Adjunct professors are part-time, contract-based teachers who meet educational requirements. Universities hire them for flexibility and cost-effectiveness. Adjuncts lack tenure and benefits, but can leave after a term. Universities benefit from expanded course offerings and easy dismissal.
An adjunct professor is a part-time professor who is hired on a contractual basis rather than being given a permanent role and position. Many universities hire large numbers of adjunct faculty members because they are flexible and less expensive to maintain than traditional full-time faculty members. Just like regular lecturers, adjunct professors have to meet basic educational requirements before they can teach, and many of them are highly educated and talented people. The use of adjunct professor positions has grown at many universities in response to dwindling funding, forcing these schools to make sometimes difficult choices. If the choice is between hiring adjunct professors or closing a program, many schools consider it better to hire adjunct professors.
Benefits for schools
For a university, there are many advantages to hiring adjunct professors. They are considered temporary, so a university might hire part-time for a single semester to expand its course offerings or to meet student demand for a program that does not have a large enough staff. An adjunct professor has no tenure or other rights, so even a university can easily get rid of one who doesn’t perform up to the university’s standards: all the school has to do is refuse to renew the adjunct professor’s contract .
Besides being essentially available in the eyes of many educational institutions, adjunct faculty members are also much less expensive to hire. They are not eligible for benefits such as health care and retirement plans and are not usually given assignments. Adjunct professors who have office space typically have to share space with other faculty members. Most are paid by the course unit and their teaching load varies from part-time to overworked.
Benefits for Professors
From an adjunct professor’s point of view, there are some disadvantages to this type of work, such as lack of job security, but there are some advantages as well. The same flexibility that makes it easy for a university to get rid of unwanted professors allows adjunct professors to leave after one term if offered a better job. They also have no administrative duties, which means they don’t need to attend faculty meetings and similar events, and most of them aren’t required to research or post work unless they’re interested in looking for a job at full time. Some people actually prefer to work as adjunct faculty members because they enjoy teaching but dislike the duties associated with full-time tenure and responsibilities.
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