Report Details Colleges' Heavy Reliance on Part-Time Instructors By ANA MARIE COX
A report aimed at injecting hard data into the long-simmering debate over the use of part-time professors in academe has mostly confirmed the conventional wisdom: that nontenure-track instructors make up almost half of the teaching staff in many humanities and social-science disciplines. The survey also found that the nontenure-track professors receive far less pay and far fewer benefits than their peers.
The report, to be released today by the Coalition on the Academic Workforce, an association of the leaders of disciplinary societies, surveyed departments in 10 social-science and humanities fields to discover which types of faculty members teach what courses, and what kinds of pay and benefits the professors receive. The survey, which was conducted by the opinion-research firm Roper Starch, made these findings:
* Freestanding composition programs have by far the highest proportion of classes taught by part-time and graduate-student instructors (31.4 percent and 34.9 percent, respectively) and the lowest taught by tenure-track instructors (14.6 percent). * Except in history and art history, full-time tenure-track professors teach fewer than half of the introductory undergraduate courses offered. In English, composition, foreign languages, and philology, full-time tenure-track instructors teach only a fraction of such courses, ranging from 6.9 percent to 34 percent. * In different disciplines, graduate-student instructors teach anywhere from 7 percent to 34 percent of all undergraduate classes, and up to 42.5 percent of introductory courses. * Part-time faculty members are rarely afforded benefits. Only 22.6 percent of history departments offered any benefits to part-timers, while in other disciplines, only about 40 percent offered benefits. * Even teaching four courses a term, part-time faculty members are paid at a rate -- less than $3,000 per course on average -- that puts them in an equivalent salary range to fast-food workers and baggage porters.
In part, the coalition's study stems from pressure put on professional disciplines by graduate-student activists within the Modern Language Association. During the 1998 meeting of the M.L.A.'s Delegate Assembly, the association's graduate-student caucus introduced a successful motion to require the M.L.A. to collect and publish data on the salaries and working conditions of part-time faculty members. (See an article from The Chronicle, January 8, 1999.) In the years since the 1998 meeting, leaders of the M.L.A. worked with their counterparts at other academic associations -- 25 in all -- to form the coalition and to conduct this joint study. Because of the specific demands of the graduate-student motion, the M.L.A. will release its own report on graduate-student and part-time instructors; that report will attach the names of departments at specific universities to the data.
A preliminary summary released by the M.L.A. looked at part-time and graduate-student instruction by type of institution. These results are among the project's most surprising, as they show that elite, Ph.D.-granting institutions are just as likely as colleges that grant only associate degrees to use nontenured or part-time faculty members in English and foreign-language courses.
According to the M.L.A., full-time tenured or tenure-track professors at doctorate-granting institutions teach only 30.5 percent of English classes and 28.4 percent of foreign-language classes; in departments at associate-degree colleges, full-time tenured or tenure-track instructors teach 31.8 percent of English classes and 26.2 percent of language classes. Only in English departments that do not offer graduate degrees at institutions that grant only bachelor's degrees did the proportion of tenured and tenure-track instructors exceed half (53.6 percent); 46.3 percent of the foreign-language courses at those institutions were taught by tenure-track and tenured faculty.
Faculty members interviewed by The Chronicle -- full-time and part-time alike -- expect the findings of the two surveys to strengthen the claims of advocates for part-timers.
Ernst Benjamin, director of research for the American Association of University Professors, emphasized that the surveys broke new ground by taking the accounting of faculty members down to the departmental level. "That's new data," he said.
Mr. Benjamin said the report did far more than simply confirm the anecdotal sense that colleges rely heavily on part-timers. In the past, he said, researchers have known how many part-timers were teaching, but researchers haven't known what proportion of the classes part-timers were teaching. While many academics are eagerly awaiting the M.L.A.'s release of the data broken down by departments, Mr. Benjamin said that even without those details, the survey is important. "This survey is very valuable even if doesn't name names because it's telling us what the salary patterns are." He added: "People call me all the time for part-time salary data and I can't give it to them. So for first time I can tell them that 25 percent make less than $2,000."
Many observers were struck by how meager the per-course pay is for part-time faculty members. "To be honest," said Eric Foner, president of the American Historical Association, "I thought the pay was a little better. What is it they're making? Sixteen hundred? Two thousand? That sounds like 20 years ago. Clearly, it's impossible to make a living teaching adjunct courses."
Mr. Foner, a professor of history at Columbia University, said that he hoped the study's concrete findings would prompt tenured professors to pay more attention to the part-time issue. "This is really the first time that tenured professors are taking notice and taking action," he said. "In the past, it was, 'We have tenure, we're teaching what we want, it's not our problem.'" Mr. Foner said that with this study, professors are starting to realize that the part-time system "undermines tenure, undermines the institutions they work in."
He added: "We don't want to be the last generation of full-time faculty."
David Adamany, the president of Temple University, who participated in the first meeting of the Coalition on the Academic Workforce in 1998, said the report failed to confront the most important question of all: What effect does the use of part-timers have on the quality of education?
"This describes who does the teaching but not whether that has any effect upon students or not," he said. "It may well be that part-time teachers are as effective or even more effective in introductory courses than the full-time faculty, but we don't know that. This report gives us useful information but doesn't answer the fundamental question of whether the growing use of part-time faculty has any effect whatsoever on education."
Mr. Adamany agreed that part-time salaries are too low, but he questioned where the money for raises was going to come from. Institutions don't have the resources to hire more full-timers, he argued, when the full-time professors they already have are winning reduced teaching loads and avoiding teaching introductory courses. "Institutions are filling in the curriculum that is no longer being taught by the full-time faculty by hiring part-timers."
Mr. Benjamin said that the new data make clear that there aren't even enough full-time professors to provide instruction to first- and second-year students. "If you took the full-time faculty teaching upper divisions and said, `You should teach the introductory courses,' then there wouldn't be anybody to teach the upper divisions."
Part-time faculty members found vindication in the survey.
"I think this study reinforces what a lot of us have thought," said Keith Hoeller, a part-time instructor of philosophy at Green River Community College and cofounder of the Washington Part-Time Faculty Association, which represents adjuncts in Washington State. "The academy has developed a caste system for its faculty. I've called it `academic apartheid.' A minority of full-time faculty rule over a vast majority of part-time faculty."
Critics often complain that the use of part-time and graduate-student instructors gives students substandard education. Mr. Hoeller said -- and Mr. Foner agreed -- that students are "cheated" by the part-time system, but not because part-time instructors are less-able instructors. Said Mr. Hoeller: "First, a fraud is being perpetrated by colleges by their not revealing the large number of part-time faculty that they are using." But just as harmful to a student's education, Mr. Hoeller argued, is the fact that "by having us come and go on campus, our ability to be involved with students is undercut." The coalition's study confirmed that many part-timers don't have access to e-mail, or their own offices or phones on campus, Mr. Hoeller noted. "Students can't get a hold of part-timers -- they're not in the phone directories, they're not in the catalogs."
Cary Nelson, an English professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign who helped the graduate students push their original motion within the M.L.A., described as "stunning" the survey's finding that English departments at Ph.D.-granting institutions depend on part-timers and graduate teaching assistants as much as community colleges do. "I have made the argument before that you can go to Yale and basically get the same instruction you'd get at Long Island Community College because higher education is relying on the same labor pool," he said. "So you have the institutions with the highest self image and the greatest amount of pride and the greatest amount of cult prestige aligned, in terms of their labor policies, with institutions at the bottom end of the ladder. The survey made that stark."
The full report can be found at <http://www.theaha.org/caw/index.htm >.
Courtney Leatherman contributed to this report.