Major Problems Result from the Growing Use of Part-time and Adjunct Faculty

Maxine N. Lurie

Concerns about the increasing number of historians teaching as part-time and adjunct faculty led to the creation of a permanent Joint OAH-AHA Committee on Part-Time and Adjunct Employment in January 2002. My involvement started early in 2000 when Eric Foner asked me, as an elected member of the AHA Teaching Division, to serve on an ad hoc committee dealing with part-time and adjunct faculty issues. For two years, I was co-chair of that committee, and then for a year the chair of the now permanent joint committee. For the past three years, I have participated in numerous conversations about part-time/adjunct employment with an assortment of committee members as we wrestled with what is for our profession a serious and growing problem.

Looking back, I think that this has been one of the most important and most difficult things I have done. The issues are serious, emotions run high, and solutions are not easy. As a part-time/adjunct faculty for more than twenty years (a result of gender, the job market, and family commitments), and now a department chair responsible for hiring part-time/adjunct faculty member, my perspective runs in several directions at the same time. The anger and pain of those caught in the often unfair and demeaning gristmill of such employment resonates, as does the frustration that comes from trying to be fair while being circumscribed by institutional policies. I agreed to participate because I knew the problems personally. After doing so, I am more than ever convinced that both professional organizations must take a role in finding solutions. The implications, as the committee has concluded, are enormous for everyone concerned--part-time/adjunct faculty, full-time faculty, students, and institutions of higher learning.

The committee has consisted primarily of those who are now, or who have been in the past, part-time faculty. This has been important because the committee has heard, sometimes in very angry tones, from those who have struggled with the problems. OAH and the AHA officers, staff, and members need to hear this alternative view rather than that of those who are at the top of the profession. The litany of problems include:

• abysmally low pay, often lacking any benefits (medical coverage is frequently the most pressing need, but the absence of retirement funds has serious long range implications),
  
• ineligibility for grants or travel money (to help with research that just might make escape possible),
  
• poor or no office space, or no clerical assistance, lack of computers (as technology becomes ever more important), and sometimes no library access.
  

Teaching is not easy under these circumstances--scholarly research is nearly impossible, self esteem runs low, and financial survival becomes difficult.

Wrestling with these problems is complicated by the fact that there are some individuals--such as retired faculty still engaged with the discipline, those with other full-time employment or family responsibilities, and graduate students working to complete their degrees--who prefer to teach part-time. Any proposed solutions need to recognize this group. There are also small departments that can only offer a specialized course with a part-time or adjunct employee. The other side of the equation is the numerous institutions dealing with financial cuts by hiring large numbers of teachers at very low wages who then try to survive by piecing together jobs at several institutions. These "sweat shop" workers are gambling on their futures, and paying with their labor so that others get an education at their expense. No wonder many become angry and alienated.

Although the committee has concentrated on how unfair this system is to those caught in it--natural given its membership--in a report submitted to the OAH and AHA last spring, the committee emphasized the wider impact of part-time faculty on the profession. Growing reliance on part-time faculty means that graduate students increasingly face an unpleasant future (and as they realize it there will be fewer graduate students.) The report also notes that a smaller number of full-time faculty will become increasingly responsible for more institutional tasks. Consider what the difference would be if you were in a department with 25 full-time faculty covering 100 classes in a semester, as contrasted with one of 10 full-time and 30 part-time members (or 11 full-time and 77 part-time, currently the case at two New Jersey institutions). How many can advise, serve on committees, recruit, fundraise, and deal with accreditation? Students, if they are lucky, get an underpaid Ph.D. teacher, if not an appallingly low paid person, teaching out of field. They are more likely to have someone who spends time traveling from one campus to another, has less time for teaching tasks, gives few or no papers, submits inflated grades (to insure they have a job the next semester), and is not there in two or three years to write a letter of recommendation. Institutions, whose reputations depend on the scholarship of their faculty have less to brag about. The list goes on, but the point is that this does have an impact on all of us in the profession whether we realize it or not.

Solutions need to go in two directions. One is to halt and reverse the bleeding of full-time positions. The second is that make life better and fairer for those who do teach part-time. The committee's recommendations to the OAH and AHA include provisions for a limit on the percentage of part-time faculty in a department, for increased salaries (as a percentage of what is paid full-time faculty), benefits, office space, etc. Having the recommendations accepted is just the first step. The harder task ahead will be to convince those in control of the purse strings that this is necessary--because it is the right thing to do, but also because education in this country will seriously suffer in the long run if it is not done. q

Maxine N. Lurie is associate professor of history at Seton Hall University and served as chair of the Joint OAH-AHA Committee on Part-Time and Adjunct Employment.