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Disciplinary Research on Contingent Faculty
Disciplinary associations, including members of CAW, have continued to produce resources on contingent faculty across the disciplines since the CAW surveys. Below is a summary of available information on departmental staffing and contingent faculty use collected since 1999. Disciplines or organizations that do not appear in the listing are omitted only because they do not have data or publications useful to a discussion of contingent faculty.
Anthropology
The American Anthropological Association (http://www.aaanet.org) produced a report in 2001 from the association’s CAW survey of anthropology departments. Who Is Doing the Teaching … and How Are They Being Supported? Survey on the Use of Part-Time Instructors Report found that in 1999 just over half of all anthropology instructors were fulltime, tenure-track faculty members; most of the remaining faculty members were either part-time contingent instructors or graduate assistants. Issues of concern included pay, benefits like insurance and professional development, and staffing structures. The comprehensive report includes tables.
In 2005, the AAA disseminated a staffing survey focusing on part-time faculty but asking questions about course loads, pay, and benefits similar to those included in the 1999 survey. At the time of this writing, a report had not been published. If anthropology is following the trends seen in other disciplines, however, the number of full-time contingent faculty will have increased, and the number of part-time faculty will have decreased or remained the same.
Classics
Data on classics departments across the country come from the American Philological Association (http://www.apaclassics.org). Since the 1999 CAW surveys in which the APA took part, no substantive work has been done exclusively on contingent faculty. Instead, the APA’s most current staffing data for higher education come from work done by its Committee on the Status of Women and Minority Groups.
The committee produced a departmental survey in 2002–03 that includes a comprehensive set of charts and tables and a narrative introduction. The survey focuses on gender and race but compares overall staffing data from 1997 to 2003 in several categories, including tenure status. The survey reported that 60 percent of all classics faculty were tenured in 2002–03. Among newly hired faculty, 29 percent were on the tenure track, 35 percent were employed full time but not on the tenure track, and 32 percent were part time. Although classics may be maintaining a body of tenured faculty members, new positions in the discipline are overwhelmingly contingent, something this report claims may be influenced by economics.
A 2003–04 report by the committee reveals trends in positions offered from 2000 to 2004 with some reference to data from the 1990s. (Its main focus, however, is on the status of women and minorities in classics.) Candidates most likely to be offered tenure-track positions were already working as full-time contingent faculty members (22 percent of all tenure-track hires and 33 percent of the candidate pool had worked as full-time contingent instructors). In addition, the number of graduate students hired into non-tenure-track full-time positions matched the number of full-time contingent faculty hired into tenure-track jobs. The report calls on classicists “to be cognizant of [the] discrepancy between the number of candidates and the number of jobs, as well as the increasing institutional reliance on non-tenure-track faculty to perform the work of the modern university.”
Composition
In 2001, the National Council of Teachers of English (http://www.ncte.org) released an essay collection, Moving a Mountain: Transforming the Role of Contingent Faculty in Composition Studies and Higher Education, dealing with the cultural and material working conditions of contingent faculty members, collective bargaining, and benefits and roles for untenured faculty members.
The NCTE also helped fund research by the Two-Year College Association, which published Two-Year College Facts and Data Report: 2005. The report notes that as of 2004, just over 25 percent of all two-year colleges did not offer tenure of any kind to faculty, and part-timers accounted for 66.7 percent of all two-year faculty. The association is working on a survey of English faculty at two-year colleges that will explore how the ratio of full- to part-time positions has changed over the past five years.
Also of interest is an annual survey of adjunct writing faculty that Gloria McMillan, a writing instructor at Pima Community College in Tucson, began in 2002. A nationwide sample of 5,000 faculty members and administrators at schools across the country has yielded approximately 400 replies, which McMillan divides by region in tables and figures. Her most recent data are from 2005.
English and Foreign Languages
Using the data from the 1999 MLA Survey of Staffing in English and Foreign Language Departments, the Modern Language Association (http://www.mla.org) produced a policy statement, Ensuring the Quality of Undergraduate Programs in English and Foreign Languages: MLA Recommendations on Staffing. Average percentages of courses taught by full-time faculty in English and foreign languages were culled from the association’s CAW survey and presented as guidelines for departments in making staffing decisions. To provide what the MLA considers a quality undergraduate education, a department must rank above the average. For PhD-granting institutions, this requirement means that 46 percent of undergraduate courses must be taught by full-time faculty members. Although a table in the policy statement differentiates between categories of full- and part-time faculty, the statement itself groups contingent full-time faculty with tenure-track faculty in calculating a department’s percentage of courses taught by full-time faculty. The MLA did, however, write a policy recommendation in 2003 for dealing with full-time contingent faculty members and departmental staffing, acknowledging the growing use of contingent positions in the discipline.
The Report on the MLA’s 2004 Survey of Hiring Departments provides percentages and real numbers of tenured and nontenured hires made by departments of English and foreign languages at two- and four-year institutions in 2003–04. Candidates hired into full-time tenure-track positions were just as likely to be hired straight out of graduate school as they were to be hired from contingent full-time positions. Far fewer candidates were appointed from part-time positions, but nearly 20 percent (at four-year institutions) were hired from another tenure-track position. The report describes an academic job market in which a significant number of candidates move from full-time contingent positions to the greater security of the tenure track. It also reveals part-time faculty, unlike fulltime contingents, are not being hired out of their predicament.
History
The American Historical Association (http://www.historians.org), which was instrumental in developing CAW’s 1999 surveys, has produced several documents relevant to contingent faculty positions. “The State of the History Department: The 2001–02 AHA Department Survey,” published in the April 2004 issue of Perspectives, the AHA newsletter, reports that full-time contingent faculty members accounted for only a small proportion of the history instructors at responding departments (which employed just over half of all history faculty teaching at two and four-year colleges and universities in the United States in 2001–02). While most full-time history faculty either already had tenure or were employed on the tenure track, part-timers made up 28.6 percent of history faculty. As the article notes, however, the survey included graduate instructors in a separate category. Because they made up 20 percent of the history teachers at doctoral-granting institutions, the figures for part-time contingent faculty would have looked much different if graduate and part-time contingent instructors were combined.
A report on the 2005 history job market published in the January 2006 issue of Perspectives reports that the proportion of part-time and adjunct faculty increased 4.4 percent between fall 2004 and fall 2005. An article in the March 2006 issue of Perspectives draws on salary and staffing data from the 2004 National Study of Postsecondary Faculty, which reports on staffing data gathered by the U.S. Department of Education in fall 2003. The article notes that part-time faculty in history had decreased by just over 7 percent at four-year colleges and universities since fall 1998, while full-time faculty increased by a little more than 33 percent. No tenure status distinction was made. Parttime faculty made up 25.1 percent of the history teaching population at four-year institutions. At two-year colleges, full-time positions in history decreased by 8.4 percent, and part-time positions increased by 11.2 percent. At both two- and four year institutions, tenure-track faculty account for just 56.7 percent of history faculty.
Mathematics
Each year, the American Mathematical Society (http://www.ams.org) publishes surveys of departments and faculties in the mathematical sciences at four-year colleges and universities. In a September 2005 report, the AMS noted that the proportion of full-time contingent appointments in mathematics had increased 45 percent from 1998 to 2004. Part-time faculty positions increased by 19 percent in those same six years, while tenure-track faculty appointments decreased by 1 percent. Mathematics clearly shares a common problem with many humanities and social science disciplines: sharply increasing numbers of full-time contingent faculty positions.
The AMS’s 2003 report on mathematics faculty analyzes the shift in the academic job market that occurred between the late 1980s and early 1990s and the early twenty-first century. Drawing on a study of job advertisements and deaths or retirements among tenured faculty members, the report demonstrates that as tenured faculty members die or retire, they are replaced increasingly by contingent full-time faculty members, a fact reinforced by the finding described above that the contingent full-time faculty workforce in math almost doubled in six years.
Religion
“They Also Serve: Contingent Faculty in the Academy,” published in the March 2004 issue of Religious Studies News, the newsletter of the American Academy of Religion (http://www.aarweb.org), summarizes data from a 1999–2000 departmental survey carried out at undergraduate institutions. The survey found an overall increase of 32 percent in contingent faculty members in religious studies compared with a 1996–97 departmental survey. (The article does not define “contingent”; however, the per-course salary it cites suggests that only part-time faculty members are included in this category.) The survey also found that departments use almost twice as many of these contingent faculty members as full-time faculty in staffing their courses, most of whom are men. Most of these contingent faculty members worked at Protestant institutions in the Southeast, the location of the majority of departments in the survey.
Sociology
In 2004, the American Sociological Association (http://www.asanet.org) released Academic Relations: The Use of Supplementary Faculty, a research brief on contingent faculty in sociology that uses data from a 2000–01 ASA survey of departments. The researchers include graduate student teachers in the “supplementary” category and place non-tenure-track, full-time faculty members in the full-time category. With these specifications, 61.9 percent of all faculty in sociology worked full time in 2000–01, and 38.1 percent of faculty members fell into the supplementary category. The researchers reported that full-time staffing figures had been stable for some time, while student enrollments and supplementary faculty numbers continued to rise. The report notes that supplementary faculty members taught a total of 22.5 percent of sociology courses in 2000–01 and had average salaries well below the CAW-recommended $3,000 per course.
Physics and Astronomy
2004 Physics and Astronomy Academic Workforce, published by the American Institute of Physics (http://www.aip.org), presents data gathered by the AIP’s Statistical Research Center in spring 2004. The center found that full-time hiring had increased an average of 1 percent a year since 1994 but that new positions had become increasingly contingent since 1998. At the time of the survey, one in five physics professors served in full-time, non-tenure-/track positions. Although the survey report includes some data on percentages of part-time faculty, its primary focus is on full-time staffing. This report’s finding about the steady growth in contingent full-time positions suggests that the sciences are suffering from the same staffing trends affecting the humanities and social sciences. Other organizations in the sciences, including the Association for Women in Science (http://www.awis.org), gather interesting staffing data, but as of this writing, no other information applicable to a discussion of contingent faculty was readily available.
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