From the Origin provides a forum for lively discussion of issues of importance to the mathematical community. The Michigan Section-MAA Newsletter solicits opinion pieces for publication in this column from anyone in the Michigan mathematical community. In addition, comments on pieces published in earlier issues are welcomed.
Items for From the Origin should be submitted to the editor by the beginning of October to be considered for inclusion in the December issue and by the beginning of February for the April issue. Main opinion pieces should be at most 1800 words long, and responses at most 400. The editors reserve the right to shorten responses, if necessary, in order to fit as many as possible within the available space.
Two conditions in higher education—larger student enrollments and costs of hiring additional full-time faculty—have led to increased use of adjuncts in nearly every academic discipline. As a dean and mathematics professor, I play a contradictory role at my university with regard to use of adjuncts.
On the one hand, as an administrator, I must hold departments accountable to their budgets and place particular emphasis on having enough majors and minors, credit hour production, and extra-revenue-generating activities to at least break even with total program costs.
On the other hand, recruiting, training, and retaining adjuncts presents a new set of problems that places stress on a department. In the following I discuss the pros and cons, both as an administrator and as a faculty member in a mathematics department, of using adjuncts.
Pros. Some of the arguments in favor of using adjuncts are obvious and sound. Qualified and available adjuncts living within easy driving distance of a university represent a valuable asset. Some of these persons are faculty at neighboring educational institutions who are looking for additional opportunities to use their expertise. Some are professionals working in the community who have special knowledge that current full-time faculty do not have. Some are retired secondary or college personnel looking for meaningful ways to continue to contribute. Some are homemakers wanting to continue to build their teaching skills until such time as they are available for full-time work. There are a variety of reasons why qualified adjuncts may be available in the university community.
Another sound argument for using adjuncts if they are available and qualified is that they represent a cost-effective way to provide quality instruction. They are hired on a course by course basis, typically for only one course a semester. The pay rate is several times lower than the pay rate for regular contracted faculty members and typically there are no benefits to pay. They are not tenured and so when an adjunct does not work out, you simply don’t ask him/her to teach for you anymore. And if department enrollments drop, then you are not obligated to them.
Finally, adjuncts who do good work for a university semester after semester are a joy to have as part of a department’s staff. They often have good relationships with students and faculty members in the department and are seen as an integral part of the team. They enhance an institution’s relationship with the larger community, often serving as a resource for both faculty and students. A good adjunct makes a department chair glad.
Cons. For each of the three arguments presented above about the benefits of using adjuncts, there is a corresponding down side. First, many prospective adjuncts are qualified but not available when you need them. They typically are not available during the daytime hours, because they are working at their regular jobs then. This means that a fair number of your courses have to be taught at night and choosing which courses those might be and finding the adjuncts for those particular courses is tricky business. In addition, providing services (for example, photo-copying and technology support) may mean that someone in the department has to stay late to be available to help with these tasks. This is an additional and often unseen cost of using adjuncts.
It’s a good idea to develop a list of available and qualified adjuncts and then arrange class schedules to make good use of them. But who has time to do this when you are building a course schedule in December (typically near the end of a busy fall semester) for the following school year! Most often we build our course schedule in early winter and then in late spring or early summer begin looking for adjuncts to fill courses uncovered by full-time personnel.
That can lead to interesting and disturbing efforts to use adjuncts who are available but not qualified for the courses for which you need instructors. One way to counter this is to take courses away from the full-time staff and give those courses to adjuncts who are qualified to teach them and then give the full-time staff courses they may not want to teach or may not be best qualified to teach. This can lead to bad feelings among your full-time faculty members and student dissatisfaction. And nobody needs that!
While it can be cost effective to use adjuncts to cover some of a department’s course offerings, there is often concern that the compensation for adjuncts is so low that it borders on exploitation. I am often surprised that adjuncts are willing to teach for such measly pay and am keenly aware that our full-time faculty members often feel guilty about the disparity between their pay and the pay of their adjunct colleagues.
It does not help that one of the advertised reasons for using adjuncts is so that universities can have a cheap form of labor and use the salary savings to pay their full-time faculty better. If an adjunct is a highly paid professional, as is sometimes the case, then that guilt is not too great. But for some adjuncts, their work at our university represents part of their primary income and so it would be good to pay them more, even if it is a modest increase each year.
Similarly, there is some concern that adjuncts are not treated very well in terms of benefits. At my university, we have introduced a set of benefits that we hope will attract adjuncts. Our adjuncts are eligible to use the university pool, gyms, and exercise labs. They are also eligible to take a three-credit course tuition free for every nine credit hours they teach for us. So while universities have often stopped short of offering health insurance and retirement benefits to adjuncts, they have given some thought to legitimate benefits for these underpaid members of the instructional staff.
While using adjuncts represents a cost-effective use of salary dollars, there are other costs associated with adjuncts that are often unseen and unacknowledged. Someone has to recruit, train, oversee, and evaluate adjuncts, and typically this falls on the shoulders of the department chair. This takes a fair amount of time above and beyond other departmental duties and is typically simply added on, without additional compensation, to the burgeoning list of duties for department chairs. So not only does the institution save salary dollars by using adjuncts instead of hiring additional full-time faculty, they also get more work out of administrative staff for no additional cost. While this may be seen by the institution as good finance management, it cannot be seen as good personnel management.
Finding available and qualified adjuncts is one thing—keeping them is another thing altogether. I spend too much of my time each semester recruiting a new batch of adjuncts for some of the same courses I recruited adjuncts for last semester. Good adjuncts are a joy to find, but finding good adjuncts willing to teach semester after semester is often difficult. So that means that department administrators spend more and more of their time finding temporary personnel.
And even when you find adjuncts willing to teach for several semesters it is rare that they can make the kind of time commitment to students and department duties that full-time faculty make. Do adjuncts go to professional meetings and bring back knowledge to share with colleagues? Do adjuncts provide academic advising and oversee student research and independent studies? Do adjuncts serve on committees and task forces? Are they involved in accreditation and re-certification efforts? Typically, no. That work falls on the full-time faculty, and in small departments, if a full-time position is replaced with a set of adjuncts, the net effect is an increase in the number of non-teaching tasks each full-time faculty member gets assigned.
One additional concern about using adjuncts is the quality issue. Increasingly, adjuncts are used for freshmen-level general education courses, and I wonder if that sends the right message about the quality of instruction at our universities. It’s not that adjuncts necessarily provide instruction that is inferior. Often they are very good instructors and, because of their specialized expertise, they can provide instructional benefits that full-time faculty cannot.
But adjuncts do not have the same vested interest in the overall success of a university’s program. Despite training, they are not as knowledgeable about department goals and operations, they are not as involved in the lives of students from the beginning of their program to the end, and they are not there in the department day after day to handle the ever-increasing number of things that come up. These important department responsibilities have to be picked up by full-time faculty.
Conclusion. Using adjuncts is probably here to stay and for a variety of good reasons. They represent a skilled but relatively inexpensive source of labor, provide flexibility to department planning, and fill in the holes in a department’s faculty expertise. But they also provide an administrative drag on the department, create concerns about quality, and have unknown long-term effects on the overall program of the department. Managing these competing strengths and weaknesses takes administrative skill and dedication.
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