Identifying The Strangers: Exploring Part-Time Faculty Integration in American Community Colleges

As John Levin noted in Chapter Two, how part-time faculty are viewed depends on the organizational mission of the particular community college. In this chapter, I present an argument for how part-time faculty at community colleges can be conceptualized and understood as new economy labor. Initially I review the literature regarding part-time, temporary labor in the new economy and then develop a specific characterization of how this might be understood in terms of part-time faculty at community colleges. Finally, I present an analysis of data from the 1999 National Study of Postsecondary Faculty (NSOPF 99) to demonstrate how community college part-time faculty resemble this conceptualization in terms of their incomes, employment patterns, and perceptions of their positions at colleges.

Section: New Economy Labormentioning

confidence: 99%

Globalization, the new economy, and part‐time faculty

Wagoner¹

2007

“…Whether they are described as invisible (Gappa and Leslie, 1993), strangers (Roueche, Roueche, and Milliron, 1995), the working poor, or accidental faculty (Gappa and Leslie, 1993), adjunct faculty have a lowerstatus position in the academic profession. Most adjunct faculty express some dissatisfaction with their status and working conditions (Roueche, Roueche, and Milliron, 1995).…”

Section: Related Literaturementioning

confidence: 99%

“…Most adjunct faculty express some dissatisfaction with their status and working conditions (Roueche, Roueche, and Milliron, 1995). At the same time, they continue to be perceived as a threat to the profession because their tenuous status has led to the marginalization and disempowerment of full-time faculty (Cohen and Brawer, 2003;Rhoades, 1998).…”

Section: Related Literaturementioning

confidence: 99%

“…They are guilty, or guilty by association with perceptions of providing low-quality instruction, of being disconnected from the campus community and contributing to grade inflation (Sonner, 2000). While Roueche, Roueche, and Milliron (1995) argued that no significant study showed a difference in educational outcomes because of the use of adjunct faculty, there is now evidence that associates the number of adjunct faculty with lower graduation rates at community colleges ( Jacoby, 2006).…”

Section: Related Literaturementioning

confidence: 99%

See 1 more Smart Citation

A systems approach to strategic success with adjunct faculty

Smith

2007

Rio Salado College has a reputation for being an innovative community college with a high reliance on adjunct faculty to accomplish its mission and purposes. A 2006 cover story for the Chronicle for Higher Education noted that only a few full-time faculty managed over a thousand adjuncts (Ashburn, 2006). Rio Salado College prides itself on its systems approach to the management of adjunct faculty. This approach directs faculty, organizational resources, personnel, and other supports so that adjunct faculty focus on teaching and learning processes-the core aspects of their work at the college. Davis, Helminski, and Smith (2005) and Bird (2006) have presented and shared some of the keys to this college's success. This chapter reviews and updates those strategies within the context of Rio Salado College' s unique mission, vision, and culture. It also examines adjunct faculty as players and knowledge workers in the global economy.Rio Salado College has what many would consider an ideal situation in terms of adjunct faculty at a community college. There is a stable, qualified, and proven cohort of adjunct faculty teaching courses. The adjunct faculty continue semester after semester, with little turnover. This stability has helped to maintain the quality and consistency of the instruction provided to students. The way Rio Salado successfully recruits, retains, evaluates, and manages adjunct faculty within a nontraditional academic context not only informs practitioners of best practices but also speaks to the nature of the adjunct faculty role in this new and challenging environment. 55 7

“…part-time employment is unethical, unfair labor practice, irresponsible, exploitative, and the like (Gappa and Leslie, 1997;Rhoades, 1998;Roueche, Roueche, and Milliron, 1995;Wagoner, Metcalfe, and Olaore, 2005), they refrain from challenging the goals of the institution-goals that are the basis of the practice. In order to change the practice, community college goals must be altered.…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

Multiple judgments: Institutional context and part‐time faculty

Levin

2007

Part-time faculty members at community colleges are customarily understood from an institutional perspective that is based on traditional conceptions of the community college as a component of a tiered educational system (high school, community college, four-year college or university). This conception places the community college in the role of either a junior college or a training school. This traditional conception highlights academic preparation, skills development, and sequential learning and justifies the institution's worth through proxies such as degree attainment, job placement, and percentage of students who transfer to a four-year college or university. It is this conception that has been used to examine the role and condition of part-time faculty, conflating those at community colleges with those at universities and aggregating all part-time faculty as if they were part of this traditional conception. From this perspective, part-time faculty are viewed as either marginal or deleterious to the community college mission of student advancement.Yet there are other ways of viewing and understanding the community college distinct from the traditional conception. For example, I have used the term new world college to describe the behaviors and actions of community colleges that place them in a globalized and competitive economy (Levin, 2007). These institutions are components of the new liberalized world of economic global competition and are decidedly distinct from their old world, or European-generated, conceptions of higher education institutions, particularly universities-even those found in former European 15 2