Which faculty members are more satisfied with their jobs: contingent faculty members or their tenured or tenure-track peers?
That might sound like a trick question. But according to a research paper to be presented on Friday at the annual meeting of the Association for the Study of Higher Education, the answer depends on whether contingent faculty members work part-time or full-time, and on what aspect of their job is put under the microscope.
The authors of the paper—one of several being presented at the conference that examine characteristics of contingent faculty members, the largest swath of the professoriate—find that part-time faculty members are much less likely to be satisfied with their salaries and benefits than tenured or tenure-track faculty members. However, full-time non-tenure-track faculty members are more likely to be satisfied with their benefits than tenured and tenure-track professors, and they have the same level of satisfaction with their salaries as the other groups.
“It’s important to provide some empirical data around the anecdotes we hear,” said Paul Umbach, an associate professor of higher education at North Carolina State University, and one of the authors of the paper, “Contingent Contentment? Exploring Job Satisfaction of Four-Year College Part-Time and Full-Time Non-Tenure-Track Faculty.”
Mr. Umbach and his co-author, Ryan S. Wells, an assistant professor of higher education at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, based their research on data from the 2004 National Study of Postsecondary Faculty, a survey conducted by the Education Department’s statistical center. They selected five job-satisfaction measures from the study that would apply most to contingent faculty members to help determine overall job satisfaction and satisfaction with salary and benefits among a sample of 16,256 faculty members from 567 four-year institutions.
They found that while contingent faculty members would be less likely than tenured or tenure-track professors to pursue an academic career again, all three groups expressed about the same level of overall job satisfaction.
However, offering benefits to part-timers appears to have a payoff that extends beyond improving job satisfaction: When part-timers are offered benefits, all faculty members, “regardless of appointment type, are more likely to be satisfied with their salaries,” they write.
Mr. Umbach says that findings suggest that if colleges had to choose between offering pay increases or benefits to part-timers, giving them benefits might be the best thing to do when it comes to increasing job satisfaction. But as colleges are still dealing with the effects of the recession, some would find it “unreasonable right now” to take on additional costs, Mr. Umbach said.
Indeed, he said, some institutions might find it more financially feasible to “pay $1,000 more a course” instead.
More Research Results
Among the other papers dealing with adjuncts, one takes a different perspective and focuses on how scholars who study contingent faculty members sometimes unintentionally frame them in a bad light.
“The major assumption we challenge and which seems to be related to many of the other negative preconceived notions is that non-tenure-track faculty are often framed as laborers and not professionals,” the paper’s authors write.
The paper, “Understanding Non-Tenure-Track Faculty: New Assumptions for Conceptualizing Behavior,” was written by Adrianna Kezar, an associate professor of higher education at the University of Southern California, and Cecile Sam, a graduate student there.
Their research, the authors say, signals “the need for different research and new theories” to help explain the behavior of contingent faculty and to avoid “creating problematic stereotypes” that shape negative realities.
In a different paper, Ms. Kezar and Ms. Sam wrote, among other things, about how the participation of contingent faculty members in governance on campus can help dispel stereotypes about them. Such participation allows tenured and tenure-track faculty members to get to know them better and view them as “both colleagues and professionals,” the authors write in “Governance as a Catalyst for Change: Creating a Contingent Faculty-Friendly Academy.”
But contingent faculty members’ lack of access to governance mechanisms has “reinforced their lack of status” in academe, the report says, “and resulted in them being treated as second-class citizens.”
When tenured or tenure-track professors see faculty members who work off the tenure track as professionals, they “provide less resistance to proposed changes” in the workplace for contingent faculty—such as multiyear contracts or the provision of office space, the report says.
