Examining how full-time and part-time faculty make sense of their professional experiences with, and relationships to, each other as faculty members at the same community college

• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/2047/D20328924

Higher education no longer consists of a traditional student body, a venue, a method of delivery and a single faculty population (Betts & Heaston, 2014). Colleges and universities increasingly depend on conditional, non-tenure track adjuncts who frequently lack resources, development and training (Smith, 2015, p. 236). Two-thirds of all college and university instructors in the United States are non-tenured or off-tenure track faculty, commonly referred to as contingent faculty (Gappa, 2000; Leslie & Gappa, 2002; Kezar & Sam, 2013). This increase corresponds with a decrease in full-time faculty positions at some higher education institutions. The 2006 American Association of University Professors (AAUP) Contingent Faculty Index reported that between 1995 to 2003, full-time, tenured faculty positions declined by more than 2000 (AAUP 2006). Although there is literature about adjunct populations (Lorenzetti, 2016) and adjunct onboarding (Shattuck, Dubins, & Zilberman, 2011), the experiences community college part-time and full-time faculty have as they teach on the same campus has been mostly ignored. Community colleges tend to use a large number of adjunct faculty with professional (as opposed to traditionally academic) backgrounds to train skilled, vocational workers for the professional environment (Milliron & Wilson, 2004). It is vital to include research on how faculty interact with one another, and how these interactions affect perceived individual roles on campus. Role Theory will be applied to this study in order to show that individual experiences contribute to individual satisfaction and the role that one assigns to him or herself as a colleague and educator.--Author's abstract