The University of Massachusetts Amherst (UMA), a public research university, has demonstrated a long-standing commitment to improving working conditions for non-tenure track faculty (NTTF) with a 20-year track record of progressive policies to improve the support for them. This commitment is manifested through a series of improvements in policies,…

Contingent faculty in higher education markedly outnumber those considered tenured or on the tenure-track, with about 73% of faculty serving in nontenure-line positions (American Association for University Professors, 2018). The term contingent faculty refers to college and university instructors who may work part-time or otherwise off the…

This report builds on work of the Delphi Project on the Changing Faculty and Student Success, initiated in 2012, that has documented changes in the academic profession and its implications for higher education. While the Delphi Project has aimed to address specific issues--for example, by conducting and disseminating research on how faculty…

This monograph complements volume 36, issue number 4 of ASHE Higher Education Report: "Understanding the New Majority of Non-Tenure-Track Faculty," and focuses on theories applied to study non-tenure-track faculty and philosophical and practical tensions represented in the literature. The chapter "Theories Used to Study and…

Citing a decreased proportion of full-time tenured faculty at American colleges and steady increase of part-time adjunct and other nontenure-track faculty, this American Federation of Teachers' (AFT) document advocates professionalism of the manner in which part-time/adjunct faculty are employed, compensated, supported and treated in higher…

Explores various impediments facing the academic labor movement, especially the resistance of tenured radicals, focusing on the experiences at Yale University. Discusses how graduate student organizing can jeopardize student-faculty relationships, affect chances for academic jobs, and create personal and professional tensions in many…

Describes the work of the Graduate, Adjunct, Lecturers: Organized Labor at the University of Maryland, noting that the bulk of graduate student struggles overall has occurred at state institutions. The group lobbied state legislators to include nontenured faculty in a bill granting collective bargaining to state employees. Highlights the…

Over the last generation, the instructional staffing system in American higher education has experienced a significant reduction in the proportion of jobs for full-time tenured and tenure-track faculty members and a dramatic growth in fixed-term full- and part-time instructional jobs without tenure. About 70 percent of the people teaching in…

This report addresses the unionization of part-time (or adjunct) faculty and sets forth certain demographic data pertaining to them. Included are sections from national faculty organizations' status reports on part-time faculty. The first part of the report lists factors contributing to the growth of adjunct faculty collective bargaining. Tables…

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…

In conjunction with efforts to make more widely known the trend towards decomposition of the tenure system in American colleges and universities, the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) has examined conditions of full-time nontenure track faculty, part-time/adjunct faculty, graduate employees and new categories of academic professional staff…