Academic Employment Numbers: A Closer Look


Articles about employment in higher education sometimes mention that 75% of today’s college instructors are adjuncts. That number—or at least the idea that there are very many adjuncts employed by universities—seems to inform various discussions about academic training and employment (such as whether there are too many philosophy PhDs — here and here, for example). Is that figure correct?

If Phillip Magness, an historian and adjunct professor at George Mason University, is correct, the answer is No. He observes that people (especially those in the media) assume that “non-tenure-track” means “adjunct.” That assumption is mistaken. He writes:

The false 75% figure, and others like it, actually refers to the approximate number of non-tenure track “contingent” faculty in the United States – a number that includes several hundred thousand full time professors who have renewable appointments with benefits and are paid at levels comparable to a tenure track hire. Adjuncts actually comprise about 45% of all faculty when you include the heavily distorted for-profit college industry. In traditional not-for-profit higher ed, adjuncts only make up about one third of the faculty.

He shares the relevant data here. There, he notes:

Practically none of the news stories on the so-called “adjunct majority” indicate that they are referring to patterns that are most evident at places like the University of Phoenix, or that include community colleges where adjuncts have long been the norm. Rather, they invariably suggest that the “adjunct explosion” is taking place at normal 4-year universities. They toss out the 76% statistical trope as if it were true of Harvard, UCLA, Texas A&M, and Ohio State, when nothing could be further from the truth.

In short, relax. Traditional 4-year degree higher ed isn’t descending into an adjunct death spiral where three quarters of the faculty are also part time replacements for formerly full time positions. If you take out the For-Profits and community colleges, the adjunct totals are a comparatively tame rate of only about a third of the faculty. And that rate, I submit, is both a reasonable expectation and a beneficial one as it reflects on the use of adjuncts to augment and supplement classroom offerings that are still very much situated amongst a full time faculty core.

Magness’ analysis is consistent with the data we have for philosophy. As reported here last year, the Humanities Departmental Survey conducted by the American Academy of Arts and Sciences indicated that 69% of philosophy faculty are tenured or tenure-track, and that the instructor of record for philosophy undergraduate courses, on average, is a tenured or tenure-track professor 73% of the time.

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Warwick University MA in Philosophy
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LecturePig
LecturePig
8 years ago

I am a full-time contingent faculty member at a large public research institution. As a “lecturer” I earn 30% less than the other junior faculty in my department; I have no voice in departmental matters; I do not qualify for research and development travel funding like the other junior faculty; I teach more than the other junior faculty (I also publish more and attend more conferences); I must expose myself to the rigors of the job market and its costs each and every fall/winter; I live under the constant stress of not knowing, from year to year, whether my contract will be renewed. (This past year I signed my contract about a week before Fall classes started…because it took our dean that long to approve my funding line for the year). So, while adjuncts who are not full time are worse off than people in my position, I find it somewhat offensive and blinkered for Mr. Magness (or anyone else) to think that the position of folks like me is “comparable” in any way to a tenure track position. It is not.

Commentator
Commentator
Reply to  LecturePig
8 years ago

It is really unreasonable that these sort of job conditions exist. Why can’t the contracts, at the vest least, be for longer periods? This is an exploitative situation and I see no ethical justification for it.

Avi Z.
Avi Z.
8 years ago

I agree with LecturePig. Over too many years of job hunting, I have declined a few offered “Lecturer” or VAP positions that involved 4/4 or 5/5 loads for less than $30,000 with no benefits, no travel funding, and no private office. One might argue those jobs are more convenient and secure than adjuncting at multiple schools for the same compensation and some may even have long term stability, but they really are adjunct positions in all but name. By contrast, I have had a few “real” VAP positions that paid nearly T-T starting salary with benefits, travel funding, and private office. Two of those even included the right to vote on departmental matters.

Francisco
Francisco
8 years ago

Lecture Pig – the numbers cited in the links are the national median, which is $47.5K for full time “contingent” faculty. Starting salary for a 1st year tenure track runs about $50K. I’m sorry if your university pays you less than the national median, but your lone anecdotal example doesn’t refute a national statistical trend.

anon
anon
Reply to  Francisco
8 years ago

Presumably, LecturePig’s point was not restricted to salary. The stability provided by a secure job until tenure review, the comparative teaching loads, and the likelihood of long-term advance are presumably factors that are relevant. (Indeed, LecturePig raises at least 2 of the 3 straightforwardly). Supposing we were to restrict to salary, it is unclear why starting salary is the right datum to target as presumably we are more interested in long-term prospects. So, mid-career salary of those who started with the either a TT versus non-TT would be relevant. (Indeed, we might try for greater stratification as the many start non-TT, but achieve TT within a few years, so we might look at, for instance, TT as first post-degree job versus Non-TT as first post-degree with TT secured within (say) 2 years versus Non-TT as first post-degree with TT secured within (say) 5 years versus Non-TT with no TT secured within (say) 5 years.

anon
anon
Reply to  anon
8 years ago

also, I should note that I’m a different anon than that below. apologies. I didn’t see her/his post when I began to write.

anonon
anonon
8 years ago

I’m not surprised that more prestigious places use adjuncts less frequently; is there a place where colleges report what percentage of their faculty are tenure/tenure track, lecturer, VAP, adjunct, etc to see which schools do the best/worst?
The point about for profit schools is interesting. It seemed to me that one possible solution to the increasing use of adjunct labor would be to tie it to prestige by making the percent of tenure/tt professors a part of various college rankings for undergrads. Many schools are willing to make changes in response to those rankings, and there’s some evidence that adjuncts aren’t the best instructors (through no fault of their own). But if the problem is most acute at for profit schools and community colleges, it likely wouldn’t make a substantial difference.

Anon
Anon
8 years ago

That the 75% statistic is misleading is pretty well known (not that it doesn’t bear repeating). That said, even if the percentage of adjuncts is lower than that overblown statistic suggests, I don’t think that means the correct solution is just to “relax.” Even if 75% are not adjuncts, according to the AAUP data only 25% of teaching staff are tenure track overall. Moreover, it would seem like trends here are as important as the current level and no matter how you cut it, and many different sources point towards a trend towards hiring more and more contingent and fewer tenure-track faculty. This article here breaks down the shift between 1997-2007 by institution type using data from the Education Department’s National Center for Education Statistics: https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2009/05/12/workforce

Something that would be helpful is to know why the AAUP data and this AFT report do not square with that American Academy of Arts and Sciences report that Justin cited above.

Derek Bowman
Derek Bowman
Reply to  Anon
8 years ago

It’s at least in part because the report by the AAAS does not include community colleges and other 2-year schools.

Derek Bowman
Derek Bowman
8 years ago

We should definitely be clear about the distinction between “contingent” and “part-time,” but the proportion of part-timers is still almost 50% for faculty nationwide.
https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d14/tables/dt14_315.10.asp?current=yes

I also don’t know why we wouldn’t want to include community colleges (as both Magness and the HDS do). Are the PhDs teaching at those schools not philosophers? Are there classes not philosophy classes? Are their students not part of the population we are trying to educate?

Finally, Justin, I don’t think you’re accurately reporting the numbers from the Humanities Departmental Survey. The 73% Tenure-Track faculty number appears to come from table PS10, which refers only to *non-introductory* undergraduate courses. For introductory courses, reported in table PS9, the percentage is only 57% tenured or tenure-track. I can’t seem to find a number reporting the total for all classes, but presumably that is available somewhere in the data.

Anon1
Anon1
Reply to  Derek Bowman
8 years ago

Derek – We shouldn’t automatically assume that the adjuncts teaching at community colleges have PhDs. In my experience, CC adjuncts are overwhelmingly populated by people who only have a master’s degree. There are exceptions, but as a rule the ones with full PhDs are the minority of CC faculty who do better at securing a fulltime position.

Now there’s nothing wrong with only having a master’s degree….BUT if we’re talking about the higher ed job market, only having a master’s is self-limiting on your job prospects. You’re never going to make it to the big leagues of higher ed on only a master’s degree and anyone who does hiring there will – rightly – discard your application if you don’t have a PhD at minimum.

Justin Kalef
Justin Kalef
Reply to  Anon1
8 years ago

Until recently, it was normal for instructors at community colleges to have an MA only. But that has been shifting over the last couple of decades. Since the question at hand concerns the placement of new PhDs, it seems important to consider that.

Derek Bowman
Derek Bowman
Reply to  Anon1
8 years ago

It’s hard to find good numbers on this, but there is good anecdotal reason to believe that the number of PhDs working at community colleges (often as adjuncts) is on the rise – not surprising, given the oversupply of PhDs relative to teaching jobs.

ejrd
ejrd
Reply to  Anon1
8 years ago

” In my experience, CC adjuncts are overwhelmingly populated by people who only have a master’s degree. There are exceptions, but as a rule the ones with full PhDs are the minority of CC faculty who do better at securing a fulltime position.”

I suppose I want data to support claims like this. In my experience, it is also true that CCs are willing to accept someone with a Master’s degree to teach in an adjunct fashion. However, the market in the past few years has produced such a glut of PhDs (or, conversely, has not produced enough tenure-track jobs for the PhDs granted), that I wonder whether CC are, like most other universities, being pickier about who they hire, even on a contingent basis.

Derek Bowman
Derek Bowman
Reply to  Anon1
8 years ago

In any case, if those folks with MAs are qualified to teach community college students – often for years – why are they not qualified enough to warrant decent terms of employment?

Anon1
Anon1
Reply to  Derek Bowman
8 years ago

Because terms of academic employment (at least the full time kind) include more than simply being minimally qualified to teach. If you make it to the big leagues, you are also being paid for the quality of your research & your ability to direct dissertations and theses. There are few people with MAs who can direct quality dissertations and who routinely publish in top journals, even though they may be able to teach a freshmen class on Intro to Ethics perfectly fine.

Derek Bowman
Derek Bowman
Reply to  Anon1
8 years ago

So you think only those in the “big leagues” deserve full-time employment? You think the teaching work done at community colleges is not important or difficult enough to warrant a livable wage?

Urstoff
Urstoff
Reply to  Anon1
8 years ago

As long as there are lots of people willing to take those bad salaries just to keep their hope alive that maybe someday they’ll land a TT job, colleges have no incentive to change. As many people has said before, supply vastly outstrips demand, and as long as that is true, these conditions will persist. Unfortunately, telling potential students in their early 20’s (like I was at one point) that getting a philosophy degree with the intention of becoming a professor is an incredibly risky proposition doesn’t have much effect. Everyone seems to need to learn that lesson on their own (and most need to learn about the virtue of quitting).

Anonymous
Anonymous
8 years ago

I don’t know about the data, but I do know that ~70% of instructors in my own department are adjuncts.

jdkbrown
jdkbrown
8 years ago

There is a technical distinction between adjuncts and other types of contingent instructors. However, in most discussions of the of the higher-ed labor force, “adjunct” isn’t used with this technical meaning–it is, rather, used as a catch-all term for non-tenure track teaching positions. This would be problematic if, as Magness suggests, VAP positions and other contingent, but non-adjunct positions were comprable to tenure-track positions. But, as LecturePig points out, this claim is risible.

Furthermore, Magness’s claim that the numbers are distorted by the for-profit sector is not borne out by his data. Clicking through to the data he provides shows that, though the for-profit sector is 100% contingent, the sector is small enough that it only has a small effect on the overall proportion of contingent faculty: 61% in public institutions, 60% in private non-profit, 62% overall.

Anon1
Anon1
Reply to  jdkbrown
8 years ago

His chart shows there are 130K for-profit adjuncts & they’ve grown rapidly since the early 00s. That’s no small effect. http://philmagness.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/08/ForProfitFacultyNumbers.jpg

jdkbrown
jdkbrown
Reply to  Anon1
8 years ago
Phil Magness
Phil Magness
Reply to  jdkbrown
8 years ago

The second chart is from 2005 and should only be taken to illustrate the drastically different rates at which adjuncts are used by different types of institutions. The actual numbers of persons employed at for-profits are in the graph at the link above. Adjunct numbers at the for-profits have swelled dramatically in the past 20 years – from only a couple thousand to about 125,000 at present. Though adjunct numbers have also grown elsewhere (and at a slower pace), for-profits are the single fastest growing category and the single largest contributor to the recent adjunct boom.

jdkbrown
jdkbrown
Reply to  Phil Magness
8 years ago

Assume an extra 100,000 contingent faculty added to the for-profit sector in the past 10 years, with no adjustment to the number of faculty or tenure-track/contingent mix in the non-profit sector. That still only pushes the overall proportion of contingent instructors to 66%, against ~%60 in the non-profits. So even the big increase in the number of instructors in the for-profits isn’t really driving the overall proportion of contingent faculty.

Phil Magness
Phil Magness
Reply to  Phil Magness
8 years ago

jdkbrown – You’re getting lost in the percentage changes and missing a central issue of the absolute numbers. The absolute number of full-time faculty grew as well in the same period.

If we start in – say – 1995, there have been about 240,000 new full-time faculty positions created in academia. Over the same period there have been about 370,000 new adjuncts. If 125,000 of those adjuncts are at for-profits and we take them out of the equation, it quickly becomes apparent that the adjunct growth is taking place at virtually the same pace as new full-time position creation.

the Onion Man
the Onion Man
8 years ago

Even without considering the separate critiques by other commenters, I don’t understand why we should want to exclude for-profits from consideration. The rise of institutions like the University of Phoenix might be the single biggest story in higher education over the past 10 years; it’s irresponsible to ignore it just because it doesn’t fit the narrative we want to tell ourselves about the nature and purpose of post-secondary education.

Phil Magness
Phil Magness
Reply to  the Onion Man
8 years ago

Who’s ignoring the for-profits? Quite the contrary, I’ve argued that they are *the* single biggest factor in the “adjunctification” process of the past 20 years. Of course one of the implications of that realization is that traditional not-for-profits aren’t as vulnerable to the same adjunct crisis we’ve all been hearing about lately. But that also means we should pay more attention to the following question: what is specifically unique to for-profits that makes them so heavily susceptible to adjunctification? And what does that mean about their business model and the value of the degrees they issue?

the Onion Man
the Onion Man
Reply to  Phil Magness
8 years ago

Sorry, this was more of a response to Justin, not the commenters (who have been nearly uniform in pointing out the huge problems with his argument). Justin’s entire argument in the OP hinges on ignoring for-profits.

The Doctor
The Doctor
8 years ago

If the thesis of the analysis is to ‘relax’–that we are not ‘descending into an adjunct death spiral,’ then the data does not support it. The data shows us a snapshot (and yes, that snapshot is not as bad as some suggest) but the question of whether or not we are descending requires data about change. Are TT jobs disappearing and being replaced with adjunct jobs? Are new TT lines being created, or are adjunct positions being created instead? Until I see the data suggesting otherwise, I am not going to relax just because it isn’t as bad *now* as many claim it is.

Phil Magness
Phil Magness
Reply to  The Doctor
8 years ago

1. There is no evidence of adjunct jobs replacing full time jobs. The creation of full time jobs has continued uninterrupted since the 1980s, even as adjunct job growth has accelerated in the same period (driven mostly by the for-profits). See here http://philmagness.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/08/fulltimefaculty-number.jpg

2. A more telling picture may also be found in the ratio of enrolled students to full-time faculty, which has remained remarkably stable at about 25 to 1 for the past 40 years. See here http://philmagness.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/09/FulltTimeFaculty-Students.jpg

3. There was a slight contracting in Tenured positions as a % of Full Time positions, but it took place in the late 1990s and early 2000s. It has been stable in for the last decade, with about 45-48% of all Full Time faculty possessing Tenure (note that tenure-track faculty are part of the remainder). See here http://philmagness.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/12/TenurePercents.jpg

postdoc
postdoc
Reply to  Phil Magness
8 years ago

What I see in these graphs actually supports the claim that adjuncts are taking over.

Graph 1 shows that part-time faculty have been increasing much faster than full-time.

Graph 2 only speaks of full-time faculty. I don’t know the definition they’re using. If full-time is 35 hours a week (the BLS definition), I’m sure many adjuncts and non-tenure track faculty do that.

Graph 3 shows an about 8% decline in tenure faculty since the 90s. You are right it’s been stable the last decade though.

These graphs are all consistent with the narrative that today there are significantly less tenure-track faculty and way more non-tenure.

Kristina Meshelski
Kristina Meshelski
8 years ago

A. A third of faculty being adjunct is not reasonable. Adjuncts should be reserved for unanticipated maternity leaves or illness, or unanticipated sabbaticals, or special visitors who are borrowed from outside academia (though the latter is never used in philosophy). I think most universities know about how many faculty will be on sabbatical in any given year, so they can easily hire more non-contingent faculty to make up for that gap. Pregnancy and illness happen in other industries too, yet they do not need as many contingent workers to deal with it. And even if we did need that many contingent workers, why should they be paid so much less than non-contingent workers?

B. When considering whether contingent faculty are paid fairly we really have to compare salaries within universities, not to national averages. If some adjuncts are making salaries almost as good as the national average for TT profs that isn’t fair unless it is also comparable to the salary for TT profs within their university. Otherwise they are simply doing the same work for less pay, within the same organization. I think we have to emphasize this simple fact, that we want equal pay for equal work in academia. Nothing less should be legal, let alone acceptable.

C. It’s true that schools like UCLA, Harvard, Ohio State, etc are not using THAT many adjuncts. But at less prestigious 4 year universities they are. I just want people to remember that there are a lot of schools that aren’t for profit or CC, that clearly are starting to replace all their TT teachers with adjuncts. That is absolutely the case within the Cal State system, where I teach.

D. Even if the trend isn’t that bad yet, that is exactly the reason why we should not relax. It means we have a greater chance of reversing this trend if we act now.

ajkreider
ajkreider
8 years ago

A couple of anecdotal thought on the comments about CCs:

At my institution, a very large Florida cc/state college, roughly half of the full-time tenured philosophy faculty have PhDs.

The state of Florida’s Department of Education recently passed a rule giving state colleges and CCs the authority to make all new full-time faculty positions non-tenure track. It’s then each college’s prerogative to offer tenured positions or not. This kind of tenure in Florida, even when offered, is weaker than tenure at university positions

recent grad
recent grad
8 years ago

“And that rate [of 1/3 adjunct faculty] is both a reasonable expectation and a beneficial one as it reflects on the use of adjuncts to augment and supplement classroom offerings that are still very much situated amongst a full time faculty core.”

Uh, no. The idea that relying on someone who commuting between multiple campuses, giving multiple-choice tests, who lacks an office, who worries about financial disaster–the idea that relying on him or her might “supplement” course offerings is outlandish. If I were a student and I had the choice of taking a class with a TT professor or an adjunct, you can guess which I’m choosing. I’ve been taught by adjuncts and while they may have be smart and likeable, the educational value of their classes was very limited. So even 1/3 is too high because that means that roughly 1/3 of the classes are subpar in quality.

Kathleen Lowrey
Kathleen Lowrey
8 years ago

Seriously? We’re supposed to take numbers crunched by the Academic Director of the Institute for Humane Studies at GMU (motto: “we believe in the power of freedom”; where you can “learn liberty”) as gospel about what’s going on with adjunctification in higher? Published on his blog, not peer-reviewed. Thanks but no.

Phil Magness
Phil Magness
Reply to  Kathleen Lowrey
8 years ago

Kathleen – Overlooking your ad hominem proclivities and apparent biases against “freedom” and “liberty” for the moment, I’ll offer two answers to your concerns:

1. All of my data sources are cited and publicly accessible. You are welcome to review them at your leisure if you have any doubts about their validity or my interpretations.

2. The data I have blogged are in fact part of several larger research projects that have undergone peer review. Two articles that employ them will be appearing in the next ~12 months in the Journal of Business Ethics and the journal of Liberal Education.

David Wallace
David Wallace
Reply to  Kathleen Lowrey
8 years ago

I’ll take numbers crunched by anyone (provided the sources are accessible, as they are in this case) in a heartbeat over the mass of conflicting anecdotes that usually characterises this discussion. Sweeping claims of ever-increasing adjunctification and every-reducing tenure lines, and of a grand conspiracy to replace the latter with the former, have been a feature of philosophy blogosphere discussions for years, but seldom if ever quantified or evidenced. Now we have some concrete data; it calls those claims into doubt and amends others. If it turns out that the crunched numbers rely on faulty reasoning or questionable sources, that in turn can be pointed out, corrected, or improved on, and we actually get somewhere.

In God we trust; all others bring data.

Kathleen Lowrey
Kathleen Lowrey
8 years ago

Huh. I don’t know anything about the Journal of Business Ethics, though it seems an odd forum for higher ed research. The Journal of Liberal Education is published by the very anodyne-sounding American Association of Colleges and Universities, heavily plumped for by the Lumina Foundation and which advocates all of the best current buzzwords in higher ed: competency-based education, experiential learning, heaping abuse on that retrograde monstrosity known as “the lecture” which is still known to slink about the odd hallway and learning environment formerly known as the lecture hall, and so on and on and on and on and on. Again, thanks but no. Surprised, though, to see it trotted out here as even-handed gospel.

Anon1
Anon1
Reply to  Kathleen Lowrey
8 years ago

The AACU is a hundred year old national association of liberal arts colleges. It’s no more of a captive interest of corporate ed than the APA or MLA. You’re betraying your own biases and ever-changing demands for what “counts” as evidence when you malign them as a source. But go ahead and keep shifting the goal posts.

David Wallace
David Wallace
8 years ago

@Kathleen Lowrey: this is starting to become a rather demanding epistemic standard. You’re arguing (I think) that factual data analysis should be rejected out of hand, on the grounds of scepticism about the analyser’s ideological starting point, absent any actual criticism of the data source or of the methodology, even when that analyser points you to the primary source of their data and even when your previous criterion of peer review has been met. Not one blog post in a thousand meets this standard. I’m getting concerned that Justin’s “child, who you brought with you for a lesson on how to discuss controversial issues with strangers” may be being led astray.

Anonadjunct
Anonadjunct
8 years ago

Isn’t part of the problem that even reasonably paid lecturers are still beholden to administers for their renewals and non-renewal can happen without cause? Or have we given up on the whole tenure ensures academic freedom claim?

It’s interesting how libertarian this blog gets when race and gender aren’t at issue.

David Wallace
David Wallace
Reply to  Anonadjunct
8 years ago

@Anonadjunct:

A view from abroad: I’ve only recently come to realise how strongly the argument for tenure is tied to the US’s incredibly weak employment protections. In the UK (and, I think, elsewhere in Europe) if you hire someone a year at a time to cover a teaching need, they have a strong presumptive entitlement to be reemployed next time around, assuming the need still remains (even if it doesn’t you have redundancy obligations). The issue in the US doesn’t seem to be so much that teaching-intensive posts need a security as strong as tenure, so much as that tenure seems to be the only way to get any security at all. And as far as I can see that’s true even in Democratic-controlled states, though I haven’t researched it exhaustively.

(And so this topic is a lot more US-specific than meets the eye and I don’t know the system well enough to assess whether you’re right in this particular case.)

babygirl
babygirl
Reply to  Anonadjunct
8 years ago

In contrast to adjuncts, who are generally hired on semester or year-long contracts, most people in the US are employed “permanently” — If I work as an engineer, I can expect to keep working, unless the company downsizes or I commit some egregious violation. It’s the way administrative assistants who work in our offices are employed, the way administrators are employed, etc. There’s no good reason lecturers can’t have this type of employment as well (I believe some do). Continuing to hire adjuncts on a contract basis for permanent teaching needs is a terrible practice.

Adjunct Ally
Adjunct Ally
8 years ago

The thought that we should “relax” if “only” 1/3 of faculty are adjuncts is to grossly misunderstand what the problem is with adjuncting. Adjuncts are routinely preposterously underpaid and routinely lack access to retirement, childcare, parental leave, and health care benefits of full-time faculty, even though they are often working full-time (or much more), pulling in multiple gigs from different schools. They also lack job security and of course won’t have any say in governance matters in the departments and schools they work for. If “only” 1/3 of faculty are treated like this, I regard that to be a problem. Indeed, it’s an embarrassment, one most TT/tenured faculty would rather not be reminded of, which is the only reason I can imagine they would bother to find ways to deny that this very real problem is, in fact, a problem.

I strongly support adjunct unions, and I also strongly support a conversion of many or most adjunct positions to full-time positions, with renewable contracts, decent pay, and benefits (these benefits needn’t be TT to have these features, but making them TT would be one way to go). Tufts’ adjunct union is one I regard to be a model of what the adjunct movements that are happening across the country might achieve: they’ve managed to negotiate benefits, jobs security, and an automatic interview for any TT positions that might become available: https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2014/10/28/tufts-adjuncts-tout-pay-and-job-security-gains-first-union-contract

zuper7
zuper7
8 years ago

At Research I universities, the majority of undergraduates are taught not by tenure-stream faculty nor by adjuncts but by TAs, which somehow have been ignored in this discussion. Combining those credit hours with those covered by adjuncts and non-tenurable lecturers, it is evident how large is shift in the professoriate in the past generation.