The Instructors Who Seek a Voice From Academe’s Margins

Colleges have become increasingly dependent on full-time, non-tenure-track faculty members in recent years. Yet little research has been done on the roles such instructors play in their colleges’ affairs, especially when it comes to day-to-day decisions by academic departments.

Such instructors’ workplace status — or lack thereof — is the focus of a new study by Nathan F. Alleman, an assistant professor of higher-education studies at Baylor University; Cara Cliburn Allen, a doctoral student in higher education there; and Don Haviland, an associate professor of educational leadership and director of the Center for Evaluation and Educational Effectiveness at California State University at Long Beach.

The researchers extensively interviewed 39 full-time, non-tenure-track university instructors, asking them questions related to their experiences with collegiality. They limited their study to people who had worked full time at their institution for at least three years, to ensure that the subjects had had an opportunity to develop a presence on the campus. Mr. Alleman and Mr. Haviland were scheduled to present the study’s findings in Denver on Thursday, at the annual conference of the Association for the Study of Higher Education.

The Chronicle asked Mr. Alleman to discuss the study’s results. Following is an edited and condensed version of the interview.

Q. You focused heavily on the roles that such contingent faculty members play in their departments. How is this important in studying collegiality, and what did you find?

A. Often we don’t think that non-tenure-track faculty play important roles in the department. They tend to be thought of as people who come in and teach a class and they leave. What we have seen is that many of them were heavily involved in a lot of the aspects of the faculty life that we tend to think about the tenure-track faculty as doing. They are involved in service, they are undergraduate-program directors, they are running summer outreach programs. This is important because when we think about the range of activities related to collegiality — sort of willingness to engage with departmental colleagues, willingness to serve, self-giving for the good of the department — we don’t usually think that that is the sort of thing that non-tenure-track faculty do.

Q. Did such instructors feel equal or feel valued?

A. There is a great deal of variation. The equality was always contingent and limited. They felt it in the efforts of chairs to say, “Hey, we have got this guy coming in to interview for this role, would you talk with him?” or “Come to his job talk and tell us what you think,” but there was no formal mechanism for their participation. In many ways the department, at its best, had to provide cultural workarounds for structures that didn’t invite them in naturally. Some were very happy with that. There were others who said, “I have no role within faculty governance, my colleagues really have very little interest in me, I get the message that I am just here to teach a class and stay out of the way.”

Q. Did your subjects have much chance to socialize with their tenured and tenure-track peers?

A. That’s also an area where we saw a lot of divergence. For some of them it really depended on their field or discipline. People in the performing arts, they saw a lot of one another, they worked together on projects, they socialized inside and outside the institution. Others were more isolated naturally, such as in some of the sciences and mathematics, and it really depended on the initiative of the tenured faculty. Often there was clumping around job status. People said, “Well, we go for lunch, but it is always the tenure-track people, they sit together, and the non-tenure-track people, we kind of have our own thing.” The faculty made different sense of that. Some of them said, “They’re not unfriendly, they just don’t invite us,” and others said, “They send a message when they don’t invite me, and that message is that I am not equal.”

Q. What was the worst story of mistreatment you heard? What was the best example of a contingent faculty member’s being made to feel equal or welcome?

A. There are a couple of great worst stories. A department went through and, rather than adding the suffix “Ph.D.” onto a non-tenure-track faculty member’s door, took them off of all of them so they would not have to have them on any. There were other examples of people who had a class that they taught for years, or had an office that they had been in, in one case for a decade. A tenured faculty member said, “No, I want that class” or “I want that office, you’re out.” That, obviously, was deeply offensive. Most of the time, it’s not one major instance, it’s an accumulation of little things. Our best stories were ones of deep self-giving. There was one woman whose husband had been in the hospital for a long time, and people from the department brought her food, they passed the hat and raised some funds to help with travel expenses for her going back and forth to the hospital, they covered her classes.

Q. Did your research leave you with any sense of what is experienced by other contingent faculty members, who work only part time?

A. It’s pretty clear that our participants have a very different experience, based on the work that’s been done on part-time faculty. These full-timers on the whole felt like they were faculty. They felt like they were members of the institution. They had a lot of institutional loyalty in many cases — though certainly not all — and that seemed very different than what we hear about part-time faculty who see their employment as very short term.

Q. Should university administrators care about your study’s findings? Why?

A. We sure hope so. Collegiality is a thing that allows a group of autonomous professionals to find some common way to work together. It is the grease in the wheels. When we see this shrinking pool of tenure-track faculty, and growing pool of non-tenure-track faculty who are not part of this collegial system fully, what we see is a shrinking group of people who are responsible for a lot of governance, a lot of decision making. I think, ultimately, denying full collegiality to non-tenure-track faculty is bad for the institution and is bad for the tenure-track faculty themselves.

Q. What can administrators do to make the workplace environment better for contingent faculty?

A. The beginning answer to that is that there are always policies that are going to help, policies that say non-tenure-track faculty are allowed to come to meetings and should have a voice in decision making. But it is not policies that make a place collegial. It’s behavior, and it’s seeing non-tenure-track faculty as people who have expertise, even though they may not be researchers. Until we are able to align what it is that these faculty are trained to do as graduate students and the kind of regard they get within their professional lives, no amount of policy at the institutional level is going to knit those pieces together.

Peter Schmidt writes about affirmative action, academic labor, and issues related to academic freedom. Contact him at peter.schmidt@chronicle.com.