UCLA

The composition of the professoriate across colleges and universities during the second half of the 20th century has undergone a qualitative metamorphosis to include a new majority comprised of contingent academicians. This shift has led to intense scrutiny regarding the efficacy of part-time faculty, and findings from previous research remain largely mixed, at best. Previous scholarship suggests a host of negative effects of part-time faculty on student outcomes. However, prior empirical examination of contingent faculty’s teaching practices has been limited in its conceptualization and may have served to further disadvantage part-timers, who tend to perform their work in academic spaces characterized as unsupportive, negative, and even hostile.

The purpose of this study was to examine how a part-time academic appointment compared with full-time, tenured faculty across several outcomes rooted in a definition of efficacious practice. Drawing from a thick literature on best practices strongly associated with positive student learning outcomes, this study presents a comprehensive definition of faculty efficacy. More importantly, theoretical frameworks centering on the notion of workplace empowerment, namely psychological and social-structural empowerment theories, were employed to both ground and guide thinking on the relationship between faculty performance and the atmosphere the academy. A final sample of over 37,000 faculty members at more than 460 colleges and universities was drawn from the 2010-2011 Faculty Survey, administered by the Cooperative and Institutional Research Program (CIRP). Hierarchical linear modeling (HLM) was used as the preferred analytic technique to specify a series of nested, multilevel models to examine the effect of having a part-time faculty academic appointment on the study’s outcome measures.

Collectively, the conclusions from this study demonstrate that part-time faculty scored substantially higher across the study’s outcomes of educator effectiveness. In fact, after controlling for stress and various perceptions of campus and departmental climates, as well as attitudes connected to the teaching and learning environment, part-timers’ scores on the outcomes increased even more when compared to their traditional counterparts. Inspection of the final multilevel models across all outcomes revealed that all faculty subgroupings were more efficacious instructors than their tenured colleagues. In light of these findings, the study unpacks implications for faculty and university administrators, as well as offering multiple areas ripe for further research.