Contingent Faculty Across the Disciplines

Here are the latest developments for contingent academic labor around the country.

By Monica F. Jacobe

At a recent conference, I met a woman who has been a visiting professor at her institution since 1998. She was hired before she finished her dissertation and thought the job would be a twelvemonth stepping stone to a better position in a more geographically desirable location. Eight years later, PhD in hand, she is still there with a renewable yearly contract, a husband who is tenured in the psychology department, and two children. She said that she, unlike her tenure-track colleagues, doesn’t feel pressured to publish or meet performance standards for tenure. Moreover, her university accommodated her need for maternity leave, and she feels secure in her job. But is she secure? By definition, this woman is one of the many “contingent” faculty members—full- and part-time non-tenure-track professors—increasing in number at universities around the country.

In 1999, the Coalition on the Academic Workforce (CAW), a group of higher education and disciplinary associations concerned about the dramatic rise in contingent faculty, surveyed staffing practices across eleven humanities and social science disciplines. The surveys found “compelling new evidence about the use and treatment of part-time and adjunct faculty, highlighting the dwindling proportion of full-time tenure-track faculty members teaching in undergraduate classrooms and providing solid evidence of the second-class status of part-time and adjunct employees in the academy.”

This project aimed to develop more complete information about the many classes of contingent faculty, a goal participating organizations certainly achieved. They collected comparable data from anthropology, cinema studies, English, folklore, foreign languages, linguistics, history, philology, philosophy, composition, and political science. Most of the professional societies that gathered data released independent reports. In addition, Robert Townsend, assistant director for research and publications at the American Historical Association (AHA), wrote a report comparing all the disciplinary data for CAW, which is available at http://www.historians.org/projects/caw.

The comprehensive report showed a growing use of contingent faculty in most disciplines—but it also revealed inequality between part- and full-time contingent professors. Full-time faculty participated in departmental decision making and received support for professional development almost across the board, while part-time faculty saw little of these benefits, to say nothing of access to health insurance and technology.

This 1999 collection of data remains the only large-scale examination of part- and full-time non-tenure-track faculty in the disciplines. In fact, since the 1999 surveys, little or no comparable data on contingent faculty have been gathered in the disciplines, although CAW organizations have continued to pursue the problem of contingency on a smaller, more fractured scale. (See “Disciplinary Research on Contingent Faculty.”)

When CAW distributed the surveys in spring 1999, the department of the eight-year “visiting professor” described above believed her to be on a one-year visiting contract and would have included her as such on its forms. It would do so again if the survey were repeated. Is she the only one? Has her institution even noticed the inequity of her situation, and would it care if it did?

An Upward Trend

In their independent reports, the associations involved in the CAW surveys use different terms to describe contingent positions, which makes comparison difficult. Data were gathered on five staffing categories: full-time tenure-track, full-time non-tenure-track, part-time tenure-track, part-time non-tenure-track, and graduate student faculty. In its report, however, the American Sociological Association places graduate students in a “supplementary” faculty category and groups all categories of full-time faculty together for statistical analysis, including those considered contingent by the collective CAW report. AHA publications discuss full- and part-time faculty only, regardless of their tenure status, while several associations use both “contingent” and “part time” in their publications without distinguishing tenure status.

A cross-disciplinary analysis of data gathered since the CAW disciplinary surveys indicates that the recent rate of increase in part-time appointments is minuscule compared with previous years. However, full-time contingent positions are rising dramatically. The 2004 National Study of Postsecondary Faculty, which reports on staffing data gathered by the U.S. Department of Education in fall 2003, provides the most current numbers available on contingent positions across disciplines, as shown in the table accompanying this article.

In a 2003 issue of New Directions for Higher Education called “Exploring the Role of Contingent Instructional Staff in Undergraduate Learning,” Ernst Benjamin, a former AAUP general secretary, suggests that administrators find these full-time contingent positions attractive because they allow institutions to maintain the advantages of contingent academic labor (for example, lower costs and higher flexibility) along with a full-time workforce. Yet even though these faculty members contribute to the life of their departments and the education of their students outside of the classroom, they are still contingent. Their growing use—along with a continuing dependency on part-time contingent positions—should concern faculty on all sides of the tenure line, college and university administrators, and anyone else worried about the quality of higher education and the academic workplace.

Professional Associations

Although professional associations cannot change staffing decisions made by individual university departments, they can help contingent faculty better their individual positions in the profession. The associations support professional networks and professional development not bound by geography or departmental politics, and many offer benefits and special programs for contingent faculty.

For example, the Conference on College Composition and Communication (CCCC), part of the National Council of Teachers of English, offers grants to adjunct and part-time faculty members to permit them to attend the annual CCCC convention. Its Professional Equity Project provides $250 to first-time attendees to defray convention expenses and to cover the cost of a one-year membership in the CCCC. For details, call the CCCC at (217) 278-3602 or visit www.ncte.org.

Since 1997, the Executive Council of the Modern Language Association (MLA) has invited members to donate to a fund that supports annual meeting attendance by unemployed or non-tenure-track faculty members who teach less than full time and whose income places them in the lowest income range in the MLA dues schedule. Funds are available to cover up to 175 awards of $200 for the 2006 convention. The MLA gives priority to applicants who have not received a grant, including a graduate student travel grant, in the previous five years. The MLA gives grant recipients a letter to present to their department chair (if they are employed) to help raise awareness of professional development opportunities and the needs of contingent faculty members. For details, visit http://www.mla.org.

Almost all disciplinary associations offer some form of graduated membership dues based on income. These reduced dues can be a substantial benefit for contingent faculty members. The American Anthropological Association is in the process of restructuring its membership dues to include a special rate for “under-employed” anthropologists. The new rate, scheduled to take effect in 2007, will allow most contingent faculty members and students to pay less than fully employed members for the same benefits. The current dues structure has a reduced rate only for retired members, who will be held to the income-based system once it is in effect.

Educational Quality

Thanks to a sustained focus over the past ten years on problems related to contingent faculty labor, the use of contingent positions has become a regular topic of conversation among members of disciplinary associations, department chairs, and administrators. Ultimately, however, contingent faculty labor cannot be the central concern of professional associations in the disciplines, nor, realistically, can it be the main focus of college and university administrators. It can, however, be an important topic of discussion among all of these stakeholders, raising important questions about the kind and quality of education students receive at U.S. colleges and universities.

Data collected since the CAW surveys show that the face of contingent labor has been changing over the past decade. Contingent labor consists increasingly of full-time faculty members whose jobs, benefits, and even office space are guaranteed from September to May. Administrators see these full-time instructors as a more stable workforce that is more physically present than part-time contingents. But these full-timers have heavy workloads, including labor-intensive introductory courses, and must get used to a new workplace while hunting for that next job. Is this situation really any better than hiring part-time faculty who face the same demands for less pay at more than one campus? This question is more than rhetorical and yet unanswerable; the outcomes of this kind of staffing on both the academy and the students it seeks to educate have not yet been observed.

In the end, voiceless, burdened contingent instructors, no matter how talented they are as teachers or researchers, cannot contribute fully to the life of their departments or to the education of their students. Moreover, the increasingly contingent academic labor force reduces the influence of faculty—important contributors to educational quality—on the structure and function of higher education. Keeping our conversation about contingent faculty current is a must, requiring ongoing statistical reassessment that can produce a coherent picture of staffing across disciplines, in different types of institutions, and even by region—a full and complete picture of the problem. Many organizations include contingent issues in their regular research agendas, including the AAUP, but few have the resources to dedicate large amounts of staff time to the study of contingency in higher education.

The Humanities Indicators Project, sponsored by the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, is beginning to collect staffing and curriculum data in humanities disciplines using consistent terminology and categories. Although only a small portion of the data will inform conversations about contingent faculty (the main focus is the state of the humanities), the project recognizes the need to avoid fractured statistics that speak about the same faculty using different terminology with data from a variety of years, gathered with multiple survey instruments.

The 1999 CAW surveys aimed to avoid these problems and produce comparable, discipline-specific data on the role of contingent faculty in higher education. They did—in 1999. As noted above, more recent data show that the use of contingent faculty is changing quickly, in response, at least in part, to the work of CAW and other organizations. More vigilance, altered awareness, and current and complete data are needed, however, to maintain a productive conversation about the constantly changing academic labor force.

Monica Jacobe is a doctoral student and instructor in the English department at the Catholic University of America and a research fellow for contingent faculty issues at the AAUP. Previously, she was adjunct professor of literature at American University, where she served as the adjunct representative to several university-wide and departmental committees. Her e-mail address is mjacobe@aaup.org.

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