The University of Massachusetts Amherst (UMA), a public research university, has demonstrated a long-standing commitment to improving working conditions for non-tenure track faculty (NTTF) with a 20-year track record of progressive policies to improve the support for them. This commitment is manifested through a series of improvements in policies,…

An over-looked global educational development has been the exponential growth of "international schools." The field in 2014 involved almost 350,000 educators in over 7000 English-medium schools in non-English-speaking countries. This is expected to rise to half a million educators, mainly American and British, in 10,000 schools by 2022.…

In four decades of teaching college English, the author has watched many good teaching jobs morph into second-class ones. Worse, she has seen the memory and then the expectation of teaching jobs with decent status, security, and salary depart along with principles and collegiality. To help reverse this downward spiral, she contends that what is…

Among the many challenges facing college and university boards, one set of issues often is overlooked: those involving employment of non-tenure-track faculty members and the policies and practices shaping their work. There are a number of compelling reasons why boards not only should become knowledgeable about the relevant policies and practices,…

Recent media reports of teacher shortages across the country are confirmed by the analysis of several national datasets reported in this brief. Shortages are particularly severe in special education, mathematics, science, and bilingual/English learner education, and in locations with lower wages and poorer working conditions. Shortages are…

Several years ago, when his college first financed a writing program administrator (WPA) position--reassigned time and a budget to pay adjunct faculty stipends for program development--the author met with all the most senior adjunct faculty. "Without you," he told them, "this effort to build a better writing program won't work. Participation and…

The objectives of this article were to assess the relationship between burnout, health, job demands and job resources in a sample of educators. A cross-sectional survey design was used. Stratified random samples (N = 266) were taken of educators in an area of the North-West Province. The Maslach Burnout Inventory-General Survey, the Health…

One of the highest priorities of American Federation of Teachers (AFT) Higher Education over the past several years has been the shift away from a corps of full-time, tenure-track faculty to a contingent instructional workforce in American colleges and universities. This document focuses on one aspect of that shift: full-time faculty who are not…