Are adjuncts the best teachers for college courses?
Does it matter who teaches a college course?
Increasingly, more and more classes — especially undergraduate ones — are taught by adjunct faculty members instead of tenured professors.
On Thursday afternoon, I chatted about all-things-faculty with Jonathan Robe of the Center for College Affordability and Productivity, and the subject of colleges using adjuncts instead of tenured professors kept popping up. (You can read the full transcript, here.)
One reader wrote in: “I just graduated from a masters program in public policy here in the DC area. I had always heard that while the “experts” didn’t teach the undergrads, I sort of expected that would be different in grad school. I couldn’t have been more wrong. The experts who were full faculty were no where to be seen... The most useless classes were the ones taught by “adjunct faculty” who were supposed experts in their fields. With one exception, all of the adjuncts were poor at best when it came to actual teaching...”
Robe responded (read his answer after the jump):
“This is actually one of the very problems we identified in our analysis of the University of Texas at Austin (which is one of the largest campuses in the country). About 1/3 of graduate students are taught by non-tenured faculty, despite the fact that it is common to assume that grad students are the ones who get the most attention from tenured faculty. There is one caveat here, though. Some professional programs (i.e., law, medicine, etc.) probably have to rely upon non-tenured faculty who are active in their professions. But for most non-professional grad students, the expectation would be that they benefit from full-time tenured faculty.
As the kids say: "derp."
ReplyDeleteWait, I thought the problem was lazy ivory tower tenured professors who don't care about teaching because they've got a job for life, and who'd be better teachers if they were all on short-term contracts like people in the real world. Now the problem is that not enough of the teaching staff have tenure? Did I miss a meeting?
ReplyDeleteI can't quite figure out quite where the Center for College Affordability and Productivity folks, who seem to be the Washington Post education bloggers' new favorite source for ideas, are coming from. They clearly want faculty to teach more, probably in large lecture classes (as both the comments on the blog and several participants in the linked chat point out, they seem to assume this mode as the default; in the course of the chat, Robe seems to have ignored or evaded several attempts to engage him in a discussion of the pedagogical value of smaller classes, and where such classes might fit into the Center's productivity model). And, at least from a quick look at their website, I'd say that they're pretty strongly anti-tenure, mostly because they believe that tenure rewards and encourages research rather than teaching. That's true in many places, but not, of course, all (think community colleges and some liberal arts colleges). I'd love to know what they think of the AAUP proposal for converting teaching-intensive contingent faculty to tenure, but couldn't find any mention of it on their website. One of the reasons it appeals to me is one that I think the Center should, philosophically, agree with: it rewards faculty who put all or most of their energy into teaching students at a particular institution (an activity which is much less likely than research and publication to increase those faculty members' employability elsewhere -- one of the central paradoxes, as far as I'm concerned, of the current patterns of employment in universities).
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