Collective Sidestep on Adjuncts

I believe the accrediting agency for Business Schools rigorously maintains a restrictivepercentage quota on adjunct instruction, without nonsensical spin about “partnership.”

John Zeugner, Prof. of History, Emeritus at WPI, at 7:25 am EDT on April 14, 2008

What about DE adjuncts?

Contrary to wat this article presents, I have yet to see ANY (as opposed to “many") “detailed rules that [accreditors] expect colleges to meet,” especially in regard to minimum faculty qualifications.

Accrediting guilds are self-regulating special interest groups, and AAUP’s suggestion that “faculty members [should] become more involved in accreditation and urging colleges to make it more realistic for professors to devote the time and energy necessary to serve on review teams” shows a fundamental “misunderstanding of the role of accreditation,” since access to these positions is tightly controlled and closely monitored by accrediting elites.

Prospective review team members are carefully screened and vetted before they are assigned to reviews. AAUP misunderstands the control mechanisms that would prevent idealistic and naive faculty from becoming more involved.

Judy Eaton’s attempts to burnish the public image of her agencies cannot disguise AAUP’s findings, and cannot disguise the fact that there are no non-guild studies of overall accreditation effectiveness.

As Eaton points out, “It is up to the institution to determine how it will address [faculty] standards,” since there are no minimum faculty standards, for adjuncts as well as full-timers.

One area that needs attention and has not been addressed, are dual enrollment / concurrent enrollment adjunct faculty, primarily high school teachers teaching for college credit.

Here, not even the institutions have been able to keep up with the rapid spread of DE across the country. Simply ignoring the problem does not, I believe, demonstrate that the institutions are determining “how” they address adjunct faculty standards.

Glen S. McGhee, Dir., at Florida Higher Education Accountability Project, at 9:05 am EDT on April 14, 2008

Still Dodging the Basic Issue

There would be no problem if steps were taken to end the second class treatment of adjuncts. The solution is blazingly obvious; treat adjuncts as fractional full time faculty. Divide up salary, vacations, benefits proportional to the full time appointment appropriate for any part time faculty, who would be granted tenure, assigned appropriate additional duties (committees, etc.) and employed at suitable levels (assistant, associate, etc.). Why don’t we see this?

Of course, this would cost a great deal to implement, for most institutions (not the ones cited in the comments above) pay pennies for part timers. In short, adjuncts are used in many places to cut costs, keep up high salaries for everyone else, while (as at my institution) adjuncts teach a majority of the classes. A further note: adjuncts were invited to attend a full day orientation at an institution I know, and for a full 8 hour day’s work were paid $80 (that’s right, eighty dollars a day). I calculated the adjunct pay for a full academic year (32 weeks, not counting holidays) as $12,800. That’s FULL TIME pay for an adjunct.

Keith Johnson, at 1:30 pm EDT on April 14, 2008

Adjunct Overload

I appreciate the excellent review of the situation and the insights provided by the previous commentators.

As a part-timer myself, I noticed in my graduate student life and in my career thus far that for every liberal arts department I’ve worked or studied with (7), the trend has been to hire part-time lecturers through an ever revolving door, a semester here, a semester there, instead of replacing the retiring full-time professors.

One program I worked for was made up entirely of part-time lecturers, with professors from other departments overseeing the program. The program was held up by the Dean as, paraphrasing, a “model of economic efficiency.”

While I was in my Ph.D. program in the late nineties, the projection was that we grad students would be replacing those who were retiring. This never came to pass.

I apply for FTE positions competing with, in one case over 500, and in another 700-800 applications.

The effect on the students has been heartbreaking and almost completely invisible to the administration. Every semester for the last five years, I receive e-mails from students asking, “What are you teaching next semester? I want to take another course with you,” or, “Would you be our faculty sponsor for a student-run course?” or, “May I visit you next semester to talk about my courses?”

I have to answer these students with, “I’m so sorry. I am not continuing with the program/dept. next semester,” or, “I’m so sorry; I do not have an office next semester,” or, “I’m so sorry; part-time lecturers at this school do not have the authority to sponsor student projects.” Or, “I’m sorry; as a part-time lecturer I am not allowed to teach upper level courses, only this one they assign to me.”

*Continuity* and *stability* of faculty have been completely overlooked in the rush to save money in liberal arts. This “wham, bam, thank you ma’am” approach to throwing disposble, disregarded instructors at undergraduates, then yanking them away after one or two semesters, is undermining undergraduate education at an growing pace.

At “Big Research U.,” a part-timer’s ability to care about students and to take the time to mentor them can sometimes be seen as yet another reason to devalue a part-time lecturer even further. A left-handed compliment on one of my past dept. evaluations even took a sneering tone toward my high student evaluations and my ability to mentor students: “She does a lot of ‘hand-holding.’” Despite being called a “highly effective teacher,” I was let go in order to placate one professor’s desire to hire a protege’

There’s a great deal of lip service coming from university administrators and dept. chairs about the desire to provide “quality education” to undergraduates. Yet, these same people continue to bring in hoards of liberal arts graduate students, many of whom the higher ups *know* may never find full-time work.

This is unconscionable. This is a swindle—both to graduate students, who trade in a decade of the prime of their life to no end, and to the undergraduates who trust that they will find faculty to guide them through their education and yet do not.

I suggest that the _U.S. News and World Report_ college rankings should alter their evaluations of colleges and universities to more accurately reflect the proportion of tenured and tenure-track faculty versus adjuct and part-time lecturers.

Not only should regional accreditation bodies implement firmer requirements for permanent faculty (yes, perhaps even a formula for a ration), but parents, esp. those “helicopter parents” should ask about a school’s true ratio of instructors and should then vote with their feet—and their checkbooks.

If the people who matter, the parents and students, were to find out the truth of what is being sold to them, I think the scenario for Ph.D.s seeking permanent positions would change.

The old joke about being a liberal arts major, learning how to say, “Do you want fries with that?” has taken on a new form and become reality. The institutions of higher learning themselves are quickly morphing into transient, anonymous purveyors of fast food for thought.

The “university” was never meant to be McDonald’s.

“Dr. Eliza Dolittle”, Lecturer, at 1:25 pm EDT on April 16, 2008