A Profile of the Non-Tenure-Track Academic Workforce

Abstract

OF THE more than 1.5 million members of the academic workforce counted on the United States Department of Education's 2011 Employees by Assigned Position survey (EAP), nearly 1.1 million (1,092,598, or 71.7%) were teaching off the tenure track in temporary or contingent appointments. This count includes members of the faculty and of the instructional staff in two-and four-year degree-granting institutions in the fifty states and the District of Columbia (graduate student teaching assistants are not included). In 2011, full-and part-time non-tenure-track faculty members made up 66.7% of the more than 1.1 million faculty members teaching in four-year institutions and 85.4% of the more than 400,000 faculty members teaching in two-year institutions (table 1).Despite its huge size and manifest importance to higher education's teaching mission, the segment of the higher education teaching corps employed off the tenure track continues to be largely invisible in every sense-it is large and yet its members are often invisible to the public and policy makers, as well as to colleagues and administrators in the institutions where they are employed. Ignorance remains surprisingly pervasive about the most basic factual information on this majority segment of the academic workforce. In "Among the Majority," a reflection on the 28 January 2012 New Faculty Majority Summit in Washington, Michael Bérubé, then president of the MLA, remarks on the comment of an administrator who asserted that there will be no solving the adjunct problem until the profession, and specifically English departments, do something about the overproduction of PhDs. The assumption-a mythology in wide circulation-appears to be that the adjunct academics teaching composition for $2,500 a course are all surplus English PhDs for whom higher education has no tenure-track jobs. In fact, the 2004 National Study of Postsecondary Faculty (NSOPF:04) indicates that in the 2003-04 academic year, across all fields of study, out of a non-tenure-track faculty population then estimated at 617,700, only 22.6% held doctorates; 48.5% held master's degrees. Of the estimated 85,500 non-tenure-track faculty members in the humanities, 23.1% held a doctorate and 65.2% a master's degree as their highest degree.1In four-year institutions in the arts and sciences, NSOPF:04 data reveal an especially sharp and telling contrast in the degree qualifications of members of the academic workforce on and off the tenure track. Table 2 displays NSOPF:04 data on the educational attainment of faculty members on and off the tenure track in two-and four-year institutions and in the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences, three of the eleven broad disciplinary teaching fields the NSOPF series used to classify respondents. (The "all fields" category shows the aggregate breakdown for all eleven disciplinary fields.) In four-year institutions in the humanities, natural sciences, and social sciences, well over 90% of the estimated 198,000 tenured and tenure-track faculty members held a docto...

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