Nearly one in three Princeton faculty members is untenured or not on track to become tenured, a number which ranks the University in the middle of the Ivy League, according to the "Contingent Faculty Index," a report published Monday by the American Association of Professors (AAUP).
At Princeton, 31.5 percent of the faculty — including part- and full-time faculty, graduate student employees and postdoctoral fellows — are outside the tenure system, compared to 54.6 percent nationwide.
Harvard, at 56.6 percent, has the highest percentage of faculty not in line for tenure in the Ivy League. The University of Pennsylvania, at the other end, has the lowest proportion at 16.1 percent.
Nationwide, colleges and universities are continuing to witness an increase in non-tenure-track professors — a trend which "endangers both teaching and research," the report said.
The authors of the report organized the tenure data, which all universities submitted to the U.S. Department of Education in 2005, to present the vast collection of statistics in a more useful and accessible manner.
"The objective of the report is to provide comparable data at the campus level, enabling faculty, students, administrators, governing board members and the general public to participate in local discussions about the impact of contingent faculty employment on the quality of higher education," the organization explained in a press release issued the same day.
The index included an article — along with the tables and appendices — that describes the negative academic implications of these increases in nontenured faculty. The new direction taken by American universities, according to the article, will significantly impact the quality of teaching that they will be able to offer.
"Maintaining an academic workforce where faculty are valued for their contributions in and out of the classroom, and then rewarded for those contributions with the security and freedom of tenure, is fundamental to the system [of higher education]," co-writers John W. Curtis and Monica F. Jacobe said in the article.
"Without such faculty, higher education cannot remain the vital institution it has become in American society."
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