Academia's New "Gypsies"

By Ezra Bowen

For generations, membership in a college faculty has implied the enviable prospect of lifetime job security through the granting of tenure. Not anymore. Since the late 1970s, academe has suffered a Ph.D. glut as baby-boom enrollments leveled off while universities continued to churn out fledgling professors, particularly in the humanities, faster than the shrinking job market could absorb them.

Today the prospect of even steeper declines in enrollment further reduces the need for new permanent professorships. Tightened university budgets and lowered federal spending make salary money scarcer, and recessions in some states have brought budget cuts at public universities (Utah, for example, will eliminate 95 faculty positions over the next three years). The result: with entrenched senior professors guarding the gateway to tenure, many junior professors are facing dim prospects and shaky job security. Meanwhile, many colleges are calling into question the concept of tenure itself.

While these issues go largely unresolved, universities are staffing classrooms in increasing measure with part-timers, creating a new class of "academic gypsies." Among the 32,000 professors in California's university system, the country's largest, about 33% are temporary. Nationally, of 700,000 faculty, 30% of professors in some of the liberal arts are not permanent; the percentages range downward in other fields. Emily Abel, a researcher at the University of California, Los Angeles, and author of a book on college employment, says of the growing race of gypsies, "They're like any part-time employees that McDonald's would hire . . . cheap labor that colleges and universities are relying on to save money."

Consider Alice Roy, an assistant professor of English at California State University, Los Angeles. For five rough years she scrambled as a part-timer on various faculties. One semester she taught five courses at three different colleges, driving as much as 80 miles a day to keep all her teaching commitments. "I could get on the freeway and find I was going to the wrong place on the wrong day," she says. Her average aggregate salary for such frantic devotion: as little as $15,000, less than a fourth of the pay for a tenured full professor in the California system. In 1983, Roy finally won a probationary tenure appointment at Cal State. Her income has improved to about $28,000, but she still must sweat out the standard six-year probationary period, knowing that around 1988 it could end with one year's notice to get lost. Says she: "It makes me nervous as hell."

Well it might, particularly in chauvinistic academe, where males are generally considered far more likely to win tenure than females. Administrators claim that in using the gypsies, they are only doing what they have to do in the face of academe's changing needs and hardening realities. Moreover, laymen and even some independent-minded faculty scorn tenure as a refuge for the insecure or the marginally competent. But the fact is that tenure or some analogous security blanket is basic to the role of the university as an arena of open inquiry. Scholars must be free within wide bounds to teach, write and research in accordance with their convictions, whether or not these convictions are congenial to their superiors or to society at large.

Most temporaries and junior professors, however, are subservient to administrators and senior faculty in their own departments and feel wary of espousing anything too controversial. Norma Feshbach, chair of the UCLA Department of Education, notes that some apprehensive juniors tailor their work, down to the smallest details of research methodologies, with an eye to supervisor approval and eventual publication. Says she: "This may not contribute to society or science, but it does to tenure." Both students and junior faculty agree, moreover, that the quality of classroom instruction suffers when untenured teachers are distracted by pursuing requirements that have become too hidebound or arcane.

The one great hope of the have-nots has been that, during the next eight years, the presiding cohort of senior professors -- some 40% of tenured faculty -- will reach conventional retirement ages of 62 to 65. But federal law now forbids any mandatory retirements that are based on age. For academics, this blanket rule, passed by Congress last summer, is phased to take final effect in 1994, raising the possibility that after that date professors might enjoy tenure until death. However, says Mary Gray, a mathematician at American University in Washington and member of a committee on tenure of the American Association of University Professors: "Universities and colleges are no longer willing to commit to having faculty on forever."

The California state-university system is trying to ease the pressure at the top by offering sweetened early-retirement inducements to 55-year-olds, who can receive normal benefits (worth $11,844 a year) plus up to 40% of salary by going part time themselves. During the past two years, nearly 1,800 have bought the package. Haverford College, outside Philadelphia, is considering offering new tenure candidates 25- to 30-year contracts. While forthrightly businesslike on the surface, however, such contracts could eventually trigger age-discrimination charges if new short-term agreements are offered to some older faculty members but not to others.

As colleges wrestle with solutions, the effects of the dilemma on the professoriat are becoming critical. Kenneth Mortimer, vice president of Pennsylvania State University and an expert on faculty hiring, notes that some 20 years ago, 1.8% of entering freshmen were interested in academic careers. Today only a minuscule .2% want anything to do with the poor job prospects and salaries that are generally below those of the corporate world. In addition, says Mortimer, "those we trained in the 1970s who went and got jobs driving cabs with their Ph.D.s now are doing something else and are lost to the profession." If some way can be found to deal fairly with the elders, he adds, then in the 1990s "we'll need ((those dropouts)), and they won't be there."

With reporting by Jon D. Hull/Los Angeles, with other bureaus