Faculty hiring at the SOCCCD

     I wanted to highlight a recent reader comment re faculty hiring at the California Community Colleges.

Bob Cosgrove said...
     Having taught FT at 3 universities before coming to Saddleback College, I was pleased to find community college students comparable to students I had encountered elsewhere. That was in 1981. That has changed. CC districts have grasped the 50% rule* with a tenacity that has harmed curriculum and program review, the work of making departments run efficiently, and stretched faculty by the increased demands place on faculty to serve on committees. Some 60 percent of our classes in some divisions are taught by ou[r] part time colleagues. When I came to Saddleback we had 32 full time faculty in the English Department with a student complement of about 20,000; we now have a student body in the upper 30,000s but only 18 FT faculty to serve them. Many of the thoughtful ideas to make Student Success work is seriously hobbled by the lack of Full Time faculty in our labs, counseling centers, libraries and classrooms. If part time work is so helpful to reducing college costs, we should move to have part time administrators to save money. Perhaps some of that money can be moved to where students are—in our classrooms and labs.

11:35 AM, September 12, 2015

     *The 50% law creates a floor for expenditures on “instruction.” According to that law, at least 50% of expenditures must be on instruction—including faculty salaries, etc.
     Bob is saying, I think, that the 50% law has in some districts turned into a ceiling instead of a floor, limiting the amount of full-time instruction. (The 50% law became a focus eight years ago under Chancellor Mathur’s watch; his failure to monitor this percentage compelled the district to hire 38 faculty at once! At the time, Bob asked why Mathur wasn't being held to account. See The 50% crisis: never mind what Mathur says. Look at the data!)

What Is the Point of College? (New York Times)

By KWAME ANTHONY APPIAH

…Consider the declining proportion of fac­ulty with tenure. Tenured faculty are defined by more than the fact that they are hard to fire. Tenure allows professors to pursue intellectual projects without regard for what the trustees or the governor or the community care about. It gives them the kind of intellectual freedom that has helped make our universities the research powerhouses of the world. Adjunct faculty, on the other hand, are a lot less expensive — they’re paid less and typically lack health and other benefits — and you can easily expand or contract their ranks as demand fluctuates. In the Utility vision, students are consumers; they have needs and desires to be met, at a price they’ll pay. If pleasing the customer is the goal, a tenured faculty member who wants to teach what he or she considers worth teaching can be an inconvenience. Plus, at Utility U., one obvious way to better your ‘‘value proposition’’ is to cut costs. These days, three-quarters of the teaching faculty at America’s nonprofit colleges and universities are hired as adjuncts with no tenure and no research support. A few decades ago, only a quarter were….