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The AWP Director's Handbook
A Compendium of Guidelines and Information
for Directors of Creative Writing Programs
A Publication of The Association
of Writers & Writing Programs 2008
 The Director's Handbook (713KB)
AWP's Recommendations Regarding Non-Tenure Stream Faculty
These recommendations embody AWP’s concerns about the exploitation of non-tenure- stream faculty. The term “non-tenure stream,” or NTS, includes faculty otherwise known as adjunct faculty, lecturers, or instructors who teach either full or part-time in higher education. According to the U.S. Department of Education, the proportion of appointments in higher education held by part-time or adjunct faculty has increased from 22% in 1970 to 43% in 1998. At many institutions, especially at community colleges, more than half the appointments are NTS faculty.
While increases in the price of tuition have out-paced inflation, colleges and universities have assigned more of their classes to poorly paid and poorly treated teachers. Although the popular assumption may be that professors are comfortable members of the middle class with genteel jobs that afford time for research, the reality has become that most college and university teachers have challenging work loads, no job security, low pay, no health benefits, and little time off to conduct research or complete creative work. Many NTS faculty members have no offices, no secretarial support, no financial support for travel or research, and limited access to basic office supplies and photocopying. Many NTS faculty members are appointed to classes only a few days before the start of the semester. Many NTS instructors are paid $1,200 to $3,000 for conducting a class with a duration of 14 weeks; this level of pay is a small fraction of what tenured faculty earn per class. At these low levels of pay, if NTS faculty do a good and conscientious job with each class, they will be earning less per hour than workers in the fast-food industry. AWP believes that these poor working conditions and poor compensation thwart every institution’s efforts to establish excellence in higher education.
Although AWP recognizes that many public institutions have budgets subject to the caprice of state legislatures that often fail to address the needs of a growing population of college-bound students, AWP urges faculty members, department chairs, and university leaders to provide better education for their students while their institutions provide fair compensation and professional working conditions for NTS faculty. Today’s universities require investments that are colossal compared to the needs of universities in the 1950s and earlier. Modern universities need more complex equipment and infrastructure, research laboratories, and computer networks, and our colleges and universities have done an excellent job in meeting these needs. Academe must focus the same care and investment on its most precious resource: its teachers.
Toward that end, AWP has provided these recommendations for the employment of NTS faculty:
- Institutions should create and periodically revise NTS policy statements consistent with their mission statements. Institutions should devise strategic plans that include two objectives towards the goal of establishing excellence in education: (a) reducing the percentage of NTS faculty; and (b) providing adequate pay, good working conditions, health benefits, and professional support for NTS faculty.
- In political advocacy among state legislators, university leaders should make investment in faculty a priority. University leaders should advocate investment in professional pay and working conditions for NTS faculty; they should also advocate increased investment to increase the percentage of full-time, tenure-track faculty.
- Colleges and universities should develop comprehensive hiring plans that eliminate excessive NTS faculty appointments. Each department should set limits on its number of NTS faculty members in relation to the number of tenured or tenure-track faculty members. NTS faculty should be used only to meet short-term or special needs (such as unanticipated enrollment surges, grants, experimental courses, sabbatical replacements), rather than to routinely staff regularly-offered courses. At four-year colleges and graduate schools, NTS appointments should constitute no more than 10% of a department’s total faculty; at community colleges, NTS faculty members should comprise no more than 30% of the faculty.
- Departments should establish an equitable compensation scale for NTS employees. Salary schedules for NTS faculty should be based on a scale comparable to that of a tenure-track assistant professor, and pay should be proportionate to work assignments. Salaries should reflect qualifications, experience, years of service, and workload (including hours of instruction and related work outside the classroom, as well as any required service or research).
- Departments should develop clear job descriptions and criteria for evaluation of NTS faculty. Departments should provide NTS faculty with these accurate job descriptions, specifying expectations for teaching, service, and/or research. Processes for hiring, evaluating, and assigning NTS faculty should be comparable to those for tenure-earning faculty while taking into account the particular demands of NTS work. The evaluation mechanism should help assess which part-time faculty are eligible for conversion to full-time employment.
- Part-time NTS faculty should not be required to serve on committees, advise theses, or to coordinate community service projects unless they are given additional compensation above and beyond the typical wage for teaching each class. Full-time NTS faculty should not be expected to serve on committees unless their pay (per class) is commensurate with the level of pay (per class) of tenure-track assistant professors.
- Departments should provide new NTS faculty with systematic orientation to their jobs and departments. Handbooks on departmental policies regarding NTS employees should be provided. Departments should provide mentorship and advisors to those NTS members who have fewer than three years of teaching experience at the college level.
- Benefits for NTS faculty should include health insurance, as well as access to other forms of insurance and retirement planning available to tenure-track faculty.
- Teaching load for all faculty assigned to writing workshops or writing-intensive courses should not exceed 15 students per class for graduate seminars. At the undergraduate level, writing-intensive courses should not exceed 22 students for introductory classes while advanced writing workshops should not exceed 18 students. AWP maintains that the optimum level of enrollment, for both graduate and undergraduate writing courses, is 12 students.
- Working conditions for full-time NTS faculty should be comparable to those for tenure-earning faculty and should include assigned office space, phones, clerical support, photocopying privileges, computers (including email accounts and Internet access), parking assignments, and other ancillary privileges.
- Professional development funding, including incentives, grants, merit raises, and travel money, should be available to NTS faculty.
- NTS faculty should have a voice in setting departmental or institutional policies that affect them, and they should have academic freedom to express their professional judgments.
- NTS faculty who wish to bargain collectively should do so.
- Academic associations, conferences, and publications should provide forums, analyses, and news coverage on the treatment of NTS faculty to help persuade political leaders and academic administrators to improve the compensation and working conditions of NTS faculty.
- Please see AWP’s other documents: “AWP Guidelines for Creative Writing Programs and Teachers of Creative Writing,” “Hallmarks of a Successful Graduate Program in Creative Writing,” and “Hallmarks of an Effective BFA Program or BA Major in Creative Writing,” and “AWP Recommendation on the Teaching of Creative Writing to Undergraduates.”
AWP is committed to helping its member institutions develop programs that ensure fair and professional support for all faculty including NTS faculty.
—The AWP Board of Directors
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