Let’s pretend for a second that the college is a corporation. You’ve got the big boss on the top sending orders to several bureaucratic layers, all with an eye on the bottom line. What’s that bottom line? Money.
Specifically, that bottom line is money being spent – or, rather, not being spent – on faculty. The overall ratio of full-time to part-time faculty is 73 percent to 27 percent. Is this too high? Definitely.
I know that a part-time faculty member has taught all of you out there. I had a terrible experience with one of them and an excellent experience with another. Not all are bad, but the search criteria for part-time professors are much less stringent than they are for tenure-track professors.
Do we really want someone to teach us who will be on campus only a couple of hours a week, or who has another job? Where is the quality that the college has a reputation for?
“I hope that we use part-time faculty effectively here. I think we do”, said Rob Whitnell, an associate professor of chemistry and also the head of the department of Computing and Information Technology. We may be using them effectively, but we need to re-evaluate what our needs are as a college.
I realize that enrollment is way up for Center of Continuing Education students – according to the college Web site there are now 693 students enrolled in the program – and the need for new faculty is increasing, but why must we sacrifice quality for quantity? The U.S. News and World Report uses the percentages of full-time and part-time faculty when ranking colleges and universities. The school could be turning off new students with these percentages.
It is a corporate mentality that hires two part-time workers as opposed to one full-time. What are the advantages for the college? Less money is spent looking for a qualified applicant. There is also less responsibility to that employee; specifically, benefits are not offered.
The percentage of fulltime to part-time faculty has increased over the past year, according to Whitnell. But the numbers are still high. I’d like to see more tenure-track faculty being hired via countrywide searches. The college prides itself on being diverse; so let’s see that being reflected in the hiring process.
I don’t doubt that students have loved some of their classes taught by part-time faculty, but the fact of the matter is that it’s just not fair to the students or the professors. Every employee of the college deserves to have health care benefits, and every student deserves to be taught by a teacher who has experience and enough time to spend with them.
C’mon, Guilford. Lets reverse this hiring trend and get the numbers right.