Abstract

There currently exists a situation in the American academy that challenges the integrity of the university and affects all the participants in the collegiate environment—the over-reliance on temporary instructors at the four-year, research university. This labor practice directly concerns students, as it affects the quality of the instruction they receive; professors, as it compromises the veracity of their work (it would not be possible to devote time to research without taking advantage of the instructors); teaching assistants, as it forces them to take on heavy teaching loads because of the lack of full-time personnel available; administrators, as it allows them to ignore a personnel contingent that is crucial to the survival of the university in its current state; parents, as it misleads them into thinking they are “paying for professors” to teach their children; and instructors, as it allows them to be employed for considerably less money (when compared with full-time, tenure-track faculty), little in the way of benefits, no voice at the institution, and no financial or career security. This essay argues that instructors should be fully acknowledged in the academic world through a series of actions aimed at compensatory fairness. If instructors are granted the chance to receive instructor “tenure,” i.e., an annually revolving contract that allows them to have explicit teaching responsibilities and, perhaps, some limited service duties, they would be formally acknowledged by the university as a important contingent of the academic community that while separate and distinct from the tenure-track or tenured professor are nonetheless essential to the fiscal health of the university, the growth and academic development of graduate teaching assistants, and the scholarly pursuits of the traditional research professor (Murphy, 2000).