The Old Numbers Game
by
P.D. Lesko
I READ THE hefty Department of Education Statistics Quarterly
from cover to cover with the relish that some people save
for their favorite travel magazines. So, I was delighted to
discover that U.S. News and World Report’s controversial
college ranking list includes percentages of full-time faculty
employed. I read that several of the top 10 universities claimed
over 95 percent of their faculty were full-time. What bastions
of responsible hiring, or so most parents and students reading
those numbers might think.
The truth, of course, isn’t as close to 100 percent full-time
faculty employment as those colleges would like everyone to
believe. I went to my bookshelf and cracked open my 2001 copy
of Petersen’s Guide to 4 Year Colleges. There, I found
the percentages of faculty who were full-time, as well, at
the various institutions. At Harvard, officials had reported
to Petersen’s that 73 percent of faculty were full-time. To
the officials at U.S. News and World Report, Harvard
had upped the percentage from 73 to 99. Of colleges in the
top 10 of U.S. News and World Report’s rankings, and
Petersen’s Guide, Harvard had the largest discrepancy, with
a 26 percent difference reported between the two sources.
Actually, that didn’t bother me as much as the guys who claimed
in Petersen’s Guide that 100 percent of their faculty
were full-time: Duke University and Columbia. A quick trip
to the Duke University Web page (www.duke.edu) and a click
through to the Mathematics department faculty list showed
plain and simple that someone at Duke was telling a little
white lie: there were 16 adjunct faculty listed on the Web
page, as well as instructors, lecturers and visiting faculty
(full-time, yes, but temporary faculty nonetheless). Over
at Columbia, on that institution’s Web page (www.columbia.edu),
a click through to the Journalism School turned up a Spring
2001 faculty list with over 120 adjuncts included.
The fine folks at Stanford (number 5 on U.S. News & World
Report’s top 10 list) have a page on-line just for parents
who are interested in statistics about that college’s distinguished
full-time faculty. On-line, 8 percent of faculty are listed
as non tenure line. Stanford officials reported the same statistic
to Petersen’s. To U.S. News and World Report, Stanford
reported that 21 percent of its faculty are non tenure line.
According to the Department of Education, on average 31 percent
of faculty at 4-year research universities are part-time.
That number, does not reflect the large increases in full-time
temporary faculty hiring which has gone on over the past 3-5
years. College and university officials have responded to
front-page articles in the national media about the exploitation
of part-time faculty, but funding more full-time temporary
slots. Benefits are included with many of these jobs, but
they are dead-end appointments, which leave the faculty who
accept them with little time to see to their own professional
development.
Faculty hiring is complicated by many factors, including
shrinking state funding for higher education and, in some
cases, state laws which penalize colleges financially if tuition
is raised above pre-determined levels in a given year. The
Michigan Legislature doesn’t tell General Motors how much
a Cadillac may be sold for, but the representatives will withhold
funding from the University of Michigan and Michigan State
if the institutions raise tuition above 8 percent per year.
As a result, the number of full-time temporary lecturers at
the University of Michigan has doubled since 1987. A lecturer
on the Ann Arbor campus earns, on average, one-third of what
at tenured faculty member earns.
Of course, this faculty employment status numbers game could
be simply the result of a clerical error, or some other innocent
mistake. The fact remains, though, that in print (faculty
directories) and on-line (Web page faculty listings), as well
as in college catalogues like the Petersen’s Guide,
college officials routinely neglect to list part-time faculty.
Whether this is an attempt to cover up overuse of adjuncts,
or the result of the fact that it would take more time and
money to list adjunct faculty in directories and on-line,
one can only guess. However, such practices must stop.
