Effects of prolonged adjunct faculty employment on career outcomes

Education -- Psychological Effects of Delayed Promotion

Understanding the Fundamental Role of Contemporary Educators

Traditionally, the education field is one where the individual devotes himself to a higher philosophical purpose than direct remuneration or other tangible forms of compensation. The rewards of a career in education include the opportunity to contribute to the intellectual development of others and to the betterment of society by contributing to the development of thousands of qualified professionals over the course of a typical academic teaching career. Certainly, there are also benefits to a teaching career; nevertheless, in many respects, the choice to pursue a teaching career entails certain altruistic sacrifices on the part of individuals who go into teaching as a profession.

Ideally, all stakeholders, including educational institutions, students, and society benefit when educational systems and institutions employ the best educated, best qualified, and most motivated professionals as teachers and instructors. By definition, that means that the best educators are those who are sufficiently talented and capable to pursue employment in non-academic (i.e. private sector business) careers. Therefore, it would seem to behoove the academic community to ensure that career development and advancement opportunities available to educators are awarded strictly on objective merit.

Reconsidering Traditional Professional Advancement Process

The importance of ensuring the highest possible quality of educators also suggests that the elements encompassed by the concept of objective merit, must, in principle, be directly related to the primary responsibility of educators: namely, to educate their students. Certainly, for example, it is beneficial to academic institutions of higher learning that some of their professors publish extensively; on the other hand, research and writing may not necessarily be as important a criterion for evaluating the performance and the merit of the work of many professors. In that regard, the traditional criteria and processes necessary for professional advancement (and tenure award in particular) in higher education may place undue emphasis on certain criteria while failing to recognize the significance of other criteria in appropriate relation to their actual importance to the main objective of educating students.

Unfortunately, the traditional emphasis on publishing may preclude some highly talented educators who do a superb job actually educating and contributing to the intellectual development of their students from achieving the most important professional reward that fairly compensates some of those who make the lifelong professional commitment to the betterment of others: namely, promotion to full professor and eventual tenure. Meanwhile, the traditional evaluation matrix normally employed in conjunction with consideration for tenure are not necessarily capable of ensuring against tenure being awarded to educators whose primary motivation and efforts may not genuinely relate to their commitment as educators.

Ironically, in education, (as in the realm of business and other major human endeavors), a certain amount of energies directed toward professional success sometimes relate more to egoistic goals and impulses than to altruistic goals or to impulses that are intrinsically related to the education of others. In fact, the professional advancement and tenure award systems at many institutions incorporates aspects of so-called "politics" both at the interpersonal and at the institutional levels to a significant degree that have nothing to do with the degree to which educators benefit their students. As a result, in all likelihood, the process of awarding full professorships and tenure does not necessarily guarantee that the best educators will always be recognized for those benefits and distinctions.

Frequently, and as a very general principle of human personal psychology, individuals who exhibit the highest drive to achieve professional success do so substantially as a manifestation of a phenomenon that mental health professionals call "overcompensation." This is a psychological phenomenon that is evident throughout modern society and it applies to virtually every conceivable human endeavor, avocation, or vocation. If anything, it is probably less characteristic of education professionals than of private sector professionals, simply because those hoping to make the biggest possible "splash" tend to pick careers in the highest paying or highest profile fields for which they are qualified.

Admittedly, by definition, those who go into education as a lifelong profession are less extrinsically (and superficially) motivated than their counterparts in commercial business or entertainment, for example. Nevertheless, in every community of educators there are undoubtedly those who maintain a low profile and perform superbly as educators without earning promotion to full professorship or tenure; likewise, those communities likely also include others who fulfill their roles as educators less thoroughly or effectively but who achieve full professorship and tenure by devoting themselves to the tenure track.

Ironically, everything else being equal, adjunct professors who focus mainly on their roles as educators at the expense of the energy and time necessary to publish more or to ingratiate themselves more to others within the institutional political hierarchy often actually contribute more to their students than some of their counterparts who aggressively pursue promotion and tenure. Surely, every academic institution of higher learning employs adjunct and untenured full professors who routinely become foundational influences on the lives of some of their students. Just as surely, every academic institution of higher learning also employs tenured professors who lecture only to large lecture halls and rarely interact with any students directly other than their research assistants. In some respects, the traditional criteria and processes of professional advancement may overlook many in the former category while rewarding those most inclined to become part of the latter category.

Understanding the Consequences of Denied Promotion and Tenure

Teaching is a noble profession, undoubtedly. Nevertheless, that is not to say that educators cannot become disenchanted with their profession over time, based substantially on their perceptions of whether or not they are being treated fairly, just as in other professional fields. Within the community of professional educators, there are individuals who approach their positions as little more than a job and without necessarily worrying about professional advancement in the field. They may be talented educators who do benefit their students and their institutions but they might have chosen teaching specifically because it allows them the freedom to devote to other pursuits. They probably do not think about earning a promotion to full professorship and they genuinely appreciate the compatibility of the fewer responsibilities of associate professorship with their other interests in life and competing demands on their schedules. Naturally, those in this group are also the least likely to remain in teaching throughout their professional lives; on the other hand, when they leave the profession, it is more likely to pursue other specific opportunities than as a consequence of whether or not they achieve full professorship.

At the other end of the spectrum are those educators who pursue promotion to professorship and tenure track as aggressively as possible, often placing great emphasis (at least privately) on achieving both full professorship and tenure by a specific point in their careers or by a specific chronological age. Some of them may also be talented educators; others may not necessarily be such good educators, performing only as well as necessary to remain on the tenure track. Generally, talented educators who also devote themselves to the tenure track probably do become full professors relatively early in their careers. Their less talented colleagues may also achieve full professorship and even tenure by devoting themselves to publishing research and insinuating themselves into the middle of the institutional social culture. Many times, their efforts are successful; where they are not, there is not necessarily a great loss to the educational community, at least not in their contributions as educators.

The real loss of valuable teaching talent probably occurs among the group of adjunct professors who happen to be excellent teachers and who are genuinely committed to the development and welfare of their students but not equally motivated to jump through certain hoops to achieve full professorship and tenure. Unfortunately, those whose most specific motivation for going into teaching in the first place was, precisely, their love of teaching sometimes fall into this category. The more removed they perceive the criteria for advancement to be from teaching and the greater the competition from their extrinsically motivated colleagues, the less likely they are to devote the necessary effort to those endeavors just for the purpose of achieving a higher professional "rank" and the associated transactional benefits. However, it would be both appropriate and beneficial to the educational community to recognize the objective merit of the work as educators of some professors purely on the basis of their genuine commitment to educating and on their contribution to the intellectual development of their students.