Heavy reliance on contingent faculty appointments hurts students.
Faculty working conditions are student learning conditions.
Faculty on contingent appointments are typically paid only for the hours they spend in the classroom. While they may be excellent teachers, they are not given adequate institutional support for time spent meeting with students, evaluating student work, and class planning and preparation.
Adjuncts are often hired on the spur of the moment with little evaluation or time to prepare--sometimes after a semester has already started.
Faculty in contingent positions often receive little or no evaluation and mentoring, making them especially vulnerable to being dismissed over one or two student complaints.
Faculty in contingent positions, though they may teach the majority of some types of courses, are often cut out of department and institution-wide planning. The knowledge that they have about their students and the strengths and weaknesses of the courses they teach is not taken into consideration.
The high turnover among contingent faculty members mean that students in a department may never have the same teacher twice, or may be unable to find an instructor who knows them well enough to write a letter of recommendation.
The free exchange of ideas may be hampered by the fear of dismissal for unpopular utterances, so students may be deprived of the debate essential to citizenship.
They may also be deprived of rigorous evaluations of their work.
Overuse of contingent faculty appointments hurts all faculty.
The integrity of faculty work is threatened as parts of the whole are divided and assigned piecemeal to instructors, lecturers, graduate students, specialists, researchers, and administrators.
Proportionally fewer tenure-track faculty means fewer people to divide up the work of advising students, setting curriculum, and serving on college-wide committees.
Divisions among instructors create a less cohesive faculty; on some campuses, tenure-track and adjunct faculty rarely interact or participate in planning together.
Tenure should be a big tent that provides due process protections for the academic freedom of all faculty; where contingent appointments predominate, it becomes instead a merit badge for a select few.
Academic freedom is weakened when a majority of the faculty lack the protections of tenure.
The insecure relationship between faculty members in contingent positions and their institutions can chill the climate for academic freedom, which is essential to the common good of a free society.
Faculty serving in insecure contingent positions may be less likely to take risks in the classroom or in scholarly and service work.
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