After relying for years on anecdotal evidence and outdated statistics, the debate over the use of part-time faculty members took on new urgency last week with the release of a report filled with hard data. It suggested an even darker view of the situation than conventional wisdom supposed, showing that nontenure-track instructors make up almost half of the teaching staff in many humanities and social-science disciplines.
The report, based on a survey sponsored by a coalition of 25 disciplinary associations, also said that part-time and adjunct professors receive far less pay and far fewer benefits than their peers.
"This report is going to reveal a shameful truth," said Richard Moser, a national field representative of the American Association of University Professors. "Administrations have abandoned the notion that the university should set an example of good citizenship, that they have turned away from the pursuit of justice and instead set up the sweatshops of the future for the greedy to imitate."
The report, which was released by the Coalition on the Academic Workforce, drew on a survey of departments in 10 social-science and humanities fields to discover which types of faculty members teach what courses, and what levels of pay and benefits the professors receive. The survey, conducted by the opinion-research firm Roper Starch, made these findings:
* Freestanding composition programs have by far the highest proportion of courses 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 less than half of the introductory undergraduate courses offered. Full-time, tenure-track instructors teach only a fraction of courses in English, composition, foreign languages, and philology, ranging from 6.9 percent to 34 percent.
* Graduate-student instructors teach from 7 percent to 34 percent of all undergraduate courses, depending on the discipline, and up to 42.5 percent of introductory courses.
* Part-time faculty members are rarely afforded benefits. Only 22.6 percent of history departments offer any benefits to part-timers; in other disciplines, only about 40 percent offer 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 on a par with porters and fast-food workers.
The coalition's report grew in part out of pressure put on the professional disciplines by graduate-student activists in 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.
Since 1998, leaders of the M.L.A. have worked with their counterparts in other academic associations to form the coalition and sponsor the 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 college. Those results are among the project's most surprising, as they show that elite, Ph.D.-granting institutions are just as likely as community colleges to use nontenured or part-time professors in English and foreign-language courses.
According to the M.L.A., full-time, tenured or tenure-track professors at doctoral institutions teach only 30.5 percent of English courses and 28.4 percent of foreign-language courses; in departments at associate-degree colleges, full-time, tenured or tenure-track instructors teach 31.8 percent of English courses and 26.2 percent of language courses.
Only in English departments that do not offer graduate degrees does the proportion of tenured and tenure-track faculty members exceed half (53.6 percent). At those same baccalaureate institutions, 46.3 percent of the foreign-language courses are taught by tenure-track and tenured faculty members.
Cary Nelson, an English professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign who helped the graduate students push the M.L.A. motion, described those results as "stunning."
He added: "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. 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."
Faculty members interviewed last week -- full time and part time alike -- said they expected the findings of the two reports to strengthen the claims of advocates for part-timers. "There are no surprises," said Karen Thompson, who heads the part-time-faculty union at Rutgers University at New Brunswick, "but it's certainly about time people begin to act on it."
Ms. Thompson added that the survey's accounting of the quality-of-life issues faced by adjunct professors should underscore the report's bleak findings: "The importance of the conditions of teaching personnel is of the utmost because those are also the learning conditions of the students."
She and others cited the report's findings that institutions make it difficult for part-timers to do their jobs, which in turn diminishes the quality of their students' education. The report confirmed that many part-timers don't have access to e-mail, or even their own offices or telephones on the campus.
"Students can't get ahold of part-timers -- they're not in the phone directories, they're not in the catalogs," 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. "By having us come and go on campus, our ability to be involved with students is undercut."
The sheer amount of publicity generated by the survey should help part-time faculty members advance their grievances, but some of those interviewed said they hoped administrators might be moved to take action out of simple embarrassment.
"The survey tears away the veil of lies about the new economy -- that if you get a good education and become an expert in the knowledge economy, you will get a good job," commented the A.A.U.P.'s Mr. Moser. "Here we have some of the most highly educated professionals in the country, and they're barely making minimum wage."
Ernst Benjamin, director of research for the A.A.U.P., emphasized that the survey had broken new ground by taking the accounting of faculty members down to the departmental level. "That's new data," he said....
Mr. Benjamin said that the new data made clear that there aren't even enough full-time professors to instruct 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," he said.
In addition, Mr. Benjamin said, the report did far more than 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 it wasn't known what proportion of the courses they were teaching.
While many academics are eagerly awaiting the M.L.A.'s release of the data broken down by departments, Mr. Benjamin said the survey matters without those details. "This survey is very valuable even if it 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 the first time, I can tell them that 25 percent make less than $2,000."
Many observers were struck by the meager per-course pay for part-time instructors. "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 he hoped that the study's concrete findings would prompt tenured professors to pay more attention to the part-timer 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 professors were starting to realize with this study that the part-time system "undermines tenure, undermines the institutions they work in."
For those who have paid more attention to the plight of part-time faculty members, the concern of full-time, tenured professors comes late in the game. "A lot of people are going to claim to be 'shocked' by the results," said William Pannapacker, an assistant professor of English at Hope College who, as a graduate student, helped force Mr. Foner's counterparts in the M.L.A. to take a look at part-timers. "I don't think anyone is going to be able to claim anymore that the crisis is merely the whining of people who couldn't cut it in the profession. This is a major structural catastrophe."
As for the study's ramifications, Mr. Moser of the A.A.U.P. said, "It will allow us to think about creating industry standards that we can hold universities accountable to. . . . We're still naive enough to believe that information is power."
The coalition's report is available on the American Historical Association's World Wide Web site (http://www.theaha.org/caw/index.htm).
Courtney Leatherman contributed to this article.