During the past decade, the number of non-tenure-track faculty positions has increased relative to the number of tenure-track positions at universities nationwide. Though the change has occurred as a short-term economic solution to budget cuts, it has had long-term effects on faculty sentiment, faculty relations and job opportunities. The University has been no exception to this trend, and in response, the Faculty Senate Task Force on the University's Policy for Non-Tenure-Track Faculty issued a report last summer to clarify and define the roles of non-track faculty members.
The divergent paths\n"The main distinction today between these two ranks is job security," said Peter Norton, an assistant professor and member of the 2008 Faculty Senate Task Force on Non-Tenure-Track Faculty. "This is not a distinction of rank; an assistant professor, for example, is an assistant professor, on or off the tenure track."
Tenured faculty members are appointed for a term of up to seven years followed by an evaluation. The job security associated with tenure often allows professors to exercise increased academic freedom.
Conversely, non-tenure-track faculty - also known as general faculty - have limited appointments of only one to five calendar or academic years and can opt for a contract renewal specifically for members of their group. Additionally, members can qualify to serve with the Expectation of Continued Employment after their sixth consecutive year of employment pending a performance review but will "normally be reappointed with a term commensurate with the term just completed," according to University policy.
Norton, however, said ECE is not nearly as secure as tenure.
Expectations for general faculty vary between University departments, as well, General Faculty Council Chair Ricky Patterson said.
In the College, for example, non-tenure-track positions generally emphasize one of the three areas of teaching, research or service, while tenure-track positions generally emphasize all of them.\nNon-tenured track faculty in the Engineering School, on the other hand, are required to fulfill two of those three areas, Engineering Dean James Aylor said.\n"We expect non-tenure track faculty to exhibit excellence in two of the three areas of teaching, research and service," Aylor said. "But in general, tenure track-faculty would be expected to contribute to all three areas."
Prevailing discontent?\nTenure-track positions often are paid more and have more prestige than non-tenure-track ones, Norton said, even though many general faculty members are internationally recognized within their fields. This disparity likely contributed to the dissatisfaction that general faculty reported in a spring 2008 survey conducted by the Faculty Senate and released in May 2009, Patterson said.
Another Faculty Senate survey in spring 2007 found that general faculty members were dissatisfied in three ways: They were less likely to agree that the University is collegial, less likely to feel that their research is valued by their departments and less likely to feel that their participation in department governance is valued.
Nevertheless, the University's policy is that non-tenure track faculty should be involved as equals in the department and all of its activities, except when considering tenure for a faculty member, Patterson said.
"In some departments, the policies are adhered to, whereas in others, there are major discrepancies, like the exclusion of non-tenure faculty members from department faculty meetings," Patterson said.
Non-tenure track faculty also are concerned when they near the six-year eligibility mark for ECE, Patterson said, because the University may be tempted to dismiss them before increasing their salaries. Even when general faculty members have served for many years, they often feel that their positions are terminal, with little to no opportunity for advancement, according to the Faculty Senate's 2007 survey.
Though general faculty members apply for tenure-track positions, they rarely are accepted, Patterson said.
"There can be a tendency to attach some stigma to someone in a [general faculty] position, using the faulty logic that if they had potential to be a star in the field, why aren't they already in a tenure-track position," he said.
Overall, the Task Force report stated that non-tenure-track faculty felt there was "essentially a caste system, where general faculty have considerably fewer rights and privileges and have considerably lower regard," than do tenure track faculty.
An effect of the economic woes?\nThe concerns of general faculty members have increased as their relative population at the University has grown larger, largely because of budget considerations.
In 1998, for example, 8 percent of College faculty were lecturers, who are considered general faculty, while 45 percent were full professors, most of whom were tenure-track professors. In 2008, however, 12 percent of College faculty were lecturers, while 42 percent were full professors, according to the Human Resources System.
This trend exists in part because opportunities in the tenure track are scarce, especially for professors in the humanities and social sciences, Norton said.
"If you are a school that is watching your budget, hiring non-tenure faculty is the thing to do," Norton said. "It's cheaper and it's much easier to shed people, until they earn employment protection in their sixth year."
Consequently, departments often are staffed by combinations of tenured faculty - most of whom were hired when faculty positions were nearly all tenure-track.
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," according to the 2009 Report on the Economic Status of the Profession from the American Association of University Professors, the policy of which the University follows. This attitude "represents a disinvestment in the nation's intellectual capital precisely at the time when innovation and insight are most needed," the report added.
Norton, however, said he does not think the increase of non-tenure track positions is entirely a bad trend.
"The erosion of tenure opens up the academic marketplace for non-tenure track faculty to compete in," Norton said. "The situation still isn't ideal for non-tenure track faculty though, because the legacy of tenured positions from past decades limits the market in which non-tenure-track faculty can compete."
The University responds\nThe Faculty Senate created the Task Force on the University's Policy for Non-Tenure-Track Faculty to address the issues revealed in its own 2007 survey.
Though the Task Force is comprised of an even distribution of general faculty and tenure-track faculty, the majority of policy proposals have originated from the non-tenured members, Task Force Chair Lawrence Phillips said.
Task Force reports also have recommended that respective schools and departments explicitly outline the expectations for general faculty to prevent further confusion.
The report also clarified an unwritten distinction between non-tenure-track faculty and tenure-track faculty to encourage more transparency.
"Tenured and tenure-track faculty are expected to perform research, teach and provide service in the University community," Patterson said. "Non-tenure track faculty should only be expected to perform on one or two of these areas."
Moreover, general faculty members should be encouraged to participate actively in all school and departmental faculty meetings, the Task Force recommended.
The Task Force responded to another general faculty concern by recommending that departments and schools should not replace experienced general faculty members with new hires merely to prevent them from earning ECE.
The trend appears to have been reversing since the report was issued, Norton said.
"The ECE process had not been formalized" until a few years ago, Phillips said. "Now the process of receiving ECE is handled similarly to the process of promotion and tenure, where non-tenure-track faculty are given up to five years to show their worth."
But this practice contrasts with a popular trend for universities to hire general faculty members without making them eligible for ECE. As a result, the Task Force recommended that the University should be transparent about its intentions by notifying newly hired general faculty members whether their positions are even available for ECE.
Provost Arthur Garson and the General Faculty Council endorsed these recommendations and requested that all deans disperse the report to their schools' faculty members.
Improvement or empty policy?\n"In general, there has been a marked improvement in recent years," Norton said, adding that initiatives such as the Task Force recommendations have been particularly helpful, especially because administrators like Garson have supported them.
The College, for example, has made significant strides in responding to these recommendations, Woo said.
"Among the things we have done are being more explicit about the eligibility for ECE in every offer letter, and reminding the chairs and directors of departments and programs within the College of the importance of more fully incorporating non-tenure-track faculty in the life and governance of their department or program," she said, adding that all College faculty meetings include general faculty members.
Some faculty members, however, think that other departments and schools have not reached out as much to general faculty members. Some areas of the Engineering School's policy on general faculty are inconsistent with the Task Force recommendations.
General faculty members whose main jobs are to teach are sometimes expected to publish in other fields, including education. Norton said there are several problems with this expectation. Namely, it is difficult for any faculty member to publish outside his area of expertise, it does not evaluate teaching on the basis of performance in the classroom and it subjects non-tenure-track faculty to criteria under which track faculty are not judged.
"It would be like requiring a math professor get an article published in a education journal," Norton said, adding that the University is the only school that imposes this expectation for non-tenure-track teaching faculty.
Engineering Dean James Aylor, however, said only non-tenured faculty who choose to fulfil instruction as one of their three required areas of service, research or teaching are expected to fulfill that requirement to the best of their abilities, which involves going beyond simply conducting classroom instruction.
"If education is your primary function, then the expectation is for you to publish in those areas," Aylor said. "For example, if teaching is your primary function, then teaching is not enough to get promoted. You need to show excellence in teaching if that's what you want to do and you should be expected to advance the state of the art of education ... Just going to class and doing an excellent job at teaching is not enough."
Aylor added that the concerns of both tenure- and non-tenure-track faculty in the Engineering School are weighted equally.
"We have non-tenure track faculty and they do serve a very important purpose in this school and that's the reason why they're addressed so," he said.
As with many of the Faculty Senate's policy recommendations, there are no official mechanisms in place to hold departments accountable to these suggestions - even with the support of the Provost, Patterson said. It will be up to those departments to ensure that the needed changes are made.
"While the Faculty Senate Task Force Report has done a commendable job in addressing many of the concerns of the [general faculty], it is still necessary to ensure that these practices are followed uniformly across departments, and that [non-tenure-track faculty] aren't treated as second class citizens in some areas of the University," Patterson said.
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