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Derailed: How students are impacted by adjunct faculty – Daily Montanan

['Carrie La Seur', 'More From Author', '- March']

Date: 2022-03-09 00:00:00

Bess Lovec, a former dance adjunct at Montana State University-Billings, echoed the common adjunct refrain of appreciation for her “incredible, hungry, eager, positive, hard-working” students, paired with frustrations in her underpaid, term by term teaching role. Although adjuncts were teaching half the classes in her department, she was never invited to a faculty meeting. She loved her work, but questioned how curriculum can be designed and implemented for students’ long-term development if so many of their teachers are drop-ins, with no input and little evaluation.

Especially at Montana’s larger universities, adjuncts are often the faculty members who get to know students first, said a sciences adjunct who spoke on condition of anonymity. She knows more about what’s wrong with her department and her campus than most of the people running it, she’s certain. She knows why the department has problems with recruitment and retention, which full professors don’t pull their weight, who’s moonlighting in violation of their contract, and why the university has trouble fundraising and keeping staff. She tries to be an advocate where she can, but most of the time, it’s professionally dangerous for her to speak out, and she’s not compensated for time spent on anything but her classes. She has to play defense, hang onto the job.

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.

Many adjuncts get stellar reviews, but due to the challenges of hiring for low-wage, part-time, temporary work, they can’t always be of the same quality as faculty hired through national searches. There’s a code of honor among adjuncts – most are very reluctant to criticize each other, and tenure track faculty are generally careful to speak respectfully about their contingent colleagues – but a few cracks show. An experienced and accomplished humanities professor who adjuncts in large part because she enjoys it emphasized the high quality and commitment of most Montana adjuncts — but recalled seeing a “mediocre” former student teaching composition with a bachelor’s degree because the university was desperate to fill the position.

You hate to be legalistic and refuse to do things that you’re good at that need to be done, but you’re not getting paid. You don’t feel valued. – Sciences Adjunct, Montana University System

Professors up for tenure can choose classes based on what takes the least preparation, leaving time to assemble their tenure portfolios, while shifting time-consuming classes onto adjunct faculty, who may lack the resources to stay current in the field. Professor Emily Arendt at MSU-Billings worries that even the most qualified, hard-working adjunct can’t offer students the level of support and continuity that a tenure track professor can.

Part-time faculty read the collective bargaining agreement and do precisely what they have to do not to get fired, the sciences adjunct said. “You hate to be legalistic and refuse to do things that you’re good at that need to be done, but you’re not getting paid. You don’t feel valued.” Because her students ask and she cares about them, she writes “tons of recommendations.” That’s uncompensated time. She regrets that the recommendation won’t be as valued by graduate programs or potential employers as one from a tenure track professor.

The Chronicle of Higher Education frequently reports on the national “adjunct problem,” pointing out that most campuses don’t understand very well who their adjuncts are or what’s happening to them. In August 2021, the Chronicle called for a national survey of the academic workforce “that asks adjuncts about who they are and how they perceive their jobs” as well as “data at the department and college level that is far more robust than the numbers currently available from the Education Department’s IPEDS HR survey.”

The IPEDS — Integrated Post-Secondary Education Data System — survey was the main source of faculty data provided by the Montana University System in response to an extended series of requests to many sources for this article. According to the Chronicle, an expanded survey should include “data on academic appointments by principal disciplinary unit, by tenure status, by full-time or part-time status; by percentage of faculty members with or without benefits; and by how many instructors are graduate students.”

Despite adjuncts’ tenuous position on campuses and the lack of data about them, Montana’s universities rely heavily on them to teach entry level courses and — often informally — provide early guidance and support in decisions like choosing a major or selecting classes. More than 20 percent of Montana University System students are first generation, meaning that neither parent graduated from a four-year university, with higher proportions at community colleges. Faculty, including adjuncts, are well aware that these students need and deserve extra support from a teaching-oriented, well resourced, fully professional faculty — not a part-time, temporary professor with no office who’s rushing out the door to make it to the next gig.

Talking about how students may get short-changed by universities’ over-reliance on contingent faculty is even more taboo than talking about adjuncts’ work conditions and terms of employment. Repeated requests to faculty union representatives at multiple campuses and to the Montana Federation of Public Employees resulted in no one willing to go on the record about systemic problems with adjuncting — perhaps because a critique of the situation can translate all too easily into criticism of adjuncts themselves.

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