Tenured Professors Are The Fortunate Fifth

Well, at least at the college level, it looks like we won’t have tenure to kick around anymore. “The American Association of University Professors (AAUP) released some data snapshots last week, reporting (again) that 73 percent of instructional positions are non-tenure track (NTT),” Christopher Newfield writes on the academe blog maintained by the American Association of University Professors (AAUP). “In spite of the hundred or hundreds of applicants per tenure track job, academic work isn’t a great thing for most of the people doing it.”

“By that I mean that college teaching is mostly precarious and is a proverbial middle class job only for a minority. State legislatures and others regularly lament the inefficiencies of tenure, but it is mostly gone: fewer than 20 percent of post-secondary instructors actually have it. The public image of the privileged “college professor” lags decades behind the common reality.”

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