Adjunctivitis

Adjunctivitis |n.| {aj-ungkt-iv-i-tis} – The ever increasing reliance upon contingent instructional labor in higher education as a result of the perception that they improve efficiency and flexibility.

Researchers, advocacy organizations, higher education administrators, and a range of other stakeholders have observed—often with alarm—the changing composition of the instructional labor force in U.S. higher education over the past three decades. The nature of this change is reflected in two interrelated trends: 1) the increasing number of part-time and full-time, tenure-ineligible faculty and 2) the decreasing number of tenured and tenure-track faculty.

According to Umbach (2007), between 1975 and 1995, the number of part-time faculty increased by 103 percent, and the number of full-time, tenure-ineligible faculty by 93 percent. By 2003, part-time faculty accounted for 46.3 percent of appointments at degree-granting postsecondary institutions nationwide (American Association of University Professors, 2006). Curtis and Jacobe (2006) found that between 1975 and 2003, full-time tenured faculty as a percentage of all faculty fell from 36.5 to 24.1 percent. With these statistics in mind, an advocacy organization representing part-time and full-time, tenure-ineligible faculty formed, calling itself the New Faculty Majority. Critiquing the position of part-time faculty as nameless instructional laborers, Street, Maisto, Meves, and Rhoades (2012) poignantly asked: “Who is professor ‘staff’ and how can this person teach so many classes?”

Many scholars link the rising number of part-time faculty to a broader labor force pattern—beginning in the 1970s—of employing contingent workers. Labor economists define contingent work as “any job in which an individual does not have an explicit or implicit contract for long-term employment or in which the minimum hours worked can vary in a nonsystematic manner” (Povlika & Nardone, 1989, p. 11). In the private sector, contingent workers are employed to reduce labor expenses and increase flexibility in managing the costs associated with hiring, training, and terminating employees (Monks, 2007). When applied to the context of higher education, flexibility allows higher education administrators to respond quickly to budget shortfalls, unpredicted enrollment changes, and/or student-consumer demand because no long-term commitments of resources are made.

By linking the increasing utilization of part-time faculty to broader patterns in contingent work, many higher education researchers proffer a chiefly economic and organizational explanations for this phenomenon. For these researchers, hiring part-time faculty is a rational management technique for reducing costs and promoting flexibility in the face of steadily declining state appropriations to higher education. As follows, they take the expanding presence and cost-reducing benefit of part-time faculty as a given, focusing their attention on attendant student outcomes. Yet one cannot study the rising number of part-time faculty without considering simultaneous political and cultural critiques of the institution of tenure. And there is reason to question the efficiency of employing large numbers of part-time faculty.

Calls to reform and, in some circles, eliminate tenure proliferated in the 1970s and 1990s (Rhoades, 1996). According to Chait (2002), there are five reasons the debate surfaced with renewed fervor in the late 1990s and continues in the present. First, there were public concerns related to guaranteed, lifetime employment of faculty, with some viewing it as outdated and others labeling it a preposterous protection of arrogant elites or unproductive deadwood. Second, there were managerial and fiduciary concerns, as higher education administrators bemoaned how tenure blocked centralized planning and inhibited strategic reallocation of resources. Third, some faculty themselves issued complaints over the tenure process, especially women faculty and faculty of color. Fourth, as previously noted, tenure was increasingly seen as just one of several types of faculty appointment types. Part-time and full-time, tenure-ineligible faculty were progressively hired to teach introductory courses and staff courses in the growing number of professional schools. Fifth, at public institutions legislators tended to intervene when complaints were registered and questions were raised over wasted or inefficiently spent money. This intervention often materialized as an answer to perceived discontent with educators and tenure.

At face value, it is logical to assert that part-time faculty are less costly than full-time or full-time, tenure-track faculty. Beyond earning less, many part-time faculty are not eligible for benefits, professional development, or instructional support (Coalition on the Academic Workforce [CAW], 2012; Gappa & Leslie, 1993). Nevertheless, earnings may not be an appropriate measure of costs associated with academic staffing decisions. Hidden costs of using part-time faculty, such as bureaucratic burdens on department chairs, administrative time spent on paperwork, inefficiencies related to high turnover, and questionable returns on investment, suggest that “direct dollar savings per course are not as dramatic as they appear when the only variable examined is the actual salary paid” (p. 102).

I used panel data from 1988 to 2010 to explore the relationship between the number of part-time faculty at public research institutions and 1) education general costs and 2) instructional costs. I took data from the Delta Cost Project and included additional variables that have bearing on cost in higher education (e.g., enrollments, degrees awarded, state appropriations, research expenditures). I ran a panel-corrected fixed-effects regression, with interesting results. Based on my analysis, the number of part-time faculty is positively related to both education and general costs and instructional costs. A one percent increase in the number of part-time faculty is associated with a 0.016 percent increase in education and general costs and a 0.03 percent increase in instructional costs. In other words, hiring part-time faculty doesn’t appear to reduce costs at public research institutions.

The increasing utilization of part-time faculty may not be a rational management technique to promote efficiency and flexibility in response to reduced state appropriations. Instead, heads of academic units may be making personnel decisions based on the perception of cost-savings. The fact that many part-time faculty are hired quickly after the release of state budget information indicates that the decision may be more of a crisis-induced reaction to a shortfall of instructors than a planned personnel strategy.

At the same time, it is worth further exploring the possibility that hiring part-time faculty carries symbolic value and helps institutions score political points. In an era when higher education is harshly criticized by various stakeholders for ballooning costs and tuition increases that outpace the rate of inflation, campus leaders are maneuvering to convey that they are managing resources effectively and better serving consumers. Accordingly, the employment of part-time faculty may not originate from a desire to expand contingent labor in higher education, but rather from a fear of protecting or perpetuating the institution of tenure, which has been critiqued for wastage since the 1970s. These ideas remain speculative until further research is conducted that, like this study, questions the cost-savings associated with hiring part-time faculty and investigates other explanations for this trend.

For me, a major take away of this mini research project is that some of the assumptions on which research is based are exactly that: assumptions. They lack empirical substantiation. Because they are cited ad nauseum in literature, they take on the veneer of truth. What appears to be common sense may have the political backing to make it so. 

Incubate Your Dreams, Invent Your Future

Today, my university played host to what has become one of the largest non-athletic events on campus: the Cupid’s Cup business model competition. The event is funded, in part, by alumnus Kevin Plank, the founder and CEO of Under Armour. The name of the event reflects Plank’s first business venture, which involved buying roses wholesale and selling them cheaply to students around Valentine’s Day, undercutting nearby retailers. This is not the only business model competition on campus. In fact, many of the competitors seemed to have circulated all of the various opportunities on campus for securing seed funding and other resources.

Nevertheless, Cupid’s Cup is one of the largest and has garnered national attention, largely due to its presence in the corporate spotlight. The day started with a business and innovation showcase, where local and university-based start-ups can present their products and services to potential investors at conference-like booths. Attendees voted on their favorite booths, and the winners were presented with cash prizes of $2,000 each. The main event, however, was a competition in which six teams of student entrepreneurs from around the country pitched their ideas to a panel of judges. The teams essentially have a few minutes to tell their entrepreneurial story, complete with props and multimedia, in the hopes of winning $50,000 and access to Plank’s expertise and network.

As an interested onlooker and researcher, this was an illuminating experience for a number of a reasons. First, there was clear evidence supporting the idea that entrepreneurship permeates my university’s institutional culture. In one short afternoon, I observed the culture’s heroes (e.g., Plank, the epitome of the enterprising student turned entrepreneur), codes (e.g., “the special sauce,” referring to intellectual property, or what makes a product or service unique), and symbols (e.g., the marker board, signifying the constant need for daring ideas and curiosity). When the Dean of the business school spoke, he proclaimed that “we live and breathe entrepreneurship every day in the halls of Van Munching [Hall].” Dr. Wallace Loh, President of the University of Maryland, made it clear he wants this to be a university-wide occurrence, declaring his ambitious goal that all 37,000 students to be exposed to innovation and entrepreneurship education.

Second, I was immediately struck by the resources required to produce an event of this magnitude.  Of course, much of the money was put up by donors, which included AOL and BB&T Bank. Still, the event was largely planned and implemented by university staff in the business school, particularly its two entrepreneurship-related centers. There are scholars who link the rise of entrepreneurship in colleges and universities to the search for new money in the face of declining state and local appropriations. Although at least one of teams competing was marketing a product whose intellectual property belonged to the university, I could not help but wonder if more is being spent promoting and teaching entrepreneurship than is being brought in through licensing royalties. If this is the case, we need research that looks at the true costs and benefits of these initiatives. And we cannot think of the entrepreneurial turn in higher education as purely a rational response to economic conditions. It must serve other purposes.

Third, I noticed an interesting paradox that has been discussed by a few others. Entrepreneurship, in part, is about taking risks to disrupt the status quo. For this reason, the university has developed an entire marketing campaign around the slogan “Fearless Ideas.” But what Cupid’s Cup and similar initiatives try to do is minimize the risk to students by providing coaching, access to experts, and seed funding. The university has created a set of resources that collectively create a business incubator for students. Some of these resources come directly from state appropriations, hence the concept of the state-subsidized student entrepreneur developed by Matthew Mars. Interestingly, the competition included an award for the team that had best leveraged all of these resources in developing their product or service. Plank encouraged “all those out there who want to start a venture but don’t know where to begin” to make use of campus resources to incubate into reality “the fearless ideas that keep you up at night.” What I find intriguing, however, is the possibility that all of this coaching and all of these resources actually constrain innovation. There are norms and parameters set, shaping the types of ideas that students pursue in order to gain access to seed money. It could be the most disruptive, novel ideas are those that are never given the chance to compete or win any money because they do not conform to institutional expectations of social/economic value creation.

The final learning moment for me was the most profound. It aligned with a comment one of my advisors made during a talk I gave on entrepreneurship in education. He said that the rise of entrepreneurship is a symptom of system failure. We saw similar discourses about the need to be innovative and entrepreneurial in the 1980s, when, much like today, our country grappled with slow economic growth, questions about global competitiveness, and high unemployment. In other words, we turn to entrepreneurship when there are few good jobs, and the powers that be want people to reignite the rugged individualist spirit and channel ingenuity in order to pave their personal path to prosperity. At Cupid’s Cup, President Loh told the audience that there is a lack of formal, full-time jobs for this generation of students. Graduates in the 21^st century need to invent their own jobs, and the nation needs them to innovate in order to out-compete India and China. After all, in order “to win the future” students must contend not just with competition from “Baltimore and Boston, but also Bangalore and Beijing.”

So, it’s not really just about fearless ideas and making dreams come true. We have to think about the particular historical moment that has given rise to investment in student entrepreneurialism—how the social context has shaped the field. The sociology of knowledge teaches that a field emerges not merely from ideas themselves, but also the settings in which researchers and practitioners work. How is it that entrepreneurship has developed into a subject of study, something that is “recognized as worth knowing, teaching, credentialing, advancing through research, and the like”? (Gumport, 2007, p. 349). When we step back to do this type of analysis, we recognize the multifaceted dimensions of the push for entrepreneurial studies—equal parts political, economic, and cultural. Entrepreneurship comes to embody the concept of functionalization. That is, when one discourse comes to serve the strategic and utilitarian ends of another: national economic competitiveness. 

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Gumport, P. (Ed.). (2007). Sociology of higher education: Contributions and their contexts. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press. 

Concentrated Campus-Based Consumption Areas

In a previous post, I described the Chipotle Effect, or the rise of a consumer logic among college students based on individualization and personalization. Part of what spurred this idea was the explosion of Chipotle-like eateries on and around my campus. Even as I write this, a new Mediterranean restaurant is opening a few blocks away, structured around the same assembly line idea: you pick your platform (e.g., bowl, sandwich, pita, etc.), pick your toppings, and hit the road.

On the one hand, it has been nice to see any development happening in a town that has been slow to recover from the 2007-2010 financial crises. Construction has resumed on a number of projects, and I have heard of others in the pipeline (get excited ::read with sarcasm:: for more hotels and luxury student apartments). On the other hand, one has to wonder at the trajectory of College Park’s development—what is the end game? Not all development, in my mind, is of equal value, and I, for one, have difficulty understanding the need for another burr-eatery when we still have no community-cohering coffee shop or bar showcasing local craft beer.

The concept of “smart growth,” from the field of urban planning, offers one way of evaluating development in College Park. The University of Maryland is actually home to the National Center for Smart Growth Research and Education. Indeed, the state of Maryland is considered the birthplace of the smart growth movement as a result of Governor Parris Glendening’s landmark executive order introducing the idea. The basic notion driving smart growth is that population growth and economic development are not inherently bad—they just need to be realized in a smart way. This means checking the environmental, economic, and social costs of suburban sprawl. In the poignant words of James W. Rouse:

Sprawl is inefficient. It stretches out the distances people must travel to work, to shop, to worship, to play. It fails to relate these activities in ways that strengthen each and, thus, it suppresses values that orderly relationships and concentration of uses would stimulate.

Sprawl is ugly, oppressive, massive, dull. It squanders the resources of nature—forests, streams, hillsides—and produces vast, monotonous armies of housing and graceless, tasteless clutter.

But worst of all, sprawl is inhuman. […] The vast formless sprawl of housing pierced by the unrelated spotting of schools, churches, stores, creates acreage so huge and irrational that they are out of scale with people.

So, if not sprawl, then what? According the Smart Growth Network, development imperatives should be:

• Create a range of housing opportunities and choices
• Create walkable neighborhoods
• Encourage community and stakeholder collaboration
• Foster distinctive, attractive communities with a strong sense of place
• Make development decisions predictable, fair, and cost effective
• Mix land uses
• Preserve open space, farmland, and critical environmental areas
• Provide a variety of transportation choices
• Strengthen and direct development towards existing communities
• Take advantage of compact building design

With this list in mind, is College Park’s development smart? They’re getting a few things right. There are certainly a variety of transportation choices, although many of these options owe their existence to the town’s proximity to Washington, DC. Additionally, several of the development projects are trying to reuse existing buildings and promote walkability to public transportation and the seasonal farmer’s market. As for all of the other items on this list, College Park falls remarkably short. The new housing options are the same luxury student apartments. There have been concerns raised about a planned business incubator and research park affiliated with the university being built on vital meadowlands. And, finally, College Park seems to be selling itself to the highest development contractor and paying little attention to creating a distinctive sense of place.

The result is not smart growth, but rather the spread of what I would call concentrated campus-based consumption (CCC) areas. CCC areas arise in response to the college student consumer market. Some would argue that, in an era of rising tuition and struggling middle-class families, the presence of this market is questionable. I beg to differ. This market is thriving, and there appears to be no shortage of disposable income among at least a sizeable subset of today’s college student. This is one of the more interesting aspects of the conversation surrounding the mounting costs of higher education. Very few people have considered the extracurricular spending that has become a cultural norm—spending on housing, laptops, cell phones, clothing, coffee, and the other accoutrements of being a college student.

Business owners have capitalized on the existence of this thriving market. They are building mega-complexes that, while located within walking distance of campus, remind one of Rouse’s description of the sprawl that is “out of scale with people”. These complexes are multiple stories tall, housing thousands of students. They often feature a similar constellation of businesses: convenience stores, grab-and-go eateries, and perhaps a frozen yogurt place. A world is thus created for the average college student to orbit consisting largely of quick consumption sites. There is nothing unusual about a college student leaving their luxury apartment, buying a massive iced coffee in the morning, heading to class while talking on their iPhones, picking up a burrito, and sitting down to tap out a reading response on their MacBooks, before heading out to a bar for the night. Little thought goes into this routine beyond: “such is college life.”

Development in College Park hinges upon CCC areas. These are not designed with the community mind, but rather a large enough number of college students with enough disposable income to sustain a market. The fact that these areas depend upon college students is evinced by the great efforts expended to facilitate spending. They create pseudo-dining plans, or meal cards, so that college students can buy with a quick swipe. They pass out coupons at the student union, and advertise heavily in the student newspaper. Finally, it is worth noting that most of the businesses in CCC areas prepare for the quiet summer months—the offseason—when student consumers leave and their sales drop. It is in the summer months that it becomes clear that these areas are not built to strengthen the wider community.

The trajectory of College Park’s development is troubling. In lieu of constructing a distinctive college town with sustainable, community-minded development, we have rows upon rows of burr-eateries preying on a population of college students, many of whom have been encouraged to think of little beyond studying their way to upward mobility and buying their way to self-gratification. This is, admittedly, a rather narrow, pessimistic view of students. It is also somewhat self-condemning, as my routines sometimes resemble those of the students with whom I interact daily. Still, after six years of living and working among college students, I see unfortunately few counterexamples. As a firm believer in the idea that our behavior is shaped, in part, by the spaces we inhabit, I suggest here that we need smarter growth to help redirect the college student orbit, making possible smarter decision-making and lifestyles.