At Rutgers the faculty are unionized. Recently, the union reached a tentative agreement with the University regarding non-tenure track (NTT) faculty. The full text of the agreement is available now.

In the sciences and engineering, especially at research-focused universities, one often thinks of adjunct faculty as industry folks who come in and teach a class a semester or year. This stands in stark contrast to most departments in the humanities, where adjunct positions are (often) a way to dramatically underpay PhDs by paying them a mere $5k per course without benefits or even office space, sometimes. In the Boston area, the SEIU estimate is that “67 percent of the teaching faculty are not on the tenure track”. I don’t know how they estimated that number, and obviously the SEIU is a bit biased, but the number is certainly large.

Given the way the whole tenure system is going, any steps to provide more stability to adjunct contracts should be welcome. I think the short-term goal is to create more full-time instructional positions with benefits but without tenure. This agreement does something to address that. From an email I received:

Non-grant-funded NTT faculty who are successfully reappointed after six years of full-time service will have appointments of at least two years’ duration thereafter. Departments and decanal units will be required to develop, promulgate and post on their web sites clear criteria for appointment, reappointment, and promotion, and will also be required to provide all non-tenure track faculty with regular performance review and feedback.

Essentially, adjunct contracts were a bit of no-rules scenario before, and this is definitely a better situation.

The other big thing in the contract is to make the job titles more in line with other institutions. There are now 5 classes of non-tenure track faculty: Teaching, Professional Practice, Librarian, Clinical and Research. The first three are new. I’m not sure how the NTT body as a whole feels about this, and in a sense this approach is a capitulation to the trend of having fewer tenure-track faculty, but I think it’s much better than what we have now.