FULL-TIME PROFS A VANISHING BREED

In the quest to save money but not necessarily higher education, administrators are increasingly turning to adjuncts.  The New York Times, via a story titled "The Case of the Vanishing Full-Time Professor," discusses this phenomenon.  An excerpt:

In 1960, 75 percent of college instructors were full-time tenured or tenure-track professors; today only 27 percent are. The rest are graduate students or adjunct and contingent faculty — instructors employed on a per-course or yearly contract basis, usually without benefits and earning a third or less of what their tenured colleagues make. The recession means their numbers are growing.

After perusing the above article, readers are encouraged to take a look at this September story on the Inside Higher Ed website.  It seems that colleges and universities are hiding their adjuncts when competing for a ranking in the U. S. News & World Report.  Please see "Hiding Adjuncts from U. S. News."  An excerpt:

The American Federation of Teachers on Wednesday posted a blog item asking how it is, given those well documented trends, that magazine rankings give parents the sense that most of the teaching at large universities is done by full-time faculty members. "The majority of top colleges report well over 80 percent of their faculty are full-time and a large number report that well over 90 percent of their faculty are full-time. University of Nebraska-Lincoln even reports that 100 percent of its faculty are full-time," the blog says of institutions in the U.S. News & World Report rankings, a small part of which are based on the percentage of faculty who are full time. "Amazing!"

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