This article appears in the NY Times today, calling attention again to the increasing reliance on adjunct professors in undergraduate teaching. Adjunct professors now account for about 70 percent of college and university teachers according to the American Federation of Teachers. I find this to be an astonishingly high percentage. Reasons offered for the increased reliance on adjunct teachers include a diminished financial capacity to maintain a sufficiently large tenured or tenure-track faculty to cover necessary courses as well as a desire by the institution to be more flexible with regard to courses offered and teachers hired.
Law schools rely on adjunct teaching as well, but for different reasons and in response to mostly different institutional pressures. Many undergraduate faculties in colleges of arts and sciences have dealt with financial pressures by replacing tenure-track retirees with adjuncts, decreasing the size of traditional faculties, while also perhaps increasing the scholarly expectations for existing tenure-track faculty. Similar pressures do not exist in law schools, perhaps because financial restraints are less acute. Moreover, a caste stigma can attach to the adjunct position in the wider university, but does not ordinarily attach to a law school adjunct professor. Adjunct professors in law schools are often prominent members of the bar who teach a course in their specialized practice area, enriching a student’s experience, and broadening the course offerings a law school may offer.
The problems at the undergraduate level seem readily apparent to me, where the end product, the production of a university graduate, perhaps too often takes precedent over other process-oriented values related to the sustenance of academic community and inquiry. The loss in terms of academic community, scholarly engagement, and institutional commitment to the scholarly enterprise that comes with increased reliance on adjunct teachers does not seem balanced in the university by any substantive academic benefits. What I find interesting, is that this structure is different for law schools. We can imagine decreasing the size of tenure-line faculties by relying more on practitioner-adjuncts, while also reaping substantive benefits to balance the losses from a smaller academic faculty. These benefits are those of the apprenticeship system, where actual practitioners in particular areas of law prepare students for the practice of law. If this is right, then law school faculties may have more in common with their university colleagues with regard to this issue than might first appear. If universities can rely on adjuncts where there are no obvious substantive benefits (apart from finances), how much easier it would be to move in that direction where some benefits do exist. What I see is a need for continual re-articulation of the specific values of academic community, inquiry, and writing that readily flow from full-time faculty (and I would argue, from tenure-line faculty in particular) within the university as a whole. Otherwise, as universities more readily comport themselves on the corporate model, academic outsourcing will increasingly dominate the future of the university.
Posted by Tommy Crocker on November 20, 2007 at 04:57 PM