The AFT Aims to Reverse the Course of Academic Staffing
Citing higher education's continuing reliance on underpaid contingent faculty to staff college and university classrooms and the rapidly declining number of full-time faculty with tenure, the AFT has just released a new report that provides a model for changing direction. Reversing Course: The Troubled State of Academic Staffing and a Path Forward documents that now over 50 percent of college and university courses are taught by contingent faculty and instructors, most of whom are part-time and paid indefensibly low wages. To begin the work of reversing this trend, the report includes an interactive Excel model that allows unions, institutions and states to calculate what it would cost to incrementally increase the number of full-time tenured faculty and pay contingent faculty an equitable salary.
