Colleagues on and off the Tenure Track

David Montgomery

Read the part-time standards developed by the joint AHA/OAH Committee on Part-time and Adjunct Employment.

Read the original part-time survey report, as published in the November 2002 issue of the OAH Newsletter.

In her column in this Newsletter, OAH President Hall has drawn our attention to the rampant substitution of adjunct and part-time appointees for tenure-track faculty in history departments throughout the land and to the commitment of both the Organization of American Historians and the American Historical Association to work publicly and effectively to stem the rising tide of temporary and contingent employment of historians and also to improve the earnings, treatment, and career prospects of the thousands of historians who have already been caught up in that tide, often for many years.

As the recommendations of the Joint AHA-OAH Committee on Part-Time and Adjunct Employment, which the two historical societies have endorsed, make clear, both limiting the institutional use of contingent faculty and improving the treatment and support provided to the many historians who are so employed will require action on many levels. President Hall has noted the efforts of organizations formed by contingent faculty members themselves, of the American Association of University Professors, and of several teachers' unions. The Joint Committee has also indicated important roles that accrediting agencies and media evaluations of colleges can and should play in bringing employment practices up to the standards the historical societies have adopted. The fact that the great majority of historians at community colleges and some state systems are contracted to teach by the term or by the course makes state legislatures a potential agency for improvement of standards. In Washington, a state superior court judge ruled in 2000 that the state must count time spent by part-time faculty in preparing for class, grading papers, and advising students, as well as actual class hours, in calculating eligibility for retirement benefits (1).

There will be little progress made, however, until history departments around the country address their own use and treatment of part-time and adjunct teachers. It requires the initiative of individual department members and of department chairs even to discuss the matter. Virtually all departments today face tight budgetary restraints, handed down by administration officials or even state legislatures. All departments want to do their best to meet the desires of students for courses of interest to them. Promising candidates for part-time and adjunct positions are all too abundant. Contingent faculty are often appointed by the chair (or even by an administration official, who is not part of the department), while department meetings focus on other matters. At worst, transient historians, who may well also teach courses at other institutions, have no voice in departmental decisions and may be virtually invisible to tenured members of the faculty. Indeed, when the AHA surveyed department chairs in 1997, it found that 62 percent of part-time faculty members did not even have their names listed in the Directory of History Departments and Organizations in the United States and Canada.

To be sure, a significant minority of part-time or adjunct teachers (perhaps 15 percent) is made up of individuals who have good reason to prefer such status, and the course offerings of any department can be enriched by visitors. The need is not to end the practice, but to curb the massive expansion which has characterized the last three decades. The proliferation of two-tiered departments in colleges and universities and of the dominance of casual employment in community colleges has substituted managerial practices brought from industry for what remains of faculty self-government. It has also significantly increased the burden of administrative tasks, advising students, and directing their research for the remaining tenure-track faculty.

Moreover, as growing numbers of historians work without the protection of tenure, they find that annual or even semiannual reappointments make it advisable for them to be cautious about what they say and write. As the AAUP has argued for more than half a century, tenure is the bulwark of professional integrity and it secures the power of historians to regulate their own profession (2). And everywhere tenure is under attack. Even a 1999 report of the American Association of State Colleges and Universities, which advocated better salaries and treatment that would "legitimize" adjunct and part-time faculty, coupled that admirable proposal with a call for "more flexibility in our personnel policies, not less," and specifically for routine posttenure review for faculty members who had been tenured (3).

Above all, we who are tenured historians must heed the admonition of Professor Joyce Appleby that "adjunct professors being hired today have excellent potential, because they have been our graduate students." We "have participated in their development as scholars," but we also know "that their potential is slowly drained, year by year, without the support for their scholarly development that we have written into our own working conditions" (4).

Inaction by history departments is the most certain way to consign whatever control they exercise over their own professional activities, the conditions of their employment, and the future prospects of the graduates with whom they have worked closely for years to administrators and legislators, who are obsessed with reducing instructional costs and imitating current practices of the business world. The standards proposed by the Joint AHA-OAH Committee on Part-Time and Adjunct Employment and endorsed by both organizations, and the appeal of President Hall, summon all of us to place our own departments' use of nontenure-track appointments high on our departmental agendas. The committee's report provides valuable guidelines for discussion and for action within every college and university.

David Montgomery is the Farnam Professor of History Emeritus at Yale University and past OAH President (1999-2000).

1. NEA Today, 19 April 2000, 3.

2. American Association of University Professors, "1940 Statement of Principles on Academic Freedom and Tenure, with 1970 Interpretive Comments," AAUP Policy Documents (1995): 3-10.

3. Denise K. Magner, "Report Urges Post-Tenure Reviews for Professors and More Pay for Part-Timers," Chronicle of Higher Education, 22 January 1999, A10.

4. Joyce Appleby, "Of Parcels and Part-Timers," AHA Perspectives, October 1997, 9.