Even with feedback from students previously enrolled in classes and websites like RateMyProfessors.com, it can be difficult to gauge the quality of a class before experiencing it firsthand. It can be even harder when many classes are taught by adjunct professors — professors who are not on track toward permanent positions at the university and whose reputations are unknown to the majority of students, as well as colleagues within their departments.
Adjunct professors proliferate in subjects such as sociology at Tufts as well as at universities all over the country. Over the last few decades, the rise in adjunct professors has paralleled a falling economy — it is more cost-efficient to hire a few part-time lecturers in the place of one full-time, tenure-track professor. According to The New York Times, only 27 percent of current college instructors are full-time professors, as opposed to 75 percent in 1960.
According to Department of Sociology Chair John Conklin, an adjunct professor would have to teach four classes per year to make even a third as much as an assistant professor would make.
"To get courses taught, it's cheaper for universities to hire adjuncts," Conklin said. "There's a lot of pressure from Congress to keep tuition down, but costs are increasing, for health care, to keep technology updated, and you're not able to charge students more. Universities nationwide feel it's a way for them to keep their costs down. I don't think anybody's out to shortchange students, but the pressure is very real."
"The problem is that adjuncts have to teach so many classes, the pay is terrible and there are no benefits," Caitlin Slodden, an adjunct teaching assistant at Tufts from the graduate sociology program at Brandeis, said.
Adjuncts don't get the benefits of full-time university staff unless they're teaching three courses per year, which, according to Conklin, most of them are not doing.
Even if the adjunct professors teach only one class per semester, however, they can offer students a wider range of topics.
"I think it's interesting to hire adjuncts because you have a certain flexibility," Alex Alejos, a sophomore majoring in sociology, said. "One of my professors was also a lawyer, and another was more of an activist. Sometimes you get really interesting people when you get them for short periods of time."
"Hiring adjuncts can definitely give a department that flexibility," Conklin said. "They can teach a course that no one else in the department is an expert in. The downside is that you can't do a national search for them. The positions pay so badly that you're not going to relocate to a new city to teach just one course."
While hiring adjuncts gives departments more flexibility, it also provides an environment that students looking for advisors find difficult to navigate.
"I've only taken three sociology classes, but two of them were taught by adjuncts, and I feel like the department is disconnected," Daphne Amir, a sophomore who recently switched her major to sociology, said. "It's understandable that if you're hiring people who come from totally different places that they're not going to know each other if they're not here a lot."
Alejos felt that inconsistency in the department contributes to inconsistency among students. For classes like "Introduction to Sociology," which has consistently had different professors, students might come out of these courses reflecting different emphases and different knowledge banks, depending on the semester.
"We're all having very different experiences — those who took it last year, this semester, fall of next year," Alejos said. "Will some people be better prepared when we meet in an upper-level class? Who knows."
"I don't think sociology is unusual as a department in our number of adjuncts," Conklin said. "If you compared us to English and the languages, there are probably more there than here. I know they hire a lot of lecturers to teach writing to freshman and introductory language courses. It's more mechanical; you don't necessarily need a tenured professor to teach those."
Conklin said Introduction to Sociology was a similarly mechanical class, if only because the incredible amount of subject matter to cover allows for very little in-depth analysis.
"If you start here in [a] basic language class, you're not going to be majoring in that subject, and if you're taking English 1, you're not going to be an English major," Alejos said, "but if you're taking Intro to Sociology, you might be building a foundation for a major."
Slodden noted that graduate students do not teach the introductory classes in many universities. "You want to put your best and brightest tenured professors in. It's a challenging thing to teach. It's almost like an upper-level seminar is easier for a burgeoning professor to teach because it's so focused; there are such tight parameters. Whereas for ‘Intro,' it's like, ‘Oh gosh, what isn't off-limits?'" Slodden said.
While hiring adjuncts has both its detriments and benefits, Tufts is consciously moving away from hiring new adjuncts and is instead focusing on building a steady permanent faculty.
"The university's aware and is trying to cut back," Conklin said. "Full-time people have been growing in Arts and Sciences. It's not a good life, from the adjunct's point of view, and Tufts has been consciously moving away from using adjuncts.
"Universities in some sense are businesses too," he said, "and we have to keep going."
