Yikes! So much anger...

“Today, in 2013, a majority of those teaching in academia are working on a contingent basis. Tenure is nearly nonexistent…”

I agree and disagree with this statement from a frustrated and rambling article found at Inside Higher Ed. My entire teaching career has been as an adjunct and my employment has always been part-time so I agree that a majority, 51% or more of all teaching is done by part-time faculty members. But stating that tenure is nearly nonexistent is far from true.

As I look ahead to my Spring Research Project on budgets in higher education I will take a gander at my alma mater, the University of Arizona and briefly look at their tenure percentage as I mull over the ‘nonexistent’ quote.

According to the University of Arizona 2012-2013 Fact Book, there are 1560 tenured faculty (faculty and department heads) out of a total of 3022, or 51.5%. In addition there are 147 research and clinical faculty that would be full-time employees most likely contingent on grant and year to year departmental funding; and 834 Other Instructional Faculty that includes adjuncts. If you include these faculty and the 2984 Graduate Assistants and Associates, although they do not all teach, the total faculty jumps up to 6006 and the percentage of tenured faculty drops to 25.9%. Not being a statistician, and including pretty much everyone, I do not think that 25.9% is equivalent to ‘nearly nonexistent’ at the University of Arizona. But this is just one institution out of thousands and smaller colleges, undergraduate institutions, and community colleges would all drag the percentage of tenured faculty down.

According to another article in the Atlantic that took information from an AAUP report, “since 1975, tenure and tenure-track professors have gone from roughly 45 percent of all teaching staff to less than a quarter.” A little farther down the following numbers were presented, “At public four-year colleges, about 64 percent of teaching staff were full-time as of 2009. At private four-year schools, about 49 percent were, and at community colleges, only about 30 percent were.”

Using the number of tenured faculty at the University of Arizona; 51.1% is lower than the four-year college average of 64% but higher than the private four-year average of 49%.

So what does this tell us? Tenure is not ‘nonexistent’ in America’s higher education. With that said, is tenure changing and will it probably shrink over the next two decades? Yep. Will this create an entire generation of robots (students) who lack critical thinking skills or do not have an appreciation for the liberal arts? Probably not. Are the STEM fields going to take over higher education? As far as funding goes, they already have.

Back to the original Inside Higher Ed article. I understand where this writer is coming from but he needs to focus on just one idea and explain his position. Instead, he jumps around from nonexistent tenure faculty to MOOCs, to Sputnik, to higher education economics, to adjuncts, to the ‘matrix’, to retention tools, to Fitzgerald and Stein, to college being reduced to online education, to 1884, to individualized education, and to Luddites (da capo).

We are all concerned about the future of higher education from tenured faculty members to budgets, from liberal arts education to STEM fields; but nothing constructive is going to happen unless we all step back, breath, and focus on the task at hand.