Penn State Provost Nicholas P. Jones offered his Provost's Report during today's (Nov. 14) Board of Trustees meeting in Dean's Hall of The Penn Stater Conference Center Hotel on the University Park campus. Following is a transcript of his remarks:
At the last board meeting, I discussed the contributions of Penn State’s faculty, staff, students and alumni. Today, I’d like to focus on some key issues related to faculty – the heart of our University.
Faculty are teaching our 98,000 students, pursuing research grants, supervising student research, and undertaking service projects. They are responsible for the consistently strong academic rankings that draw students to our campuses.
A national conversation has been taking place for some time about tenure-track faculty and non-tenure track faculty. Across the country, faculty not on the tenure track, sometimes referred to as adjunct or contingent faculty, express concerns about their financial compensation, benefits, job security, professional development and opportunities for advancement.
If we look at national data through the late 1960s, fewer than 5 percent of new full-time faculty hires were outside the tenure system. Today, more than 50 percent of new full-time hires are non-tenure-line faculty.
So what happened along the way and what is the nature of this change for higher education and for Penn State?
If we look back 20 years at Penn State’s full-time faculty, we can see indications of the same trend that occurred nationally. In 1992, non-tenure track faculty made up 31 percent of our total faculty. By 2013, non-tenure track faculty had risen to 46 percent. The absolute number of tenure track faculty increased only slightly over this time period.
Before we go further, let me review for you the main types of faculty appointments that we use at Penn State. The first three categories are covered by employee benefits.
Standing appointments are full-time with no ending date specified. They are backed by permanent budgeted funds. Standing appointments include faculty who have earned tenure or are on the tenure track.
Fixed-term Multi-year appointments are full-time for a minimum of 36 weeks and a maximum of five years, and have an ending date specified, although they may be renewed. They are supported by permanent funding for the time period stated.
Fixed-term I appointments are full-time for at least six calendar months, but have an ending date specified. They are funded on a temporary basis, and may be renewed.
Fixed-term II: Full-time, but less than six calendar months, or part-time. They also have an ending date specified and may be renewed.
Other – Professor of Practice is one example. These are non-tenure track faculty with nontraditional academic backgrounds but with high-level leadership experiences outside the university.
We can also look at faculty appointment types in the context of student credit hours taught. The left axis (Figure 1) shows the number of student credit hours. The colors in the bars indicate the type of faculty appointment. Standing faculty, shown in blue, have taught slightly more student credit hours over the last 10 years, but a smaller percentage of the total. As the number of student credit hours has increased, most of the increase has been covered by faculty with Fixed-term I and Fixed-term Multi-year appointments, shown in red. Student credit hours taught by Fixed-term II and “Other” faculty have decreased since 2002.
As we’ve reported to the board previously, research expenditures rose significantly from 1992 to 2013, from $288 million to more than $800 million. Penn State has hired an increasing number of research faculty – not on the tenure track – who are essential contributors to our productive and growing research enterprise.
Student enrollments have also risen since 1992, and non-tenure track faculty are helping to teach these new students. Instructional faculty on non-tenure tracks typically have more extensive teaching responsibilities than standing faculty. Our use of part-time faculty has been actually been decreasing.
Penn State did not set out with a plan to increase the number of non-tenure track faculty. This change came incrementally by both strategic and tactical unit-level decisions that responded to a combination of market forces, budget constraints and processes, as well as more opportunities and success for Penn State in attracting students and research funding. Department heads, college deans, and campus chancellors have added non-tenure track faculty positions to teach increasing enrollments, particularly in lower-level and introductory courses and associated with our World Campus, during years of limited permanent budget growth and our ongoing efforts to keep tuition increases as low as possible. Similarly, research faculty members have been hired to support our vibrant research programs.
You hear frequently about the accomplishments of our standing faculty. Our non-tenure track faculty are also vital contributors to both the University’s research and the teaching enterprise, contributing substantially to our tripartite mission of research, teaching, and service. I’d like to share three brief examples of the key roles such faculty play for Penn State.
Karen Barr has been a non-tenure track faculty at Penn State Beaver since 2000. She teaches both face-to-face classes and online through the World Campus. Ms. Barr has received an Academic Advisor Award from the Student Government Association, two Excellence in Teaching Awards from her campus and the University-wide George W. Atherton Award for Excellence in Teaching. In addition to teaching and advising students, she develops curriculum and serves on academic committees.
Dr. Stephanie Lanza is a developmental methodologist and the scientific director of the Methodology Center in the College of Health and Human development. The Center develops and disseminates innovative statistical methodologies for prevention-related research. Dr. Lanza helps faculty, post docs, and students conceptualize and strategize on their research and grant funding proposals.
She has also played a significant leadership role in the College of Health and Human Development where she was a member of the Strategic Planning Council. She is an important part of the Health and Human Development community.
Dr. Ron Gilliland is a professor of practice in the Department of Astronomy and Astrophysics. Before joining Penn State, he was an astronomer at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, Maryland, which operates the Hubble Space Telescope.
We’re delighted to report that on Sunday he was named as a recipient of the $3 Million 2015 Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics as part of the High-Z Supernova Search Team. In 1998, this group found the first evidence for the existence of Dark Energy, the mysterious quantity that is causing the expansion of the Universe to accelerate. Dr. Gilliland is also a member of the Kepler satellite science team, which has discovered more than a thousand planets orbiting nearby stars.
Here is the University-wide chart that we looked at before (Figure 2), showing the trends in tenure track and non-tenure track appointments.
The Office of Planning and Institutional Assessment also compiles information about tenure track faculty, student credit hour production, and budget expense summaries over time for selected colleges and campuses. More detailed analysis shows that different units have responded in different ways to faculty hiring needs and opportunities, and those responses have led to different distributions among the different appointment types. These distributions evolve with time, and reflect the serious and deliberate commitment of our academic units to respond, in the context of external and internal constraints, to fulfilling our mission.
Penn State has a tripartite mission of teaching, research, and service and we have assembled highly qualified faculty to execute this mission. Some faculty members are cutting-edge teachers and researchers. Other faculty are purely research or purely instructional in their focus. We pay attention to the distributions among the different faculty types centrally, as do our deans and chancellors, in order to ensure that we are well positioned to fulfill our commitments in the most effective way possible. At any moment in time, the breakdown for a particular unit, or for the institution, may not be quite what we seek, but we are always focused on getting the balance right.
We are paying attention to the composition of our faculty, guided by our values and vision, and we’re working on this balance on multiple fronts. At Penn State, we value all members of our faculty, and their complementary contributions are what make us a quality university.
And now I’d be happy to take your questions as time allows.