It is a constant juggling act for Central Michigan University administrators to work out the way temporary and tenured faculty positions are financed.

According to data kept by Faculty Personnel Services, the number of regular faculty positions have fallen 4.6 percent over the last five years and the number of unfilled regular positions have increased 102 percent.

As the national recession continues, increases the number of temporaries is often the solution rather than decreasing regular faculty positions and the university's economic woes.

"Very candidly, the economy is not real good and we're struggling, just like all our competitor institutions are struggling, in terms of what positions are we able to fill, what positions do we most need to fill and how best do we go about doing it," said Bob Martin, associate vice provost of Faculty Personnel Services.

In January's presidential update, University President Michael Rao said that Provost Julia Wallace's consultation with CMU's deans had developed several ways to ensure regular faculty vacancies would be filled.

Deans under the update would write vacancy reports every year in June, providing a search process timeline for Wallace with a goal of hiring faculty for the subsequent academic year. The provost would approve search requests based on program reviews, priorities or needs within a college and simple budget principles.

In a November interview, Rao said this type of process would help him determine where regular positions are awarded.

"What we need to do more of is determine the pathway of what's happening to those positions," he said. "Right now, one of the ways I'm doing it is I'm awarding those positions with the provost, but I'm holding the money until they fill it. We didn't do that before."

Martin said he has been harping CMU college deans to begin searches early in the fall to identify potential candidates.

"I will tell you one thing I sense we've found ... where our faculty and our deans working together make their regular faculty opportunities known," he said. "We get out with our advertising and our promotion of opportunities in a timely way."

Adjunct advantages

Temporary faculty have also become a more instrumental part to CMU balancing its check book, said Dean of Students Bruce Roscoe, because they will teach more courses and help keep class sizes down under one-year contracts.

This large advantage, he said means they're much cheaper.

"The benefit of having the person being a temporary is we can cut our losses," Roscoe said. "If the market dries up and we don't need these folks, we're not locked into them for the next 30 years."

Gary Shapiro, dean of the College of Humanities and Social and Behavioral Sciences, said centered management at CMU's six academic factions shifts economically back and forth between temporaries and tenures.

"So if there's certain money allocated for regular faculty, and if the expenses are less because there are fewer regular faculty, we can spend that dollar on temporary faculty," he said.

Mark Freed, associate professor of English, Language and Literature, attests to the fact that temporary faculty offer CMU flexibility, but that administrators "cut corners" around the issue, and in the cases where temporaries stay longer than a contracted year, it is often because their qualifications are of a terminal degree.

"Do you want the reputation that your university (hires) faculty cheap?" he said. "It may be financially necessary, but it comes at a cost."

university@cm-life.com