Adjuncts, Contingent Faculty

First, before I begin, I will say that had I not received a full-time offer this year, I would not have paid much attention to Community College Dean’s discussion of what it means to be a professor with an overload. Does it impact adjuncts? Should we care? Does it impact the full-timer’s work? These are some of the questions CCDean asks.

The reason I now find it relevant is that I will be teaching an overload this fall. It is not by choice. My four-hour classes only count as 3.75 and my options are to take an underload, which will not be possible because the alternative assignments are all already taken, or an overload.

Truthfully, I don’t want an overload. I’m new at the school and I’ll be learning at least as much as most freshmen students, though hopefully not the same things! I really am expecting to be too busy to teach an overload. But since I have to teach it, I guess some of that learning will be put off.

I also don’t want an overload because they are going to pay me for it as an adjunct. So my extra work will earn me an additional $1000. Not cool. I’d almost rather they took the $1000 from my annual pay and let me teach an underload. But that’s not an option.

This is the framework from which I came to CCDean’s discussion. His discussion isn’t really on that topic, per se. But it is an interesting tangential point.

Folks who teach overloads also tend to be less available for committee meetings, since they’re more likely to be in class at any given time. Others have to do more unpaid labor so they have time to do more paid labor. It doesn’t smell right, and it somewhat discredits the idea that full-timers should be paid more because of their college service. If they aren’t available to do that college service, what, exactly, are we paying for?

I think THAT is CCDean’s most significant point.

What are we paying ft’ers for?
1. Years of service. That explains one set of “steps” in the promotion and pay ranks.
2. Degrees. That explains the other set of “steps.”
3. Tenure. I don’t mean that in the academic sense, but in the real world sense. We are paying our ft’ers to be around for the long haul.
4. Committee service. I think that’s a low ranking point. See the academic tenure rules for clear proof of that.
5. Name recognition. As an ft’er I am supposed to get my college’s name “out there.” I am supposed to publish and present and let people see that the ft faculty at MyCC is active, professional, and amazing.

That’s what I think they are paying for.

Name Recognition
Having been an adjunct who gave three different colleges Name Recognition on 19 publications and 29 presentations, I think that while Name Recognition is important, it is not limited to ft faculty. In fact, I think it is sometimes, at least in CCs, limited to adjunct faculty.

At CC1, the home of my longest tenure (length) as an adjunct, I sent the CFP for the state English conference to all the tt professors. No tt profs applied, only adjuncts did.

So I am not sure that, in the CCs at least, name recognition is usually that important.

HOWEVER, I also know that I lost my bid for a ft position at MyCC last year because I didn’t have as many publications as another candidate.

So, at least in this financial climate, it is important to the adjuncts who want to get tt jobs.

Years served
At least in my systems (four), no one was paid extra for having been a long-time adjunct. I know that some systems do, but I think these are rare. So we pay twenty-year veterans and newbies out of their grad classes the same amount.

We OUGHT to pay them based on seniority, but then we’d have to pay them more. Most of the point of adjuncts is to help the administration balance a precarious budget.

Degrees
Also in my systems, there was no additional pay for advanced degrees. (See discussion above.)

Tenure
This is what I think is the most important reason to pay ft’ers.

We pay ft’ers so that the courses we need taught and want taught will be taught. I dropped three schools and five courses last week, when I got the offer from my college. Five classes, including four hard-to-staff classes, will go begging. They’ll find someone, I am sure. But it won’t be someone who is qualified to do the work. Or at least it won’t be as qualified as I am.

That’s not bragging. That’s truth. I taught those courses BECAUSE they are hard to staff. I have the skills and it’s why I had the classes.

Ft’ers rarely leave a position two weeks before classes start. They don’t do that because they have ft pay.

Yes, we pay adjuncts squat so that we can keep the bills of the college down. I know that. But we pay the ft’ers a living wage so that we can keep the dropped courses down.

Committee Service
CCDean seemed to think this was the most important thing that differentiated ft’ers from adjuncts. I have never seen a CC where this mattered though. No one got ranks, promotions, tenure, or raises based on committee service.

You reward what you value.

Colleges do not reward committee service.

Is it any wonder that ft’ers are willing to do something to get out of a null advantage?

In the email they sent out they called it “Most Adjuncts Like Working Off the Tenure Track.” The Chronicle has an article about full-timers who are not in the tenure track. They said they like their jobs.

Being non-tenure track does not make you an adjunct.

My alma mater has two non-tenure track lines which have been filled by the same people for twenty years. Their jobs are secure. They don’t have to go through the interview process every year. They also don’t have to publish and they don’t have to get their PhDs.

Non-tenure track does NOT equal adjunct.

A full-time adjunct is someone who teaches full-time hours for an hourly wage much lower than the regular faculty and does not get benefits. I am a full-time adjunct. Those guys are just non-tenure track full-time faculty.

There is a new article out on how adjuncts aren’t really bad for student learning. At The Chronicle What Adjunct Impact? talks about a new study on adjuncts.

For their study, Bolt and Charlier looked at students who were considered to have “high exposure” to adjuncts (at least 75 percent of first semester courses taught by adjuncts) and “low exposure” (up to 25 percent of courses). About 30 percent of the students were in the low exposure group and about 41 percent were in the high exposure group.

Then Bolt and Charlier tracked student success over three years, looking at two measures of success: fall to fall retention, and program completion (either a degree or a certificate, depending on the student’s program). They found absolutely no correlation between adjunct exposure and either of those measures. But they also analyzed other factors, and they found a negative correlation on both measures of success with a student starting in remedial courses.

I’ve talked about this sort of issue elsewhere.

Adjuncts decrease later donations. If your favorite teacher isn’t there, you’re not going to give in his name.

Faculty and students are disengaged with adjuncts.

Adjuncts are the Stepchildren.

Adjuncts Feel Disconnected.

Clearly, I am an adjunct and I do not think that adjuncts are bad for student learning, though they can be. (For example, An Example of a Bad Adjunct.)

Most of the time, if adjuncts are bad, it is because they are on Adjunct Overload.

I do think that adjuncts may be more stressed, because of an extreme teaching load.

The study sounds like a reasonable one.

Erin O’Connor, a former English professor, writes about false advertising in colleges.

One of the arguments against universities’ growing reliance on part-time, non-tenure-track faculty is that it amounts to a form of false advertising: students enroll at Prestigious University X, and expect to receive an education from the world-class faculty employed there. Instead, they get taught by a cadre of grad students and adjunct faculty who work cheap, who are not the reason for the school’s top reputation, and who are, arguably, functioning as part of a shell game played with students’ tuition dollars.

I am thinking about quitting doing what I enjoy and get paid for.

“I don’t have time to write that paper, which has been on my wish list of things to do for over a month. Because, as can happen too often, my teaching gets in the way of my writing.” That’s what I said in a January 23 blog post here at TCE.

That is the biggest impetus for my rethinking all my adjunct work. I like teaching upper division courses, but I have been working for this particular SLAC for a year, teaching the full-time load. There has been no discussion of hiring me full-time. And I’m on the schedule for full-time in the fall.

Here’s the deal:

I am teaching full-time, paid 2x as much as my other college pays, and given upper division writing courses, some of which I have full design rights/responsibilities for.

I like that.

But full-time teaching, for that college would pay 2+x what they are paying me now. I put their name on my conference papers and publications already. Why should they hire me full-time?

So, I am thinking that I need to tell them that I can’t work full-time for them, unless I am employed full-time by them. That would mean giving up 1/2 my money, though. And that’s a big sacrifice.

It also means giving up two classes of sophomore level writing that I thoroughly enjoy. That’s a sacrifice as well.

But if I don’t, what incentive do they have to ever hire me full-time?

And there is the catch-22 in the whole scheme.

And this is why adjuncts have become such a significant part of the higher education workforce.

On the other hand:

This school is not very fond of adjuncts. They have them, but they try not to have too many and they try not to give them to much to do. Right now they have eight in my department, which is a lot.

Six of us have PhDs. Three of us are retired and do not want to work full-time. The opportunity to continue teaching, and to make some decent money teaching classes we love, is worth it. I’m not in that “we” though.

I am the only one of the eight who is teaching a full-time load. And they don’t have another instructor who can teach those classes. Not, at least, without severely handicapping one of their full-timers. (One ft person teaches two of these classes. She would have to teach all four of them with only that course each semester in order to take are of it without me.)

So, what am I doing about it? I am getting my name out there. They have a campus newsletter and I am trying to make sure I am in it every week. (That means I need to stay busy!)

And I am using the school’s name on my conferences and papers. I am hoping that someone will notice how many of those works are out there. So far, I haven’t heard anything about it.

And that is why I am re-thinking my plan to continue teaching courses I love for decent pay.

A contact of mine at a respected private university told me last year that her uni is starting to retreat from the adjunct trend because it discovered that students whose professors came and went didn’t feel as attached to the uni, and the administration was afraid of the consequences for future donations.

from CC Dean

I take notes at the conference sessions I attend. These are not those! Instead, these are the tangential thoughts those notes evoked. There are a lot of them, so I may be doing this over several days.

As you will see from my notes, a lot of information at the conference was helpful. It was definitely worth attending.

Reader as witness
A question was asked about bills of sale for estates during the Middle Ages: By writing it down, does that make the reader/audience a witness? an involved participant in the transaction?

I think this is very interesting, especially in terms of the work I am doing with sexual assault survivors. Do they write down their trauma in order to create a form of witness?

It is an interesting concept and one which I would like to explore/expand.

Community colleges
43% of students in the US who go to college, go to CCs
39% of students in CCs are first generation college students

What that says to me is that lots more students are in CCs than I thought. It also makes me wonder if that 43% are less powerful. Certainly their is a stigma attached to community college attendance. But is it a stigma because of the backgrounds of the students or something else?

Again, it is something I will need to think about.

Feel free to chime in with thoughts on this if you have some.

Adjuncts
In 1953, full-time faculty were 52% and 48% were adjuncts.
In 2003, full-time faculty were 37% and 63% were adjuncts.

My first thought was that adjuncting has been a lot more prevalent for longer than I thought. 1953! This was eight years after WWII ended and we had a lot of GIs in school right after WWII, but I think they were mostly done by 1953. They had to go to work. So what was the motivation for this percentage of adjuncting? Eight years is sufficient to get a college degree and a PhD, if you were interested in that. My grandfather-in-law had not graduated from high school prior to WWII and he did a bachelor’s in 27 months after the war ended.

Disclosure:
I am an adjunct and have been one for eight years. Six of those years I was happy as an adjunct. Two of those years I was working a full-time job, but being paid as an adjunct. I have benefits because the state of Texas ruled that as an adjunct in a state college, I am allowed to purchase health insurance. It’s not great insurance and it costs $650 a month, but I have it. I have been an adjunct at three different colleges.

My view:
I think that adjuncts are the wave of the future. Yes, I am aware that adjuncts already teach 40-60% of the courses in higher education in the US. But I actually think that they will be teaching even more courses in the future.

The justification:
Finances are tight. Many tenure track lines are being lost. As folks move, retire, or die, the jobs they left behind them disappear. There’s not a lot of money and costs are being cut in ways that make sense and ways that don’t. One of the ways that budgets are being reframed is by having fewer full-time instructors.

I doubt seriously that most tenure track positions will be renewed once the economy returns. There are a lot of reasons to not do that.

First, of course, is the question of money. It is cheaper to pay adjuncts. There are plenty of people (including me) around who are willing to teach for minimal pay. The cost equivalent in teaching courses through adjuncts versus full-timers is between 3:1 and 5:1. At some of the better paying schools, this ratio might go even higher.

Second, is the issue of tenure. Without tenure schools can hire and fire at will. New administrations can restructure the school according to their ideals and many want to. If the faculty are half or more adjuncts, then it is easy to reconfigure the course of the school. Even if the schools add lecturer positions, which pay a little more than adjuncting, they will still have this flexibility. A one- to three-year contract will allow continuity without permanence, at a slightly higher price than simply hiring adjuncts to do the same work.

Third, is the issue of expectations. As faculty are let go, other faculty take up the slack. So if three members of a department leave and no more are hired full-time, the other fifteen people take over those three faculty’s committee and service work. There is no loss to the college in terms of service and so there will be no reason to hire full-timers to take over those service projects. The college will expect more service from the tenure-track faculty and they will comply if they want to keep their jobs.

Fourth, the negative of not being able to attract star faculty will not apply. Tenure won’t cease to exist; instead it will cease to be the norm. So, if the college wants to hire Big Name, they will still be able to offer tenure and, perhaps, even more money because they have brought their faculty costs down.

Therefore, hiring more faculty as adjuncts and still retaining the system of tenure will give college administrators more flexibility. Why would any administration, seeing this, decide to renew tenure-track lines and go for the more expensive option?

A report from Community College Faculty Survey of Student Engagement is out. Inside Higher Ed had a lot to say about it.

“Disengaged faculty doesn’t change students. We hire part-time faculty almost exclusively under the understanding that we’re just paying them to show up for three hours in a classroom. Why is that? Is it possible to hire adjunct faculty with a different set of expectations, including that they participate in professional development and other services? What I don’t have are glib, easy answers, but the survey does raise these questions.”

Yes, it is possible to hire adjunct faculty with a different set of expectations. You still may not get what they were looking for though.

CC2 hired adjuncts at $1800/class x5 +$10,000 to be in their office for office hours ten hours a week. If they expected advising and professional development, they would need to pay more. If you pay more, why not just hire full time and get it all?

Forty-three percent of part-time students take evening classes, whereas only 12 percent of full-time students take them. The report stresses that, as a result, “these students have fewer options for certain kinds of interventions that strengthen engagement.”

“A lot of things are happening during the day for daytime students, and not much happens at night for nighttime students … like activities and orientations,” said one of the anonymous students cited in the report. “If you come to class at night, you miss out on all that.”

This is something I would like to see changed. Perhaps hiring one or two faculty full-time for night courses and have them also offer activities at night. If there were a veteran’s group at night, would more of our night veterans be able to attend?

…
The report seems to look at part-timers as the same as full-timers. But, in fact, they are not. Full-timers have offices. They have a secretary whose work they share. They have phones paid for by the school. They have a choice of classes and times to teach. They are paid $50k to be on campus, attend meetings, and teach and grade the same courses that I am paid $18k to teach and grade. So, yeah, for their $32K the school gets something else. At least I hope they do.

I’m more than willing to advise students for $32K a year.