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Office of the
Chancellor P.O. Box 3175 Eugene, OR 97403-0175 PHONE (541) 346-5743 FAX (541) 346-5757 www.ous.edu |
June 8, 2005
The Honorable Richard Devlin
Oregon State Senate
900 Court St. NE
Salem, OR 97301
Dear Senator Devlin:
In response to your request regarding faculty recruitment and retention, and adjunct faculty, please find the attached report, OUS Faculty Recruitment and Retention Issues. This document contains information in response to the four questions you posed:
- What is the approximate number of unsuccessful searches for faculty in the last 3-5 years?
- What is the number of non-retentions for this period, based on the number of faculty who left prior to application for tenure/promotion?
- Please provide data on ranking of actual hires according to rank in application pool.
- Please provide the absolute number of adjuncts and their FTE, and proportional numbers of adjuncts and their proportional FTE.
Inasmuch as faculty search information is kept at the departmental level, we do not have a complete central file of data on unsuccessful searches. As a result, we believe the numbers reported here understate the magnitude of the problem, especially since we know that faculty applicant pools are diminished well before they reach the finalist stage. The salary and resource situation in Oregon universities is well known to faculty in other states, and many either withdraw before reaching the finalist stage or elect not to apply after making inquiries about salary.
With respect to faculty retention, the numbers tell only part of the story. One of the critical issues is which faculty are leaving. We are seeing more tenured, mid-career faculty leaving than we have in the past—faculty at the peak of their productivity and accomplishments.
Finally, we have reported on both part-time and adjunct faculty at our campuses in fall 2004. These are instructors who may be practicing professionals teaching an occasional course, or they may be part-time faculty on longer contract to teach some of the basic courses in foreign language, composition, or general math. In all cases, they represent part-time instructors who do not bear responsibility for other aspects of student instruction and support, such as advising, mentoring, or thesis support. They also do not contribute to the administrative workload of faculty—curriculum development, participation in tenure review and search committees, services