R-E-S-P-E-C-T
Adjunct faculty are invaluable to community colleges, so why aren’t they taken into consideration in the colleges’ missions?
As budgets are cut, community colleges continue to take advantage of the adjunct faculty population. While there is little doubt that part-time instructors are a better value as a line item in the budget, the price, figuratively and literally, of the relationship between adjuncts and higher education should be reconsidered in regard to the community college’s mission and vision.
If community colleges are going to employ more adjunct faculty to lower budget costs, these instructors should be included in all efforts to meet the institution’s mission to maintain the quality and integrity of educational services.
For the most part, adjunct faculty bring a willingness to work, flexible schedules, extensive knowledge and a lower salary to community colleges. Most two-year institutions embrace these advantages. Dr. Mary Deane Sorcinelli, associate provost for faculty development at the University of Massachusetts, said in a 2007 study that colleges can achieve fiscal savings, respond to changing student interests and help students connect academic studies to the workplace when they use a variety of adjunct faculty.
Colleges also benefit from adjuncts because they fill staffing gaps. For instance, at Harford Community College in Maryland, the transitional studies department has only four full-time faculty available to teach developmental reading and writing courses. So, full-time faculty taught only 20 of the 84 sections available for fall 2008. In this case, many students would go unserved without the help of adjunct faculty. Adjuncts allow a community college to offer a broader selection of courses and more course availability for students.
Adjunct faculty are readily available to teach for community colleges. According to the American Federation of Teachers, 69 percent of instructional faculty taught part time at community colleges in 2008. Adjunct faculty are also inexpensive to employ. The National Center for Education Statistics reports that a full-time, tenured faculty member is paid an average of $65,338 per year in contrast to an adjunct faculty member earning about $9,200. While full-time faculty do much more than “just teach,” teaching is the primary responsibility of community-college faculty.
