Many Full-Time Instructors Prefer Working Off the Tenure Track

A national study of 300 faculty members who work off the tenure track has found that while many said their job conditions should be improved, most said they liked the freedom their positions offered precisely because they were not on the tenure track.

The study, “Contingent Faculty in a Tenure-Track World,” whose findings echo the results of a survey of part-time adjuncts conducted last year by The Chronicle, was completed by the Center for the Education of Women at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor.

The center interviewed 300 non-tenure-track faculty members at 12 research universities across the country in 2008 and 2009. About 80 percent of those worked full time, many of them on yearly contracts. Nationally, only about 20 percent of the professoriate works full time but off the tenure track. About 50 percent of the professoriate works as part-time adjuncts.

The full-time instructors the center interviewed earned much more than part-timers: an average of about $57,000 per year for those who were primarily teachers and about $75,000, on average, for those who were full-time researchers within the faculty ranks.

“We were surprised by the extent we found they didn’t want to be tenured or on the tenure track,” said Jean Waltman, a research specialist at the center who conducted the study. “They said being off the tenure track gave them the opportunity to focus on the things they liked most about their jobs—working with students—and that they did not have the pressures that come with being on the tenure track.”

The instructors did complain that they were not always respected by administrators or by tenured professors, and were often excluded from faculty meetings and from opportunities to design curricula. The instructors also complained about their lack of job security, saying their jobs were often overly dependent on evaluations they received from students.

The center hopes to publish the results of the study in The Journal of Higher Education. The researchers also produced a video with the voices of full-time instructors that is available on the center’s Web site.