Most UniversityTeaching Staff are Non-Tenured

The US Government Accountability Office has  released a detailed report finding that 70% of those employed teaching at universities are non-tenured and those part-time were paid 75% less than full-time tenure-track faculty (GAO, 2017). This is consistent with a survey by the Florida Public Services Union, which found two-thirds of university teachers have jobs without long-term security (SEIU, 2017).

The levels of the use of "contingent" teaching staff are likely to be similar in Australian higher education, but hopefully without such poor work conditions. However, advances with on-line education and AI are likely to  reduce the job opportunities and working conditions for all adjuncts.

I suggest graduate students need to be encouraged to think of academia as a supplement to a career in an outside field or profession. Those who do wish to have a part-time career in academia need to be encouraged to obtain formal qualifications in two disciplines: firstly in their chosen profession and secondly in teaching.

Teaching academics how to take a professional attitude to teaching, I suggest, can help improve their working conditions. Rather than work long unpaid hours to attempt to keep up with an unrealistic workload, academics can instead change their teaching techniques to fit the resources available.
 As an example, I have academics complain to me that they do not have enough time to do all the lecturing and marking required. So I suggest they do less lecturing, and use alternative forms of assessment, which do not take as much time. The problem is that unless they have been trained how to do this, staff are not confident to make the change. A typical response is that alternate teaching and assessment techniques will not work, or will not be approved by accreditation authorities.

Universities can offer their teaching staff training and education to improve both quality and the efficiency of the teaching. However, it is up to individual academics to take the time, and considerable effort, needed to learn their craft.

References

SEIU (2017, November). Life on the Edge of the Blackboard: Florida Adjunct Faculty Survey 2017, Florida Public Services Union. URL http://seiufacultyforward.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/11/Life-on-the-Edge.pdf

GAO (2017, October). CONTINGENT WORKFORCE: Size, Characteristics, Compensation, and Work Experiences of Adjunct and Other Non-Tenure-Track Faculty". United States Government Accountability Office. URL http://www.gao.gov/assets/690/687871.pdf

Avoiding Adjunct Hell

Brandy Robinson writes about "Adjunct Hell: Getting Unstuck"(facultyclub, 2015). "Adjunct hell" has a good description of the problems of being a part time university teacher. But I am not so sure of the solutions offered. The obvious one not mentioned is "don't do it". Universities produce far more graduates than there are academic jobs for. Adjuncts will always have a status (and pay) about the same as the people who pack shelves at supermarkets during the middle of the night. Two methods I found to cope with being an adjunct are to get yourself trained in how to teach (even if you have to pay for the training yourself) and teach whole courses, not bits of courses other people are running.

One tendency I have noticed with full time tenured staff, as well as adjuncts, is to complain about not having time for teaching, while engaging in unproductive approaches to it. An example is providing voluminous comments when marking assignments. There is plenty of research to show students don't read these comments (the longer the comments, the less they read). It is a particularly pointless activities with a final assessment item. I suspect that this is done for the ego of the teacher, not the education of the student: so they can get in the last word.

A professional teacher has an obligation to teach within the resource constraints set for them. If only 30 minutes is allocated per assessment item, a teacher who spends an hour on each is not doing their institution, or the student a favor, they are wasting everyone's time and acting unprofessionally. If the teaching activity can't be done within the resources, then redesign it. If it still can't be done then ask for more resources. If the resources are not provided, then don't "make do" and end up doing a bad job, do something else instead which is feasible (or don't teach the course at all).