Contingent Faculty

Stabilizing Persons, Creating New Lines

At some of the fourteen campuses represented by the Association of Pennsylvania State College and University Faculties (APSCUF), there are a dozen or more tenure-track faculty who used to teach the same courses in the same departments but on contingent appointments.

The APSCUF contract features two unique contract provisions (11.G and 11.H) that permit the conversion of both persons and lines to the tenure track.

The Unhappy Experience of Contingent Faculty: The Curious Case of Boston University.

This article, like most of the others included in this issue, was submitted in response to the editor’s widely circulated call for papers that would present compelling stories about how different institutions have responded to the current financial crisis. It is not Academe’s policy to publish anonymous articles. However, it is an unfortunate commentary on the job insecurity and the limits on the academic freedom of contingent faculty in American higher education that the editor received several separate inquiries about the possibility of keeping the identity of contingent faculty authors confidential in order to avoid potential retaliation. Because the editor thought it was important to include at least one essay that would address the problems of contingent faculty in a time of economic crisis, he decided, in this particular case, to make an exception to the magazine’s editorial policy of not publishing anonymous articles.

As with all features published in Academe, the opinions expressed in this article are those of the authors, not necessarily those of the Academe editor or of the AAUP. Comments on this article or any other article in this issue can be submitted online.

 

The Toll Road to Contingency

Off-Track Profs: Nontenured Teachers in Higher Education. John G. Cross and Edie N. Goldenberg. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2009.

Tenure and Teaching-Intensive Appointments

Recommendations on stabilizing the faculty infrastructure by converting contingent faculty positions to the tenure track.

Access to Unemployment Benefits

More than half of U.S. faculty members now work in one or more part-time appointments, generally on a semester-by-semester basis. Many more, both full- and parttime non-tenure-track faculty members, hold renewable academic-year appointments. Those serving in contingent appointments often do not know until a semester actually begins whether they will have a job for that semester and do not know in May whether they can expect to be employed at the same institution in the fall. For these teachers, summer and winter breaks are periods of unemployment.

Tenure and Teaching- Intensive Appointments

The majority of faculty members hold teaching-intensive positions, and over the past few decades the majority of teaching-intensive positions have been shunted outside of the tenure system and stripped of other responsibilities, says Tenure and Teaching-Intensive Appointments, a report issued by the AAUP’s Committee on Contingency and the Profession. The report, originally titled Conversion of Appointments to the Tenure Track, was issued in draft form in October 2009 and prompted almost two hundred comments.

A Midcareer Feminist Reflection

In an era of increasing contingency and devaluation of the humanities, we should take a moment to reconsider the meaning of activism.

A Novel Departure

Fight for Your Long Day: A Novel. Alex Kudera. Kensington, MD: Atticus, 2010.

From the President: Reforming Faculty Identity

Last year the AAUP’s Committee on Contingency and the Profession issued an important report titled Tenure and Teaching-Intensive Appointments. I have repeatedly endorsed its recommendation that all long-term college teachers be granted tenure at the percentage appointments they currently have. I always point out that the proposal is budget-neutral. It doesn’t make institutions give contingent faculty members a living wage; it just gives them job security, though of course they’d be better able to agitate for improved working conditions if they were tenured.

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