Part-time faculty on rise, report says

More than half the faculty at Boston University, Northeastern, Tufts, and Harvard are part-time or are not on the tenure track, according to a report released yesterday.

These prominent institutions performed poorly compared with their peers around the country, according to the study by the American Association of University Professors, a union organization.

Professors and advocates for students have raised concerns for years that colleges are increasingly turning to less expensive, temporary labor and eroding the tenure system, to the detriment of students and scholars alike. The study, based on fall 2005 data from the US Education Department, heightens such concern.

At private research universities nationally, 55 percent of academic staff are part-timers, known as adjuncts, or full-timers who do not have an opportunity to earn tenure, the AAUP reported.

At well-known Boston-area universities, the proportions are even higher: 71 percent at Boston University, 67 percent at Northeastern, 66 percent at Tufts, and 57 percent at Harvard, according to the study.

http://www.boston.com/news/local/articles/2006/12/12/part_time_faculty_on_rise_report_says/

At least ten years. Glad I got my BS back then. Of course they are also charging more money, too. Don't like this trend, and prospective students should watch out for this!

A friend of our family is the former Dean of a major college. She says that schools (including her old school) are purposely trying to stay away from full-time faculty so they can save money. She's pretty pissed about it.

(Hopefully we can outsource education to China and India soon.)

Online instruction is already the wave of the future ... I taught adjunct English courses two years at a community college that way and got sick of it.

Who needs teachers to actually be in class and interact with students and promote a learning environment? Press-a-button education; it's all about passing "competency" tests. :grr:

That's easy because some colleges allow students to turn in all work and take all tests online.

AAUP has noble objectives but it's toothless in most colleges because faculty won't get involved.

I'm personally familiar with a one university branch with perhaps 3,000 students and about 30 full time faculty. The rest of the faculty are adjuncts who are acceptable for freshman/sophomore level courses but rarely qualified to teach upper level and graduate courses.

Adjunct faculty are not paid very well and of course they have zero benefits.

Regional and special accreditation associations simply ignore the continued abuse of adjunct instructors.

Cheer up though because it's going to get worse.

The administration was going to get a big-name prof to post his notes and material online, then hire some grad-student sessional (like me) to actually run the course and update the stuff (actually they were seriously talking about skimping on that part and just using the exact same labs as before), while advertising it as being taught by the original guy. The students complained about a bait-and-switch, and the prof got the faculty association to complain about lack of adequate compensation for intellectual property, since of course he would only get paid the one time.

In Canada, quite a number of universities have had most of the teaching work done by non-tenure faculty, ranging from undergraduate and graduate helpers, and part-time sessional lecturers, to short-term-contract personnel. This has become evident whenever we the peons have a labour dispute, and an entire campus grinds to a halt because there just aren't enough people to teach the courses. As you point, out, the labs and tutorials, marking, and quite a number of the high-volume courses (first and second year) are done by people who really do not have much job security. (It's not unheard-of for our department to grab a sessional 2 weeks before term starts and demand that s/he take over the class on that much notice ... if that person hasn't done the course before, it can be pretty stressful trying to get all the stuff ready on time.)

I'm in myfirst semester of teaching at a CC. I could teach anything they have listed in their science curriculum, but I'm pigeonholed towards their intro bio. I was hired 2 days before the term started to do 2 sections at $4K per section per semester (4 units lab at 6hrs/week. Yes it's stressful as I never really caught up. Taking a break from tomorrow's prep and it's 12:30AM. I usually only get 2 hrs sleep 3x/week (the night before class). i was surprised to learn thet ft is considered 3 sections. I've been FT ((both non-tenure and tenure track at major med schools (didn't get tenure the first time at a top 5 school as I couldn't get enough grant $ during the last Bush administration when NIH paylines dipped to single digit percentiles as they have again))

That "racing to catch up" feeling sure is familiar, though. Good luck with the intro bio! A couple of years ago, I almost killed myself commuting between 2 colleges to give back-to-back intro geography lectures on the same days. (The second place never did get me a copy of the textbook ... I ended up having to borrow one from a colleague, and of course he wanted it back a couple of weeks into term, because he was teaching from it too!)

We've had people bailing out on courses much more frequently, in recent years. I knew there was a problem when the chair suddenly visited my cubicle, the day before they shut the place down for Christmas ... he NEVER checks on us grunts ... turns out he wanted my body. (The part that teaches the students, that is.) Someone (ironically, the faculty spouse they'd hired after laying me off) unexpectedly left for a new job in Alberta, and they needed someone to take over a 120-student course. I spent the whole holiday prepping lectures/labs and photocopying handouts ... and the same thing each year since. Last time I got home to see my folks was before people worried about boxcutters on planes!

I could always refuse to teach ... but the last person who did that didn't get hired again.

When my last teaching job ended (1993), I looked at what was available and saw nothing but part-time, one-year, and two-year jobs, mostly in unattractive places.

I considered that a sign that I should make my living some other way.

By the way, the use of adjuncts to save money has been going on since at least the early 1980s. I worked two-thirds time for half-time money with no benefits for two years before I got my first full-time ob.

I was planning on making academia my career but after reading that story maybe I should go and become certified to teach in public schools.

How depressing.

"father, Marvin Pierce, was then vice president of McCall Corporation, publisher of Redbook and McCall's magazines. After his daughter joined the banking oligarchy by marrying into the Bush family (1945), Pierce became McCall's chief executive. Pierce and his magazine's theme of `` Togetherness ''--stressing family social existence divorced from political, scientific, artistic or creative activities--played a role in the cult of conformity and mediocrity which crushed U.S. mental life in the 1950s." Webster G. Tarpley, George Bush the Unauthorized Biography

the bushes have such a way of mediocratizing anything they touch ... from even way back then ... and whether they are responsible or not for the hiring practices and the undoing of tenure at most of these higher institutions ... these hiring practices, the level of knowledge and intellectualism, the degree of conformity expressed by these institutions at this particular time in this society do reflect the bush's quest for conformity.

creativity, knowledge and intellectualism (thinking men and women) could lead to their (the bushes')actual final undoing!

It's been happening for ages in local colleges in SC.