AAUP Chapter News
Academic Job Market (University Conference, February 16, 2012, 3:35 pm to 4:30 pm (McClain Hall 305)
Truman State University prides itself on the high number of graduates who attend graduate school. But what do we tell our students about the dire state of the academic job market, which is often the end goal of graduate studies? This session will begin with a short presentation on the current nature of the job market, and include a discussion of what we can do in terms of advising our students on the realities of academic careers. Can and should Truman State University do more to prepare our students for such careers? What alternatives exist for those interested in following in the footsteps of their faculty mentors? This session will include handouts and a conversation to prepare students who are considering pursuing academic careers.
Academe: Articles relevant to the academic job market
November-December 2008
The Centrality of Contingent Faculty to Academe’s Future
By Gary Rhoades
If you’re concerned about academe, you need to be concerned about contingent faculty.
July-August 2009
Who Are the Part-Time Faculty?
By James Monks
Not everybody wants to be full time.
January-February 2010
Graduate Student Labor (special issue on issues concerning graduate assistants especially)
March-April 2010
No Refuge
The Annual Report On The Economic Status Of The Profession, 2009-10
May-June 2010
The Casualties of the Twenty-First-Century Community College
By David McKay Wilson
Increasing enrollments and decreasing academic freedom and tenure.
July-August 2010
A Primer on Improving Contingent Faculty Conditions
By Heidi McGrew and Joe Untener
Collaborating takes time and care, but it can work wonders.
January-February 2011
The Ivory Ceiling of Service Work
By Joya Misra, Jennifer Hickes Lundquist, Elissa Holmes, and Stephanie Agiomavritis
Women associate professors provide more service and get promoted more slowly.
March-April 2011
The Annual Report On The Economic Status Of The Profession, 2010-11
May-June 2011
The High Price of For-Profit Colleges
By Barry Yeoman
Low graduation rates, high debt loads, and deceptive recruiting practices at for-profit colleges.
Crisis In Public Higher Education
By Gwendolyn Bradley, Gregory S. Brown, and Nsé Ufot
July-August 2011
Top Ten Workplace Issues for Faculty Members and Higher Education Professionals
By Greta Petry
Keep track of these issues, and the office will feel less like Office Space.
The Dress Rehearsal for McCarthyism
By Carol Smith
CCNY witnessed the largest political purge of faculty members in US history.
September-October 2011
Making It
By Monica F. Jacobe
Many faculty members can’t help deliver the mythical ticket to middle-class transformation.
Memory Loss
By Anne Cassebaum
A highly tiered system of inequality among faculty wasn’t always such a given.
January-February 2012
Academic Freedom and Indentured Students
By Jeffrey J. Williams
AAUP Report
Tenure and Teaching-Intensive Appointments. (2010). (Approved for publication by the Committee on Contingency and the Profession)
“By 2007, almost 70 percent of faculty members were employed off the tenure track.5 Many institutions use contingent faculty appointments throughout their programs; some retain a tenurable faculty in their traditional or flagship programs while staffing others—such as branch campuses, online offerings, and overseas campuses—almost entirely with faculty on contingent appointments. Faculty serving on a contingent basis generally work at significantly lower wages, often without health coverage and other benefits, and in positions that do not incorporate all aspects of university life or the full range of faculty rights and responsibilities. The tenure track has not vanished, but it has ceased to be the norm. This means that the majority of faculty work in subprofessional conditions, often without basic protections for academic freedom.”
Two relevant footnotes:
3. As of 1970, roughly three-fourths of all faculty were in the tenure stream and 78 percent of all faculty were full-time; in 1969, only 3.2 percent of full-time appointments were nontenurable. Among all full-time appointments in 1969, teaching-intensive faculty (with nine or more hours a week of teaching) outnumbered research intensive faculty (with six or fewer hours a week of teaching) in a ratio of 1.5:1, accounting for 60 percent of the total number of full-time appointments. See Jack H. Schuster and Martin J. Finkelstein, The American Faculty: The Restructuring of Academic Work and Careers (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006), 41 (Table 3.2, “American Faculty by Employment Status, 1970–2003”); 174 (Table 6.1, “Non-Tenure-Eligible Faculty, 1969–1998,”); 97 (Table 4.4, “Ratio of High to Low Teaching Loads among Full-Time Faculty, 1969–1998”).
4. By 1998, among full-time faculty, the ratio of teaching- intensive appointments to research-intensive ones had risen significantly from 1.5:1 to 2:1, or from about 60 percent to 67 percent of the total. This was accomplished, as Schuster and Finklestein document, “largely by the resort to ‘teaching only’ appointments” (99). However, the percentage of all faculty who were in teaching-intensive appointments rose much more sharply, largely because of a massive increase in teaching-intensive part-time appointments (ibid.).
Links on AAUP website:
http://www.aaup.org/AAUP/issues/contingent/contingentfacts.htm
Trends in Faculty Status, 1975-2009. A chart showing the growth in non-tenure-track appointments.
AAUP Contingent Faculty Index 2006. Provides data specific to individual college and university campuses on the number of full-time faculty with and without tenure, the number of part-time faculty, and the number of graduate student employees.
While Truman pays below average wages to its professors, on the positive side it employs far fewer contingent faculty than most other universities (even other public institutions). The picture that students get while attending this university – i.e., that they are being taught mostly by tenured or tenure-track faculty – is very different from the reality that they are likely to face when they enter the academic job market – i.e., that most available jobs are contingent, either part time or temporary. Academically inclined students may see us, the professors. as role models, but how aware are they that these kinds of secure jobs in academia are increasingly under attack? And what should we as professors say to our advisees on this issue?
Relevant articles in Perspectives on History–
http://www.historians.org/perspectives/issues/2011/1112/The-Ecology-of-the-History-Job-Shifting-Realities-in-a-Fluid-Market.cfm