In academia, there are two different worlds, one inhabited by tenure-track and the other by non-tenure-track faculty. In the first, people encourage faculty to become involved in a series of important reforms that increase student success, completion, and learning. In this first world, people envision faculty simultaneously increasing their…

An effective faculty is essential to student success, and faculty development programs help sustain that effectiveness. Central to the faculty development programs at Hillsborough Community College (HCC) in Tampa, Florida, is the philosophy that they should lead to strengthened teaching and learning and, ultimately, improved student success. At…

What qualities are the essence of a top-notch university professor? "Enthusiastic." "Fun." "Interesting." "Cares about students." These attributes are listed in student reviews of America's number one professor for 2009, as determined by the Web site ratemyprofessor.com. Other students made these comments about the same instructor: "Very easy A,"…

A history of the professoriate would not be complete without an account of nontenure-track faculty. Whether these faculty members are referenced using the terms "contingent," "part time," "contract," "adjunct," "clinical," "research," "visiting," "lecturer," or…

This Accountability Report shows the status and progression of Florida Agricultural and Mechanical University (FAMU) from one year to the next. The Executive Summary is divided into the following sections: (1) Dashboard; (2) Key Achievements; and (3) Narrative. Data tables on FAMU's financial resources, personnel, enrollment, undergraduate…

This article presents three recent American Association of University Professors (AAUP) cases that involved the dismissal of a senior non-tenure-track member of the faculty. The most recent case resulted in the investigating committee's report on Nicholls State University, a regional public institution in Louisiana. Preceding Nicholls was an…

Boston University (BU) has had a history of contentious relations between administrators and faculty. John Silber, who ran the university from the early 1970s through the late 1990s, gave faculty little say in university governance, and an "us versus them" atmosphere soon developed. In 2004, however, major changes in the board of…

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…

This article talks about the issues on gender and contingent labor in the field of composition. The authors contend that the composition programs are feminized, devalued, and heavily populated by contingent faculty. The feminization of the field of composition in particular makes the work--and the potential solidarity between those on and off the…

There are two worlds that exist in the academe: a world where the tenure system remains strong and a world dominated by the absence of tenure. In this article, the author cites the differences between these two worlds. In a world where tenure remains strong, academic departments benefit from a stable, dedicated workforce composed of tenured and…

New faculty members are traditionally indoctrinated into a system that demands that they write incessantly and successfully publish their manuscripts. Yet they typically are not offered help in navigating the publishing process. For junior faculty members who have little experience with scholarly writing beyond their doctoral dissertations, these…

The work of colleges and universities is carried out each day by committed, talented faculty members. The faculty's intellectual capital, taken collectively, is every institution's principal asset. Today, as higher-education institutions are faced with new challenges that only seem to grow more difficult the importance of all faculty members in…

The nature of the American academic workforce has fundamentally shifted over the past several decades. Whereas full-time tenured and tenure-track faculty were once the norm, more than two-thirds of the professoriate in non-profit postsecondary education is now comprised of non-tenure-track faculty. New hires across all institutional types are now…

In this article, the authors provide a description of the academic climate in New Mexico. Like many other places in the world today, New Mexico is trying to find an identity in an environment that the authors label "increasingly privatized, corporatized, and militarized." New Mexico's higher education salaries are lower than those in…

The tenure system is a tenure of one's own making. It can be flexible, supple, and responsive to the diverse needs and life situations of faculty members, or it can be rigid and uncompromising. The tenure years need not be a time of high anxiety, but for that to happen, institutions will need to make structural changes in the tenure system. In…