This article supports Bérubé's conclusion regarding the intellectual health of humanities scholarship. However, it argues that the case of "contingent faculty"--or academics with short-term or casual contracts--is in many respects different in Australia to the situation he outlines for the US. Whilst a variety of funding pressures have…

Tenure provides professors with a unique level of job security and utmost respect in the academy (Shea, 2002). Receiving tenure and progressing through the academic ranks are among the most visible and valued accomplishments for college and university faculty (Perna, 2001). Faculty who achieve excellence in teaching, research, and service readily…

In this paper, the authors call for an approach that, in recognizing the economic realities facing most institutions, attempts to put aside objections that funding is simply not available to support an expansion of the current tenure system. In calling for the changes in faculty working conditions, the authors recognize that change will…

A combination of destructive trends in higher education--shrinking state budgets, stagnant student aid, the growth of corporate-style management, the overuse and exploitation of contingent faculty, increasing workloads and attacks on academic freedom--is weakening the educational integrity and professionalism of American colleges and universities.…

The author begins by asserting that tenure does have a future, even though cultural and economic trends in American higher education have brought it to near annihilation in the past decade. She is sorry to say that it has survived these trends for one troubling reason--tenure is the ultimate employment perk for very successful members of the…

Back in the 1970s, when the author was an art professor at California State University at Northridge, he had a colleague who absolutely would not say anything about anybody that he would not say to that person's face. Marvin Harden, the African-American artist, originally came to Los Angeles in the late 1950s from segregated Austin, Texas, to play…

For those who still see tenure primarily as a form of job security, the larger economic context should be plain. No one, not even in the traditional professions, can any longer expect a fixed pattern of employment in the course of his or her lifetime. In this article, the author discusses how this generation is witnessing the merging of the…

Job security is a relatively new concept in the ancient field of teaching art. Historically artists have created, and been judged on, their own credentials--that is, their art. The master of fine-arts (M.F.A.) degree, often described as a "terminal degree," or the endpoint in an artist's formal education, has long been sufficient for artists…

The question of faculty being evaluated by students remains central to the well-being of academia for one reason: such evaluations dictate behavior. The threat that these evaluations will be used to deny promotion or tenure leads one to assume some will yield to the temptation of pleasing their judges. (MLW)

One of the highest priorities of American Federation of Teachers (AFT) Higher Education over the past several years has been the shift away from a corps of full-time, tenure-track faculty to a contingent instructional workforce in American colleges and universities. This document focuses on one aspect of that shift: full-time faculty who are not…

This paper, from the Faculty Association of Community and Technical Colleges (FACTC) in Washington, addresses the issue of part-time faculty employment in the state's community colleges. In fall 1997, there were 3,019 full-time and 5,256 part-time instructors in Washington's two year colleges. Departments that rely most heavily on part-time…

This paper, one in a series about the priorities of the professoriate, explores some creative employment practices which will stimulate campus discussions of faculty employment policies and practices in four areas: (1) alternative career paths, (2) workload and productivity, (3) peer review, and (4) academic freedom and employment security. In…