Gov Doyle to ride off in to the sunset as… The head of the Peace Corps?

The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel covers a new report from the Faculty Council concerning the use of adjunct faculty members at Marquette University. The report comes at the initiative of the Theology Department, which had passed a resolution urging study of the issue.

The first issue with the media coverage so far, I think, is the failure to distinguish between different types or classes of adjuncts. Many adjunct professors fit the traditional role, bringing their insights from real world into the classroom (the type referred to in the Marquette Tribune’s editorial on the subject). At Marquette Law School, I benefited from distinguished practitioners who were loyal to the school and their profession. The same could be said of many adjuncts in the business and dental schools.

In theory, a moonlighting adjunct could also teach in a humanities or social science discipline, for instance, if Bishop Sklba wanted to teach a graduate level seminar in the Theology Department one semester.

In practice, however, some liberal arts departments rely on recent Ph.D. graduates as adjuncts to teach numerous sections of undergraduate courses, especially those in the core curriculum. In the Theology Department, over half of the undergraduate courses are taught by adjuncts. The departments pay $3,200 per class with no benefits, and these adjuncts scrape by, cobbling together a meager income teaching numerous sections.

The financial situation of these adjuncts, which are only a handful of the total number of adjunct professors at Marquette, is rightly deserving of attention. Although I am opposed to a government mandated “living wage” as the minimum wage, I believe that Marquette as an employer is under a moral obligation to treat and pay its employees fairly.

Any task force should start from this basic reality: someone needs to teach freshman English and Theology 101, and tenured professors generally don’t want to. In the “public or perish” world of higher education, they want to teach as few classes as possible, with just a handful of advanced students. So each semester they teach two or three classes of graduate or upper-division undergraduate students, often in seminars. They relegate the introductory classes to the adjuncts. These adjuncts usually hold Ph.D.s from Marquette or another local institution like UWM, and have not yet secured a full-time, tenure-track academic post. So they subsist on a minimal income teaching a number of undergraduate classes while they wait for a position to open.

But the second reality that no one has said publicly thus far is that open tenure-track positions at Marquette generally don’t go to Marquette Ph.D.s. For the school’s reputation to continue to rise, Marquette will hire Ph.D. graduates from universities like Duke or Notre Dame. Many of these adjuncts will have no opportunity to move onto the tenure track at MU.

Given these two facts, I hope that one model a task force would consider is a reinvigorated conception of “lecturers,” used at many universities already in a way not unlike Marquette’s professors of legal writing.

A lecturer, operating on a renewable contract basis, could receive full-time pay and benefits to teach five sections per semester of undergraduate courses. These lecturers would be under no expectations to research and could be recent, local Ph.D. graduates who would invest their full energies in teaching students. And if at some point they want to pursue a tenure-track position at a regional college, they would do so with a wealth of classroom experience. Or they may decide to stay at Marquette, sharing the fundamentals of their discipline with successive classes of students.

This will, admittedly, cost the university more money than the status quo. At the same time, the solution is not to dramatically expand the number of tenure-track faculty lines or give a huge pay bump and health care coverage to anyone who teaches two classes a semester. Rather, I believe the best solution is to create a new position entirely to fit the particular need.

As a P.S., I suggest reading this recent op-ed by Prof. Francis Fukuyama, which identifies some of the larger forces at work in academia that lead to this situation.