Why Not Adjunct Administrators Instead of Adjunct Instructors?

[mamalion]

Yesterday I took my daily walk to the park, and I met a fellow professor. Though he is at a small LAC and I am at a large, state, research university, we had no trouble telling “funny” anecdotes about administrators for half an hour.

Perhaps the funniest one was about how administrators had taken admissions and recruitment away from faculty at his small school, found out they were not as effective as faculty (parents wanted faculty contact), and now wanted the faculty to become re-involved. The faculty, however, had discovered (1) they enjoyed using that time for other activiities and (2) that the administrators wanted the faculty to function under them. Since the administrators had already proved their incompetence, the faculty had no desire to work under them.

I then told a tale about how administrators had tried to run our teaching center by having administrators (with minimal teaching background) run workshops for the faculty on how to teach. No one turned up. After running the teaching center into the ground for 5 years, they finally have put a faculty member back in charge, but he has a major task putting the center back on track.

Hurray for the great services brought by administrators!

[Zinhead]

@sylvan8798 -

How is your opening statement not saying “I want to spend my money on quality teachers (instead of poor quality adjuncts), and let the (poor quality) adjuncts be the administrators.”??

One must need a PhD to be able to misconstrue the original comment.

@Hanna -

No, it doesn’t…

@katliamom

your article doesn’t rebut Hanna’s comment

It is obvious that neither of you read the article.

Three main explanations are often adduced for the sharp growth in the number of university administrators over the past thirty years. One is that there have been new sorts of demands for administrative services that require more managers per student or faculty member than was true in the past. Universities today have an elaborate IT infrastructure, enhanced student services, a more extensive fund-raising and lobbying apparatus, and so on, than was common thirty years ago. Of course, it might also be said that during this same time period, whole new fields of teaching and research opened in such areas as computer science, genetics, chemical biology, and physics. Other new research and teaching fields opened because of ongoing changes in the world economy and international order. And yet, faculty growth between 1975 and 2005 simply kept pace with growth in enrollments and substantially lagged behind administrative and staff growth. When push came to shove, colleges chose to invest in management rather than in teaching and research.

A second common explanation given for the expansion of administration in recent years is the growing need to respond to mandates and record-keeping demands from federal and state governments as well as numerous licensure and accreditation bodies. It is certainly true that large numbers of administrators spend a good deal of time preparing reports and collecting data for these and other agencies. But as burdensome as this paperwork blizzard might be, it is not clear that it explains the growth in administrative personnel that we have observed. Often, affirmative action reporting is cited as the most time consuming of the various governmental mandates. As the economist Barbara Bergmann has pointed out, however, across the nation only a handful of administrators and staffers are employed in this endeavor.

More generally, we would expect that if administrative growth were mainly a response to external mandates, growth should be greater at state schools, which are more exposed to government obligations, than at private institutions, which are freer to manage their own affairs in their own way. Yet, when we examine the data, precisely the opposite seems to be the case. Between 1975 and 2005, the number of administrators and managers employed by public institutions increased by 66 percent. During the same time period, the number of administrators employed by private colleges and universities grew by 135 percent (see Table 4). These numbers seem inconsistent with the idea that external mandates have been the forces driving administrative growth at America’s institutions of higher education.

A third explanation has to do with the conduct of the faculty. Many faculty members, it is often said, regard administrative activities as obnoxious chores and are content to allow these to be undertaken by others. While there is some truth to this, it is certainly not the whole story. Often enough, I have observed that professors who are willing to perform administrative tasks lose interest when they find that the committees, councils, and assemblies through which the faculty nominally acts have lost much if not all their power to administrators.

If growth-driven demand, governmental mandates, and faculty preferences are not sufficient explanations for administrative expansion, an alternative explanation might be found in the nature of university bureaucracies themselves. In particular, administrative growth may be seen primarily as a result of efforts by administrators to aggrandize their own roles in academic life. Students of bureaucracy have frequently observed that administrators have a strong incentive to maximize the power and prestige of whatever office they hold by working to increase its staff and budget. To justify such increases, they often seek to capture functions currently performed by others or invent new functions for themselves that might or might not further the organization’s main mission.

[GoNoles85]

If we ever get serious about reducing higher education costs:

1. Yes, we would cut back on higher ed administrators. Lots of fat there. Lots of bloat. I speak from experience mostly at my current position at a community college. My previous two CC positions were with colleges that didn't have more admins than you could shake a stick at.
2. Get the federal government out of FA.
3. Allow students to test out of certain basic skills and/or establish certain professional standards and bodies of knowledge and let the students self-study towards passing those tests. No mumbo, no jumbo. Teachers would then be more less used as needed as tutors and guides. Certain corporations provide tests to new employees anyway to verify that they know what they should no somewhat ignoring what the education system says they know.
4. Cultivate more online MOOC's and so forth as the basis for education instead of the messy way we do it now.
5. I hate to say it, because it goes against my own self-interests, but we probably should rely more on adjuncts and less on FT tenured faculty anyway. Isn't everyone pretty much part-time nowadays almost as it is? I am not, and God knows, I think my lucky stars on a daily basis.

[katliamom]

No Zinhead. Nothing you posted rebuts anything anyone else has posted.

[HRSMom]

I might have misunderstood, but I thought the OP was in support of making teaching a full time actual paid gig again, rather than forcing people into adjunct status…

[Zinhead]

@katliamom - Let’s see what Hanna wrote in her first post on this thread.

Look at the other threads where parents are distressed because their kid has a crisis and couldn’t get an appointment with a counselor for two weeks, or faced long lines at registration, or is graduating without a job in part because the career center was understaffed. Those are administrative functions, not faculty functions.

Lets see the quote from article in Washington Monthly.

Three main explanations are often adduced for the sharp growth in the number of university administrators over the past thirty years. One is that there have been new sorts of demands for administrative services that require more managers per student or faculty member than was true in the past. Universities today have an elaborate IT infrastructure, enhanced student services, a more extensive fund-raising and lobbying apparatus, and so on, than was common thirty years ago.

What Hanna was providing as as an explanation, more administrative functions, was mentioned and rebutted in the article.

[katliamom]

Where is it rebutted?

[sylvan8798]

What does “quality” have to do with whether it is the faculty or administrators who are the adjuncts?

[apprenticeprof]

I’m an adjunct right now as well, and I don’t think it is unfair to say that reliance on adjuncts can lead to a decline in quality. That isn’t because adjuncts aren’t quality professors, but because of the circumstances we are working under:

1. I have 50 students between my two sections of freshman writing this semester. Since I'm making under 5000 per section, I also have to teach elsewhere to make a reasonable living. That leaves me with less time than I would like to spend on my freshman writing classes -- it isn't feasible, for instance, for me to read full first drafts of each essay, as I did when I used to TA for two sections of 15 students.
2. I am simply not on campus enough to meet with students as much as I would like to. I can offer to meet with them before and after class, but in an ideal world, I'd be having mandatory conferences as part of the course.
3. While there are certainly some long-term adjuncts like sylvan, relying heavily on adjuncts means a lot of turnover -- and a lot of fairly new teachers teaching courses for the first time. I think I've done a good job this year, but if I teach the same courses next year, I know I'll be more effective simply because I've learned from my experience. Obviously, everyone has to have a first time teaching a class -- but in a school with more full-time faculty, you're likely to have a larger proportion of courses taught by experienced people, many of whom have been teaching the same course for some time.
4. There is such a glut of under-employed PhDs that most adjuncts are highly qualified, but good teaching isn't a universal skill, and if you're hiring a revolving door of part-timers, you're simply not going to maintain the same kind of quality-control that you would if you were mainly hiring to fill a few long-term positions each year. It is true that hiring and tenure decisions have more to do with research than with teaching in most cases, but every tenure-track job I've heard of has required a teaching demo as part of the process, often along with a statement of teaching philosophy and/or other "evidence of teaching excellence." I got hired at the school I adjunct at on the basis of a cover letter and a cursory meeting with the chair.

[mamalion]

In my university the adjunct pool is particularly unstable–in part, because it pays so low ($2500-3000/course)–that there are regular emergencies when a program director is looking for a replacement teacher 2 weeks or less before the class starts. Even though are greal adjunct teachers, under "emergency’ circumstances, any warm body will do.

[NotVerySmart]

Of course, it might also be said that during this same time period, whole new fields of teaching and research opened in such areas as computer science, genetics, chemical biology, and physics. Other new research and teaching fields opened because of ongoing changes in the world economy and international order. And yet, faculty growth between 1975 and 2005 simply kept pace with growth in enrollments and substantially lagged behind administrative and staff growth. When push came to shove, colleges chose to invest in management rather than in teaching and research.

Though I can see why you might agree with the article’s explanation, I’m not sure you can make that inference, @Zinhead . James Prescott Joule discovered a lot of areas where further research was needed, but he also made professors whose expertise lay in caloric theory redundant. New discoveries don’t always mean greater demands on staff. Responsibilities like Title IX mean more administrators. Why have private colleges hired more administrators than publics? Because they can afford it, and hiring a second Title IX expert doesn’t have to mean firing a librarian or a janitor.

It’s also worth noting that most college professors aren’t performing high-level research. Sure, at top 50 schools, and much of the top 100, and some CTCL, you’ll find professors working on research. A local directional mostly needs to keep pace with enrollment, no matter what’s happening at NASA or CERN.

[SouthFloridaMom9]

Just an anecdote from our time in dual enrollment as a homeschooling family . . . the administrators at our son’s community college seem well-dressed, sharp, on top of things. They often put on helpful seminars, do community outreach, etc. The part-time faculty - it’s been hit or miss. Some have been very good, others not so much. All seemed stressed and harried.

It would be nice to see a better balance between the two worlds. Personally, as a parent, I would like to see the faculty better supported. But both functions are necessary to the excellence (or lack thereof) of higher education.

[barrons]

At large R1 schools there are 1000’s of non faculty non-admin people employed that support the research enterprise. And until recently that enterprise has seen huge growth. Most have a PhD or a master’s but do not teach any classes.