To hire or not to hire
Jeff Moses
330 teachers. The split is about 1,000 adjuncts to 330 full-time faculty members according to James Mabry, vice president of academic affairs.
“Hiring a residential (full-time) faculty member is a multi-million dollar commitment,” said Mabry.
Hiring adjuncts is four times cheaper than hiring full time because adjuncts can’t teach as many classes, don’t receive benefits and don’t keep office hours, among other differences.
Adjuncts receive less than residential faculty because “adjunct is designed for part-time teachers,” said Mabry. Adjuncts are meant to subsidize the rest of their lives with other careers.
An advantage to having adjuncts is, “adjuncts bring specialized knowledge from their day jobs,” Mabry said.
But keeping a full-time job and being an adjunct staff member can be quite difficult sometimes admitted Paul Valach an adjunct at MCC.
“You have to teach the classes that are open,” said Valach, though MCC is flexible when working with adjuncts and their day jobs. Teaching nine credit hours a week and having another full-time job is still strenuous.
Valach feels he is able to connect with his students in the classroom and finds the time to spend extra hours on campus, but says not having an office can pose hindrances on the teacher-pupil relationship.
“Maricopa colleges are very generous when spending on both adjuncts and full-time teachers, and provide a tremendous amount of resources for adjunct development,” Mabry said.
He continued to say “most colleges give adjuncts nothing toward adjunct development, but MCC sends four adjuncts every summer to a master teacher conference.”
But Valach on the other hand claims adjuncts don’t get very much at all in the way of resources and development.
“Truth be told somebody comes up here right now and says Paul we need you, we want you, we want to hire you, you start Monday. Salary is $60,000 a year and you have to be there from 9 to 5.” Said Valach he went on “I’m in a hard spot because I’m committed to my students, but on the other hand somebody says ‘we’ll pay you a lot of money ‘so you know you leave and people have done that.”
“I think they’ve (MCC) probably lost a number of really great teachers, because people can’t afford to hang out for free as long as it sometimes takes,” Valach said.
He thinks there are two types of adjuncts, those who don’t care about the extra pay, they just teach to pass on the knowledge.
“The other is like myself, we want to teach, we want that full-time position,” said Valach, “so I think when you get hired as an adjunct there should be some kind of track (to residential status).”
Valach would like to see those adjuncts that wish to be full-time able to be more, “immersed into the aspects of full-time teaching, you are invited to sit on committees, which we are not often invited if at all.” He would also like to see adjuncts who wish to be full-time be “much more a part of department meetings and decisions, and start to get involved in course development.”
“You’d kind of be allowed into the circle as opposed to sometimes all the adjuncts feel like we are left out of it,” he stated.
But even if MCC adopted an adjunct track, adjuncts getting full-time jobs still wouldn’t be guaranteed.
“Our general philosophy is to conduct a full national search to fill any full-time teaching position,” said Mabry. So adjuncts compete not only with each other for full-time jobs but also with field professionals and anyone else searching for a job.
“It’s a matter of finance,” Mabry said. 10 years ago the state provided 25 percent of MCC funding, but now, only 1 percent.
“We take the resources that we have and use them as efficiently as possible to make the best education for our students,” said Mabry.
Having been a former adjunct at Duchess County Community College in New York, Mabry said “adjuncting is the place for people who love to teach.”
