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Adjuncts happen: strong faculty; weak system.

Article Excerpt
Abstract

Given the current increase in the use of adjunct faculty, this paper addresses adjunct faculty role expectations for the purpose of clarifying program stressors. Because university policies on adjuncts are open-ended or unspecified, each participant defines adjunct roles differently; these definitions are not always compatible. Both core and adjunct faculty focus on teaching but core faculty also must perform a service role of influencing continuous program modifications. Adjuncts often limit their role to teaching and may not fully incorporate policy changes, undermining programmatic coherence Inequity is experienced by core and adjunct faculty as well as students. Understanding perspectives is a first step towards program coherence. While solutions aimed at reducing stress for core and adjunct faculty are not readily apparent, initial discussion of the dilemma allows us to consider options as programs are revised in response to new standards.

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Graduate programs in Schools of Education (SOEs) are administered and taught by faculty with a great range of association to the university. The common bond tying together all adjunct faculty is their lack of permanent connection to the university and the existence of a contract that can be nullified with no penalty at the behest of either party. Based on the literature and confirmed by preliminary interviews with core and adjunct faculty members, adjunct faculty appear to limit their role to teaching wherein they may share their specialized knowledge with willing students. Adjunct faculty often hold full time professional positions within their field of expertise; such faculty generally recognize that their interests lie in the interaction and contact with students (Schneider, 2003) rather than in the development of an academic persona or maintenance of an academic infrastructure. Therein lies the basic stress to the system: each participant in the system defines the role of the adjunct somewhat differently and these overlapping but separate definitions are not always compatible.

Adjunct faculty members have been variously described as peripheral to campus life, marginalized from the academic mainstream and frustrated by their exclusion from campus governance, less likely to interact with students outside of class, less effective as teachers, more focused on their lack of long-term job stability than the system that provides the job, and more likely to inflate students' grades which may compromise academic rigor in order to sustain student approval (Johnson, MacGregor, & Watson, 2001; Klein, Weisman, & Smith, 1996; Lane 2002; Rifkin, 1998; Scheutz, 2002, Sonnet, 2000; Wyles, 1998). The lack of participation in and understanding of departmental and university affairs may translate into a "loss of credibility with frustrated students" (Edmondson & Fisher, 2003, p 11).

On the other hand, adjunct faculty are recognized for their expertise and the cutting edge knowledge...

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