The Adjunct Project

Have a look at "The Adjunct Project," which is collecting U.S. data on the situation of adjunct faculty at colleges and universities. The core of the project at this point is an open GoogleDocs spreadsheet on which contingent faculty are asked to report pay and working conditions at their institutions.

"The Adjunct Project is a way for us to compile data on treatment of contingent faculty. Combining our knowledge and resources will help us all to better understand the reality of life as an adjunct professor. The goal of this website is to identify universities that set the standard for best practices with regard to adjuncts. The best schools should be recognized and honored for what they are doing. The project is also designed to promote transparency in higher education employment practices for the sake of teachers, students, and parents."

Faculty Value Civic Engagement and Diversity

The Higher Education Research Institute at UCLA describes changing views of American college and university teachers:

Compared to just three years ago, a significantly greater number of today's college teachers consider civic engagement and appreciation of racial and ethnic diversity important educational goals for undergraduates, according to a UCLA report on teaching faculty at the nation's colleges and universities.

The majority of college faculty (55.5 percent) nationwide now consider it "very important" or "essential" to "instill in students a commitment to community service," an increase of 19.1 percentage points since the survey was last conducted in 2004–05, and 75.2 percent indicate that they work to "enhance students' knowledge of and appreciation for other racial/ethnic groups," a gain of 17.6 percentage points over three years.

The report, "The American College Teacher: National Norms for the 2007–08 HERI Faculty Survey," is issued by the Cooperative Institutional Research Program (CIRP) at the Higher Education Research Institute (HERI) at UCLA, which puts out the national faculty report triennially. . . .

Academic Employment

The American Federation of Teachers has today released a report, "American Academic: The State of the Higher Education Workforce 1997-2007." The full report is available on the AFT web site.

Key findings from the report include:

• The number of full-time tenured and tenure-track faculty members declined from approximately one-third of the instructional staff in 1997 to just over one-quarter in 2007.
• The increased reliance on contingent faculty and instructors is manifested in all sectors of higher education, although the mix varies by institutional type.
• Even if we focus just on full-time faculty positions, the trend toward hiring off the tenure track prevails.
• The number of noninstructional staff grew by 24 percent from 1997-2007, with the most significant growth in the category of professional staff, which increased by 50 percent.
• The number of administrators, the majority of whom were full time, also increased by a substantial percentage.

• [from the AFT web site]
  

AAUP Statement on Faculty Governance in International Education

The American Association of University Professors, together with its counterpart, the Canadian Association of University Professors, has issued a statement on faculty governance in study abroad and international education. The report says, in part,

Moreover, as the U.S. and Canadian presence in higher education grows in countries marked by authoritarian rule, basic principles of academic freedom, collegial governance, and nondiscrimination are less likely to be observed. In a host environment where free speech is constrained, if not proscribed, faculty will censor themselves, and the cause of authentic liberal education, to the extent it can exist in such situations, will suffer.

Consequently, it is essential that all international initiatives undertaken by North American colleges and universities respect the UNESCO Recommendation concerning the Status of Higher Education Teaching Personnel, with its emphasis on academic freedom, institutional autonomy, collegial governance, nondiscrimination, and employment security.

These and the other principles in the report are a useful counterweight, at least in theory, to the rapid globalization of American campuses, an operation in which very frequently there is virtually no faculty participation or oversight--thus putting at risk the core academic values of the originating institution and its international partners and employees.

American Association of University Professors, "On Conditions of Employment at Overseas Campuses," 2009.

Academic Job Shortage

The recession has forced universities to modify their budgets to meet the enormous degeneration of their endowments and shrinking state budget appropriations. They are taking a variety of measures, most of which come down to lowering the costs of salaries and fringe benefits (chiefly health care) that account for most of the university budget.

In some universities, even the richest, this has led to hiring freezes. The problem is compounded because older faculty, who for the past generation have been living in a post-pension world, have been saving for their own retirements, typically through TIAA-CREF and private investments. Because the portfolios of those faculty have lost money, many older faculty are putting off plans for retirement.

And for the past generation, universities and colleges have been steadily shrinking the percentage of their faculty who are on the tenure track, turning instead to long- or short-term non-tenure-track faculty -- full or part time fixed term and adjunct teachers. These are often very good teachers, but they have high teaching loads, diminished salary expectations, little chance to engage in the sort of research and publication that would help them get into the shrinking tenure track. For universities, this turn away from tenure is not just about lessening job security. It is no accident that the declines in the robustness of faculty governance have come along with the shrinking of the tenured faculty.

These facts of the academic economy mean that there are likely to be fewer jobs for newly graduating PhD's, who have spent the past five or ten years in graduate school, working hard at very low salaries, postponing a lot of pleasures and plans in the hope of finding a great tenure track job. The recession means that for an even larger percentage of these students than usual, tenure track jobs just are not going to be there.

I love university teaching, and I'm one of the lucky ones -- lucky partly because I entered the academic job market long ago, when there were plenty of jobs opening up as the baby boom began to come to college.

There are still good jobs at colleges and universities.

But there are also alternatives, and some enterprising souls are apparently beginning to organize to face the new academic economy. I have to admit that as a graduate advisor, I really don't know how to advise my students to consider jobs outside the university -- and in fact the university uses success in job placement at tenure granting institutions an indicator of success for its graduate programs. Placement has become part of the job of graduate departments and faculty -- academic job placement.

These reflections are prompted, as I am sitting in a hotel room in Annapolis, Maryland, by two letters to the editor of the New York Times in response to an earlier Times article about the crisis of jobs in the humanities. One letter writer tells us of the many web sites and listservs created to help new PhD's find non-academic jobs.

Beyond Academe is a web site for historians looking for non-academic jobs. The site reports that "In 2004, the American Historical Association released a study on the career patterns of PhDs in history who had received their degrees between 1990 and 2004. Only 32% of these PhDs had obtained and currently held a position in a History Department."

At doctoral departments in my field -- rhetoric and communication -- we like to think that the most able students will always find the best jobs, and perhaps that is so. I like to think so. Students graduating from my own department have been getting very good jobs in recent years, and of course I think that they should. But it might not be a bad idea to explore in an organized fashion how to help our students discover all the alternatives.