The instructional staff at UW is increasingly based on non-tenured educators rather than professors on tenured track. This increase is part of a national trend to hire cheaper instructors on yearly contracts instead of more expensive faculty research members.
This year, UW added 54 percent more non-tenured instructional staff members, making the total number on non-tenured faculty just over 1,000. Take for example Choua Lee, who was hired to teach Hmong language courses several weeks before the 2007 fall semester began. Hiring Lee gave UW-Madison students a unique opportunity to take a course offered only at a larger university. Employing non-tenured professors offers opportunities to develop smaller programs - such as the Hmong language program - at UW-Madison. Less than 15 foreign languages can be majors, and thus the others do not attract tenured professors. The additional non-tenured faculty can offer more than 60 modern languages and an additional 27 ancient languages.
This is a double-edged sword, though. The problem is there is no guarantee non-tenured instructor's teaching abilities are consistent with tenured professors. While most appointments prefer prior teaching experience, it is doubtful the application pool is very large for some of the less commonly taught languages like Hmong, Tamil, Nepali or Bengali. Additionally, short-term commitments do not promote program-building, since the program might not be around the next year because of budget cuts or low enrollment. As evident in Lee's case, these jobs typically give short notice and offer no long-term job security.
At the same time, UW-Madison recently cut over 120 tenured faculty positions because of this increase in non-tenured instructors. In doing this, UW-Madison saved a minimum of $8 million. Although it saved a hefty amount of money, UW-Madison lost a sizable amount of faculty committed to doing research and improving the departments they were in.
As a large research university with consistently increasing enrollment, UW-Madison prides itself on offering courses taught by established research professors. To cut these professors in the name of a cheaper hire will hurt the university's reputation in the long run. While these non-tenured instructors allow for increased class diversity, they cannot become the sole faculty on this campus.
If UW-Madison wants to save money, this is not an appropriate means to do so, as a decrease in recognizable tenured professors will hurt the quality of classes offered and incoming enrollment.
