Tenure and Teaching- Intensive Appointments

The majority of faculty members hold teaching-intensive positions, and over the past few decades the majority of teaching-intensive positions have been shunted outside of the tenure system and stripped of other responsibilities, says Tenure and Teaching-Intensive Appointments, a report issued by the AAUP’s Committee on Contingency and the Profession. The report, originally titled Conversion of Appointments to the Tenure Track, was issued in draft form in October 2009 and prompted almost two hundred comments. This final report has been revised in response to comments received on the draft.

The seismic shift from “teaching-intensive” faculty within the big tent of tenure to “teaching-only” faculty outside of it has had serious consequences for students as well as the faculty members themselves, producing lower levels of campus engagement across the board and a rising service burden for the shrinking core of tenured and tenure-track faculty members, the report concludes. It calls for stabilizing the faculty by converting contingent appointments back to the tenure track, and it includes examples of conversions and other forms of stabilization that have been put into place at different institutions. Read the report online or in volume 96 (2010) of the Bulletin of the American Association of University Professors.