After five decades of concern about the swelling ranks, low pay, and exploitation of non-tenure-track faculty members, it may seem obtuse to suggest that we still need better data about these instructors. But the reality is: To advocate effectively on their behalf, we need much better data.
That’s not an excuse to do nothing. Getting the specific, detailed, and accurate data we need is both feasible and actionable. With up-to-date, reliable data in hand, we could empower adjunct faculty members and their allies to make headway on a problem that has dogged higher education for 50 years.
What’s wrong with the data we have?
Let’s start with the oft-cited statistic that roughly 70 percent of faculty members at American colleges and universities work off the tenure track. The trouble with this number is that it’s both true and meaningless. The capacious category of “non-tenure-track faculty members” contains a multitude of different career realities across different disciplines, institutions, departments, and positions.
Yet the term tends to conjure a very specific image of “freeway fliers” and “subway fliers” who teach 10 courses a semester to make rent, or part-time adjuncts who live on food stamps. On some campuses, the terms “adjunct” and “contingent faculty” also encompass faculty members teaching full time on short-term contracts without job security or predictability. There are many, many people who — locked out of a stagnant tenure-track job market — live and work under these professionally stressful conditions. Their situations deserve our action and attention.
Past surveys indicate that, in the absence of support from a spouse or partner, non-tenure-track faculty members who rely on college teaching as their primary source of income are likely to suffer from a lack of job security, money, health insurance, or all three. Many also face working conditions that make it difficult for them to perform up to their own standards. One of us was a non-tenure-track instructor for three years and can testify to these realities firsthand.
However, the people who fall into that category comprise far less than 70 percent of the professoriate. The existence of many other categories of non-tenure-track faculty members complicates the adjunct data and makes it difficult to target reforms where they could be most effective. Consider just a few of the other groups who fall within the 70 percent:
- People who hold full-time jobs outside of academe and teach a college class or two as an avocation, or to supplement their incomes.
- Retirees who teach part time for similar reasons.
- Successful practitioners in a vocation (such as the arts, law, or medicine) who are hired to train students in particular skills.
- And finally, teaching assistants, graduate-student instructors, and postdoctoral fellows who teach part time to gain essential professional experience.
All of them have their own reasons for taking adjunct positions, and most receive the same meager pay and limited workplace support and protections as their peers. But the true measure of their exploitation varies substantially depending on how much a classroom paycheck means for their standard of living.
This is reflected in the most recent federal survey, which found that three-fourths of adjunct faculty members were satisfied with the position overall (but less satisfied with specific aspects of it, such as salary and job security). That federal data is terribly outdated (the U.S. Department of Education stopped conducting the survey in 2004), but it illustrates how differently adjunct work is regarded by those who do it for a living versus as an avocation.
Acknowledging that non-tenure-track instructors are a highly varied group does not in any way minimize the problem of contingent labor. In terms of the human cost, arguing over whether the proportion of the professoriate that is impoverished is 70 percent or 30 percent is beside the point — either number is unacceptable.
Understanding the varied and complex nature of contingency does, however, help to explain why the adjunct crisis has proved so intractable. Simply put, the heterogeneity of non-tenure-track instructors dooms universal solutions to failure.
A recent essay in The Chronicle called for some of the same reforms we’ve heard since the 1970s to resolve recurring job crises in the humanities, including the conversion of non-tenure-track jobs to the tenure track.
But call for a blanket replacement of adjunct positions with tenure lines, and you’re telling the dental-hygiene department it can’t bring in a skilled hygienist to demonstrate a difficult procedure for students, the music department it can’t hire a professional bassoon player to teach private lessons, the history department it can’t give its own graduate students valuable classroom experience, and the law school it can’t employ a retired judge. Half the departments on campus will oppose your campaign from the start, rendering impossible the solidarity you need for success. And administrators will reject your plan — not just because it costs them money (which you can organize against) but because it’s unworkable (which you can’t).
As a result, the contingent-faculty problem is not a single national problem. It is thousands of specific problems in individual departments, colleges, and disciplines — each different from the others in scope, particulars, and needed remedies — that collectively make up a national crisis.
And while we all understand, in a general sense, that some Ph.D.s are being exploited, few academics know specifically who those people are on their own campuses — particularly outside their own departments. The same obstacle bedevils the efforts of national advocates such as unions and professional associations. More-precise data about the patterns and categories of non-tenure-track faculty members could inform workable strategies and generate effective activism for the people who most need help — if we just knew exactly who they were.
Exploitation thrives in the shadows. Without reliable data, non-tenure-track faculty members remain isolated from the coalitions and structures that could support them, atomizing opposition and impeding solidarity even where labor unions exist. How do you keep advocates from sticking up for workers? You keep them in the dark about who, exactly, is being harmed.
Fundamentally, we need two types of data to illuminate the nature and scale of the adjunct problem:
- First, we need a national survey of the academic work force that asks adjuncts about who they are and how they perceive their jobs. There is already a precedent: The federal survey we mentioned above — the National Study of Postsecondary Faculty, last conducted in 2004 — provided much, though perhaps not all, of the data we need. This kind of national survey provides an essential baseline. Discerning the nature and scale of the adjunct problem in a perilous time of transition will be critical as we emerge from the pandemic, so restarting the survey should be a key lobbying priority, not just for adjunct advocates but for anyone who cares about the quality of higher education.
- Second, we need data at the department and college level that is far more robust than the numbers currently available from the Education Department’s Ipeds HR survey. Ideally, that survey of the number of faculty and staff members working in higher education should be expanded to report data on academic appointments by principal disciplinary unit, by tenure status, by full-time or part-time status; by percentage of faculty members with or without benefits; and by how many instructors are graduate students.
As part of that effort, the U.S. Department of Labor should also look to improve its own occupational-classification system (used by the Education Department for its database), as well as the Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics program that is used to classify and estimate the number of college and university faculty members. If the Labor Department ever wants to get a proper handle on the “gig” economy, and develop policies and practices to deal with exploitation in this area, it needs to include a focus on adjunct employment in higher education, and not just estimate the gross number without regard to employment type.
Imagine the power of a public database with reliable, granular, routinely collected information about the academic work force at every college and university in the country.
Even without names and salaries attached, this database would immediately reveal the potential trouble spots on every campus. And it would reveal them to everyone: the news media, faculty senates, local and national unions, professional associations, accreditation bureaus, university rankings groups. Faculty exploitation would move from the shadows into full public view, where exploitation does not so easily thrive, and where the connections between student learning and faculty labor structures can be studied and improved systematically.
These are the data on contingency that we desperately need: not more evidence that things are bad, but evidence of exactly where they are bad — in which disciplines, institutions, departments, programs, and positions — so we can deploy strategies tailored to specific situations and categories.
Such data have been maddeningly difficult to come by. None of the surveys created by nonprofits in recent years — by the Coalition on the Academic Workforce, the American Academy of Arts & Sciences, the American Association of University Professors, or by disciplinary organizations such as the American Historical Association — has provided sufficiently granular data on the faculty work force at the department level. Groups with significant power to compel a response from a college or a university — state-assessment bureaus, regional accreditors, and even the U.S. News college rankings (the magazine unsuccessfully tried to collect data on part-time faculty members, as The Chronicle reported) — also do not have the data that faculty advocates need, even if access to their data were not limited by privacy concerns.
While the labor of adjunct faculty members is integral to the work of higher education, counting them in this way might seem to administrators like merely a time-consuming addition to the mountains of paperwork and institutional-research data-gathering that are already needed for accreditation and other annual reporting requirements. The only viable solution to these administrative concerns is federal intervention: that is, the creation of national reporting requirements, standards, and funding to support the necessary research and give colleges the tools they need to carry out that research consistently.
None of these are modest asks. Conducting another National Study of Postsecondary Faculty properly would cost about $10 million, and retooling the HR survey to obtain the needed structural information about who is teaching in college classrooms will cost considerably more than that, when the reporting expenses for each college and university are factored in.
Yet this information is the key to unlocking a problem that has bedeviled higher education for a half-century. By providing contingent faculty members and their allied organizations with the specific data needed for effective advocacy, we can build toward a more equitable future for all. But to achieve that, we need the right tools.
