No trend has changed the face of higher education more than the shift away from a corps of full-time, tenure-track faculty to a contingent instructional workforce. This work force includes part-time/adjunct faculty, full-time, nontenure-track faculty, and graduate employees. Together these employees now make up an amazing 73 percent of the nearly 1.6 million employee instructional workforce in higher education. For more details, see the AFT Higher Education Data Center.

Total postsecondary instructional workforce, by employment type

U.S. Department of Education, NCES, 2007 Fall Staff Survey

The growth of contingent labor over the last two decades represents a major and purposeful effort by higher education institutions to reduce the number of full-time tenured and tenure-track faculty. This has been done partly in response to the failure of most states to provide adequate funding for their colleges and universities. But money isn't the whole story.

The growth of contingent labor also mirrors the movement to run higher education institutions "more like a business." The traditions of tenure and shared governance, which guarantee due process and academic freedom, and which give faculty a major role in academic decision-making, run counter to a command-and-control business model. The fact that large numbers of academic workers are hired without effective job security, without decent salaries and benefits, and without a guaranteed role in academic decision-making is of great concern to those of us who value a free and independent academy.

Addressing this "academic staffing crisis" is AFT higher education's highest priority. In an effort to reverse these trends, the AFT launched the Faculty and College Excellence (FACE) campaign. Through legislative advocacy and collective bargaining, FACE is designed to achieve two goals simultaneously:

• Achieving full equity in compensation for contingent faculty members; and
  
  
• Ensuring that 75 percent of undergraduate classes are taught by full-time tenured and tenure-track faculty and that qualified contingent faculty have the opportunity to move into such positions as they become available.

The campaign goals are designed to be phased in over time to ensure that there is no job loss for contingent faculty currently working at a college or university. To learn more about the FACE campaign, visit the campaign web site at www.aftface.org.