A Growing Number of Professors Are Off the Tenure Track, Report Says By ANA MARIE COX
The gaps between the average salaries of professors at public and at private institutions, and between tenured and nontenured faculty members, continue to widen -- even as the percentage of professors who are tenured or on the tenure track decreases, says a report released last week by the National Education Association. The report, based on 1998-99 data collected by the U.S. Department of Education from 18,000 faculty members at 960 institutions, supports the assertion of many faculty leaders that the use of part-time labor undercuts the tenure system.
The report says tenured professors of all ranks at public research institutions earned $17,000 less, on average, than their tenured counterparts at private research institutions. Those figures corroborate a somewhat similar 2000-1 study by the American Association of University Professors that -- using a different classification system -- found differences between the salaries of professors at public doctoral institutions and those at private doctoral institutions of $23,000 at the full-professor level and $10,000 at the associate-professor level. (See an article from The Chronicle, April 20.)
John Lee, president of JBL Associates, a group in Bethesda, Md., that analyzed the data for the N.E.A., said of the public- and private-professors' salaries, "That's a huge difference, considering the similar concerns and responsibilities of professors at public and private research universities."
The salary disparity between tenured and nontenure-track faculty members at all research and doctoral institutions is even more striking. According to the N.E.A. report, tenured professors of all ranks at private research institutions earned an average of $87,000 -- $31,000 more than nontenure-track faculty members. Tenured faculty members at public research institutions earned $69,000 -- $26,000 more than their nontenure-track colleagues at the same universities.
The compensation discrepancies take on greater importance when one looks at the percentage of all faculty members with tenure. The percentage of full-time faculty members with tenure held steady at about 55 percent from the last Education Department survey, in 1992-93. But, says Mr. Lee, the fall to 32 percent from 35 percent in all (full- and part-time) faculty members who hold tenure "is mostly due to the increased number of part-timers, and the great number of professors working at institutions that don't offer tenure."
The percentage of part-time faculty members rose to 45 percent from 40 percent between 1992-93 and 1998-99, and the percentage of all faculty members at institutions without tenure grew to 14 percent, almost double the 8 percent reported in 1992-93. Community colleges were the least likely to offer tenure, according to the study, and public research universities were the most likely.
In a written statement, Robert F. Chase, the N.E.A. president, bemoaned the report's findings regarding tenure. "Tenure is vitally important to sustaining high quality in our nation's higher-education system," he said. "Unfortunately, there is a shrinking number of tenured faculty members who are the guardians of the long-term educational health and quality of our institutions."
The report is available online at <http://www.nea.org/he/heupdate/vol7no3.pdf> (requires Adobe Acrobat Reader, available free).