Adjuncts remain largely excluded from faculty senates at most research universities, according to a groundbreaking study of which types of instructors can serve on such bodies.
Among the more than 100 research universities examined in the study, about two-thirds had faculty senates that were off-limits to adjunct instructors who had less than half the workload of a full-time faculty member.
The remainder of institutions were fairly evenly split between those with faculty senates that were much more open to non-tenure-track faculty members and those with faculty senates that more rigidly excluded them. About a sixth of the universities examined had faculty senates open to any adjunct faculty member, regardless of workload, while the faculty senates at another sixth precluded any adjunct involvement and were restricted to tenured or tenure-track professors.
The study, being presented in St. Louis this week at the annual conference of the Association for the Study of Higher Education, represents the first attempt by researchers to quantify adjuncts’ involvement in shared governance by examining faculty senates’ eligibility criteria.
A paper summarizing the study’s results says its finding of widespread exclusion of part-time faculty members shows that “many institutions have a considerable ways to go” when it comes to giving part-time instructors “a voice and meaningful role in institutional-level governance.”
Not What the AAUP Recommends
If some adjunct faculty members actually have little interest in getting involved in faculty senates, “I wonder how much of that is due somewhat to the culture that institutions have,” said one of the researchers behind the study, Willis A. Jones, an assistant professor of higher education at the University of Kentucky. He conducted the analysis with Wayne D. Lewis, an assistant professor of educational-leadership studies at Kentucky, and Neal H. Hutchens, an associate professor of education at Pennsylvania State University at University Park. They were assisted by two graduate students: David Brown at Kentucky and Paul Andrade at Penn State.
The picture that their study paints is at odds with the recommendations of the American Association of University Professors, which in January issued a report arguing that eligibility for voting or holding office in shared-governance bodies “should be the same for all faculty regardless of full- or part-time status.”
The AAUP’s report conceded that integrating contingent faculty members into college governance posed difficult questions, such as how to compensate such faculty members for governance-related activities, how to protect non-tenured faculty members’ expression of opinion, and how to prevent administrators from unduly pressuring those with little job security.
But, the report argued, “no faculty member should be excluded from participation in governance because of the appointment conditions over which most have little control.”
‘A Lot of Nuance’
The researchers behind the study conducted it from August until last month by visiting university websites and closely examining faculty handbooks and faculty-senate constitutions and bylaws. They began their analysis with a random sample of 137 research universities, but ended up winnowing that number down to 105 after excluding institutions that lacked faculty senates or had faculty-senate policies that were unclear or unavailable online.
The 105 universities “surprised us with regards to the diversity of their policies,” Mr. Jones said in an interview. “We thought there would be much more uniformity,” he said, but instead the researchers found “a lot of nuance.”
Similar results arose from a survey of faculty-senate leaders three years ago by an AAUP subcommittee on contingent faculty members and governance. That survey had a low response rate and other shortcomings, however, prompting the subcommittee to caution against using it to draw broad conclusions about higher education.
More than half of the adjuncts who have provided information about their working conditions to The Chronicle’s Adjunct Project said they had no role in faculty governance. They do not represent a random sample of colleges, however, and come from a wider array of institutions than were covered either by the AAUP survey, whose respondents were mainly at doctoral or comprehensive institutions, or by the analysis of faculty-senate eligibility rules being presented this week.
The latest study also has important limitations, the paper summarizing it says. Among them, some of the documents viewed online might be out of date, and some are so ambiguous that it will take follow-up calls by researchers to confirm they were interpreted correctly. The paper characterizes the difficulty the researchers encountered in making sense of faculty-senate eligibility standards as emblematic of the problems non-tenure-track faculty members face in seeking a role in shared governance.