The Sloan Conference on Part-Time and Adjunct Faculty brought scholars from varied disciplines together to share research, perspectives, and ideas about important changes taking place in academic employment. Participants explored causes, effects, and implications of a dramatic shift from full-time to part-time jobs. Conferees acknowledged that the use of part-time and adjunct faculty is a multivariate phenomenon. It has varied roots, varied manifestations, and varied effects-from discipline to discipline, from institution to institution, and from one type of institution (research universities, for example) to another type of institution (community colleges, for example).
As higher education has expanded-taking on new missions and programs, serving new populations, and adding capacity with new and larger community colleges-so too is the definition of faculty beginning to change. As Langenberg' s chapter marking the subfaculty as a growing part of the academic workforce implies, and as Tolbert' s analysis of departmental mitosis illustrates, faculty work and faculty roles may be evolving through a sort of vertical differentiation.
But constraints on funding for higher education, shifting patterns in jobs and careers, and misalignment of supply and demand have dislocated academic employment patterns, too. Institutions have found themselves teaching more students with less money. Student enrollment has shifted, and new disciplines and professions have emerged to put heavier demands for specialized faculty on college and university budgets.
Faculty employment patterns have become markedly different among the varied teaching fields as well (Clark, 1997). Sloan Conference participants noted that these emerging patterns may have overrun the traditional faculty career patterns, leaving them characteristic only of the minority of all who teach in higher education. The new majority of faculty do more varied work, in more varied settings, on more varied terms and conditions-and bring more varied preparation and qualifications to academic life.
How will their work be divided up? Who will teach, who will discover, who will apply knowledge, who will serve? The comforting paradigm of a tenured and tenurable faculty is challenged by an emerging understanding that college and university teaching is no longer a stable career prospect. It is becoming, more and more, just a job, and a temporary one at that. How and why that is happening, and what its effects are, remains a subject for serious and sustained inquiry.