Fri, 23 November 2007 Are you on the tenure track? Or, are you considered a "contingent faculty" member? The statistics are scary: In 2005, 68% of the professoriate were NOT on the tenure track. In today's podcast, Jason and I discuss an AAUO Online letter he received on October 22, 2007 from the American Association of University Professors in addition to a related article from the NY Times about the decline of the tenure track. AAUP Online Snippet: This message celebrates an anniversary: a year ago the AAUP adopted its most detailed and specific set of recommended institutional regulations governing part-time faculty positions. That action followed upon an extensive series of AAUP reports about the changing state of faculty appointments. The reports themselves, the first appearing in 1980, were written in response to thirty years of gradually increasing use of contingent faculty throughout American higher education. In 1975, tenured and tenure-track faculty together constituted 57 percent of faculty nationwide. By 2005, the latest year for which figures are available, that combined group had been whittled down to merely 32 percent. Contingent faculty had meanwhile grown from 43 percent to 68 percent of the professoriate. You can help us raise awareness of these dramatic changes by printing out a bar graph recording them and putting it on your office door. The term “contingent faculty� itself reflects our awareness that several groups of teachers—including part-timers, full-timers off the tenure-track, and graduate employees who teach well beyond the needs of their own training—endure overlapping forms of exploitation and present comparable risks to higher education. We have warned repeatedly that the excessive employment of faculty without job security would eventually undermine both academic freedom and shared governance. That time has arrived. When most faculty are at risk of summary dismissal, the freedom for faculty to speak forthrightly is diminished. And faculty control over the curriculum is also undercut. AAUP Website: www.aaup.org The New York Times article information: A nationwide trend for universities to
use adjunct professors instead of a tenured faculty has become so
extreme that some schools are pulling back. Comments[0] |
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