History Of Adjunct Faculty

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Faculty, Adjunct (also Part-Time Faculty)
The employment of contingent faculty in education has sparked intense debate regarding fiscal responsibility, shared governance, program development and scalability, and the ethics of faculty hiring. Contingent faculty members include part-time adjunct faculty, graduate assistants, and full-time, non-tenure track lecturers. Adjunct faculty members are those hired for part-time assignments on a course-by-course or term basis. They do not participate as members of the full faculty.
The Growth of Adjunct Faculty in Education
In the period between 1970 and 2001, the use of part-time adjunct faculty in higher education grew 376 percent, with the greatest growth in faculty positions from 1980 and beyond seen in part-time and non-tenure track positions. With the growth of online education programs, the trend continued. In 2008 forty percent of the higher education workforce was comprised of adjunct faculty members and, at some institutions, 100 percent of the faculty teaching online courses were adjunct faculty members. Currently, one-fourth of the workforce in higher education is tenured or tenure-track, down from one-third in 1995.
While it has been commonly assumed that adjunct faculty members fall into two categories, moonlighting professionals who teach an occasional class in addition to working a full-time job or those who teach as a retirement activity, recent survey data from the Coalition on the Academic Workforce (CAW) indicate that adjunct faculty members are 90% white, 61.9% female, 70% are between the ages of 36 and 65, and 65.4% teach in the humanities and professional fields. Over seventy-three percent of the respondents indicated that teaching was their primary employmen...

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Reich, R. S. (2001). Higher ed, inc. The Johns Hopkins University Press: Baltimore, MD.
Shattuck, K. (ed). (2014). Assuring quality in online education: Practices and process at the teaching, resource, and program levels. Stylus: Sterling, VA.
Snitzer, M. & Crsoby, L.S. (2003). Recruitment and development of online adjunct instructors. Online Journal of Distance Learning Administration, 6(2). Retrieved from http://www.westga.edu/~distance/ojdla/summer62/crosby-schnitzer62.html
Tamar, L. (December 3, 2013). Adjuncts see strength in unions. The New York Times.
Thompson, M. M. & Kuhne, G. W. (2014) Ethics matters: Assuring quality in the academic program. In Assuring quality in online education: Practices and process at the teaching, resource, and program levels. Stylus: Sterling, VA.

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