Tenure and Teaching-Intensive Appointments

This report was prepared by a subcommittee of the Committee on Contingency and the Profession. The parent committee approved publication of this final report in 2010. The full report included two appendices, which have been omitted here. Statistical information in the report was updated in 2024.

I. The Collapsing Faculty Infrastructure

The past five decades have seen a failure of the social contract in faculty employment. The tenure system was designed as a big tent, aiming to unite a faculty of tremendously diverse interests within a system of common professional values, standards, and mutual responsibilities.¹ It aimed to secure reasonable compensation and to protect academic freedom through continuous employment.² Financial and intellectual security enabled the faculty to carry out the public trust in both teaching and research, sustaining a rigorous system of professional peer scrutiny in hiring, evaluation, and promotion. Today the tenure system has all but collapsed.

Before 1970, as today, most full-time faculty appointments were teaching-intensive, featuring teaching loads of nine hours or more per week. Nearly all of those full-time teaching-intensive positions were on the tenure track. This meant that most faculty who spent most of their time teaching were also campus and professional citizens, with clear roles in shared governance and access to support for research or professional activity.³

Today, most faculty positions are still teaching intensive, and many of those teaching-intensive positions are still tenurable. In fact, the proportion of teaching-intensive to research-intensive appointments has risen sharply.⁴ And while many of these teaching-intensive positions are still tenurable, the majority of teaching-intensive positions have been shunted outside of the tenure system. This has in most cases meant a dramatic shift from “teaching-intensive” appointments to “teaching-only” appointments, featuring a faculty with attenuated relationships to campus and disciplinary peers. This seismic shift from “teaching-intensive” faculty within the big tent of tenure to “teaching-only” faculty outside of it has had severe consequences for students as well as faculty themselves, producing lower levels of campus engagement across the board and a rising service burden for the shrinking core of tenurable faculty.

The central question we have to face in connection with this historic change is real and unavoidable: Should more classroom teaching be done by faculty supported by the rigorous peer scrutiny of the tenure system? Most of the evidence says yes, and a host of diverse voices agree. This view brings together students, faculty, legislators, the AAUP, and even many college and university administrators. At some institutions, however, particularly at large research universities, the tenure system has already been warped to the purpose of creating a multitier faculty. In order to avoid this, individuals must have available to them “multiple ways to salvation” inside the tenure system.⁵ Tenure was not designed as a merit badge for research-intensive faculty or as a fence to exclude those with teaching-intensive commitments.

By 2022, almost 68 percent of faculty members were employed off the tenure track, compared with about 47 percent in 1987.⁶ Many institutions use contingent faculty appointments throughout their programs; some retain a tenurable faculty in their traditional or flagship programs while staffing others—such as branch campuses, online offerings, and overseas campuses—almost entirely with faculty on contingent appointments. Faculty serving on a contingent basis generally work at significantly lower wages, often without health coverage and other benefits, and in positions that do not incorporate all aspects of university life or the full range of faculty rights and responsibilities. The tenure track has not vanished, but it has ceased to be the norm. This means that the majority of faculty work in subprofessional conditions, often without basic protections for academic freedom.

Some of these appointments, particularly in science and medicine, are research intensive or research only, and the faculty in these appointments often work under extremely troubling conditions. However, the overwhelming majority of non-tenure-track appointments are teaching only or teaching intensive. Non-tenure-track faculty and graduate students teach the majority of classes at many institutions, commonly at shockingly low rates of pay.

This compensation scheme has turned the professoriate into an irrational economic choice, denying the overwhelming majority of individuals the opportunity to consider college teaching as a career. This form of economic discrimination is deeply unfair, both to teachers and to their students; institutions that serve the economically marginalized and the largest proportion of minority students, such as community colleges, typically employ the largest numbers of nontenurable faculty.⁷ As the AAUP’s 2009 Annual Report on the Economic Status of the Profession points out, the erosion of the tenure track rests on the “fundamentally flawed premise” that faculty “represent only a cost, rather than the institution’s primary resource.” Hiring faculty on the basis of the lowest labor cost and without professional working conditions “represents a disinvestment in the nation’s intellectual capital precisely at the time when innovation and insight are most needed.”

A broad and growing front of research shows that the system of permanently temporary faculty appointments has negative consequences for student learning.⁸ Mindful that their working conditions are their students’learning conditions, many faculty holding contingent appointments struggle to shield students from the consequences of an increasingly unprofessional workplace. Faculty on contingent appointments frequently pay for their own computers, phones, and office supplies and dip into their own wallets for journal subscriptions and travel to conferences to stay current in their fields. Some struggle to preserve academic freedom. However heroic, these individual acts are no substitute for professional working conditions.

We are at a tipping point. Campuses that overuse contingent appointments show higher levels of disengagement and disaffection among faculty, even those with more secure positions.⁹ We see a steadily shrinking minority, faculty with tenure, as increasingly unable to protect academic freedom, professional autonomy, and the faculty role in governance for themselves—much less for the contingent majority. At many institutions, the proportion of faculty with tenure is below 10 percent, and too often tenure has become the privilege of those who are, have been, or soon will be administrators.

II. It Is Time to Stabilize the Faculty

In opposition to this trend, a new consensus is emerging that it is time to stabilize the crumbling faculty infrastructure. Concerned legislators and some academic administrators have joined faculty associations in calling for dramatic reductions in the reliance on contingent appointments, commonly urging a maximum of 25 percent.¹⁰ Across the country, various forms of stabilization have been attempted by administrators and legislators, proposed by faculty associations, or negotiated at the bargaining table.

Many stabilization efforts focus on winning employment security for full-time faculty serving on contingent appointments, a fast-growing class of appointment. In some cases, such positions effectively replace tenure lines; in others, they represent a more welcome consolidation of part-time contingent appointments. Increasingly, however, teachers and researchers in both full- and part-time contingent positions are seeking and receiving provisions for greater stability of employment: longer appointment terms, the expectation or right of continuing employment, provisions for orderly layoff, and other rights of seniority. These rights have been codified in a variety of contract language, ranging from “instructor tenure” to “continuing” or “senior lectureship” to certificates of continuing employment.

As faculty hired into contingent positions seek and obtain greater employment security, often through collective bargaining, it is becoming clear that academic tenure and employment security are not reducible to each other. A potentially crippling development in these arrangements is that many—while improving on the entirely insecure positions they replace—offer limited conceptions of academic citizenship and service, few protections for academic freedom, and little opportunity for professional growth. These arrangements commonly involve minimal professional peer scrutiny in hiring, evaluation, and promotion.

III. Conversion to Tenure Is the Best Way to Stabilize the Faculty

The Committee on Contingency and the Profession believes that the best way to stabilize the faculty infrastructure is to bundle the employment and economic securities that activist faculty on contingent appointments are already winning for themselves with the rigorous scrutiny of the tenure system. The ways in which contingent teachers and researchers are hired, evaluated, and promoted often bypass the faculty entirely and are generally less rigorous than the intense review applied to faculty in tenurable positions.

Several noteworthy forms of conversion to tenure have been implemented or proposed at different kinds of institutions. The most successful forms are those that retain experienced, qualified, and effective faculty, as opposed to those that convert positions while leaving behind the faculty currently in them. As the AAUP emphasized in its report Contingent Appointments and the Academic Profession, stabilization of positions can and should be accomplished without negative consequences for current faculty and their students.

The best practice for institutions of all types is to convert the status of contingent appointments to appointments eligible for tenure with only minor changes in job description. This means that faculty hired contingently with teaching as the major component of their workload will become tenured or tenure-eligible primarily on the basis of successful teaching.¹¹ (Similarly, faculty serving on contingent appointments with research as the major component of their workload may become tenured or eligible for tenure primarily on the basis of successful research.) In the long run, however, a balance is desirable. Professional development and research activities support strong teaching, and a robust system of shared governance depends upon the participation of all faculty, so even teaching-intensive tenure-eligible positions should include service and appropriate forms of engagement in research or the scholarship of teaching.

In some instances, faculty serving on a contingent basis will prefer a major change in their job description with conversion to tenure eligibility. For example, some faculty in teaching-intensive positions might prefer to have research as a larger component of their appointments. While the employer should not impose this major change in job description on the faculty member seeking tenure eligibility, the AAUP encourages the employer to accommodate the faculty member. However, faculty themselves should not perpetuate the false impression that tenure was invented as a merit badge for research-intensive appointments.

Finally, stabilizing the faculty infrastructure means substantially transforming the circumstances of teachers and researchers serving part time (about half of the faculty nationwide). Many faculty members serving part time might prefer full-time employment. Stabilizing this group means consolidating part-time work into tenure-eligible, full-time, and usually teaching-intensive positions—through attrition, not layoffs.

For faculty who wish to remain in the profession on a part-time basis over the long term, we recommend as best practice fractional positions, including fully proportional pay, that are eligible for tenure and benefits, with proportional expectations for service and professional development.¹²

The proliferation of contingent appointments will continue if institutions convert select appointments to the tenure track while continuing to hire off the tenure track elsewhere. We urge that conversion plans include discontinuance of any new off-track hiring, except where such hires are genuinely for special appointments of brief duration.

Tenure was conceived as a right rather than a privilege. As the 1940 Statement of Principles on Academic Freedom and Tenure observed, the intellectual and economic securities of the tenure system must be the bedrock of any effort by higher education to fulfill its obligations to students and society.

Notes

1. With respect to faculty tenure, the Association holds to the following tenets: (1) with the exception of brief special appointments, all full-time faculty appointments should be either tenured or probationary for tenure (“Statement on Procedural Standards in the Renewal or Nonrenewal of Faculty Appointments,” AAUP, Policy Documents and Reports, 11th ed. [Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2015], 94–98); (2) the probationary period should not exceed seven years (1940 “Statement of Principles on Academic Freedom and Tenure”); (3) tenure can be granted at any professional rank (1970 Interpretive Comment 5 on the 1940 “Statement”); (4) tenure-line positions can be part time as well as full time (Regulation 13 of the “Recommended Institutional Regulations on Academic Freedom and Tenure,” Policy Documents and Reports, 79–90); (5) faculty appointments, including part-time appointments in most cases, should incorporate all aspects of university life and the full range of faculty responsibilities (“Contingent Appointments and the Academic Profession,” Policy Documents and Reports, 79–90); and (6) nonrenewal or termination of an appointment requires affordance of requisite academic due process (“Recommended Institutional Regulations”). Back to text

2. The 1940 “Statement of Principles on Academic Freedom and Tenure” characterizes the tenure system as a “means to certain ends; specifically: (1) freedom of teaching and research and of extramural activities, and (2) a sufficient degree of economic security to make the profession attractive to men and women of ability. Freedom and economic security, hence tenure, are indispensable to the success of an institution in fulfilling its obligations to its students and to society.” That statement has now been endorsed by more than 250 academic organizations. Back to text

3. In 1970, roughly three-fourths of all faculty were in the tenure stream and 78 percent of all faculty were full-time; in 1969, only 3.2 percent of full-time appointments were nontenurable. Among all full-time appointments in 1969, teaching-intensive faculty (with nine or more hours a week of teaching) outnumbered research-intensive faculty (with six or fewer hours a week of teaching) in a ratio of 1.5:1, accounting for 60 percent of the total number of full-time appointments. See Jack H. Schuster and Martin J. Finkelstein, The American Faculty: The Restructuring of Academic Work and Careers (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006), 41 (Table 3.2, “American Faculty by Employment Status, 1970– 2003”), 174 (Table 6.1, “Non-Tenure-Eligible Faculty, 1969–1998,”), 97 (Table 4.4, “Ratio of High to Low Teaching Loads among Full-Time Faculty, 1969–1998”). Back to text

4. By 1998, among full-time faculty, the ratio of teaching-intensive appointments to research-intensive ones had risen significantly from 1.5:1 to 2:1, or from about 60 percent to 67 percent of the total. This was accomplished, as Schuster and Finkelstein document, “largely by the resort to ‘teaching only’ appointments” (99). However, the percentage of all faculty who were in teaching-intensive appointments rose much more sharply, largely because of a massive increase in teaching-intensive part-time appointments (Schuster and Finkelstein). By 2004, the ratio of teaching-intensive appointments to research-intensive ones decreased slightly to 1.8:1, or about 64 percent of the total. See Martin J. Finkelstein, Valerie Martin Conley, and Jack J Schuster, The Faculty Factor: Reassessing the American Academy in a Turbulent Era (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2016), 244 (Table 7.2, “Ratio of High to Low Teaching Loads among Full-Time Faculty, by Gender and Institution Type, 1988–2004”). Since 2004, when the National Center for Education Statistics stopped collecting data on faculty teaching loads; reliable figures have not been available. Back to text

5. E. Gordon Gee quoted in Scott Jaschik, “Different Paths to Full Professor,” Inside Higher Ed, March 4, 2010, https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2010/03/05/different-paths-full-prof.... Back to text

6. Glenn Colby, “Annual Report on the Economic Status of the Profession, 2023–24,” Academe 110 (Summer 2024): 88, figure 7. Back to text

7. Schuster and Finkelstein, 43–47. Back to text

8. Some notable research articles on this topic are Ernst Benjamin, “How Over-Reliance upon Contingent Appointments Diminishes Faculty Involvement in Student Learning,” Peer Review 5 (Fall 2002): 4–10; Ronald Ehrenberg and Liang Zhang, “Do Tenured and Tenure-Track Faculty Matter?,” Journal of Human Resources 40 (Summer 2005): 647–59; Paul Umbach, “How Effective Are They? Exploring the Impact of Contingent Faculty on Undergraduate Education,” Review of Higher Education 30 (Winter 2007): 91–123; M. Kevin Eagan Jr. and Audrey J. Jaeger, “Closing the Gate: Part-Time Faculty Instruction in Gatekeeper Courses and First-Year Persistence,” New Directions for Teaching and Learning 115 (Fall 2008): 39–53; Audrey J. Jaeger, “Contingent Faculty and Student Outcomes,” Academe 94 (November–December 2008): 42–43; Paul D. Umbach, “The Effects of Part-Time Faculty Appointments on Instructional Techniques and Commitment to Teaching,” paper presented at the 33rd Annual Conference of the Association for the Study of Higher Education, Jacksonville, November 5–8, 2008; A. J. Jaeger and M. K. Eagan, “Unintended Consequences: Effects of Exposure to Part-Time Faculty on Associate’s Degree Completion,” Community College Review 36 (January 2009): 167–94; M. K. Eagan and A. J. Jaeger, “Part-Time Faculty at Community Colleges: Implications for Student Persistence and Transfer,” Research in Higher Education 50 (March 2009): 168–88. These newspaper articles provide a summary of relevant research: Karin Fischer, “Speaker Says Adjuncts May Harm Students,” Chronicle of Higher Education, November 18, 2005; Scott Jaschik, “Evaluating the Adjunct Impact,” Inside Higher Ed, November 6, 2008; David Moltz, “The Part-Time Impact,” Inside Higher Ed, November 16, 2009. For a different point of view, see Scott Jaschik, “What Adjunct Impact?,” Inside Higher Ed, May 3, 2010.  Back to text

9. P. Umbach and R. Wells, “Understanding the Individual and Institutional Factors That Affect Part-Time Community College Faculty Satisfaction,” paper presented at the 2009 Annual Meeting of the American Educational Research Association, San Diego, April 13–17, 2009. Back to text

10. 10. See, for example, California Assembly Bill 1725, https://edsource.org/wp-content/uploads/old/ab1725.PDF, and Assembly Concurrent Resolution 73, http://www.leginfo.ca.gov/pub/01-02/bill/asm/ab_0051-0100/acr_73_bill_ 20010924_chaptered.pdf, as well as the American Federation of Teachers’ Faculty and College Excellence (FACE) campaign, https://www.aft.org/resolution/faculty-and-college-excellence-campaign.  Back to text

11. For part-time contingent faculty, the AAUP’s 2006 addition to its "Recommended Institutional Regulations on Academic Freedom and Tenure" (Regulation 13) urges that “prior to consideration of reappointment beyond a seventh year, part-time faculty members who have taught at least twelve courses or six terms within those seven years . . . be provided a comprehensive review with the potential result of (1) appointment with part-time tenure [where such exists], (2) appointment with part-time continuing service, or (3) non-reappointment. Those appointed with tenure shall be afforded the same procedural safeguards as full-time tenured faculty.” The 2003 statement Contingent Appointments and the Academic Profession recommends, “The experience and accomplishments of faculty members who have served in contingent positions at the institution should be credited in determining the appropriate length and character of a probationary period for tenure in accord with AAUP guidelines.” Back to text

12. At least since the publication of its 1980 statement "The Status of Part-Time Faculty," Academe 67 (February–March 1981): 29–39, the AAUP has recommended that colleges consider creating a class of “regular part-time faculty members, consisting of individuals who, as their professional career, share the teaching, research, and administrative duties customary for faculty at their institution . . . [and] the opportunity to achieve tenure and the rights it confers.”