3 Insights About the Professoriate From a New Federal Report

Courtesy of the Office of Rep. Bobby Scott

Following years of political advocacy by adjunct faculty members eager to make their working conditions more visible, the Government Accountability Office has released a report digging into the size, characteristics, pay, and work experiences of the largest swath of the professoriate — the 70 percent of faculty members who work outside of the tenure track.

The report, released to the public on Monday, follows up on one the office did in 2015 on contingent workers in all industries. This time the office turned its sights to contingent faculty members at the request of the U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Education and the Workforce. Some of its members, including its top Democratic member, Rep. Bobby Scott of Virginia, have long shown an interest in the issue of adjunct labor.

In its new report, the GAO analyzed national and state data and held discussion groups with contingent faculty members to learn such details as who is in their ranks, how much they teach, and what they like and don’t like about the job. It also analyzed data and conducted interviews with college administrators at institutions in three states — Georgia, North Dakota, and Ohio.

Here are three noteworthy insights in the report:

Instructional positions are divided pretty evenly between men and women — with important exceptions.

A closer look at the data shows that women hold a greater share of positions off the tenure track — 53 percent, compared with about 47 percent for men. The report attributes that, in part, to the higher concentration of women who work at two-year and for-profit colleges, where they make up more than half of the instructional staff. Both types of institutions rely more heavily on non-tenure-track faculty members than four-year colleges do. Men and women are represented almost equally on the tenure track. But the makeup of those with tenure differs markedly. Women hold only 38.4 percent of tenured faculty positions, while men hold 61.6 percent of such jobs.

Freshly minted academics are apt to wind up with jobs off the tenure track.

At public institutions in Georgia, North Dakota, and Ohio, the GAO found that most positions held by people under 40 (excluding graduate assistants) had no path to tenure. In Georgia, 60 percent of instructors under 40 had non-tenure-track jobs, and in North Dakota that age group accounted for 67 percent of contingent faculty members. In Ohio, three out of four non-tenure-track positions were held by someone under 40. The dearth of available tenure-track jobs is a likely reason, the office said.

On the flip side, the most common position for faculty members who are 70 and older in the three states was a part-time contingent one, which suggests at least some part of that slice of the higher-ed work force consists of retirees or those approaching retirement, according to the report.

Some — but not many — institutions offer “pseudo tenure.”

While the availability of tenure has dwindled nationally, the report notes an alternative labor arrangement: faculty positions that are not officially on the tenure track but that sometimes provide similar job security.

The GAO tried to pin down how many instructional jobs are “potentially pseudo tenure” positions — full-time, non-tenure-track faculty jobs with multiyear contracts at institutions that don’t offer tenure. The contracts are renewable, and the faculty members “can only be terminated for cause, such as gross professional misconduct.”

GAO representatives visited a North Dakota institution where non-tenure-track positions were described as “tenure light” — because full-time faculty members there get one-year contracts in their first four years and then, once they’ve had a successful promotion review, continuous three-year contracts.

In 2015 the GAO found some 225,570 full-time contingent positions with annual or multiyear contracts among the 4,160 institutions it looked at. An additional 33,585 positions were labeled as “potentially pseudo tenure.” Those two groups made up about a quarter of all contingent positions across the board, the report said.

Audrey Williams June is a senior reporter who writes about the academic workplace, faculty pay, and work-life balance in academe. Contact her at audrey.june@chronicle.com, or follow her on Twitter @chronaudrey.