<p>
</p>
<p>I know of one that lost their tenured job - for legitimate cause - and still got hired by another institution.</p>
<p>^Now that you mention it, I did just remember someone I knew who lost his job at a Big Ten. Was related to sexual harassment charges. Then of course we’ve seen a few cases in the media too. </p>
<p>Yes there has been much talk about replacing tenure track with adjunct teachers. That is true. But I’d like to see the actual data. The reason being the data I see is a change in proportionality; I would like to see data that also accounts for growth. As but one example of course, we have <em>far</em> more adjuncts than we used to, but we also offer a lot more courses than we used to. Our business school, like most, makes very very serious $$ for the university, so the bigger we are, the more lucrative it is. Our core tenure track faculty has not grown nearly as much but we the core will never shrink because we are a research institution. </p>
<p>I think the loss of tenure is not a bad thing, especially in places where no one is even doing research anyways. The downside of tenure is it also gives lifetime job security to some that should be replaced (such as unproductive faculty or ones who dont’ care about students). And besides, it is not as if even 5% of faculty are taking actions that would be a threat except for tenure. Most are just too busy, or doing their little part of the puzzle, or too socialized after years of trying to get tenure to be truly ‘radical’. And even when the few tenured folks come out with outlandish statements that embarrass the university, they can find ways to excuse a faculty member with tenure anyways. Having tenure has never really made you ‘free’. But I digress…</p>
<p>The average salary from 2010-11, all ranks (from lecturer to full, but all full time), across all disciplines for universities offering doctorates (where you tend to find engineering faculty): $92,486 overall, 86,653 for those at publics, and 114,661 at privates. Lower for those at 4 year colleges, 2 year colleges and so forth. </p>
<p>Lowest average is for those full time with title of ‘instructor’ at public is $48,812; highest is full professor at a private at $157,282. From annual survey by the American Association of University Professors. The data for 2010-11 includes more than 1,300 institutions chosen by the AAUP.</p>
<p>I realize this isn’t very specific- schools make a huge difference (average at HYPS is $193), actual rank makes a big difference, and of course field makes a big difference (they do quote stats showing that engineering faculty make 28% more than english faculty and business faculty make 50% more, for examples).</p>
<p>
I’m assuming this doesn’t include benefits and intangibles such as office space, which they also save by using adjuncts, but even at this rate, and using $2500 per 3 credit course for an adjunct, this salary alone would pay for 37 courses. As opposed to maybe 6 or 7 for the full time professor. Quite a bargain.</p>
<p>A great many schools are moving to using adjuncts as a cost-saver. And, in some fields, there are many,many qualified applicants for every college/university teaching slot. I have a good friend with a PhD in history who has been looking for a full-time, tenure track slot anywhere in the country for about four or five years now. My friend has been an adjunct at several colleges of varying quality all over the country and has no job security and no insurance or retirement benefits. My friend sends out hundreds of resumes, does lots of phone and face to face interviews and is still looking.</p>
<p>Tenure is a guarantee of a job forever. The only way you’re going to get fired is for criminal conduct (and sometimes not then) or if the college eliminates your department.</p>
<p>My dad was chairman of his department at a LAC for nearly 20 years, and for 20 years he had to deal with a member of his department who was seriously mentally ill. The guy’s classes were always oversubscribed, because he gave all As and there were no (as in <em>no</em>) requirements - no tests, papers, or even attendance. My dad more than once saw him lecturing away to a completely empty classroom. My dad tried to get him into treatment as a condition of continued employment, but the guy was not willing; the AAUP backed him up with the threat of legal action, and the college administration did not want to face that.</p>
<p>Unfortunately tenure does tend to protect dysfunctional and non-performing individuals. Increasing, however, the administration’s fear of student lawsuits under AA and anti-harassment legislation has caused universities to crack down on really egregious offenses by tenured faculty who used to be relentlessly protected by their unions. The administration now has to weigh duelling lawsuit possibilities.</p>
<p>There are some systemic problems. Tenure , which was intended to grant freedom to speak without fear of censure, has been job security for the favored few.
At the same time, to save money, 1/3 of all college instructors are now part time.
( See : <a href=“http://www.yaleunions.org/geso/reports/Casual_in_Blue.pdf[/url]”>http://www.yaleunions.org/geso/reports/Casual_in_Blue.pdf</a> )</p>
<p>Pay can be very low. Here’s the pay scale for a couple of random community colleges. </p>
<p><a href=“http://www.ccbcmd.edu/media/hr/adjscale.pdf[/url]”>Broken Link;
<a href=“http://www.austincc.edu/hr/compensation/documents/FY2010AdjunctFacultySalaryScale.pdf[/url]”>http://www.austincc.edu/hr/compensation/documents/FY2010AdjunctFacultySalaryScale.pdf</a></p>
<p>
Yeah, because preparing a lecture for 6 students only takes half as long.</p>
<p>
Can anyone explain what this means? Cause I’m gonna pray it doesn’t mean what it sounds like it means…</p>
<p>The AAUP (American Association of University Professors) states that about 65% of university teaching positions are off the tenure-track. In terms of teaching, tenure protects academic freedom. In terms of everything else, tenure offers continuing employment and job benefits (health insurance, retirement accounts). When I started teaching 25 years ago as an assistant professor, only about 25% of jobs were off the tenure-track. Particularly at public universities that have seen state government support decline from about 80% of their budgets 25 years ago to 20-40% today, budgets are being balanced by replacing tenured faculty with “contingent” faculty off the tenure track. The lowest level of contingent employment is typically the adjunct level. At most universities, adjunct faculty are paid by the course ($2500-3500 per course). They have NO job benefits. The next category is “term employment.” These are typically one or two-year hires. They may include health insurance (but often don’t); they do not include retirement benefits. They are salaried at about 2/3 of what an entering level assistant professor would make. The qualifications for adjunct faculty vary greatly: some have only MA degrees; others are ABD (completed the PHD except for the dissertation). Increasingly due to the shortage of tenure track positions, PhDs spend 1-3 years in adjunct or term positions before they get tenure-track jobs. During that time, they try to collect outstanding teaching evaluations and publish as many articles as possible in order to be competitive for the very few tenure-track jobs out there. At some point, adjuncts realize that they didn’t go to school for eight years after their BA to make $24,000 a year with no benefits. But there are always more adjuncts to take their place. Gallows humor that is, unfortunately, an accurate portrait of higher education faculty in the humanities is:
[YouTube</a> - So you Want to Get a PhD in the Humanities](<a href=“So you Want to Get a PhD in the Humanities - YouTube”>So you Want to Get a PhD in the Humanities - YouTube)</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>Actually, I’m not so sure about that. Perhaps the best example in recent example was the abolition of tenure amongst publicly-funded British universities - that is to say, almost all universities in the UK including Oxford and Cambridge - in the Education Reform Act of 1988. {Extant British faculty with tenure retained it, but no post-Act tenure-track offers were granted.} </p>
<p>Was there a corresponding mass exodus of talent from British universities? Are the best young scholars no longer attracted to jobs at British universities? That’s difficult to say, as it all depends on how you measure ‘talent’. But all I know is that Oxford and Cambridge continue to be ranked amongst the top research universities in the world, both consistently ranking in the top 10 in the Academy Ranking of World Universities, QS World University Rankings, and the Times Higher Education World University Rankings. More anecdotally speaking, I can think of numerous PhD students and post-docs who would far rather take a position at Ox-bridge, LSE, or other highly regarded British universities even rather than at most American universities despite having no opportunity for tenure. Furthermore, Ox-bridge over the last two decades have both managed to build respectable business schools despite not being able to offer tenure to new faculty. </p>
<p>
</p>
<p>I agree that some existing faculty would flee and some new scholars would not be attracted to your school in the first place…but they probably wouldn’t be your ‘best talent’ - if anything, they are likely to disproportionately be your worst talent. Tenure encourages adverse selection - productive tenured faculty don’t need tenure, as a university would almost never fire somebody who is highly productive, and in the rare case that he is fired, he could surely obtain an excellent position at a competing university. It is precisely the unproductive faculty who need tenure the most, but they are also, ironically, the very faculty that the university should ‘want’ to lose due to their lack of post-tenure productivity. Put another way, it is precisely those faculty members who want tenure the most who are the ones that should not be granted tenure. </p>
<p>Consider Steven Leavitt’s proposal:</p>
<p>Absent all schools moving together to get rid of tenure, what if one school chose to unilaterally revoke tenure. It seems to me that it might work out just fine for that school. It would have to pay the faculty a little extra to stay in a department without an insurance policy in the form of tenure. Importantly, though, the value of tenure is inversely related to how good you are. If you are way over the bar, you face almost no risk if tenure is abolished. So the really good people would require very small salary increases to compensate for no tenure, whereas the really bad, unproductive economists would need a much bigger subsidy to remain in a department with tenure gone. This works out fantastically well for the university because all the bad people end up leaving, the good people stay, and other good people from different institutions want to come to take advantage of the salary increase at the tenure-less school. If the U of C told me that they were going to revoke my tenure, but add $15,000 to my salary, I would be happy to take that trade. I’m sure many others would as well. By dumping one unproductive, previously tenured faculty member, the University could compensate ten others with the savings.</p>
<p>[Freakonomics</a> Let’s just get rid of tenure (including mine)](<a href=“Freakonomics - The hidden side of everything”>Let's Just Get Rid of Tenure (Including Mine) - Freakonomics)</p>
<p>I have to agree with what I understand nemom and libartsmom to have said. Based on the young top-school mainstream PhDs I know, the days of tenure track job are pretty much gone for many who might once have thrived in academia. These gifted teachers and scholars are not finding long-term professional homes in academia, which I think will be a long-term loss to the colleges and universities that are not hiring–or even interviewing–them for tenure-track or full-time permanent. They are and will continue to be a boon to the secondary schools, foundations, and government departments that are offering them jobs with decent pay and professional respect. I cannot speak to the sciences but it’s certainly the case in the liberal arts and humanities.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>At the risk of sounding pedantic, the sciences are part of the liberal arts. </p>
<p>The contemporary liberal arts comprise studying literature, languages, philosophy, history, mathematics, and science.</p>
<p>[Liberal</a> arts - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia](<a href=“http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberal_arts]Liberal”>Liberal arts education - Wikipedia)</p>
<p>[The</a> Sorry Plight Of The Adjunct Professor](<a href=“http://www.mindingthecampus.com/forum/2008/10/the_sorry_plight_of_the_adjunc.html]The”>http://www.mindingthecampus.com/forum/2008/10/the_sorry_plight_of_the_adjunc.html)</p>
<p>Good article I’ve found</p>