Contingent Faculty across the Disciplines

Power Despite Precarity: Strategies for the Contingent Faculty Movement in Higher Education

PurposeThe faculty, as higher education's most valuable asset, is being dramatically altered. Changes in appointment status drive this alteration, resulting in the essential work of faculty being transformed. Given this change in faculty composition, this study seeks to examine how faculty appointments relate to the production of faculty work in teaching, research, and service. Faculty appointments affect faculty work and it implies that the function of higher education also is altered. The purpose of this paper is to examine the impact of the rise of contingent faculty on the professoriate and higher education.Design/methodology/approachThe National Study of Postsecondary Faculty of 2004 provided data for analyses. There were faculty and instructional staff participants (26,110) from a sample of 980 institutions in the USA and the District of Columbia. The National Center for Education Statistics provides access to its Data Analysis System (DAS) for public use. Basic calculations can result in straight counts, percentages, means, correlation coefficients, and tables. Complex analytic capabilities include covariance using both weighted least squares regression and logistic regression. The DAS was used to examine how changes in faculty composition were related to teaching, research, and service.FindingsOverall, the results indicate that tenured and tenure‐track faculty out‐perform contingent faculty on all major items of teaching, research, and service. With few exceptions, contingent faculty can be viewed as less productive faculty members within the historical function of higher education to promote inquiry and advance the sum of human knowledge, provide general instruction to the students, and develop experts for various branches of the public. If faculty are the heart and health of colleges and universities, the future of higher education may be bleak if the reliance on contingent faculty continues to soar.Practical implicationsThe gap between performance levels of tenure/tenure‐track and contingent faculty in teaching, research, and service indicates the quality of higher education is rapidly eroding. This study indicated that the contributions to promoting inquiry and advancing the sum of human knowledge are diminished with increasing use of contingent faculty. It suggests that not only is the work of faculty threatened by a contingent faculty approach but the well‐being of higher education is threatened also.Social implicationsOverall, tenured and tenure‐track faculty out‐performed other types of faculty appointments according to essential values of faculty – teaching research, and service. Faculty appointments play a significant role in the overall performance of higher education. The function of higher education cannot help but be affected. Society relies on higher education for not only career training but an educated citizenry. If left to contract and part‐time help, it raises concern for the overall well being of society.Originality/valueAlthough there is literature discussing concerns about the influx of contingent faculty, there is little, if any, empirical evidence of its impact on the professoriate and its relationship to the overall health and well being of higher education. This study suggests that the traditional framework of faculty work – teaching, research, and service – is being dramatically altered.

This exploratory study investigated Tuskegee University contingent faculty's integration of technology in instruction, their knowledge of tech-related pedagogy, and self-efficacy regarding learning and integrating technology in the classroom. The data consisted of eight thematic interviews with items derived from the modified HE-TPACK and self-efficacy questionnaires. HE-TPACK is a framework and an instrument to measure the level of technology integration into instruction. It provides insight into how practices and training aspects from the technology content knowledge (TCK), pedagogical knowledge (PK), and technology knowledge (TK) domains interrelate with self-efficacy levels. The results identified several knowledge domains in the HE-TPACK model that were associated with self-efficacy beliefs about technology integration. The eight "second-careerer's" results also indicated that HE-TPACK competencies and learning-centered pedagogy were necessary but insufficient conditions for transformation levels for technology integration for instruction. These "career enders" sought higher education because of the proximity to the student fulfilling their formal positions in the contingent faculty field (Cruz & Shoulder, 2013). The findings of this study are informative to contingent faculty at Tuskegee University, who hope to improve their use of technology in instruction through the LMS, and to leadership to determine more effective ways to support contingent faculty technological needs.--Author's abstract

Institutions of higher education play a major role in teaching undergraduate students. Historically, most courses have been taught by tenure-track (TT) faculty who may also be responsible for research or scholarly activities. However, a recent shift from "teaching-intensive" TT faculty to "teaching-only" contingent faculty off the tenure track has highlighted the importance of understanding the experiences of contingent faculty. While there have been an increasing number of studies examining the experiences of part-time contingent faculty, few studies have directly surveyed the increasing number of full-time, non-tenure-track (NTT) teaching faculty in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) to capture their experiences, nor are we aware of any study that has examined the roles of NTT teaching faculty within one discipline to examine any potential disciplinary differences that may arise across STEM fields. Here, we focus on the experiences of full-time, non-tenure-track faculty in biology whose primary responsibility is teaching. We conducted a random stratified sampling of institutions using the Carnegie classifications to identify potential full-time NTT teaching faculty at over 10% of all institutions in the United States. Our results from surveying these faculty found both positive and negative themes, including (i) NTT teaching faculty being less diverse than the STEM professoriate at large; (ii) NTT teaching faculty reporting mixed feelings on institutional support, identifying a range of opportunities to better support NTT teaching faculty; (iii) NTT teaching faculty often having limited participation in voting for department and institutional matters and reporting mixed feelings of belonging and value; and (iv) NTT teaching faculty having high amounts of autonomy over their teaching but still struggling in key areas. We end with specific implications and recommendations for our field to better support NTT teaching faculty in biology.

In recent decades English Departments and the Humanities generally have increasingly relied on part-time, non-tenure track faculty hired semester by semester to teach multiple sections of first-year composition with low pay, few benefits. Administrators have rationalized this practice by arguing that institutions need contingent faculty to protect tenure-track faculty in times of financial difficulty and to manage fluctuating enrollments. When Hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans and forced universities and community colleges to declare financial exigency or force majeur, contingent faculty were, as expected, the first to be let go. However, their dismissal did not protect tenured and tenure-track faculty from also being laid off. Moreover, without the support of contingent faculty, the English Department at Xavier University successfully managed to staff the teaching of composition in the first semesters following Katrina, a period of great uncertainty and fluctuating enrollments. This success shows that the employment of large numbers of part-time faculty can no longer be endorsed. Furthermore, faculty should strive to fully integrate their part-time colleagues into the academic community, and departmental administrators should follow the example of those departments who have been successful in turning part-time positions into full-time, tenure-track appointments.

Book Review: <i>Contingent Faculty And The Remaking Of Higher Education: A Labor History</i> by Fure-Slocum, E., &amp; Goldstene, C. Fure-SlocumE.GoldsteneC. (Eds.). (2024). Contingent Faculty And The Remaking Of Higher Education: A Labor History (pp. i–xxiv, 1–312). University of Illinois Press. ISBN 978-0-252-08765-3, $28

FORUM: Issues about Part-Time and Contingent Faculty is a peer-reviewed publication concerning working conditions, professional life, activism, and perspectives of non-tenure-track faculty in college

In this article I will examine the various arguments that have been made for and against union competition in higher education from the point of view of contingent faculty in particular and will include examples of how this competition has affected faculty. Drawing from parallel experiences in other labor sectors, I make the argument that the debate on competitive (or dual) unionism is largely misplaced and that a new analysis needs to focus on how any tactic or strategy serves contingent faculty’s need for a democratic, social-movement unionism. I conclude with an argument for what has been called the inside-outside strategy, working within existing larger groups, but also building independent formations of specifically contingent faculty.

Campus Equity Week in fall 2001 marked heightened organizing among metro Chicago's higher‐education contingent faculty, and it now seems poised to expand more rapidly. Increased organizational commitment by both AFT and NEA affiliates, as well as the founding of the Chicago Chapter of the Coalition of Contingent Academic Labor (COCAL), has sparked organizing among the contingent faculty in Chicago City Colleges, the largest single group in the area.

This study makes use of detailed student-level data from eight cohorts of first-year students at Northwestern University to investigate the relative effects of tenure track/tenured versus contingent faculty on student learning. We focus on classes taken during a student’s first term at Northwestern and employ an identification strategy in which we control for both student-level fixed effects and next-class-taken fixed effects to measure the degree to which contingent faculty contribute more or less to lasting student learning than do other faculty. We find consistent evidence that students learn relatively more from contingent faculty in their firstterm courses. This result is driven by the fact that the bottom quarter of tenure track/tenured faculty (as indicted by our measure of teaching effectiveness) has lower “value added” than their contingent counterparts. Differences between contingent and tenure track/tenured faculty are present across a wide variety of subject areas and are particularly pronounced for Northwestern’s averages and less-qualified students.

This chapter serves as the ten-year anniversary of our scholarhood – chronicling our experiences as doctoral students to tenure-track and contingent faculty. We review literature and highlight findings from a scholarly personal narrative study wherein we served as researcher-participants and contingent Black women faculty. We specifically detail how we have mentored and retained each other as cohort mates, research collaborators, and writing (life) group members in predominantly White spaces. We provide collective strategies and recommendations for cultivating a strong accountability mentoring group and we encourage other Black women to narrate their/our diverse experiences with, for, and alongside Black women.

Labor organizing efforts grew following the COVID-19 pandemic in American higher education institutions. This research brief examines unionization trends at private colleges and universities from 2007 through 2023, revealing staff as the main force behind unionization attempts, followed by contingent faculty. The Service Employees International Union plays a significant role in representing college and university employees. A disproportionate number of elections occurred in a handful of union-friendly states and well-resourced institutions. This study underscores the importance of understanding historic unionization efforts, shedding light on often overlooked staff categories, such as maintenance and campus security.

Interrogating the Politics of Post-9/11 Academic Freedom John Collins (bio) Doumani, Beshara, ed. 2006. Academic Freedom After September 11. New York: Zone Books. $42.95 hc. $22.95 sc. 327 pp. Gerstmann, EvanMatthew J. Streb, eds. 2006. Academic Freedom at the Dawn of a New Century: How Terrorism, Governments, and Culture Wars Impact Free Speech. Stanford: Stanford University Press. $53.00 hc. $24.95 sc. xvi + 241 pp. Much like freedom itself, academic freedom appears to be a concept that generates a superficial consensus (is anyone opposed to it?), only to give way to sharp divergences of opinion as soon as one enters into the philosophical, ideological, legal, and institutional details. In an academic environment that remains deeply marked by the “culture wars” of the 1980s and 1990s, the dilemmas raised by the September 11 attacks and the U.S. response to them have sparked a [End Page 142] new round of debate over the definition of academic freedom, its proper extension, and the existence of threats to its protection. Within such a context, academic freedom occupies a central place alongside a host of other important issues (e.g., workload and compensation, collective bargaining, tenure and promotion policies, discrimination and equity issues, challenges faced by contingent faculty, declining time for research) in the minds of today’s college and university professors. Anyone attempting to grapple with the complexities of academic freedom in the post-September 11 era is immediately confronted with a series of analytical challenges. The first, which might be called macropolitical, turns on the question of how to characterize the particular historical matrix within which academic work is currently taking place. On the one hand, there is the understandable need to focus critical attention on the actions carried out by the George W. Bush administration under the rubric of the “global war on terrorism” and their deleterious effects on the work of teaching, learning, and research. These actions include the infamously Orwellian USA-PATRIOT Act, but also a host of lesser-known steps designed to restrict access to information and exert control over scholarly research. On the other hand, there is a real danger that in focusing on the “trees” of these recent developments, we might find ourselves unable to see the “forest”: the ongoing transformation in the political economy of higher education and intellectual work more generally, a process that predates September 11 and will undoubtedly outlive the “global war on terrorism.” The best analyses of academic freedom today are those that are able to hold all of these processes in play, illuminating how twenty-first-century threats to academic freedom are embedded in a longer trajectory. The second challenge, closely related to the first, concerns the tension between the individual and the collective. The post-9/11 period has given us a series of medium- and high-profile test cases (e.g., Nicholas de Genova, Ward Churchill, Sami al-Arian), the results of which have revealed important patterns in the kinds of protection afforded (or not afforded) to scholars who hold dissident views. At the same time, one must always be mindful of the fact that such cases can easily draw our attention away from the deeper structural factors that are shaping the ideological environment in which all intellectual work takes place. Of particular concern here are the phenomenon of self-censorship, which by definition does not present itself in readily visible form, and the growing influence of private advocacy organizations seeking to punish dissident intellectuals and shape broader curricular, research, and hiring agendas. More generally, the issue of academic freedom can never be limited to questions [End Page 143] of individual free speech, as crucial as those questions are. Academic freedom is always a structural issue, and it can be fundamentally threatened even in a situation where free speech is fully protected. Finally, there is an important geopolitical dilemma to be faced. For obvious reasons, U.S.-based analyses of post-9/11 academic freedom issues are likely to put the U.S. academic environment at the center. Yet here, as always, one must be wary of the danger of U.S. exceptionalism and navel-gazing. The problems confronting academics and students in...

Contributors argue that the key to innovative teaching and scholarship lies in institutional support for the contingent labor force, and they encourage contingent faculty to organize self-mentoring gr

ABSTRACTThis essay considers academic labor in communication studies through the lens of Michael Bérubé and Jennifer Ruth’s The Humanities, Higher Education, and Academic Freedom. Bérubé and Ruth argue that, by and large, knowledge production in the humanities is in “fine shape,” but that the decades-long trend away from tenure-track towards contingent faculty employment has “hollowed out” the profession of college teaching—a de-professionalization that departments, disciplines, and institutions have yet to fully reckon with. We find Bérubé’s and Ruth’s policy prescription for this exigent moment—the creation of a teaching-intensive tenure-track for contingent faculty—to be a provocative frame through which to begin addressing casualization in communication studies. Our hope is to spark conversation in response to a rather large question: At a time when every profession, from law to medicine to journalism, faces varying degrees and consequences of casualization, what would it mean to reprofessionalize ourselves, as communication studies faculty?