This story was originally published by Daily Montanan: URL: https://dailymontanan.com This story has not been altered or edited. (C) Daily Montanan. Licensed for re-distribution through Creative Commons license CC BY-NC-ND 4.0. ------------ Derailed: Life Off the Tenure Track – Daily Montanan ['Carrie La Seur', 'More From Author', '- March'] Date: 2022-03-06 00:00:00 Melissa Holmes left Butte in the dark, no later than 7 a.m., to crawl along wintery roads if necessary and still be on time to teach computer science classes seventy miles away at Helena College, a community college in the public Montana University System. As a lecturer, she had no office, so she’d nap in her freezing car while cramming up to four classes into two days a week in Helena. She was also teaching at Montana Tech in Butte, which capped the number of course hours an adjunct professor could teach. As a single mother of four, she needed the extra income. Derailed: Life off the tenure track Editor’s note: The Daily Montanan is presenting a five-part series to examine the roles and inequities of non-tenure track faculty in the public Montana University System and beyond. Traditionally, non-tenure track or “contingent” faculty – those whose jobs are not protected by the tenure system that requires significant process for dismissal – have consisted of independent professionals and academics in a community filling in as needed. But as higher education struggles with budget constraints, these positions make up an increasing portion of the faculty even at flagship universities – and the hourly pay works out to less than food service employees’. This series examines five aspects of the rise of contingent faculty, which some describe as a lesser caste in which those who prepared for secure academic careers scramble to eke out a living. Part One: Caste system Outside the tenure system, university teaching has slipped into the modern gig economy, with terms often worse than delivery driving. Part Two: Lower caste Work conditions for contingent faculty can be exhausting, demoralizing, and in the worst case, fatal. Part Three: Terms of Employment Earning as little as $3 an hour, contingent faculty have no job security and little hope of advancement. Part Four: Impact on Students Despite contingent faculty’s best efforts, their tenuous position within the university can reduce their value to students. Part Five: Pushing back Professional associations, unions, and universities are taking steps to improve the status of adjuncts, to protect the core mission of higher education. On the side, she finished her doctorate one class at a time through the University of Montana. Class preparation, grading, and the degree course that might give her a shot at a tenure-track job one day made for a grueling schedule. Holmes considered herself lucky, teaching full-time at a university — but not in the way most people understand the job. As a non-traditional student who earned graduate degrees after having kids, she’d joined the growing ranks of non-tenure-track professors, who prop up higher education with long hours, tough work conditions, multiple jobs, no benefits, low pay, and little job security or hope of advancement. The status of non-tenure track faculty in American universities has been a concern for years among labor activists, university administrators, and adjuncts themselves, who often can’t speak out about their situation for fear of being blackballed from jobs they’re desperate to keep. Graduate students who work as apprentice teachers also fall into this category. “Adjuncts,” or “contingent faculty” as a catch-all, means higher education faculty who work outside the tenure system. The trend of increasing reliance on adjuncts has been growing for decades. There’s demand for professors, but the way they’re employed has changed, the way the nature of employment has shifted for many American workers. In 2016, the nonprofit TIAA Institute produced a study showing that from 1993 to 2013, non-tenure-track jobs grew by 84%, compared to 11% increases in tenured and tenure track. From nearly 80% tenured or tenure-track faculty in U.S. universities in 1969, only about a quarter are somewhere on the tenure spectrum now. Like the rest of the gig economy, the rise of adjuncts is largely an economic phenomenon. Montana’s taxpayer contribution to public university budgets has fallen from around 76 percent in the early 1990s to around 42 percent in 2022. As universities try to hold the line on tuition hikes, savings have to come from somewhere. Research is divided on whether adjuncting can be an effective model for university teaching. Some studies show lower graduation rates as contingent faculty numbers rise, but a 2015 study at Northwestern University showed that students learned more from adjuncts in lower level classes than from professors in the tenure model. The authors conceded that adjuncts at Northwestern have better work conditions than many contingent faculty around the country, but the findings suggest a need for more data. The Chronicle of Higher Education often cites the statistic that 70 percent of American university faculty currently work outside the tenure system, but acknowledges that this number is meaningless in light of the lack of broader data. Most university systems only track “full-time equivalents,” lumping two or more contingent faculty into one. The Montana University System is no exception. At the state level, administrators can’t answer how many adjuncts currently work in Montana’s public universities, what proportion of students they teach in a given semester, or what percentage of the total faculty they constitute. The National Center for Education Statistics shows 85 percent of Montana’s full-time public college and university faculty as tenured or tenure track, versus 62 percent nationally, but these statistics are incomplete and misleading. A 2010 University of Montana study, for example, showed 540 faculty in the university’s tenure system and 430 outside it, making part-time and temporary faculty nearly 45% of the total headcount. Part-time status — without benefits — is a condition of employment for many Montana adjuncts and common nationwide. It’s one reason why Holmes drove to Helena. Many adjuncts have finished their degrees yet exist in an academic no-man’s-land, trying to get by, like minor league baseball players scraping by on meager salaries, hoping for a chance at the majors. Except that instead of running bases, they’re running universities. One aspect of adjuncting that raises concern in the supposed meritocracy of academia is that women and U.S.-born underrepresented minorities hold far more than their share of these jobs. They’re disadvantaged in a profession where student evaluations are often essential to advancement. For a 2015 study published in Innovative Higher Education, researchers “led one online discussion group using their own name, and another group using the name of an assistant instructor of the opposite gender. Assistant instructors who used a female name and identity received significantly lower ratings than assistant instructors who used a male name and identity” — despite being the same person. Fair work conditions and compensation for university faculty are essential to the quality college education that more than 40,000 Montana students each semester depend on the state’s public universities to provide. A college degree remains the most reliable ticket to improved lifelong earnings and upward mobility. In an era of rocketing tuition and student debt, many large survey classes that are gateways to majors are taught by adjuncts, who often get to know students at their most vulnerable phase of university life, as they choose majors and learn to be scholars and adults. Adjuncts interviewed for this article are in many cases aware of urgent problems within their academic departments and universities, but aren’t included in decision-making. They’re often expected to advise, mentor, write letters of recommendation, and provide other services students need to thrive, but commonly receive no compensation for those extra hours. Tenure is under attack as unjustifiable permanent employment for good and bad professors alike, but a tenured professor can be fired for cause, with due process, just not fired for no reason. Job security for professors who are highly specialized in rarefied topics is a defense of the life of the mind and a way to attract professionals who could earn more elsewhere. Without it, faculty would all be adjunct-equivalents, subject to the whims of administrators and of society, afraid to pursue innovative or unpopular research or critique their own institutions for fear of censure and dismissal. [END] [1] Url: https://dailymontanan.com/2022/03/06/derailed-life-off-the-tenure-track/ Content is licensed through Creative Commons license CC BY-NC-ND 4.0. via Magical.Fish Gopher News Feeds: gopher://magical.fish/1/feeds/news/montanan/