Most Professors Are Off Tenure Track

I knew that more and more schools were turning to so-called "contingent faculty" to teach courses and fill research positions, but the extent to which this trend has progressed is very surprising (from the Chronicle of Higher Education (subscription required)):

The sweeping shift toward non-tenure-track academic labor has been one of the most worried-over trends in American higher education. But it has been charted mostly with broad-brush data, which give little indication of the trend's progress at the institutional level.

With a publication called the Contingent Faculty Index, released this week, the American Association of University Professors has set out to fill in those gaps.

Drawing on data collected by the U.S. Department of Education in 2005, the AAUP has compiled the numbers of tenured, tenure-track, part-time, and full-time non-tenure-track faculty members employed at 2,617 American colleges and universities.

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The index's cumulative findings confirm the omens that have loomed large to academic-labor activists for years: Since the 1970s, the proportion of tenured and tenure-track faculty members in the American professoriate has dwindled from about 57 percent to about 35 percent, while the proportion of full- and part-timers working off the tenure track has grown from about 43 percent to 65 percent.

Wow. One wonders whether the response to this increase use of part-time and adjunct professors will be the formation of more, separate unions (like the one we recently posted about at GW) representing the specific interests of these types of faculty members.

PS