Growth in lecturers far outpace growth in tenured faculty at Umich

Colleges and Universities A-Z University of Michigan
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<p>Just read the article on the cover of the Michigan daily, which discusses the growth in lecturers outpacing the growth in tenured faculty at Umich. The link is below:</p>

<p>Increases</a> in the number of University lecturers far outpaces growth in tenure faculty size | The Michigan Daily</p>

<p>My personal experience with lecturers here as a grad student has not been bad. I had one guy as a lecturer who was also a post-doc trying to get teaching experience to go into academia. He would have also been paid sorta reasonably as a post-doc....more than the average lecturer. He seemed to really want good evals and was better than some of the tenured profs I've had.</p>

<p>What do people think? Do these lecturers hurt quality of intro classes? Do people think not having enough tenure/tenure track profs hurt the quality of the school?</p>

<p>Aside from being a student here, I care because academia would be a nice career if one could land a tenure track position somewhere.</p>

<p>Thoughts?</p>

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<p>who cares? College is just a way to get to better jobs.
The way i see it,

  1. Get in
  2. Get out
  3. Use the name of the college to get into the industry
  4. Screw school and make the dough!!</p>
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<p>Bearcats, thanks for reading and responding…actually</p>

<p>Sadly, too many students share your views. Unlike you, I actually like being at Michigan and would like to be a prof someday, as would many grad students here. These issues about the way the University are run are interesting to many students…maybe not so much in this forum specific to Umich. The graduate school forum on CC has many posters who are interested in these issues.</p>

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<p>I think lecturers / adjunct professors / clinical professors are a great resource for departments if they can teach a course that the tenure-track and tenured faculty have little to no background (e.g., industry knowledge and professional development skills typically common in master’s level programs). However, it does hurt the students when a tenured faculty member with a popular research area leaves and their position is either eliminated or goes toward non-tenure-track instructors. I have noticed U-M is relying more on non-tenure-track faculty. Some programs, such as social work, hire many lecturers for popular courses simply because they do not have enough tenure-track/tenured faculty to teach all the MSW students. I have had good experiences with the lecturers mainly because they are experts in their field.</p>