EMUTalk.org regular Mark Higbee sent me a link to an interesting article in the most recent Chronicle of Higher Education, “Studies link use of part-time instructors to lower student success.” Here are the opening paragraphs:
At a time when colleges are under increasing financial pressure to rely more on part-time faculty, three new studies suggest that doing so erodes the quality of education many students receive.
Part-timers’ inability or unwillingness to devote more time to students outside the classroom, the research suggests, results in the denial of important support services to many students—including, often, those who need the most help.
And in a finding that breaks new ground, one of the studies concludes that heavy reliance on part-timers can actually hurt the performance of full-time, tenure-track faculty members.
It’s well worth reading; three quick thoughts for now:
- This is not to say we don’t have a lot of great part-time and non-tenure-track instructors in universities and at EMU. In my field, it is routine to teach the introductory course– aka “freshman composition”– with part-timers and grad students. There is a whole cottage industry of scholarship and debate about this practice, the details of which I will spare all of you. But I just want to make sure that it’s clear from the outset that most of these folks are doing the best job that they can do under the circumstances, and the research in this CHE article makes it clear that they aren’t trying to “blame” part-timers.
- In my experiences at EMU, the use of part-timers is the result of a lot of different things, but in recent years, it seems to me to be the result of a gradual shift of various administrative functions– “administration creep” is the term I’ve often heard. Basically, the thinking goes that the administration passes along/the faculty takes up various bits and pieces of administrative work, especially things like assessment, program review, supervising other teachers (grad students, part-timers, and/or lecturers), student recruiting and retention, advising, etc., etc. When faculty take on these roles, they often get some kind of course release, and when they get a course release, then the institution hires part-timers to make up the difference. This is a complicated situation, but I really have begun to wonder if this arrangement, which many faculty interested in some quasi-administrative work have embraced (and I should point out that I am among this group: I had course release to do stuff like this until this year), is good for students, faculty, the “bargaining unit,” and the institution as a whole.
- Finally, this reminds me of a post on the often insightful blog “Confessions of a Community College Dean” some months ago. I can’t remember the exact post/quote, but I will try my best to paraphrase it: If you are someone who is more concerned about how the use of part-time faculty hurts the quality of the “educational experience” than about how the costs of higher education continue to escalate, then that means you are probably a tenure-track faculty member in higher education. If, on the other hand, you are more concerned about the costs and less concerned about who is doing the teaching (or even it’s “quality” in some broad sense), then you are probably everyone else. And the fact that “everyone else” (e.g., parents, students, voters, legislators, etc.) sees it differently is a problem that folks in higher ed need to address.
Don’t forget the cases where faculty decide to pad their CVs for their next (probably administrative) job and cheerfully throw full-time employees under the bus in exchange for release time.
And then tout EMU as a place where “You get professors for your freshman classes!*
*Except English where you’ll get grad students and/or part-time faculty.
If you are thinking of a particular issue regarding the writing center, GT, you are extremely wrong in many levels and in many ways.
As for professors and first year students: it is very true that most sections of English 120 and English 121 are taught by lecturers, part-timers, and graduate assistants. This is the pattern/method at every public institution that has a first year writing program that I know of: it’s a class taught mostly by non-tenure-track folks.
Having said that, first year students get lots of professorial experiences in English in the form of literature classes. Further, us professor-types do teach freshman comp once in a while. I think I’m going to be teaching it this spring and probably in the fall term next year, depending on what’s going on with that.
I urge EMU Talk readers to read the full CHRONICLE report on these new studies that find the reliance on adjuncts to be detrimental to the purposes of a university.
And here’s a proposition that I believe is factual, but certainly worthy of debate: At EMU, most sections assigned to adjunct instructors are not so assigned because regular faculty have release time, but because the university managers have opted to rely on adjuncts as a permanent pool of instructors, covering a large portion of our classes. They are cheap, at least in the short run. This proposition is certainly true of the national trends. An adjunct earning $2,700 to teach a course taken by 40 students is dirt cheap, and that’s the basic reason why they are assigned so many sections.
What makes these studies and other recent ones as well, reported in the CHRONICLE is that they find that there are huge educational costs, in such terms as graduation rates, for the undergraduates whose courses are increasingly taught by adjuncts.
Penny wise, pound foolish. That’s the trend for such much of higher education these days, with short term budgets being valued more than long term goals.
Education First!