The TAUP contract states:
“TAUP and Temple shall express their joint commitment to tenure and the need to have a sizeable complement of tenured and tenure track faculty in a high-quality research university.”
We have pressed the administration to clarify how they understand this commitment by proposing a 1% increase in the number of TT faculty as a percentage of full-time-equivalent faculty per year of the contract.
The administration’s response to the proposal was that they are not sure that there is a problem, and they’d never agree to a quota. We are open to various approaches to address this issue, but it is profoundly troubling that the administration seems unwilling to acknowledge that this is an issue.
The statistics are clear: TT faculty at Temple in both absolute and relative numbers have declined significantly over the past 20 years, even as enrollments have been rising steeply. In 2005, the earliest year for which we have enrollment data, Temple was at 29,583 full-time equivalent students. We are now at 36,423.
This, of course, is part of a larger trend in higher education; but simply citing that trend does not capture the disturbing degree to which Temple has embraced contingent hiring. The chart below is drawn from data compiled by The Chronicle of Higher Education. (See Almanac 2019, “Colleges with the Lowest and Highest Numbers of Full-Time-Equivalent Students per Tenured or Tenure-Track Professor”)
It shows that compared to the 94 other Public Research 1 Universities:
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- Temple ranks third from last in percentage of TT faculty relative to all full-time faculty
- Temple ranks tenth from last in the ratio of students to tenure-track faculty
- Temple is the only school that ranks in the bottom 10 in both categories.
One mitigating factor here is that we have a large medical faculty that is mostly off the tenure-track. But even if we restrict the set to TAUP schools and colleges, only 50.8% of our full-time faculty are on the tenure track, which would move us up to only 90th out of 95 Public Research R1s. (Of course, other universities might also improve their standing if we separated out their medical schools.)
The picture does not look much better if we consider Temple in terms of all public colleges and universities. Out of 679, we rank 645th in terms of TT% of full-time faculty and 476th in terms of TT faculty per student.
These numbers all show that Temple has turned away from tenure-track hiring even more sharply than all but a few of its peer institutions.
The decline in tenure-track hiring at Temple has had many bad effects. It has increased the service burden on a shrinking pool of tenured faculty. Faculty in departments that have seen sharp declines struggle to offer broader and deeper graduate programs.
It has also led to an increase in the responsibilities heaped upon NTTs. Even though they are paid significantly less and teach more, they are being asked to do an increasing amount of service and in many cases to publish as well. Yet because they lack the protections of tenure, many feel obliged to say yes whenever a Chair or Dean asks them to take on more responsibilities–even serving as Chair of their departments. Moreover, in two colleges we know of, they are being required to engage in the tri-partite mission of research, teaching and service as a condition of their employment even though this is explicitly prohibited in the current contract.
TAUP has responded to these concerns. In addition to proposing more tenure-track hiring and more job security for NTTs, we’ve proposed to strengthen the language that prohibits management from forcing NTTs to engage in more than two of the three parts of the tripartite mission (research, teaching, and service) as a condition of their employment. Nothing in our proposals prevents NTTs from opting to do this work if they so choose, and the union has always opposed the position taken by many administrators that NTTs on non-research tracks shouldn’t be rewarded with merit for the research they do. What we all need to object to is the demand that NTTs engage in teaching, research, and service.
The administration’s response to our position is a proposal which would change the language of the contract to allow NTTs to be required to engage in all three missions!
If the administration wants to require faculty to do teaching, research and service and is worried about meeting accreditation standards, they should hire more tenure-track faculty
As we search nationally and internationally for the best tenure-track faculty, we should remember that, to borrow from the famous speech by our founder, Russell Conwell, there are Acres of Diamonds in our own backyard: contingent faculty who have already proven their excellence in their experiences teaching at Temple, and, in many cases, their excellence in research and service as well.
The administration claims that hiring more more TTs would require a loss of NTT and adjunct jobs. This is based on the assumption that Temple is already spending what it can and should on instruction. Temple’s strong financial statements reveal that they can spend more, despite the familiar drumbeat of austerity.And considering our university’s very low standing among the institutions with which it compares itself when it comes to spending on instruction, Temple should be investing more in its faculty..
As we have pointed out, Temple is dead last among public Research 1s in the percentage it spends on instruction for every dollar it takes in from tuition and fees; it also lags far behind the peer institutions it picks in the amount it spends on instruction per student, a gap that has nearly doubled in 7 years; in the most recent available data, it ranked sixth nationally in the sheer amount of dollars it takes in from student tuition and fees minus what it spends on instruction. The proposals TAUP has put on the table would set Temple on a path toward improving its dismal record.