The adjunct economy

In the world of academia, the distinction between these job titles is a huge one. Tenure-track professors are hired by universities to do a combination of teaching and research and to help their departments develop. Pending a major review of their performance after five or six years – when they try to win tenure, which pretty much guarantees a job for life – tenure-track professors are essentially full-time members of the faculty. Their positions usually come with a range of benefits like health insurance and periodic semester-long sabbaticals.

On the other side of this divide, adjunct faculty members (whose positions are sometimes described by other labels such as “lecturer,” “contingent faculty,” or “instructor”) are exclusively teachers. They generally work on a system of semester-to-semester contracts, rarely enjoy benefits, and often are considered part time, regardless of the amount of teaching they do.

I am one of an army of these adjuncts working in higher education, and our ranks are growing. There were more than 19,000 of us employed in Massachusetts in 2006, the most recent year figures were tabulated. That’s nearly 60 percent of the 32,000 or so faculty members in the state. When you factor in graduate-student teachers, who often lead the discussion sections in math and science courses, the figure tops 70 percent.

Even prestigious schools rely heavily on adjuncts, especially for teaching classes of freshmen and sophomores. At Harvard, adjuncts accounted for 57 percent of the faculty in 2005; at Boston University that year, they made up 70 percent. And over the last three decades, the number of adjuncts employed across the country skyrocketed by 210 percent while tenure-track faculty hirings rose merely 7 percent.