited at Conference on Faculty Careers
On April 1 and 2, AAUP staff and committee members traveled to New York City to attend "Recruitment, Retention, and Retirement: The Three R's of Higher Education in the Twenty-First Century," a conference convened by the TIAA-CREF Institute, the research arm of TIAA-CREF. The conference brought together researchers and academic administrators to discuss changes in faculty careers and institutional policies for dealing with those changes.
Ronald G. Ehrenberg of Cornell University, the chair of the AAUP's Committee on the Economic Status of the Profession, and Liang Zhang, also of Cornell, spoke about the growing use of full- and part-time non-tenure-track faculty at four-year colleges and universities. They said various sources of national data, including the AAUP's annual faculty compensation survey, informed their analysis, which showed that the proportion of faculty appointed off the tenure track increased significantly between 1989 and 2001. The rate of increase in full-time non-tenure-track appointments was steepest at public four-year institutions, although non-tenure-track positions make up a larger proportion of the full-time faculty at private four-year colleges than they do at public four-year institutions. Among newly hired full-time faculty, the proportion appointed to non-tenure-track positions increased to more than 50 percent during the period; the largest increases were at private institutions. In addition, private colleges and universities appointed a higher proportion of part-time faculty than did public institutions.
Ehrenberg and Zhang also explored factors influencing hiring patterns. They said that increases in the salaries of tenure-track faculty have led to more hiring of full-time non-tenure-track faculty, and that, conversely, increases in salary for non-tenure-track faculty have resulted in decreased hiring into those positions. They asserted that the increasing gap between the salaries of tenure-track and non-tenure-track faculty, coupled with the rising percentage of new faculty positions that are off the tenure track, diminishes job prospects for American students considering whether to pursue advanced study-and could harm the ability of institutions to attract the most gifted students to the academic profession.
Other conference sessions focused on the growth in postdoctoral positions, the changing demographics of U.S. faculty, the rising costs of benefit programs, and developments in institutional policies on faculty retirement.
Two presentations, one by Steven Allen of North Carolina State University and the other by John Pencavel of Stanford University, made use of data from the 2000 Survey of Changes in Faculty Retirement Policies, co-sponsored by the AAUP, the TIAA-CREF Institute, the American Council on Education, the College and University Professional Association for Human Resources, and the National Association of College and University Business Officers. Conference participants subsequently discussed in detail the trend toward phased retirements of faculty, as a means to assist both individual faculty and their institutions in managing retirement transitions.
"The conference brought together scholars and institutional decision makers in a dialogue that would not normally take place on campus," says John Curtis, the AAUP's research director. "Taken together, the trends discussed represent a challenge and an opportunity. The challenge is to maintain a faculty with academic freedom protected by tenure that is fully engaged in teaching, research, and institutional governance. The opportunity is the chance to make room for new voices and new perspectives in the academic community."
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