Ivy Tech needs profs-WEB ONLY

That’s the message Ivy Tech Community College is taking throughout the state to try to find 300 to 400 professors to teach its rapidly expanding student body.

The school launched an online advertising campaign focused on the 75 cities and towns in which it operates. The $24,000 campaign calls for part-time adjunct professors in such areas as computer science, English, humanities, physical science and mathematics.

“We have a challenge finding adjunct faculty,” said Bill Morris, Ivy Tech’s vice president of administration. “We are trying to make sure that there is not a master’s degree holder in our local communities that doesn’t know of our need.”

That need has two reasons behind it.

First, workers rendered jobless by the recession have flooded Ivy Tech’s classes looking to get new skills for new careers. Enrollment topped 100,000 for the spring semester alone-a 19-percent jump over the same period last year.

Second, the recession has created a budget crisis for the Legislature as tax revenue has plunged. Ivy Tech officials are still waiting for lawmakers to approve a budget before they know how many new full-time professors they can hire.

The school even has weighed the possibility of capping enrollment, something it doesn’t want to do. The nation’s largest community college, Miami Dade in Florida, capped enrollment in May.

If Ivy Tech doesn’t get enough state funding to meet its surging enrollment, officials there have a national advertising campaign ready to go to hire professors from other states who could teach courses over the Internet.

Focus on adjuncts

Ivy Tech is focusing on hiring part-time professors because they are significantly cheaper. The trouble is, school leaders and their advisers have long said they need to increase their number of full-time faculty because it helps retain students.

Only half of Ivy Tech students stick around past their first year.

A 2006 study by the University of Texas called for Ivy Tech to boost the number of full-time professors to half the total faculty. But trends are still moving the other way.

Full-time professors receive an average salary of $45,000 for teaching five courses per semester. They also receive benefits worth more than $17,000.

Part-time adjunct professors receive $2,200 per course they teach, up to a maximum of six courses per semester. They can participate in benefits plans offered by Ivy Tech but do so entirely at their own expense.

Average pay for full-time professors at Ivy Tech is next to last among all Indiana colleges, according to a survey by the American Association of University Professors. Only the Fort Wayne campus of Taylor University pays less.

Ivy Tech has been turning to more adjunct faculty for many years. In 1996, 72 percent of its professors were part-time. Today, it’s 78 percent.

Over that same period, Ivy Tech’s student body and teaching corps have both doubled.

The same trend is occurring nationally. The percentage of professors not eligible for tenure at U.S. colleges and universities has spiked from 43 percent in the mid-1970s to 70 percent in 2005, according to the association of university professors.

Deborah Louis, a community college professor in North Carolina and a co-founder of The New Faculty Majority: The National Coalition for Adjunct and Contingent Equity, said schools would have no trouble attracting professors if they would boost either the number of full-time positions or the pay of adjunct professors.

“There is a big pool out there of super-qualified, super-interested folks who would jump at the chance to apply for a full-time position,” Louis said.

But Ivy Tech officials say the number of full-time positions they can hire is based on the amount of money the school gets from the state. Right now, that is $175 million a year, or about 40 percent of Ivy Tech’s total revenue.

“It’s a financial issue. We just don’t have the funds,” said Marnia Kennon, Ivy Tech’s vice provost for academic affairs.

Alphonso Atkins joined Ivy Tech at the beginning of the year as an adjunct professor. He juggled four communications courses while keeping his private law practice going.

“The life of an adjunct in many, many ways can be really tough. It can be demanding,” said Atkins, 37, as students filed in for his afternoon public speaking course. That’s particularly the case, he said, for people trying to make adjunct teaching their full-time career.

Even if such teachers taught the maximum six courses each of the three semesters-a workload Atkins said would be hard to handle-an adjunct professor would make less than $40,000 without employer-sponsored benefits.

But Atkins said Ivy Tech still has an attractive pitch to make with its ad campaign. That’s because most adjunct professors have other careers. Teaching for them is a way to give back-and make a few extra bucks on the side.

“There’s kind of an altruistic notion to being an adjunct professor,” Atkins said. “This can be rewarding.” •