Moving a Mountain: Transforming the Role of Contingent Faculty in Composition Studies and Higher Education (original) (raw)

duction to their important book, The Invisible Faculty, when they reproduce a part-time faculty member's claim that she was dropped from her university's faculty because she "publicly criticized the school's treatment of its adjunct faculty" (1993, p. xi). Describing her working conditions in a local newspaper, the fac-5 committed herself in that role was the improvement of the working conditions of part-time and adjunct faculty in composition studies. Composition studies is a particularly fitting vantage point from which to study the academy's turn toward contingent employment as it has long been an instructional area staffed by nontenure-track faculty. Most colleges and universities require first-year students to take one or two introductory composition courses, which are often staffed by non-tenure-track faculty and 8-2 1 Working Contingent Faculty in[to] Higher Education document work currently under way to address the problems we face and directions in which we are moving. From Composite Portraits to Disaggregated Profiles: Learning about Contingent Faculty During the 1970s, an emerging body of social science literature documented the increasing numbers and problematic working conditions of part-time faculty in higher education in the United States. In publications directed primarily to an audience of postsecondary faculty, academic administrators and policymakers, demographers, economists, educationists, and sociologists published statistical surveys and analyses of the phenomenon of parttime academic labor: As their analyses described patterns and trends in student populations and academic hiring practices, they constructed composite profiles of part-time faculty. In one influential study of the time, two members of the Center for the Study of Education and Tax Policy, Howard P. Tuckman, an economist, and William D. Vogler, noted: The market for part-time faculty has been growing. For example, in the 1968-69 academic year, the first for which data on parttime faculty are available for American junior colleges, there were 36,420 part-time faculty or one for every 2.6 full-time faculty members. (American Association of Junior Colleges, The 1970 Junior College Directory, Washington, DC, 1970) By the 1975-76 academic year the number of part-timers had tripled to 110,976. This increase reduced the ratio to 1.8 full-time faculty for every part-timer.