In my last entry I speculated that many small, private colleges such as mine are unlikely to follow the apparent trend in academe of significantly greater reliance on adjunct faculty members. I have a number of reasons for this belief, including knowledge of what quite a few such institutions are doing, gained through my contacts with colleagues.
On thinking further, though, and reflecting more on our own institutional practices, there’s a large exception to small private institutions’ employment of tenure-track faculty members. Like many similar colleges, Buena Vista University has an off-campus adult degree-completion program. In our case, we now offer programs at 15 locations around Iowa in cooperation with the state’s extensive network of community colleges. The average age of our students in this program is about 30, the huge majority are women, and the programs we offer are dominated by business and education disciplines. We have nearly twice as many FTE students in this program as we do on campus.
At the moment, virtually all instruction in these programs is provided by adjunct faculty members, or as part of the workload of qualified administrative personnel at the sites. We also have a growing online program that employs adjunct faculty members from 35 states, many of whom have outstanding credentials. Because these are all degree-completion programs, and require at least 60 hours of previously completed coursework, we offer virtually no lower-division or general-education courses in them, which helps to make our instructional strategy viable.
I’m reasonably comfortable with our use of adjunct faculty members in these programs because we generally employ practitioner faculty members who are experienced professionals in their fields and who bring substantial “real world” knowledge to the classes they teach. Students, too, are satisfied with the faculty members they encounter, and our assessment program shows that learning outcomes are comparable between our traditional main campus and our adult programs. Unlike on campus, in the adult program we employ professional advisers, so faculty members have no formal advising function.
We do, however, want to add full-time faculty members to this program who are assigned to it permanently. We have a few campus faculty members who teach in the program either as part of their normal duties or as an overload, but no full-time faculty members whose duties are wholly allotted to the program. The issue is whether to make such appointments tenure track or not. My inclination is not to do so, but rather to offer perhaps three initial one-year contracts and then use a series of three-year contracts, or possibly a three-year rolling contract, which would have a somewhat similar effect to tenure.
So why not just make tenure-track hires? Here’s what I’m thinking: This is a different kind of job. For one thing, it will have to be a 12-month appointment, since our adult programs run year round. For another, it will not have the service requirements or expectations inherent in our main-campus tenure-track positions, and while service is not generally a make-or-break determinant of tenure, it is certainly part of the expectation for faculty members here, as at most small institutions. We will also almost certainly continue with our strategy of employing professional advisers, so these faculty members will have no formal advising duties either.
Finally, because of the nature of our programs, these positions are likely to be held by clinical faculty members of the type who are increasingly being employed at larger institutions to provide practical expertise and instruction. It’s not out of the question that these positions may allow, or in some cases even require, continued professional employment in the teaching field. It will be interesting to figure out how to construct contractual agreements to fit such an arrangement.
Many commentators on higher education note that the job conditions of the professoriate are changing quickly and probably permanently. I predict that jobs of the type I am outlining here will be a big part of the employment mix for faculty jobs in the future. The question I want to answer is how to make them decent, reliable positions that will attract strong people to provide the excellent instruction that undergraduates—whether traditional or adult learners—need.