Short-term appointments are on the rise for teachers at colleges and universities around the world. Are these 'contingent' staff being taken for a ride? Heidi Ledford reports.
Heidi Ledford

When Don Siegel went to graduate school at Rutgers University in New Jersey, he had his eye on the prize: a tenure-track professorship at a research university. It wasn't until years later, knee-deep in his research on protein structure and with a few semesters of teaching experience tucked under his belt, that he realized his priorities had shifted. So when a temporary, part-time position for a chemistry teacher came up, he grabbed it.

That was 1996. More than ten years later, Siegel is still at Rutgers, still teaching chemistry and still on a short-term contract. As a part-timer, Siegel bounced from assignment to assignment, without benefits such as health insurance or a retirement plan, until a year ago, when he switched to a short-term, full-time position managing the school's introductory chemistry course.

"It's been very frustrating and very satisfying at the same time," says Siegel. "I've had a dramatic impact on quite a few students. But in comparison to tenure-track people who've been here as long as I have, I'm making a fraction of what they're making."

Freeway flyers

Siegel is part of an expanding club of non-tenure-track, or 'contingent', teachers at universities and colleges around the world. Its members go by many names, depending on the institution and the country where they work. Officially, they may be called casual staff, adjunct professor, fixed-term worker or lecturer (which, confusingly, is a standard term for normal faculty posts in Britain). Unofficially, they're 'gypsy scholars', 'freeway flyers' or 'taxi-cab professors'.

Whatever you choose to call them, their numbers are growing. In Britain, 18% of the 2003 teaching and academic staff were short-term faculty members, up from 12% in 1995, according to the Association of University Teachers (now part of the University and College Union). In the United States, part-time and non-tenure-track full-time staff comprised 43% of the total faculty workforce in 1975 (see graph). By 2003, this had risen to 65%. Similar trends can be seen in Latin America and Asia: more than 80% of faculties in Argentina and Mexico have part-time appointments, says Philip Altbach, director of the Center for International Higher Education at Boston College in Massachusetts. As the ranks of the contingent teaching force swell, many wonder how the trend will change the face of higher education.
 
The driving force is economics. Budget-conscious institutions can save money by stitching together a patchwork of part-time workers. Such staff are often paid at a lower rate, and few institutions provide them with benefits. Jack Schuster, a professor of education and public policy at Claremont Graduate University in California, says using a part-timer for a course costs a fraction of what universities would pay a full-time tenured faculty member for the same teaching load.

The economic advantage of hiring a full-time, non-tenure-track faculty member is not so clear. Although typically on short-term contracts, these teachers are often paid about as much as an entry-level tenure-track professor and typically (although not always) receive at least partial benefits. In this case, says Schuster, the institution is creating a dedicated teaching staff whose attention is not divided between research and teaching. And short-term contracts mean that the department can quickly adjust course offerings to fit the changing interests of the student body — an appealing option.

"If there's student interest for a particular kind of course, they hire the faculty," says Schuster. "And if that interest evaporates over the next several years, they are free to say 'We don't need you any longer'." But, he adds, it remains to be seen whether this drive towards hiring non-tenure-track faculty members has improved teaching. Contingent faculty staff sometimes lack basic campus teaching resources such as offices, computers or even access to photocopiers. And part-timers who must rush from campus to campus have little time for meetings with students.

Siegel says short-term appointments give him little control over the courses he teaches. Tenured faculty members can sign up for classes a year or two ahead, but Siegel gets little warning of what his schedule will be. "There's no structure in place," says Siegel. "I teach where they tell me to teach. The only way I can be innovative is by going out on a limb and hoping that whoever follows in my footsteps will keep it going."

John Curtis, director of research and public policy at the American Association of University Professors in Washington DC, says that short-term appointments can also make contingent faculty members wary of taking risks. "At some point very soon they'll be looking for another job," he says. "For that reason, they tend to be in a position where they don't feel they can do anything controversial or risk offending students by challenging them."

Even if the teaching goes well, there is no guarantee that accepting a contingent position will lead to a tenure-track job down the road, says Monica Jacobe, a part-time instructor who shuttles back and forth between part-time teaching assignments at the University of Maryland in College Park and the Catholic University in Washington DC. Accepting a non-tenure-track post can be a good way to gain teaching experience, she says, but too much time there can become a liability. "Once you spend too many years — and that term is undefined — they start to think that there's something wrong and there's a reason that this person hasn't secured a full-time tenure-track job," says Jacobe, who is also a research fellow at the American Association of University Professors.

Out on a limb

Andrew Greene, a PhD adviser at the University of California, Berkeley, agrees that contingent faculty members can become typecast. Spending more than two or three years in fixed-term positions can be a liability in the sciences, he says, because research opportunities are limited. He adds that even small liberal arts colleges want faculty candidates to have a strong, current research background. "These days, places that 20 years ago had no great ambitions to have their faculty publish have ratcheted up their expectations," says Greene.

But it's difficult for contingent faculty members to win extramural research grants, and internal travel and professional-development grants are often limited to permanent staff. Meanwhile, a heavy teaching load leaves little time for research and publishing. Full-time contingent faculty members in the United States teach an average of 50% more than their tenure-track peers, according to Ernst Benjamin, a consultant to the American Association of University Professors.

 Philip Altbach sees worrying trends in faculty employment.
 
 Steve Wilson, a maths instructor at Sonoma State University in Rohnert Park, California, has applied for 13 tenure-track positions in the past 15 years, many of them at Sonoma State. He didn't get any. "It was very upsetting," he says. "One of the reasons they were able to hire people at Sonoma State is because I had put a lot of energy into increasing enrolment in maths classes."

Meanwhile, Siegel has also unsuccessfully applied for tenure-track positions. He is not sure if his extended time as a contingent faculty member at Rutgers has helped or hurt his chances. "A lot of schools are more comfortable taking a contingent faculty member than, for example, someone fresh out of industry," Siegel says. "But on the other hand, research is sexy."

Greene recommends limiting temporary positions to only a few years, and trying to stay in contact with the research community by attending meetings and even continuing a little postdoctoral research on the side if possible. But all of these are just temporary fixes for the bigger problem — a growing pool of PhDs and a shrinking pool of tenure-track positions. "Right now, it's a buyers' market for academic labour," says Wilson.

Hired and backfired

Unfortunately, some attempts to better the plight of temporary academic workers have backfired. The state of New Jersey, for example, declared that full-time, non-tenure-track faculty members should be automatically switched to the tenure track after four years. Regulations such as this, although well-meaning, have caused some universities to fire short-term staff. "The general practice is that the contingent faculty stay for a limited period, and then get booted out," says Altbach.

Sally Hunt is unconvinced by new work conditions.

A. WIARD
 
Sally Hunt, joint general-secretary of the University and College Union, a UK academic trade union, says she is worried that recent European Union directives to improve conditions for fixed-term workers may have similar results. That directive required member states to specify a maximum duration for temporary contracts before an employee becomes permanent. In response to the rule, Britain mandated that fixed-term workers who have been at an institution for four years automatically switch to a permanent contract unless the employer objects. But Hunt says that the conditions under which an employer can object are undefined, allowing institutions to fire fixed-term workers before the end of four years without sufficient cause.

Nevertheless, at some institutions, contingent faculty members have gained ground. Wilson says that the California State University system now offers three-year contracts to contingent faculty members who have worked in the system for more than six years. And David Robinson of the Canadian Association of University Teachers says that some Canadian universities now have seniority clauses that give contingent faculty members advance notice of new tenure-track job openings.

Jacobe says that changes such as these are crucial, given the growing use of contingent faculty members. "If this is going to be the reality of academia," she says, "then we need to make it a workable reality." Nevertheless, she wants to continue teaching. "I think we all do this because we like teaching," says Jacobe. "But liking it doesn't mitigate everything that's wrong with the system."

http://www.nature.com/news/2007/070205/full/nj7128-678a.html