At community colleges, four out of five instructors worked outside the tenure track in 2007. At public research institutions, graduate students made up 41 percent of the instructional staff that year. And at all institutions, the proportion of instructors working part time continued to grow.
Those statistics, from a new report from the American Federation of Teachers, underscore a fact by now well established, that tenured and tenure-track professors are an ever-shrinking slice of the professoriate at American colleges and universities.
The report, “The State of the Higher Education Workforce, 1997-2007,” scheduled for release today, shows that the proportion of instructional staff members not on the tenure track—including graduate students—increased from two-thirds to 73 percent over that period.
That trend, if unchecked, will eventually reduce the proportion of tenured and tenure-track professors to “a tiny speck,” said Barbara Bowen, one of the federation’s vice presidents and chair of its committee on academic staffing.
“Unless there’s real intervention, this trend is just going to continue,” said Ms. Bowen, an associate professor of English at the City University of New York’s Queens College and president of the Professional Staff Congress, a union that represents faculty and staff members in the CUNY system.
The federation’s report, which is based on data collected from colleges and universities by the federal government, highlights higher education’s increasing reliance on those who work outside the tenure track. The plight of such full- and part-time instructors has been the subject of books, journal articles, and online debates. Scholarly associations, such as the American Association of University Professors and the Modern Language Association, have weighed in on the need to reverse the trend of not hiring tenured and tenure-track faculty members.
Faculty unions, including the federation, have also stepped up their efforts to reach out to adjuncts who are poorly paid, lack job security, and are unlikely to have benefits. Just last year, the federation released a report that revealed, among other things, that faculty members who work outside the tenure track teach nearly half of the undergraduate courses offered at public colleges.
“Higher-education institutions have turned to cheap labor to do their most important work, which is teaching,” Ms. Bowen said.
At community colleges, long heavy users of adjuncts, 82 percent of the instructional staff was not on the tenure track in 2007, and most of those faculty members were part-timers, the report says. In 1997, the proportion of community-college faculty members working outside the tenure track was 79 percent.
At all public four-year colleges, part-time instructors and graduate students pushed the growth in the proportion of faculty members working off the tenure track.
At public comprehensive institutions—a category that includes both baccalaureate and master’s institutions—full-time and part-time adjuncts and graduate-student employees made up 61 percent of the instructional staff in 2007, compared with 48 percent a decade earlier, the report says. Part-time instructors accounted for 44 percent of non-tenure-track faculty members in 2007, up from 34 percent in 1997. Part of that gain was attributable to reclassifications of community colleges that started offering four-year degrees during the period, the report says.
At public research institutions, graduate students made up 41 percent of the instructional staff in 2007, up four percentage points from 1997.
At private colleges, where the instructional staff grew faster than in all other sectors, a shift toward non-tenure-track labor was evident as well. The largest increase was among graduate-student employees, whose share of the work force rose to 22 percent, up from 18 percent a decade earlier, the report says.
At private comprehensive universities, the proportion of the faculty outside the tenure track rose to 71 percent, an increase of 10 percentage points since 1997.
The report also reveals some trends about the growth of noninstructional staff members at colleges and universities. One of the most striking gains was among full-time administrators, whose numbers grew at almost twice the rate of growth for full-time tenured or tenure-track professors over the decade.
Altogether, the report’s data paint a picture of institutions that “are made up of managers, professional staff, and contingent faculty,” Ms. Bowen said.
The federation says the report is the first in a series of studies it plans to issue on academic staffing.
