Abstract
The faculties of many colleges and universities in the United States are comprised of rising numbers of instructional contingent faculty who are ineligible for tenure. Although these positions generally do not require scholarly or service activities because their primary focus is teaching, the extent to which these faculty members still choose to perform like tenure-line faculty, with at least some kind of balance of teaching, research, and service, is understudied. The current study attempted to address this omission in the literature by collecting data from contingent faculty members at a public flagship university (N = 176) about their engagement with scholarly and service activities. A majority of the respondents (63.1%) had engaged in at least one scholarly activity and in at least one service activity (69.9%). This study adds to our understanding of the lived experiences of contingent faculty and concludes that a majority of these faculty members are, at least in part, building an academic identity based off of traditional expectations and activities for tenure-line faculty.
Recommended Citation
Wilson, Sarah Bartlett and Smith, C. Veronica
(2021)
"Contingent Faculty Performing Scholarship and Service: Examining Academic Labor and Identity at a Public Flagship University,"
Academic Labor: Research and Artistry: Vol. 5, Article 10.
Available at:
https://digitalcommons.humboldt.edu/alra/vol5/iss1/10
Publication-Ready Author Bio
Sarah Bartlett Wilson (she/her/hers) is an Associate Professor of English (NTT) at Northern Virginia Community College (Alexandria) and was an Instructor of Rhetoric and Composition at the University of Mississippi from 2015 to 2019. She previously taught as an instructional staff member at Trinity Washington University and as an adjunct at Georgetown University, the Catholic University of America, Milligan College, and East Tennessee State University. She teaches first-year composition as well as basic writing and advanced research writing. In addition to contingent labor issues in higher education, her research interests include composition pedagogies, multimodality, critical reading, and research ethics.
C. Veronica Smith (she/her/hers) is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Psychology at the University of Mississippi. Prior to her current tenure-track appointment, she was a contingent faculty member and held the rank of Instructional Associate Professor. She had previously worked as contingent faculty at the University of Delaware, Rowan University, and Drexel University. She is a social psychologist whose research falls into three main areas: (a) The role of the self and motivation in people’s close relationships, including friendships and romantic and sexual relationships, frequently through the lens of Self-Determination Theory, (b) situational and individual/personality determinants of perceptions of daily experiences, including social interactions and sexual interactions, and (c) the influence of sex, gender, and sexism on social perception and interaction.