Part-Time Instructional Faculty and Staff: Who They Are, What They Do, and What They Think.

摘要

Part-time faculty members are a sizable part of the workforce in postsecondary institutions today. Forty-two percent of all instructional faculty and staff were employed part time by their institution in the fall of 1992. Two out of five (44 percent) of those employed part time were teaching in public 2-year institutions. Part-time instructional faculty and staff represented 62 percent of all instructional faculty and staff teaching for credit in public 2-year institutions during the fall of 1992 (Palmer 2000). That there has been an increase in the number and percentage of part-time faculty over the last 20 years is undeniable. The Digest of Education Statistics has tracked this increase over time (Snyder and Hoffman 2000). What is perhaps surprising to some, however, is that we have very little historical information about the characteristics of part-time faculty overall and that we have even less information about the similarities and differences among part-time faculty members and between part-time and fulltime faculty in general. One notable exception is Gappa and Leslie's (1993) The Invisible Faculty, which used data from the 1988 National Survey of Postsecondary Faculty and interviews with part-time faculty members from around the country to describe their characteristics. They concluded that part-time faculty members were a diverse workforce and that they were even more diverse in many ways than full-time faculty, yet more similar to them than is often assumed.