Michael J. Rizzo teaches seven classes a year, with a total of 750 undergraduates. But he’s not an adjunct instructor. He does all his teaching on the same campus, as a full-time lecturer in economics at the University of Rochester, where he also advises freshmen, supervises independent-study projects, and even runs his own institute to play host to speakers from off campus.
“I’m not here to win the Nobel Prize,” says Mr. Rizzo, who has no research responsibilities and earns a 10-month salary with benefits.
Imagine converting the jobs of all adjunct faculty—those who work course-by-course for little pay, no benefits or job security, often not even a desk—to full-time teaching posts like Mr. Rizzo’s. He is in the first year of his second four-year contract, and he loves it: “My tenured colleagues say, ‘Oh, God, if I had all of those students I’d be dead.’ But I say, ‘If I had to get published in the American Economic Review, I’d be dead.’”
People who studied specifically to be lecturers and were hired as full-time instructors would have both training and expectations that better met the reality of the job.
The academic work force has been transformed over the past several decades, less by design than out of expediency. In 1969, professors who were either tenured or tenure-track made up 78 percent of the faculty. Those working part time made up only 18.5 percent. By 2009, those proportions had almost flipped, with tenured and tenure-track making up just 33.5 percent, and those working part time nearly 50 percent. (The proportion of full-time lecturers like Mr. Rizzo rose from 3.5 percent of college faculty in 1969 to 18.5 percent in 2009.)
As college budgets have tightened, part-time adjuncts have become an irresistible source of labor for many colleges and universities. Compared with tenure-track faculty members, they are much cheaper, easier to hire and fire, and use up much less space and other resources.
But as the ranks of adjuncts have grown, organizations like the New Faculty Majority have made adjuncts’ displeasure with their jobs a national cause. Higher-education associations wrestle with fixing the system. The Modern Language Association, for example, has suggested paying adjuncts nearly $7,000 per course, up from the $2,000 to $3,000 per course that most currently earn.
But what if the academic work force were made up primarily of two types of faculty members? One, a small proportion of tenure-track professors—those who earn doctoral degrees, do research, train graduate students, teach advanced seminars, and help administrators run the university. And two, a larger portion of full-time instructors, like Mr. Rizzo, who teach undergraduates, help advise them, keep up with developments in the field by reading and attending conferences, but do no research. Instead of earning Ph.D.'s, like those on the tenure track, instructors could stop with a master’s degree, as many in the adjunct teaching pool already do.
Michael Bérubé, an English professor at Pennsylvania State University who is president of the Modern Language Association and has long been at the center of debates about the academic work force, likes the idea. “Why not a different track that includes a more rigorous master’s degree where you don’t spend four to six years turning out a piece of research that will not get you a tenure-track job at a research university?” he asks.
Creating a new graduate degree would allow people to train specifically to be college instructors. That’s in contrast to what happens now. Everyone who wants to join the professoriate starts out training for a doctorate, but many end up dropping out and taking an adjunct post as a fallback, or do so even after they’ve earned a doctorate, because they can’t find a tenure-track job. People who studied specifically to be lecturers and were hired as full-time instructors would have both training and expectations that better met the reality of the job. And presumably that means they would be happier, more effective teachers.
Duke University and New York University are among the institutions already experimenting with adding more full-time instructors. At NYU, the number of full-timers has nearly doubled, to almost 1,000, over the past decade, growing primarily in the arts. “Those schools have hired more experienced professionals—actors, directors, designers, etc.—as opposed to adjuncts because they have found that full-time professors are more likely to stay at the school and thus are more committed to our educational mission,” says Philip Lentz, director of public affairs at NYU.
Why would colleges willingly give up the flexibility and financial savings that come with employing part-time adjuncts? Such a change could be a tough sell but may be worth it for institutions: Some studies have shown that students learn less when they are taught by adjunct instructors.
Another chief concern is that without tenure, full-time instructors would lack academic freedom—although multiyear contracts could build in due process with grievance procedures to protect those faculty members. Some small academic departments may not have enough course sections to cobble together into full-time posts, but they might collaborate with other departments—or even nearby institutions—to create full-time teaching jobs.
There might even be objections from adjuncts themselves. Surveys show that a significant proportion of them like the flexibility of part-time work; they just don’t like the low pay and lack of stability.
Aside from questions about its feasibility, a two-tier system of full-time lecturers and tenure-rank scholars makes some people uneasy. “I don’t like models built on a hierarchy,” says Adrianna Kezar, an associate professor of higher education at the University of Southern California, who leads the Delphi Project, formed to come up with a new model for the academic work force.
Neither does Maria C. Maisto, an adjunct instructor of English at Cuyahoga Community College and executive director of the New Faculty Majority Foundation. Splitting the professoriate into research faculty and teaching faculty, she says, would benefit research faculty who are tenured or tenure-track, but not students. “It should be one faculty serving all students,” she says.
But just as some people train to be nurses, not doctors, or some doctors train to be family practitioners, not brain surgeons, some instructors might prefer to train for full-time teaching positions rather than for the tenure track.
Mr. Rizzo, at Rochester, earned a Ph.D. in economics from Cornell University and got a tenure-track job at Centre College, in Kentucky. But he left in 2006 after two years and eventually took the position at Rochester. There, he says, his tenured colleagues don’t treat him like a second-class citizen. “I walked off the tenure track to take this job,” he says, “and I’ve never looked back.”
