EDITOR’S NOTE: This is the third installment of a three-part series in which members of the USM community discuss their concerns regarding the part-time faculty situation featured in a Dec. 3 article by Steve Allan.
This week’s column is by Provost Joseph Wood, who oversees all academic departments. The first column was by Dennis Gilbert, the part-time faculty representative on the Faculty Senate. Last week’s column was by Don Anspach, president of the full-time faculty union. This is Wood’s response to the previous two columns.
I am pleased to be able to add my views to those of my colleagues Dennis Gilbert and Don Anspach on the contribution part-time faculty members make to education at USM. In response to the original Free Press article, yes, part-time faculty members do add up to a complete education.
Part-time faculty members, with whom the University contracts on a course-by-course basis for their academic expertise, contribute wonderfully to the University. They ensure that the institution is able to provide the breadth and depth of courses that make it a quality University. The University relies on such people to extend its instructional capacity to offer unique courses and ensure the University can meet student demand, say in computer science or English composition, even as we strive to maintain the academic integrity of the institution by also offering courses in geography, my academic discipline, or physics and philosophy. And USM pays them a rate comparable to that paid part-time faculty members in other public regional comprehensive universities around the country.
Economics of higher education, of course, encourage us to employ part-time faculty members to allow such flexibility. First, of course, it is more expensive to maintain full-time employees than part-time. But were the institution a factory, running assembly lines of students through in a fashion so as to reproduce exacting models, hiring would be simple, and we would likely hire all faculty members as full-time employees. We would do so, because we could also lay them off as demand declined, and because we could retrain them to do new tasks as we modified the product or the assembly line. But students are not products, and faculty members are not assembly line workers. Thus to understand the contribution of part-time faculty members, one needs to understand the contribution of full-time faculty members.
Full-time faculty members bring to their positions significant academic training. We appoint full-time faculty members for their high level of expertise in those professions and disciplines collectively we value as important in achieving the educational mission of he institution. Among the most important aspects of this academic expertise is skill in developing new knowledge or undertaking new creative activity, not just repeating what one learned in graduate school. Indeed the academic credential we most seek in faculty members, and reward as well, is the ability to sustain the development of new knowledge and create new work that refreshes and enriches the instruction we offer, which is our primary mission.
In order to find faculty members with such academic expertise, we undertake thorough search processes, advertising nationally, thoughtfully reviewing examples of teaching and scholarly achievements, doing reference checks with experts in the respective disciplines, and inviting people to campus for interviews with prospective colleagues. And then we ask the people we appoint to undertake a probationary period of six years to demonstrate the potential they exhibited as candidates for appointment. In the meantime, we attempt to provide resources and time to enhance one’s professional and disciplinary expertise and strengthen abilities through faculty development.
Having made such an investment in a faculty member, we are, one might expect, desirous of a reciprocal investment in the institution. The offer of tenure, a kind of social contract, is intended to provide insurance that the University’s investment will not be lost as faculty members continue their professional and disciplinary development. Indeed, it is in the interests of the institution, as it builds quality in its academic programs, to build in quite purposefully the inflexibility that tenure ensures. We want faculty members who sustain their efforts at developing new knowledge or undertaking creative work in order to enrich their teaching to remain with the institution. We also expect these members of the faculty to provide the necessary shared governance of the institution and to ensure leadership in academic policy and curriculum development and peer evaluation, without which we could not also ensure the integrity of academic endeavor. Tenured faculty members are our most highly valued (if relatively poorly paid) contributors to the educational mission of the institution.
All of the above in no way denies that part-time members of the faculty are qualified for appointment. At USM, we have highly talented part-time faculty members. We gladly and appropriately extend to them the right of academic freedom and assign to them appropriate rank. They also enjoy a seniority system with respect to priority in offers of contracts to teach courses-a pseudo form of tenure, one might argue. But for reasons of achieving the mission of the University while maintaining the integrity of the academic endeavor, we follow convention in higher education: We do not extend to them any right to continued employment (which, by the way, we do not extend to some categories of full-time faculty members either), any right to exercise shared governance, any right to exercise peer review, or any right to tenure.
We also do not place on part-time members of the faculty an expectation of continued professional development through scholarly activity, let alone responsibility for advising students or otherwise participating in the life of the University. This is not to say that we discourage such activity. It is to say that we evaluate performance of part-time faculty members solely on instructional achievement, for which we pay them on a contract basis. Certainly, however, we invite part-time faculty members to engage in the life of the University and seek from them advice, for instance as related to pedagogy, course development, and curriculum development in the courses they teach. This is only appropriate. But we are not prepared to pay part-time faculty members to be so engaged when we have already full-time faculty members doing this work too.
USM is not a factory, its students are not products, and its faculty members do not do factory work. A quality education requires a quality faculty, one invested in constant renewal as its members sustain their efforts at professional and disciplinary development through constant learning-developing new knowledge and undertaking new creative work-to enrich the instruction they offer. While ensuring such quality, we build flexibility into our course offerings to meet unique needs or high demand by relying on the expertise of part-time faculty members, people who help us achieve our mission and whom we value highly. Do part-time faculty members add up to a complete education? Of course they do.