4: Understanding and Supporting Full-Time Non-Tenure-Track Faculty

Abstract

As the face of the American faculty profession changes, targeted academic development becomes more important. A phenomenological qualitative study of full-time, non-tenure-track faculty in English portrays an experince characterized by a love of teaching but fraught with professional challenges stemming from low status and poor reward and recognition structures. These data provide the point of departure for recommendations on expanding organizational and faculty development strategies for supporting, integrating, and encouraging full-time, non-tenure-track faculty.The literature on faculty development is built around the traditional notion of the faculty member progressing along a stable career line, enjoying equal status with other faculty colleagues, and having relative autonomy and variety in teaching assignments. Faculty development centers often do workshops on documenting tenure dossiers, advice to developers stresses engaging "respected faculty leaders" in programming or on advisory boards, and workshops often assume that participants are free to alter their course syllabi, change course assessment methods, and develop new offerings. Enter the contingent faculty member, now among the majority of newly hired faculty members in the United States (Schuster & Finklestein, 2006).

Contingent Faculty as Nonideal Workers

“…Kezar's () and Shaker's () research also suggests that ideal worker norms drive contingent faculty members to put in many additional hours beyond what they are paid in order to fulfill their obligation of how they define a quality professor, which was developed through their training in graduate school. This is not unexpected given the fact that contingent faculty have the same socialization and training as tenure‐track faculty members and, for example, feel the same need to keep up on the scholarship in their field even though they are not being paid to do so.…”