Engaged Adjunct Faculty May Lead to Engaged Students...

Since the last weekend class, I have thinking about the role of adjunct faculty in higher education. As discussed in class, issues of higher education are complex and intertwined. Prior to the class discussions, I had a simplistic view of the relationship between adjunct faculty, higher education, and students. I believed adjunct faculty played a crucial role but were simply undervalued by administration. In my mind the way to improve adjunct faculty morale was to increase their pay. However, the discussions during the last weekend class enlightened me to the fact that not only is throwing money at an issue fiscally incompetent, it would probably do little as a long term solution. So, I set out explore viable alternatives.

I found an article that sought to explore through qualitative inquiry of 85 participants at a medium sized public four year institution, the experiences of adjunct faculty. The researchers were interested in the effect the sense of inclusion by adjunct faculty had on students and faculty. According to the author’s literature review, most of the research available pertains to community colleges and focuses primarily on the increasing numbers of adjunct faculty in the system of higher education. Although the researchers did acknowledge that a few universities are striving to promote a sense of inclusivity among the adjunct faculty, the vast majority do not. The researchers felt their data would draw a connection between adjunct faculty’s sense of inclusivity in the institution and overall student engagement.

Three prevailing themes emerged from the data collection. The first theme, receiving outreach, involved the adjunct faculty’s perception of and experiences related to inconsistent outreach, messaging, and communication from and across the institution. Mentoring emerged as a strong sub theme and a possible solution to address the lack of connectedness reported by some adjunct faculty. The next theme focused on challenges and the relation to teaching. The last theme identified by the researchers, developing skills, related particularly to professional development opportunities, specifically the lack of professional opportunities.

After analyzing and integrating the data related to the aforementioned themes, the researchers shared possible recommendations for institutions to implement to improve the sense of inclusion among adjunct faculty members. The recommendations narrowed down to advocacy and programming components. In relation to advocacy, the authors suggest some very simple steps that may be taken by administration to promote engagement with adjunct faculty members such as meeting with them for five minutes per week. The programming components suggested by the authors seemed quite simple to institute as well. Many respondents reported email dysfunction because some faculty do not have email access over the summer, or their email address may not include their full name as one of the main reasons for their feelings of disconnect from the campus. At the institution where I work, it was only within the last year that adjunct faculty’s email address actually included their full name. Prior to that, only full-time faculty had the honor of their email address including their full name. The authors recommended making access to email comparable to their full-time counterparts to better develop a sense of campus connectedness among adjunct faculty members.
Although I am a novice student to the world of qualitative research, I can appreciate the methodology employed by the researchers to collect, analyze, and integrate the data. The overall goal of the researchers was to gain an understanding to the question: How do adjunct faculty members describe their experience as a member of an institution of higher learning. Before reading this article, I only had anecdotal information gleaned from conversations with adjunct faculty. By administering open ended survey questions, the researchers were able to identify common repeated themes among the respondents.

Having been a part time staff member recently, albeit not a faculty member, I related to the feelings of disconnect reported by the survey respondents. It seems counterproductive for institutions to marginalize the front-line individuals most readily available to promote engagement with the students they serve. Although student engagement is typically a campus-wide initiative, faculty are typically the folks that students interact with on a regular basis throughout the semester. If the adjunct faculty members are feeling disconnected from the institution how can they be expected to be authentic in promoting a sense of belongingness among the students?