Lack of job security, academic freedom to blame
Professor, second class
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Second in a series (see first part here)
By Megan Zahneis, News Editor
Miami students pay more for their education than nearly any other public-university students in the U.S., yet they are increasingly taught by faculty who enjoy neither the job security nor the academic freedom of tenured college professors.
That has subtle but significant effects in the classroom, according to both tenured professors and faculty members called "contingent"--those who work on part-time or short-term contracts who can never be sure how long their jobs will last.
The contingent class -- which includes visiting assistant professors, who sign annually renewable contracts with five-year caps; instructors, who are hired year-to-year; and per-credit-hour, or adjunct, faculty -- comprised 26.1 percent of Miami's total instructional staff in fall 2015.
This reliance on contingent faculty has transformed the professoriate as a workforce, said Cathy Wagner, professor of English and director of her department's creative writing program.
"I think people have an old-fashioned idea of what a professor is and who might be teaching undergraduates," Wagner said. "A faculty member at a university these days is very likely to be either a part-timer making just a few thousand dollars per class with no benefits or somebody who's on a five-year contract and will never get tenure and might not be renewed year to year. So, it's really not the ivory tower situation that one might have imagined of old."
Though students may not know the academic rank of the person standing in front of the class, a faculty member's status may be affecting them more than they think. It's an equation with many variables, including academic freedom, job safety and transiency.
With some 40 percent of all credit hours accounted for by contingent faculty, some see a disintegration of a model traditionally relied upon in the American higher education system. It's known as the "teacher-scholar" model, which holds that faculty are most effective when they create as well as disseminate knowledge. Conducting research of their own helps faculty members to stay at the cutting edge of knowledge in their disciplines, which in turns makes them better teachers in the classroom.
It's a theory with a long pedigree in American higher education, and critics say it's endangered by economic pressures to hire more part-time and short-term faculty.
"You have to be able to adjust to new ways, to new influences, to new phenomena," one VAP in languages explained. "And you can only do that if you do research."
Peter Williams, a professor emeritus of comparative religion who taught at Miami for over 40 years, said that contingent faculty are often pulled in two directions.
"[Faculty] have a double commitment, both to their field and their research and to their students," Williams said. "If you have just one or the other, it distorts the whole interplay that makes people stay engaged and have lively minds and are eager to create as well as just transmit knowledge."
According to Williams, the teacher-scholar model is undermined by contingent faculty being overworked.
"I think students can tell that -- when a teacher is intellectually engaged and when they're trying to stay afloat by teaching too many courses and don't have time to keep up with what's going on to make their own contributions to stay active in the profession, to have a national network of associations of people who share their interests," Williams said. "If they're simply reduced to teaching machines, then they're just going to be very hard for them to sustain their enthusiasm and their engagement."
Granting tenure solves that problem by allowing faculty members the spare time and security to develop new and innovative teaching methods. Dr. Glenn Platt, director of Miami's Armstrong Institute for Interactive Media Studies, is a case in point.
Along with two others, Platt pioneered the "inverted classroom" technique, in which students listen to lectures outside of class and have the chance to work one-on-one with teachers during class time. It's a concept that has garnered international renown. Platt said it never would have come to fruition had he not had tenure.
Non-tenure track faculty don't have the time in the day to devote to innovative research due to being overburdened with teaching, and often lack the professional and financial resources to pursue such a project, said Platt.
Platt added that the system for evaluating contingents' job performance is not designed to recognize the type of outside research the teacher-scholar model operates on.
"The contingent faculty rewards system doesn't at all value that type of innovation," Platt explained. "It's just not the way it's set up. If you look at the ways in which we evaluate those faculty, it is pretty singularly focused on their classroom performance. But if you want your contingent faculty to be involved in that kind of innovation you're going to have to come up with some kind of rewards system for that to work, and we just don't have that."
It's also been shown that many contingent faculty play it safe in the classroom, according to a report released by the American Association of University Professors (AAUP).
AAUP's research, drawn from a representative survey of over 2,200 full- and part-time U.S. faculty, showed that full-time faculty were significantly more likely than part-timers to try new teaching methods and course materials. They were also more likely to "challenge students' understanding of the social world" and to give students critical feedback on their work.
And part-timers were 30 percent less likely to pursue high-risk, high-reward propositions like Platt's inverted classroom, according to the same survey.
Wagner said she experienced that phenomenon upon her promotion to tenure.
"I think any professor who gets tenure will have had the experience of realizing that they are a bit freer than they were before even if they didn't realize it," Wagner said. "That certainly was the case for me, where I didn't realize how I'd been more cautious.
"Academia is a very, very special kind of place. We are supposed to be thinking and doing research and that sort of thinking and research. We need to be able to do it without a sense that we will be wasting our jobs if we say something unpopular or if we research something unpopular."
Adrianna Kezar, a professor of higher education at the University of Southern California and co-director of the Pullias Center for Higher Education, says the combination of academic freedom and job security are keys to a successful classroom experience.
"There could be political concerns that come in to hamper the learning environment because faculty members don't have the protections to teach what might be the most important knowledge.," Kezar said. "Tenure is important to the attracting people to the profession. You may not attract the same caliber of people. It's important to the institution's stability in terms of having individuals that are committed over time."
Many argue that contingent faculty are inevitably less committed to their institutions because they lack job security. Visiting assistant professors (VAPs), for instance, are hired with a five-year term limit and must have their contracts renewed annually.
That translates to bad news for students, said professor of classics Deborah Lyons.
"The students can't really know who to expect to find in a classroom from one year, or even one semester, to the next," Lyons said. "It's hard to develop strong connections with faculty if they're coming and going. It's hard for departments to plan. It breaks down the sense of a community if people are constantly leaving and if people are constantly arriving. Obviously it's good to have some new blood, but the degree of transients in the academic population has really risen and it's not a positive thing for the institution."
And while that "new blood" can be a boon for students -- contingents are known to inject up-to-date thinking from their field of study into their classrooms -- many believe the overall effect is disengagement.
Lilian Mina, a VAP of English, acknowledged that it can be difficult to motivate herself to go above and beyond the teaching required by her job description.
"It's like, 'All I have to do is just go into the classroom, do my teaching, leave the classroom, I'm done,'" Mina said of the mindset many contingent faculty adopt. "Some of us don't even think about getting involved in any activity outside the classroom that has to do with the students because it's like, 'Why should I? I don't get compensated. I don't get appreciated. I don't get recognized for that, so why should I do it?'"
One VAP in the languages told of having to reject mentorships with students because of her precarious job status. She asked not to be identified for fear of the repercussions on her job security.
"A few years back an honor student wanted me to be her advisor. I politely declined by saying, 'I am a visiting person; I do not know when I will leave Miami, so that is why I do not want to take on this responsibility. Because if I suddenly leave, I'm not responsible to you,'" the VAP explained. "I disappointed the student. Just simply because of the extra work that would have caused me and also I still feel not committed. Because of the nature of the position, I cannot be committed."
Peter Williams said Miami's reliance on contingent faculty has pernicious effects across the board.
"There's no incentive for [contingents] to develop much loyalty to the institution or invest much time or effort into it since they're not going to be here very long. Some people do it, I think, because it's in their nature to want to help students and do the best they can," Williams said. "But if they're being exploited by enormous teaching loads and no sense of loyalty to the institution, and you lose institutional memory, you have a shortage of people who are available for advising. You just have a very weakened institution because if it operates on a corporate basis, there's no sense of personal belonging or allegiance or obligation. And people are just going to do what they have to do and look for something better."