8 May 2002

To: UO Senate

From: Senate Ad Hoc Committee on the Status of Nontenure-Track, Instructional Faculty: Shaul Cohen, Geography; Robert Davis, Romance Languages; Susan Fagan, English; Wayne Gottshall, Romance Languages; Margaret Hallock, Morse Center; Lynn Kahle, Sports Marketing; Jim Long, Chemistry; F. Regina Psaki, Romance Languages, Chair.

Re: Report on the Status of Nontenure-Track, Instructional Faculty

I. Introduction

While higher education today faces a variety of challenges, none is more pressing than the increasing numbers of faculty members serving colleges and universities without the protections of the tenure system. The drop in public support and simultaneous increase in public demand for higher education has created untenable pressures not only at the University of Oregon but nationwide. Institutions have responded to the resulting budget shortfalls and enrollment pressures by increasing the number of nontenure-track and/or part-time instructional faculty. While this development is often discussed as part of an attack on tenure itself (see Appendix 1), the situation and working conditions of nontenure-track, instructional faculty are of concern in themselves and require consideration.

The following figures, while divergent, give an idea of the scope of nontenure-track appointments. According to the U.S. Department of Education, tenured or tenure-related professors were 90% of university faculty in 1987; now they are approximately 80%. The USDE also reports that in 1987, 33% of university faculty nationwide were part-time; in 1998, 43% were part-time; and in 2001, the figure was around 46%.[1] According to the AAUP,[2]

Non-tenure-track faculty account for more than half of all faculty appointments in American higher education. The non-tenure-track consists of two major groups,

those who teach part-time and those who teach full-time but are not on tenure-track lines. Part-time faculty have increased from 38 percent of faculty appointments

in 1988 to more than 40 percent. Non-tenure-track, full-time faculty hold more than 20 percent of all faculty positions. (“Guidelines for Good Practice”)

The AAU’s recent survey (Appendix 6) indicates that 70% of the faculty in the research institutions it surveyed were tenure track (see section III, below). The figures provided by the Coalition for the Academic Workforce, which focus on specific disciplines in the humanities and social sciences, are more alarming: nontenure-track instructional faculty comprise over 50% of the instructional staff (see section III, below).

Data provided by Resource Management indicate that the University of Oregon faculty numbers 1354 (see Appendix 2). Of these, 733 do not hold tenure-related appointments. This raw figure must be contextualized, as it includes colleagues in very diverse employment situations: professionals with an independent practice and income who teach a limited number of specialized courses on the side; retired colleagues teaching on 600 hours; colleagues teaching in areas in which a university is extremely unlikely to have tenure-related appointments, such as PARS; colleagues who choose to invest a limited number of years in avowedly temporary teaching positions at the UO; and colleagues who have made a career commitment to higher education and who have taught at the UO for far too many years to be called “temporary.”[3]

Surveys and reports on the increase in nontenure-track and part-time faculty positions have been generated by many organizations nationwide and will be referenced in this report. No focused or systematic approach to this issue has emerged, however, nor has a single organization emerged to spotlight it. Instead the committee sees a variety of organizations, sometimes working in tandem, trying direct appeals to state legislatures; pressure on university administrations; collective bargaining; publicity aimed at student bodies and at the electorate at large. The issue has been taken up by the AAUP, the AAU, the American Federation of Teachers, the Coalition on the Academic Workforce, the National Adjunct Faculty Guild, the U.S. Dept. of Education, and the National Education Association.

The widespread concern regarding nontenure-track, instructional faculty (NTTIF) has two principal components. The first is the perception of an attack on or deliberate erosion of tenure; this approach entails a focus on extending the protections of tenure to those faculty members who have been working without them. The second is alarm at the differential and often prejudicial working conditions of the NTTIF, which entails an attempt to understand and improve these conditions independently of the issue of extending tenured status to NTTIF. The latter describes this committee’s charge. The fact that the committee addresses the status (and status quo) of the NTTIF, however, and considers how to improve this, does not imply that it endorses the phenomenon of nontenure-track status for long-term instructional faculty, let alone the proliferation of such appointments in the profession.

Committee members wish to make clear at the outset that the NTTIF are not a “problem”; they are valuable, experienced, and professional colleagues. What is problematic is that this cadre of colleagues is doing a large part of the front-line teaching and yet do not have equal access to the facilities and services of the institution.

The committee has focused on instructional faculty (as opposed to all UO nontenure-track faculty) because they perform a substantial percentage of what the public perceives to be the university’s primary charge: teaching academic courses. Given the slower pace of tenure-track hiring and the smaller teaching loads associated with tenure-track appointments, as enrollment projections and pressures mount, the NTTIF clearly is the group which will be affected first. How can the UO best help these colleagues to do their jobs?

II. The Committee's History and Charge

In fall term 2000 UO Senate President James Earl designated a Senate ad hoc committee to explore the employment and working conditions of the nontenure-track, instructional faculty (hereafter NTTIF) on the UO campus. The committee's charge was to:

III. NTTIF: National Background

This report will not restate last year’s report (Appendix 3) on the growing national dependence on NTTIF in academia overall, or on the growing national concern at such dependence. It does, however, emphasize that the increasing numbers of instructional faculty without tenure-track appointments is problematic from a number of perspectives. First and foremost, in comparison to the tenure-track faculty (TTF), the NTTIF is a group disadvantaged in terms of salary, academic freedom, institutional support, continuity, status, and perceived integration into the institution (a faculty member may teach at an institution for 18 years as a “temporary” employee).

Secondly, the very existence of the tenure system is undermined when universities accept with unconcern that the protections of tenure can legitimately be set aside for a large and growing number of colleagues who are central to the instructional mission on campus and in the profession. The tenure-track faculty should scrutinize and discuss these circumstances. If nothing else, the tenure-track faculty find their workload intensified in some areas (service and administration) even as it is eased in others (instruction) by the profession’s recourse to NTTIF. The American Association of University Professors (AAUP) has published a set of “Guidelines for Good Practice” regarding part-time and nontenure-track faculty includedhere as Appendix 4, although it too is concerned both with the fact of proliferating nontenure-track appointments as well as with the working conditions attaching to them. The committee endorses both the spirit and the letter of the AAUP’s guidelines, which address the central issues of nontenure-track status for faculty nationwide.

Major surveys are being administered to collect data on the NTTIF in academia. Last year the committee reported on the results of the Coalition for the Academic Workforce, an umbrella organization consisting of 25+ disciplinary and professional organizations in the humanities and social sciences (see Appendix 5 for URLs of some participating organizations). After this committee completed its 2001 report, the results of a survey administered by the American Association of Universities (AAU) were released, and can be consulted at http://www.aau.edu/reports/report1.html (Appendix 6 of this report). The AAU survey presented a very different picture of the profession than the CAW survey had. For example, the results of the AAU survey, “Non-Tenure-Track Faculty: A Study of a Sample of AAU Universities,” published April 10, 2001, indicates that 70% of the faculty in institutions surveyed were tenure track. However, the CAW survey, “Summary of Data from Surveys by the Coalition on the Academic Workforce,” published in November 2000, indicates that in 7 of 9 disciplines surveyed, “full-time tenured and tenure-track faculty constituted less than half of the instructional staff” (AAU Report).

The AAU survey, in other words, suggests a more reassuring landscape. In order to interpret these two sets of data, a detailed comparison of their parameters is necessary.

Factors that might account for the disparity between the findings of the two surveys are the size of the survey sample, the types of institutions sampled, and what units of the institution responded to the surveys. The AAU has only 63 member institutions; all are considered research institutions and offer graduate-level programs. Of those 63 members, only 25 were sampled in a first collection of data, and 32 during a second. 18 schools responding in the first study were also surveyed in the second; thus the total number of schools surveyed is 40. The data were collected directly from university administrations. In contrast, the CAW is a coalition of 25 academic societies, and its survey was sent by six of the member disciplinary societies to all the departments in their fields.[4] For four other fields, a representative sampling was selected. The institutions surveyed included 2-year, 4-year, and graduate institutions. Individual academic departments, rather than university administrations, responded to the CAW survey.

The smaller number of institutions surveyed for the AAU study might suggest a lower level of statistical certainty than in the CAW study. In addition, the AAU consists of Carnegie Doctoral / Research Universities-Extensive institutions. Institutions with graduate programs “relied heavily on graduate students to fill the staffing role of part-time and adjunct faculty” (CAW Report). The 2-year and 4-year institutions included in the CAW study clearly do not have graduate students available for staffing needs, and thus might as a matter of course have a higher number of NTTIF.

The goals of the units responding might also shed some light on the discrepancies. As a matter of prestige the administrations responding to the AAU survey would have an interest in showing that they do not rely unduly on NTTIF. The departments surveyed for the CAW study might want to highlight the seriousness of the situation to delineate to their own administrations a need for additional tenure-track positions.

Finally, the disciplinary scope of the two surveys differed: CAW reported on data gathered from departments of humanities and social sciences in 10 disciplines; AAU included data on the natural sciences as well. The distribution of tenure-track to nontenure-track instructional faculty is more unbalanced in the humanities; adding the natural sciences makes the overall picture look more favorable.

Although the CAW survey reports 50% tenure-track faculty in the instructional corps and the AAU survey reports 70%, both agree on the need to preserve the tenure system and ideally to apply it to all long-term instructional faculty. The AAU Report states that the tenure system is a “critical mechanism” for preserving academic freedom. It recommends that policies on NTTIF should reflect both the needs of the institution and the NTTIF, stating that “policies that recognize and accommodate their engagements . . . will . . . benefit the institution as well as the faculty.” The CAW concludes that “the terms and conditions of part-time and adjunct faculty appointments, in many cases, weaken [the] capacity to provide essential educational experiences and resources. Too often the terms and conditions of such appointments are inadequate to support responsible teaching or, by extension, a career.”

The University of Oregon is not one of the institutions represented in the AAU survey, although several of its academic units participated in the CAW survey.[5]

In addition to these data-gathering undertakings, both the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) and the National Education Association (NEA) have researched the situation of NTTIF in the context of collective bargaining. Both bodies have issued reports and recommended strategies for organizations attempting to gain improvements to salary and working conditions for NTTIF. While the AFT and NEA as unions represent strategies which are in some ways incongruous with the options of the UO faculty, their reports are involving and informative reading, and put the NTTIF issue into a national and professional context. URLs for their reports are included in Appendix 1, along with other bibliography and internet resources.

IV. NTTIF at the UO

In the mid-1980s the NTTIF at the UO petitioned to designate themselves as a collective bargaining unit represented by the American Federation of Teachers. The State Employment Relations Board denied the petition, as at the time the Board preferred “large and unfragmented bargaining units.” Because the proposed bargaining unit would include only NTTIF, rather than all academic employees, the Board held that the proposed bargaining unit would be inappropriate. The AFT sought a review of the Board’s decision from the Oregon Supreme Court, based on the contention “that the employees comprised by its proposed unit [had] a community of interest among themselves that [was] not shared by other faculty members.” The Oregon Supreme Court recognized that the NTTIF were treated differently from other faculty members in terms of tenure, salary, and other working conditions, stating that “the subject employees are treated differently by the University than are professors,” but nonetheless upheld the Board’s ruling in August 1988 (See Appendix 7).

A. Formal policies in print:

To contribute to an assessment of NTTIF working conditions at the UO, the Committee, under the signature of the Senate President, canvassed Department Heads for policies concerning the employment and conditions for NTTIF in individual programs. By mid-March 2002 it had heard from 41 units. 7 department heads forwarded written policies already in existence; 13 confirmed that no written policies exist; and 18 confirmed that no written policies exist, but in addition attempted to sketch out in some detail their ad hoc practices in NTTIF employment. (Some units reported merely that they had no nontenure-track, instructional faculty, and therefore no policy.)

The policies and descriptions of practice that the Committee received illustrate the complexity of the challenge facing all parties invested in this issue (see Appendix 8). The Committee notes that the AAUP “Guidelines for Good Practice” for NTTIF state that “Complex institutions may require multiple models of faculty appointments consistent with the diverse contributions appropriate to the institution’s needs” (see Appendix 4). Multiple models are obviously appropriate at the UO given the range of NTTIF responsibilities and opportunities across the range of programs here, analogous to the different terms that apply to tenure-track faculty.

However, a number of circumstances that typify the conditions affecting NTTIF can be addressed at the university level. The first of these is that all programs should have a written policy on NTTIF and attempt, to the fullest degree possible, to adhere to the policy with consistency. Many department heads indicated that their department had no formal policy in print; a few suggested that they were unfamiliar with their unit’s policy; some indicated that practice had changed substantially since the policy was last revised. At the same time, several Departments with quite developed NTTIF policies present aspects that might productively be adopted more broadly. Most basically, to quote the AAUP guidelines mentioned above, “All appointments, including part-time appointments, should have a description of the specific professional duties required”; moreover, “the performance of faculty members of renewable term appointments ... should be regularly evaluated with established criteria appropriate to their positions.” The AAUP guidelines are not themselves a policy, but rather a set of parameters which should characterize the relationship between institutions and the NTTIF.

Among the more developed policies at the UO, several include a clear statement of rights and opportunities along with the obligations incumbent on NTTIF, and this approach is to be encouraged. Though these policies do not necessarily reflect the actual experience of any individual, the Committee notes the work and thought that have been given to NTTIF policies in the School of Education, the departments of English and Biology, and the American English Institute. These policies engage a wide range of issues across various types and levels of appointment in the respective programs, and approach the relationship between the institution and the NTTIF as an important and ongoing matter worthy of significant administrative attention. While policies will never be entirely uniform across campus, these departmental documents can be a useful resource to other units as they draft their own.

The committee recommends that each unit with NTTIF develop and observe a policy which both mandates the terms of employment of NTTIF and adequately describes the experience of NTTIF in that specific unit. It recommends further that the AAUP guidelines be consulted and reflected in departmental policy statements regarding the NTTIF; certainly they offer useful suggestions for the developments of such policies.

B. Departmental surveys:

On April 30, 2002, the Committee issued, through Senate President Nathan Tublitz, a questionnaire for department heads to complete. The questionnaire is intended to supplement the departmental policies with information on actual practices, beginning with numbers (and percentages) of NTTIF in the instructional corps. It also asked for summary information on salary range, contract terms, promotion possibilities and expectations, merit raise criteria, provisions for sabbatical leave, and access to institutional support. This questionnaire was deliberately modest in scope in order to encourage and facilitate its completion; it is included as Appendix 9. Departments have been asked to return the data to the Committee by the end of exam week, and the committee members available to analyze it will work on that task in the second half of June.

V. Statistical Data on NTTIF at UO

A. Information obtained

• The breakdown of NTTIF across units (see Appendix 9):

The distribution of NTTIF across the UO is consistent with national trends.

• their FTE (but again, courses taught cannot be extrapolated from this);

• their average salary increases cf. the tenure-track faculty.

This information is attached virtually without comment at this point, since it must be contextualized in light of both the data now being collected from department heads and the data to be generated by a survey of NTTIF (see the next paragraph).

B. Information still to collect:

1. A full-scale survey of the NTTIF

Last year’s report recommended that a full-scale, professional survey of the NTTIF be conducted, along the lines of the recent OSRL survey of tenure-track faculty. This year’s budget cutbacks caused the Committee to scale back that plan, but not to abandon it. In 2001-2002 the ad hoc committee still wishes to conduct a survey of the UO NTTIF concerning a full spectrum of work issues broadly construed. Salary is an essential ingredient in equitable treatment of instructional faculty; however, many other issues are equally relevant, and these range from the intangible to the quite concrete. To supplement the information requested from department chairs, a survey adapted for UO use[6] would consult NTTIF on the same issues as well as others. The survey also addresses course load; performance expectations; office space; computer access; access to telephone, copy machine, and support staff; service expectations at the departmental, college, and university levels; input into departmental policy; opportunities for professional development and research support; perceptions of access to salary increases; and others.

This committee has been gathering information informally, in one-on-one interviews, for 18 months. Many irritants in the lives of NTTIF appear to be endemic in (even multiple) short-term appointments, such as uncertainty about reappointment and anxiety about benefits. Others are dictated by ongoing space constraints, such as the lack of appropriate work space for course preparation and offices in which to meet with students. And still other circumstances have emerged in these interviews which are quite unnecessary: the suspension of e-mail and library privileges during terms in which an adjunct faculty member is not teaching; lack of access to a computer capable of submitting grades on line; limits on photocopies and other supplies which are insufficient for the number of students taught per term; lack of inclusion in the intellectual and/or social life of a department. Anecdotal information is abundant; nonetheless, gathering data as systematically as possible is essential to understanding where the most serious problems are – of morale, of institutional support, of integration, and of workload. Once that information is collected, collated, and interpreted, the university can begin to address as many of these issues as possible.

The ad hoc committee has identified an outside researcher willing and able to conduct the survey for a modest cost (c. $4000-6000). It has presented to the FAC the desirability of administering the survey and formally requested the funding for it. We recommend that the survey be conducted in the fall of 2002, and that analysis and interpretation of its results take place in winter and spring of 2003.

2. Data from the UO’s specific comparators

Public universities are in a particular position regarding the reliance on NTTIF. The Committee recommends collecting data from those institutions which are considered to be analogous to the UO; such data should ideally include not only raw numbers but also policies and practices which may serve as examples (either positive or negative) of working conditions for NTTIF.

VI. Recommendations

A. The Committee’s first recommendation is that the UO engage actively and deliberately with this issue at all levels. Although the NTTIF is a large and productive group at the UO, comprising 497 of the 1354 faculty members here in March 2002, no central group or unit is gathering and disseminating information on them, trying to influence policy and public opinion on nontenure-track status for instructional faculty, or trying to advocate or serve as a resource for the NTTIF. In light of this fact the Committee urges the following:

1. That the UO Senate create a standing university committee on the status of nontenure-track, instructional faculty. This committee should include NTTIF, tenure-track faculty, and administration at the highest level, since the situation of NTTIF clearly requires systemic, systematic, and serious examination. The UO as a whole will benefit from the work of a standing committee in reviewing UO policy on NTTIF. The motion to form a standing committee is included as Appendix 12.

2. That the UO administration prioritize the work of this committee so that all parties cooperate with it and facilitate its endeavors. The ad hoc committee recognizes the cooperation and help of Resource Management and the many colleagues who provided prompt and complete information on their units’ policies and practices. Even more must be done. At this point many public universities are required to publish information which the UO does not even track – for example, on percentages of courses taught by NTTIF.

3. That all units should formulate clear, realistic, and fair policies setting out the terms of employment of NTTIF. The existence of published policies will reduce uncertainty for the NTTIF and allow for discussion and adaptation of any elements found to be problematic. It will also reduce the chance that the UO will be subject to complaints or filings for arbitrary or discriminatory treatment, and such policies can aid in the defense of any such claims. Employers at the UO who hire NTTIF will benefit from models of best-practice and more standardized policies, and following published policies should help protect the UO from liability for arbitrary or other unfair treatment.

B. Survey of UO NTTIF

As noted above, the committee recommends that a professional survey be conducted to determine the NTTIF's working conditions, and to see where the UO is succeeding, and where it is failing, to help them perform their duties. This information must then be acted on, not warehoused.

C. This committee recommends that the ad hoc and de facto two-tier system of instructional faculty at the UO be recognized as such and receive ongoing institutional attention. Its members insist on the need to monitor and advocate for NTTIF, who often do not feel themselves to be in a position to do so.

VII. Conclusion

The committee’s strong sense is that a wide variety of working conditions exist among the NTTIF, of which the tenure-track faculty tend to be unaware. The Committee’s goal is not to impose a counterproductive and paralyzing homogeneity on NTT appointments, but to make a priority of helping the NTTIF to do the jobs which so benefit the university. The university’s goal as an institution of higher education must be to provide maximum fairness, transparency, and consistency in the policies on compensation, academic freedom, recognition, and job security which touch all instructional faculty.

Index of Appendices:

Appendix 1: recent bibliography on NTTIF and the tenure system

Appendix 2: Data sets provided by Resource Management, March 2002:

[1] U.S. Department of Education, National Center for Education Statistics, The Condition of Education 2001, NCES 2001-072, Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 2001. “The Context of Post Secondary Education: College Resources.” Indicator 50: Part-Time Instructional Faculty and Staff.

[2] AAUP, “Guidelines for Good Practice: Part-Time and Non-Tenure-Track Faculty.” http://www.aaup.org/Issues/part-time/Ptguide.htm

[3]While universities have, as this committee noted last year, a legitimate interest in responding flexibly to changing enrollment patterns, a startling number of the nontenure-track colleagues are in no way temporary personnel appointed to respond to immediate enrollment shifts. (Enrollments in English and Spanish, for example, do not seem to fluctuate much in any direction but up – yet nationally, tenure-related faculty appointments in such departments have not always followed that upward trend.)

[4] The Modern Language Association alone, for example, surveyed 1,988 departments of English and foreign languages; the responses of each department may be examined at the MLA’s web site, www.mla.org.

[5] According to the MLA, the UO departments of English, Germanic Languages, and Romance Languages are represented in the CAW survey. Since not all disciplinary organizations publish this information, other UO units might be represented as well.

[6] Though still under construction, the draft of the survey so far is attached as Appendix 11.