Book Review: Wallin, D. L. (Ed.). (2005). Adjunct Faculty in Community Colleges: An Academic Administrator's Guide to Recruiting, Supporting, and Retaining Great Teachers. Bolton, MA: Anker

Abstract

Wallin, D. L. (Ed.)- (2005). Adjunct in Community Colleges: An Academic Administrator's Guide to Recruiting, Supporting, and Retaining Great Teachers. Bolton, MA: Anker.DOI: 10.1177/0091552108324658Adjunct or faculty members are already a significant presence in community colleges, teaching at least third of courses and composing approximately two thirds of all faculty members. As enrollment expands and funding becomes more uncertain in coming years, these proportions are expected to increase. What perspectives, policies, and practices are needed to maximize institutional effectiveness as faculty members become more prominent in community colleges?Desna Wallin's edited book, Adjunct in Community Colleges: An Academic Administrator's Guide to Recruiting, Supporting, and Retaining Great Teachers, addresses this important topic in 13 chapters written by university researchers, community college presidents, academic administrators, and community college faculty members. The chapters are grouped in three parts: Understanding Part-Time Faculty (chapters 1 to 4), Recruiting and Retaining Part-Time Faculty (chapters 5 to 8), and Supporting Part-Time Through Technology (chapters 9 to 13). Each part offers valuable information about adjunct faculty members, but most chapters give inadequate attention to the practical role that inequitable compensation plays in recruiting, supporting, and retaining great community college teachers.In chapter 1, Wallin asserts that the cheap labor, specialized skills, and curricular flexibility that adjuncts provide are essential to institutional success. Observing that adjuncts do not receive the salary, benefits, or office space that full-time faculty members receive, she goes on to assert that effective professional development is needed lest they simply remain faculty of convenience, without any real say in their working conditions and disconnected from the community of learners (p. 7). This deficit perspective neglects the influences of those aspects of an institution's internal organizational features, such as structures, curricular configurations, budgetary and staffing issues, relating to course sizes and who does the teaching in introductory courses, [and] faculty recruiting and reward policies (Terenzini and Reason, 2005, p. 2) that play a part in faculty motivation and institutional effectiveness. The last half of this chapter describes several theories of adult motivation and learning to help administrators design effective professional development programs.In chapter 2, Duane Akroyd and Amy L. Caison offer an excellent overview of parttime and full-time community college faculty demographics, attitudes, and behaviors, largely drawing on analysis of data from the National Survey of Postsecondary Faculty. The authors describe the deep diversity of part-timers, noting, for example, that one half (49 percent) of faculty hold a full-time job in addition to their community college teaching responsibilities [and] . . . just over half (51 percent) prefer to teach part-time (pp. 16-17). This chapter is of the few that refers to innovative programs that compensate faculty appropriately and integrate them into their institution's culture in a meaningful and rewarding way (p. 37).Chapter 3, by Eduardo J. Marti, describes how administrators might determine the optimum size of the adjunct faculty corps, communicate clear expectations, and handle the unionized environment. Although informative, this chapter's top-down perspective casts part-timers more as resources to be manipulated rather than as members of an academic community. Kristel D. Phillips and Dale F. Campbell offer a more balanced view in chapter 4, discussing barriers to development of faculty members such as cost, logistics, and politics before describing a number of model programs currently operating in community colleges. …