Philosophy instructor Robert Gibson works 12-hour days, dashing from campus to campus to scrape together a teaching schedule full enough to pay his bills.
Gibson – who often teaches 10 courses at a time across four colleges – is among the rising number of part-time instructors who teach most of the classes at many colleges in Colorado.
“I teach wherever they need a warm body in front of a class,” said Gibson, 64, who earns about $30,000 working year- round. “Nobody teaches as much as I do. It’s draining the life out of me.”
Adjunct faculty teach more than two- thirds of courses at some of Colorado’s 13 community colleges. At Metropolitan State College of Denver, adjuncts make up 62.7 percent of the faculty, up from 57.2 percent 10 years ago.
About 45 percent of the nation’s 1.2 million college faculty are part-timers, said P.D. Lesko, editor of Adjunct Advocate magazine.
At the state’s research universities, the number of tenured faculty is slipping as administrators save money by not filling retirees’ positions – replacing those professors with adjuncts.
The University of Colorado at Boulder has 29 students for every tenured or tenure-track professor, up from 23 students 10 years ago.
At Colorado State University, there are 27 students for every tenured or tenure-track professor, a jump from 21 in 1995.
“I call it the deprofessionlization of teaching,” said Wayne Gilbert, arts and humanities faculty chair at the Community College of Aurora. “Teachers can’t make a living by this kind of work.”
Higher education has relied on part-time instructors since at least the 1970s, hiring professionals to dispense real-world knowledge. Community colleges, in particular, have sought accountants, nurses, computer technicians and others.
But college administrators are depending more heavily on adjuncts as state funding for higher education declines, leaving many experts to question whether this is leading to a deterioration in the quality of education.
“It has a deleterious effect on education, and it’s felt in the classroom,” said CSU tenured professor David Milofsky.
“I think it’s a direct result of the bean counters looking for ways to cut money out of the budget,” Milofsky said.
Adjuncts, who typically are paid $1,500 to $2,400 to teach a three-credit course, often have less experience than tenured faculty and don’t have time for scholarly research.
They often don’t keep office hours or even have offices.
Tara DeGideo, a Community College of Denver nursing student, said she has had trouble connecting with some part-time instructors, who’ve spent more time as doctors and microbiologists than in front of a class. It is also harder to contact part-timers for questions after class.
“You find yourself kind of waiting around for your e-mail,” DeGideo said.
At Metro State, Stephen Jordan, the school’s president, has set up a task force to study working conditions of part-time instructors – to see if they are invited to sit on committees, are encouraged to apply for awards or get business cards.
Jordan raised the pay scale for adjuncts from about $700 per credit hour to $960 after realizing that part-timers teaching 15 credit hours per semester were making just $22,000 per year.
Jordan said student retention rates are linked to the number of tenured faculty who are available to mentor students.
Adjuncts have become part of a system in which colleges offer more and more courses to lure large numbers of students, said Adjunct Advocate’s Lesko.
The problem, she said, is that the schools are not supporting students enough to help them graduate within four years.
“It’s like the inmates are running the institution,” said Lesko, a former adjunct at the University of Michigan.
Administrators of community-college systems say two- thirds of their part-time instructors have no desire to become full-time professors.
The adjuncts are retirees seeking to give back to the community, stay-at-home parents or professionals with full-time jobs, administrators say.
Adjuncts allow the community colleges to flow with the economy – hiring more instructors when enrollment is up and letting them go when classes don’t fill, said Cindy Hesse, the state community-college system’s director of human resources.
“We are a really efficient, effective shop,” Hesse said.
In most disciplines, community colleges must hire instructors with at least a master’s degree and 14 credit hours in the subject they will teach.
Sen. Ron Tupa, D-Boulder, tried to pass legislation this session that would have provided adjuncts with health benefits.
Instead, the legislature requested that colleges report next year on how many adjuncts they employ and how many also teach at other colleges.
“It’s shameful how little we pay them,” Tupa said.
Diana Hornick, an adjunct at the Community College of Denver and Arapahoe Community College, makes about $20,000 teaching six English and speech courses each semester.
While Hornick says she eventually wants a full-time position, she said, “I realize the competition is thick.”
Gibson, who was a tenured professor at Loretto Heights College in Denver until it closed, said he has applied for full-time faculty jobs “several hundred times” in the past 20 years.
“Now I’m a flunky part-timer,” he said. “The people who are caught in the system are individually powerless until society finally reorganizes its priorities and starts funding higher education as it should.”
Staff writer Jennifer Brown can be reached at 303-820-1593 or jenbrown@denverpost.com.
