Equality for Contingent Faculty: Overcoming the Two-Tier System

Preface

Preface Keith Hoeller It has long been assumed that a college education is just the ticket for admittance into the middle and upper classes. High school students are routinely advised to apply to several colleges, and to choose the one with the most prestige. While financial aid is important, students are told they should go to the best college they can, and to go into debt, if necessary, to make it happen. Government statistics have regularly confirmed the wisdom of this advice. College graduates earn several hundred thousands more over their lifetimes than high school dropouts, and earnings rise the higher the degree. This advice has remained sound even though the Arab oil embargo of 1973 and the consequent recession of 1974–1975 halted the consistent economic growth that followed World War II. The mid-1970s mark the beginning of income stagnation in America, with globalization, downsizing, outsourcing, the steady decline in union membership and the middle class, and within higher education, the erosion of reliance on the tenured professor. Yet the concomitant changes in higher education have rarely been mentioned in the mainstream press. Only since the great recession of 2007–2009 has there been any questioning of both the value and cost of a college degree . Attention has been paid to whether a degree should take so long, and whether online education will replace the traditional brick-and-mortar campus , with the traditional college professor giving lectures to large numbers of students or leading small graduate seminars. But most of this mainstream discussion has focused on students and parents, tuition, and student loans. The major changes in the professoriate have been missing from the debate over the future of higher education in America. The public still retains the positive image of the college professor as well paid and well treated, with low teaching loads, plenty of funding, a lot of time free for research, and students devoted to learning. During the 2012 presidential campaign, Vice President Joe Biden, himself married to a community college professor, blamed high tuition on the high salaries of college professors.1 1 From “Mobile Professors” to “Freeway Fliers” Yet during the past four decades academe has gone from an overwhelming majority of professors holding tenure and tenure-track jobs in the 1960s to a minority today. In the past forty years, there has been a near reversal of the three-to-one ratio between the number of professors who teach on and off the tenure track, with part-time faculty now holding over 50 percent of all college appointments. In “The Case of the Vanishing Full-Time Professor,” Samantha Stainburn of the New York Times says: “In 1960, 75 percent of college instructors were full-time tenured or tenure-track professors; today only 27 percent are. The rest are graduate students or adjunct and contingent faculty.”2 Tenure-stream professors now find themselves adrift in a small, leaky lifeboat surrounded by an ocean brimming with contingent faculty who, prevented from climbing into the tenure boat, are forced either to tread water or drown. Even the American Association of University Professors (AAUP), the National Education Association (NEA), and the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) have begun to speak of tenure in apocalyptic terms. “Today that system [of tenure] has all but collapsed,” says the AAUP.3 Former AAUP president Cary Nelson says, “Now the average college teacher is no longer eligible for tenure, and the good ship humanities is already partly under water.”4 It was not always this way. In The Mobile Professors (1967), published by the American Council on Education, David Brown decried the lack of college professors to fill the ranks of the tenured: Academic labor markets serve the tremendously important role of allocating a resource (qualified manpower) which is not only scarce but vital to the social production function. If professors are poorly placed, the quality of education will suffer. So also will the standard of living and the quality of life. Almost each individual professor is a scarce resource whose optimal placement is severely restricted and whose marginal product would be conspicuous by its absence. (italics in original)5 The resulting shortage in the 1960s led to a system of musical chairs for “mobile professors,” who could and did move from one college to another in order to advance their careers. Colleges had trouble both finding professors to fill tenure and tenure-track positions and retaining them. In one study, nearly 80 percent of colleges predicted larger shortages in...