Different Paths to Full Professor at Ohio State University

At Ohio State University, president E. Gordon Gee, and many faculty, want to rewrite the rules for tenure to essentially allow a dual track: Those who excel at research and those who excel at teaching. Scott Jaschik outlines the concept in Inside Higher Ed (lots of interesting comments):

[T]he key missing element to giving teaching and service a fair shot at equal consideration in promotions to full professor is measurement of impact, which is easier for research. He said that if good criteria could be developed, not only would teaching-related activities be rewarded, but so would research that has practical use.

"Measuring impact is always difficult, particularly when it comes to teaching and service," he said. "But it can be done if we focus on the significance of these activities as it extends beyond our own institution -- just as we expect such broad effects with traditional scholarship. Thus, indicators of impact on other institutions, recognition by professional associations, broad adoption of teaching materials (textbooks, software, etc.) by other institutions, evidence of effects on policy formulation and so on -- all these are appropriate independent indicators of effectiveness."

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Regional SCUP Events! Enjoy the F2F company of your colleagues and peers at one of three SCUP regional conferences this spring:

• March 14–16: Baltimore, MD
• March 24–26: Cambridge, MA
• April 5–7, San Diego, CA

Budget Realities and Adjunct Hiring

Writing in The Chronicle of Higher Education's "On Hiring" blog, David Evans notes that at his institution, to replace adjuncts with full-time faculty would require a net increase in related expenses of $747,000, in an environment where the campus already faces $2.4M in cuts.

You can read his entry here:
http://chronicle.com/jobs/blogs/onhiring/1059

"I’ve done a little math on my own budget that I want to share to show the dilemmas facing my small university with regard to adjunct employment. For context, we have about 1,000 students on the campus and another 2,000 in professional and online programs in 14 locations around the state. For now, I am only discussing our operations on our home campus."

"Numerous critics of practices surrounding adjunct employment accuse hiring institutions of “administrative bloat” which, if eliminated, could enable a solution to the overall problem. I’m probably not very credible on that matter since I am part of the administration, but at least at my institution, we run quite lean already. If we are to maintain operations and compliance with various regulations, accreditation requirements, and other external compulsions, even the most ruthless cutting of administrative costs wouldn’t get us more than perhaps $300,000 in budget relief. So it’s not likely that we can fix our adjunct situation merely by deflating a bloated management structure."

Doctoral Candidates Anticipate Hard Times: 'This Is a Year of No Jobs'

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March 20—Can Strategically Aligning (or Re-Aligning) Academic Programs Help You With Your Budget Crisis?, featuring SCUPers Mary Doyle of the University of California, Santa Cruz, and Karen Schmid of Purdue University. Discussants include former SCUP presidents Marv Peterson, Joan Racki, and Laura Saunders. Learn more or register now.

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Not that the academic job market has been great lately, but now it's looking so much worse. Fewer and fewer openings, and more and more of the ones there are have jumped off the tenure track:

Fulltime faculty jobs have not been easy to come by in recent decades, but this year the new crop of Ph.D. candidates is finding the prospects worse than ever. Public universities are bracing for severe cuts as state legislatures grapple with yawning deficits. At the same time, even the wealthiest private colleges have seen their endowments sink and donations slacken since the financial crisis. So a chill has set in at many higher education institutions, where partial or full-fledge hiring freezes have been imposed.

A survey by the American Historical Association, for example, found that the number of history departments recruiting new professors this year is down 15 percent, while the American Mathematical Society’s largest list of job postings has dropped more than 25 percent from last year.

“This is a year of no jobs,” said Catherine Stimpson, the dean of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences at New York University. Ph.D.s are stacked up, she said, “like planes hovering over La Guardia.”

The Worst Academic Profession Career Structures: Our Suggestions for Ranking

Philip G. Altbach must be one of the more prolific authors in all of higher education. Here's another piece, with Christine Musselin, about poorly designed or badly implemented academic career structures and the harm they can do:

A few examples will illustrate how poorly designed or badly implemented academic career structures can have a severely negative impact on the profession—and ultimately on the future of higher education. Many look to the United States as the world's leading university system and to the American professoriate as highly productive. The US "up-or-out" tenure system is seen as a rigorous but effective way of ensuring careful selection while at the same time providing a clear career path. While the system has been criticized for downplaying teaching and sometimes imposing unrealistic time constraints on junior staff, it is widely seen as effective. The problem is that fewer than half of new academic appointments in the United States are made on the traditional "tenure stream"; most new appointments are either part-time or full-time contracts. While the situation is somewhat better at the top institutions, this new arrangement makes an academic career impossible for participants of this new system. While this policy may save money and increase flexibility in the short run, it will have a highly negative impact on the American academic profession. The first increasing difficulty involves attracting the most qualified individuals to academe and constrains young researchers while autonomy should be provided at an age when creativity and innovation are usually at the highest levels.

New Report Recommends Tenure Policy Reforms for the Engaged University

"A new report from Imagining America, Scholarship in Public: Knowledge Creation and Tenure Policy in the Engaged University, proposes 'concrete ways to remove obstacles to academic work carried out for and/or with the public by giving such work full standing as scholarship, research, or artistic creation.'" The entire 60-page PDF document is available for free download.

We propose concrete ways to remove obstacles to academic work carried out for and/or with the public by giving such work full standing as scholarship, research, or artistic creation. While we recommend a number of ways to alter the wording and intent of tenure and promotion policies, changing the rules is not enough. Enlarging the conception of who counts as “peer” and what counts as “publication” is part of something bigger: the democratization of knowledge on and off campus. We want this report to serve as a toolkit for faculty, staff, and students who are eager to change the culture surrounding promotion and tenure. It offers strategies that they can use to create enabling settings for doing and reviewing intellectually rigorous public work.

Teaching 6 Courses @ 4 Institutions - Definitely Not Tenure Track

The growth in percentage of faculty who are adjunct (not tenure track) has been getting a lot of attention lately. This article by Alan Finder of The New York Times uses the daily travels of an adjunct faculty member who teaches six courses at four institutions, including the University of Michigan Dearborn and Oakland Community College:

“We have to contend with increasing public demands for accountability, increased financial scrutiny and declining state support,” said Charles F. Harrington, provost of the University of North Carolina, Pembroke. “One of the easiest, most convenient ways of dealing with these pressures is using part-time faculty,” he said, though he cautioned that colleges that rely too heavily on such faculty “are playing a really dangerous game.”

Mark B. Rosenberg, chancellor of the State University System of Florida, said that part-timers can provide real-world experience to students and fill gaps in nursing, math, accounting and other disciplines with a shortage of qualified faculty. He also said the shift could come with costs.

Adjuncts are less likely to have doctoral degrees, educators say. They also have less time to meet with students, and research suggests that students who take many courses with them are somewhat less likely to graduate.

“Really, we are offering less educational quality to the students who need it most,” said Ronald G. Ehrenberg, director of the Cornell Higher Education Research Institute, noting that the soaring number of adjunct faculty is most pronounced in community colleges and the less select public universities. The elite universities, both public and private, have the fewest adjuncts.