This year, the University further shifted toward hiring non-tenure track professors (“non-tenure track” is the University’s term for “adjunct”). Information released under the Freedom of Information Act shows that in the 2012-13 academic year, there were 151 non-tenure track teaching faculty, whereas in the 2014-15 year there have been 270. This compares to the roughly 860 tenure-track professors for both academic years.
There are benefits to recruiting non-tenure track faculty for any university. Hiring part-time faculty allows the University a decent amount of flexibility in hiring individuals with expertise but who have full-time jobs elsewhere, and maintaining part-time faculty also allows for experimentation with curricula. And, for part-time faculty who are eligible for tenure, the University has more freedom to evaluate them before granting tenure.
But not all part-time faculty are eligible for tenure — and the tension between hiring tenured and non-tenured faculty should not be ignored. There is room for non-tenured faculty at our University, and those faculty members have a lot to offer — but we should be wary of too much of an increase in the number of non-tenure track faculty at our school.
In an excerpt from one of his books, Keith Hoeller, an adjunct professor at Green River Community College in Washington, outlines the numerous negative effects of hiring too many adjunct faculty members. He analogizes universities’ hiring of part-time faculty to Walmart’s hiring of part-time workers — Walmart offers low pay, no benefits and no job security for its part-time workers. The same can be true of universities’ treatment of adjunct faculty: part-time faculty receive lower salaries, few or no benefits and very little job security. Adjunct faculty also experience larger percentage points of dissatisfaction with their jobs compared to tenured faculty, and may experience what Hoeller dubs “tenurism” — that is, social hierarchies between tenured faculty and non-tenure track faculty.
The trend of shifting toward non-tenure track faculty is increasing across the board: between 1975 and 2011, the percentage of professors holding tenure-track positions has been cut nearly in half.
We see from this trend that the possibility of tenure is becoming increasingly slim for this and future generations of members of the academy. While the presence of adjunct professors is by no means inherently bad — quite the contrary — too much an increase in the presence of adjunct professors suggests a general shift away from tenure — which would, though tenure has its own pros and cons, be a bad move for retention of faculty and for faculty members’ job security. The University is trying to retain faculty, establish itself as a credible institution and should be trying to provide appropriate benefits to its workers. For these reasons and more, while we should not hesitate to hire non-tenure track professors, we should consider more of those professors for tenure in order not to let non-tenure track professors become an overwhelming portion of our faculty.
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