NLC Community Converastion with Prof Adrianna Kezar, Engaging Adjunct and Contingent Faculty in High Impact Professional Learning

NLC Community Converastion with Prof Adrianna Kezar, Engaging Adjunct and Contingent Faculty in High Impact Professional Learning: Video automatically transcribed by Sonix

NLC Community Converastion with Prof Adrianna Kezar, Engaging Adjunct and Contingent Faculty in High Impact Professional Learning: this mp4 video file was automatically transcribed by Sonix with the best speech-to-text algorithms. This transcript may contain errors.

Adrianna Kezar:
Racialized minority students particularly lean on and feel that the relationship with faculty is important to their success. And so as we've moved increasingly towards adjunct and non-tenure track faculty and they teach the majority of the introductory courses at community college, including the remedial courses. So a lot of times all of these students, as they transition in, the first experiences they have, are with our faculty that we give the least support to and we give the least professional development to. And that's just really been a concern and worry of mine over the years. Both how important this issue is, but also the lack of attention it was getting. We have so much good work going on as it relates to student success, but this just seemed to be a gap in our work and our understanding. And so you know, I am excited to have a space and other people who are who care about this issue and are trying to raise up the higher education's role in supporting all faculty and their professional development. And as it relates, you know, it is the faculty and the staff that, you know, create the conditions for students to be successful or not.

Randy Bass:
Thank you. You talk in the video about a number of very specific strategies, which I'm sure will tease out as the conversation gets rolling and people put things in the chat, we can start talking about particular challenges. And I wondered also, you know, one of the things that you've worked on and a lot of the bases that you tease out in the video is your work on The Delphi Awards, which is recognizing best practices on campuses who are doing work with adjunct contingent faculty. One of the things I was wondering is if you could maybe characterize this. Obviously, there's some very specific strategies. You can share some of those initiatives will come out. You talk about those in the video, but is there also a mindset or kind of stance or an ethos that those campuses who have been awarded The Delphi Awards for working that they bring to that work, that maybe even prior to specific strategies, there's kind of a mindset about non-tenure track faculty?

Adrianna Kezar:
Yeah, that's, I think, a really great question. I think, you know, and some I would say, I'm hopeful that maybe we'll have more of an overall campus ethos that evolves over time. I would say that something that's common for these campuses is they actually had a group of really activist and on tenure track faculty members who they themselves saw how not addressing this issue on campus was affecting students success, was affecting their ability to be professionals at the level they wanted to. And I will say I'm hopeful for the day where I see this more amongst an institutional ethos. But it often, even among the more award winners of The Delphi Project, we're seeing a lot of this activity coming from the ground up versus institutional leadership embracing the need for this. And I'm really hopeful that maybe some of you who are on this call will be spearheading more of that work. But it is often, you know, a groundswell of some of these activist faculty who then help the campus leadership, help people across the campus to appreciate what is missing and the kinds of support that need to happen. And and then you start to see some of the campus stakeholders develop a more of an empathy for and try to relate and understand the experiences. And I think that that is really an important beginning to this work. Like, unless you really understand the experience of being in any of these roles, it's hard to develop the kind of professional development or policies or practices that are going to be supportive, because we have a lot of misguided assumptions, not only even, you know, sometimes if we've been, you know, and, you know, maybe an adjunct, there are so many different experiences of being in a non-tenured faculty role.

Adrianna Kezar:
So even maybe a person who's familiar at one level really can't understand fully the breadth of experiences so that the activist groups that come together that represent the different perspectives of different adjunct and non-tenure track faculty members in different disciplines, how they're deployed differently was really like this collective experience, appreciation, and empathy that then that mindset did eventually, you know, rest across different members of the institution and there and they're planning teams. And, you know, so I think however it comes, though, I'm saying that it tends to come from the bottom up right now at developing that kind of understanding of the experiences. Some of the barriers is really, really important before we can create, you know, the kind of professional development that's going to be not only meaningful, but also effective. And I would say on both, because a lot of times people who create meaningful professional development, but it's offered at times and the modalities in ways that aren't accessible or they may do something that's successful but not really meaningful in terms of understanding what kinds of needs I have as an adjunct. Some of the just in time learning and then others who are more advanced, who want community and other kinds of things. So unless you can do both, you won't be effective at these. We both meaningful and sort of accessible and effectively develop.

Randy Bass:
Thinks that that's incredibly useful way to think about it. And I see that we already have one question in the chat, which we'll get to, and thank Mary Deane for breaking the ice there so people feel free to continue to put a question or two in the chat and we'll look forward. So please feel free. And let me just ask you one more question and then we'll turn to the chat questions. So when one has made this shift, the mindset, but that being both about meaningful and accessible, which to me is really part a combination of so many things. It also helps them to have a couple pragmatic things that sort of, you know, kind of give you give traction to that mindset. Can you just name a one or two? I know there are many practices and alignments that you found during The Delphi Awards, but one or two particularly effective, pragmatic ways that were concrete kinds of things that are simple, but they're concrete that campuses have done to try to turn that mindset into sort of ongoing cultural practices?

Adrianna Kezar:
Yeah. So I think that... It's an interesting question of taking that mindset and making it an ongoing practice, because I think I do see less of that. Then again, I would also hope, because I think what happens is potentially, you know, a task force, a group gets created that builds upon and includes several non-tenured faculty members to create maybe, you know, a new professional development program like a new it could be also, you know, other changes in policy and practice. So they're sort of oriented towards that that point in time where there's an activity usually on many campuses, they'll do some kind of assessment. They'll realize they're lacking in certain areas like we don't have we don't have a really good orientation. Right. So they'll come up with these areas of need around professional development or other areas, assemble a group to sort of you know, and again, the best ones include the thoughtful feedback from a lot of tenure track faculty. But then I you know that, you know, then it often seems off like once the once something's up and going. So the ways that you might think about ongoing advisory boards to kind of tweak and do ongoing evaluation, I've seen some of that and that can be really, really helpful. The other honestly, in my work, that is the key and most important, important element to making this a part of the overall campus is to include in a critical mass faculty or off the tenure track in governance, because it's the only way to create that mindset, as you're saying, as more part of the culture, because as long we're just too easy to lapse into our traditional ways in assumptions about thinking and planning that tend to tend to orient to the ways we think about tenure track faculty just so easy because people have been in the roles for many years and that's often how they think about doing things.

Adrianna Kezar:
So, you know, every kind of campus I've been into, every study I've done, I'm like really meaningfully getting the mindset then across the campus means how do you even if you're doing work that's mostly in professional development, how do you think about being an advocate for getting non-tenure track faculty voices more broadly into your shared governance processes? That's going to down the line ensure that the campus is making the kinds of shifts in culture and honestly creating the kinds of policies and practices that support faculty to be involved in the very professional development you might be creating. Because I've seen too many campuses where they created this. Again, I mentioned this in the video. This. Wonderful professional development, but then something that's happening on campus, you know, policy and one of the classic one is always like non-tenured faculty members can't get teaching awards. So it's like a disincentive to be involved, you know, like the exclusion. And we have all sorts of things like this where the broader campus isn't supporting. So if faculty members off the tenure track or involved the governance, they tend to point out these things. Hey, hey, hey, you know, like this you have this policy, you're doing this practice. This is really not supporting us in our work. And it's you can be advocates when you see things like that for getting them change. But it's also more likely that the tenure track faculty themselves are going to be because they're experiencing these things, they're going to know and be able to raise that issue. But any ways that you can fit that into the government system is also really critical.

Randy Bass:
That's right, yeah, that sounds incredibly important, and you're right that that's the that's the best insurance of the kind of sustained attention is to build that deep into the fabric. Thank you. Also, let's add that that I think connects very well to Mary Deane's question. And if Mary Deane wants to elaborate a bit us, can you speak to the role of department chairs or tenured senior colleagues in making a difference in these kinds of practices?

Adrianna Kezar:
That's a great question. So I have found in my studies that department chairs like the life of, you know, a typical adjunct or even a lecture is mostly lived at the department. That's their connection, the primary home and. In their sphere, it's sort of the department chair creates the culture for them, the environment, and either they're enabled for success or not. And so the ways that we can institutionally be working with department chairs to have them both understand what influence they have, I don't I don't think they understand the influence they have over the lives of these individuals. And depending on the campus, there are so many different models or department chairs, they can rotate in and out very rapidly. So they don't even you know, oftentimes, you know, in terms of the things they see and prioritize, this often falls to a lower sphere because they orient towards, again, their own experience and background being tenured tenure track. So they think about, oh, I've got to help, you know, getting the faculty, you know, the junior faculty tenured and the other faculty promoted. And they've got their set of priorities often oriented around their experience versus raising up thinking, oh, you know, have I, you know, as a department chair created the kind of environment that's going to make, you know, lecturers and adjuncts in my department successful that's usually not raised up and in their portfolio of activities. And I really think, you know, campuses need to think about training department chairs on the things they can be doing and should be doing to support adjuncts and lecturers and to get them to be, you know, meaningfully a part of the department, the kind of support they need.

David Tegeder:
They're often not trained on or familiar with any of these issues. And because, you know, sometimes the constant rotation work that happens then stops under the next department chair, you know, depending on what those rotations are like, and it's it's often harder for department chairs because they don't they don't physically see. Right. The adjuncts as often they they may see the lecturers, but just the you know, the time it takes. If departments have a lot more of them, there's just there's just less relationships and familiarity. So unless they're really introduced to what the value would be of developing relationships with these faculty members, understanding their needs, it's just likely, in my experience, in my research, not to happen. So the department chair is an incredibly, incredibly pivotal link as far as tenure track faculty members go. It's you know, it's really critical for those teaching similar classes I've seen, you know. Practices where, you know, it could be sometime it's a tenure track, an a non-tenure track get assigned is like a course lead or the tenure track faculty member who's, of course, lead on something, develops a relationship and sees it as kind of a role to mentor faculty off the tenure track or teaching similar courses, for example, have similar interest areas that can be really valuable ways to help support them professionally.

David Tegeder:
We we have very we have again, unless there participate in governance, there's very little ways often for a tenure track faculty members to interact with outside of a course lead type of role adjuncts, not tenure track faculty members. And so I've found that. Those off the tenure track really rely, that's why they rely on somebody like the department chair, it's like seems like one of they're one only hook, you know, like and they just feel like so afloat often from others that the more that we can think about roles among some of the tenure track for at least like larger class of segments, you know, like a biology 100 or an English comp, you know, like those where you have a lot of adjuncts that are teaching in them. And then they have some contact among the tenure track that's kind of looking out for them and supporting their work. Those can those can be great ways to kind of foster their professional development. But both of these groups, again, if they see their role, what I'm also trying to underscore is often they don't see their role. And I think that's underlying your question, Mary Deane, is like what we can do institutionally to really educate and make this a part of the responsibilities of many people who largely don't haven't seen this as a part of what they do, as a part of being either, you know, as being a part of an academic and a department. So I appreciate that question.

Randy Bass:
Terrific. Well, in that that I think really does, you know, kind of is very good reason to not actually all starts to get into the question that Brett posed in the chat, which was this question of community. And so you alluded to one version of that community between tenure track and contingent. Are there other ways of building structures or support of professional communities for part-time faculty that you've seen maybe out of the Delphi Award winners or other examples?

Adrianna Kezar:
Yeah, and I'm involved right now in a project. I think I mentioned this study on campuses that have created faculty learning communities that either are just for non-tenure track faculty adjuncts or include both tenure track faculty and adjuncts and lecturers. So and looking at that issue of does this provide the kind of community that I often hear is missing in in their lives? And yes, they really appreciate faculty learning communities as a way to connect with colleagues again under similar interests, like a pedagogical interest, like, you know, whether it's like culturally responsive teaching something that they care about related to their teaching practice or whether it's around, you know, subject matter and teaching. So there's a lot of I'm looking at a lot of these there STEM, so science, technology, engineering, mathematics, specific kinds of learning communities around. Let's make, you know, introductory calculus, you know, a better course that students succeed in. Right. And, you know, just even taking on that challenge and talking about it across different, you know, whether you're an adjunct, a lecturer or a tenure track faculty member, that really provides a sense of community about your role in student success. And I think what you know, what I am looking at in here is the balance, though, of community, given their roles. Right. And particularly for adjuncts like what? How much time can they spend being a part of a faculty learning community? That's pretty hard for them to do. So I was studying the kinds of modifications that they make in terms of timing, you know, deliverables like a lot of the, you know, faculty learning committees require a project deliverable at the end, which the amount of time that an agent can put in to do something like that is pretty limited.

Adrianna Kezar:
Whether they have the kind of sometimes two-hour blocks to devote that might be a part of a traditional faculty learning community or whether they can get to campus. So like the ways that these campuses made changes so that, you know, that the participation could be possible. So they desired the community. Yet they felt, you know, they don't have as much time as a traditional tenure track faculty member to contribute to such community building. And they also like these spaces as like it started talking about like, say, culturally responsive teachers teaching, but they loved, if it could expand to also just talk about other things. So I think as opposed to tenure track faculty members who are really coming just for that content, because this is their only spot for community, like they wanted to talk about other things, even beyond what was the focus of the program, because, you know, they don't ever often interact with any other faculty. So this would be the spot they could just talk about, like, does anybody know how to get the interlibrary loan something? They're just like questions like challenges they've run into. And so this faculty learning community where that wasn't the purpose suddenly served a bunch of other purposes. So that mode was really helpful.

Adrianna Kezar:
But there were other ways they did them that were less high touch. Like, you know, Kennesaw State brings together of regionally all of the adjuncts to come together and to have a day where they have they professionally, you know, get together, talk about their teaching and talk about their scholarship. And it's a chance for them once a year to meet with other people on their campus, other people outside. So sometimes it doesn't have to be an ongoing or intensive thing. It can be like once a semester, once a year or, you know, a lot of campuses offer like an academy. So it's on a time like, you know, like it's a one day kind of academy. But they can then meet a bunch of other people who are teaching. And that's, you know, the only kind of time they might build to allocate to community building is that one time. But they leave maybe meeting two or three people that they now could, you know, have as a part of a network, you know, and they often at times have no network. So that kind of those different ways that professional development can be used like. Low touch networking, you know, like to get them to meet people or higher touch like these learning communities to really kind of both develop and feel like a professional with others. So, you know, there's like a range of amazing things that are starting to go on that you can really contribute towards.

Randy Bass:
So that I think, again, that kind of a leitmotif of the conversation is it really has to be fitted to the lives that adjunct faculty contingent faculty are leading. And that, I think, speaks very much to a Liane's question, Leon, from Central State. I'm was going to read it a little bit more complicated. The questions are not getting long enough that I'm going to read them verbatim. And that's that's a good sign. Liliana's if a needs assessment survey is sent to non-tenured track and adjunct faculty, that in your opinion, what types of questions should we be asking and those needs assessments to capture the best type of vital feedback relevant to their professional learning?

Adrianna Kezar:
That's a great question. So I would say, if you can, to start with a focus group before you go to the needs assessment. So the campuses that I've spoken with who are doing a really good job, did you know, like they said? Well, we weren't sure exactly what we would put on the needs assessment. So we we thought we should sit down and talk with some adjuncts first and really understand their needs. Before we tried to pilot out a survey that would go to a lot more people and we weren't sure we were asking the right questions, because once you've asked the wrong questions, you're kind of you're lost of getting the feedback you need. So they really suggested, you know, hey, bring in just even if you can talk to, you know, five to 10, you know, adjunct lecturers, that kind of or at least slightly representative different groups, different departments. And then and if you even have a draft of some of the survey questions that you can get their feedback on what they think about those. What would they ask? I would go to them with like a draft where you sort of are piloting that with them getting their live feedback, and then that will help you to make sure that you are asking all the right questions that get at your needs. And it's going to differ by campus. That's the other reason. I mean, we do have I've collected some needs assessments from some campuses and POD, I know has their adjunct group has some needs assessments that you all could get get hold of. But even even if you get a template, it's really important to think about the specific kind of needs on your campus. And that's why a focus group can be really helpful.

Randy Bass:
Terrific. Thank you. It's great advice, Amy has a question about innovation, fatigue and asks if you can speak to the problem of innovation, fatigue or unrealistic innovation expectations and creating professional development programs. Some feedback we get will occasionally see something like, I've heard all this before, but it's unlikely, even impossible, for an event to consist of entirely new content or concepts. What's the balance here between topics and subjects that deserve to be discussed more than once and the desire of some participants to always be getting something new?

Adrianna Kezar:
So one of the things I talked about with campuses, they was this idea and they were telling you about this feedback that they had not maybe the repetition issue, but sort of the desire for like a next level. And so one of the things that I've seen in terms of kind of better practices maybe is like making sure you have the kind of introductory onboarding kind of level of materials, but then then that there's like a medium track. So you've been around for a while and you're interested in new topics and then like, you know, an advanced track for those who, you know, hit your professional development a couple of times. And even I think that one of the things that the, you know, the non-tenure track faculty expressed to me is everybody thinks or at least they feel like everybody is reaching out to them like they're the newcomer. And there's someone we're saying, well, I've been around for 20 years. I need to go to the events. But I keep getting the stuff about the, you know, the intro material. And so just not making assumptions about where you're non tenure track faculty members are at and making sure they're included in some of those farther along, more advanced kinds of materials that doesn't address... That was the sort of like how do you make sure things are new and fresh for people? But then there was a question about the innovation fatigue, which I sense is something slightly different in the question about just sometimes faculty members are like, you know, I'm being asked to like, you know, do student learning outcomes.

Adrianna Kezar:
And then I'm being asked to do culture-responsive teaching. And then I'm being asked to, you know, upgrade for my disciplines like do like my disciplinary society came out with a new set of sort of like content objectives. And, you know, so they're just kind of going on and on of like different forces, different pressures to make all these changes. And I wrote this article years ago for Change magazine, basically saying how are we are experiencing innovation fatigue because there are so many things being asked of higher ed. And I try to look at and put in buckets like similar kind of like initiatives and say which of them shared similar characteristics so they don't all look like different things. And to say, OK, you're being asked to do these 10 things, actually you could bucket these into only four things are asking you a lot of the same skill sets, but it all seems to do because it all has a different label, a different umbrella. And it's like I was really suggesting that campuses try to like. Connect and scale back things and put them under bigger umbrella buckets, verses like everything is a new initiative.

Randy Bass:
That's great, that's a great suggestion, and on your first point, I was thinking, boy, if we only had a model of a system by which we calibrated learning to people's skill levels, oh, it's called the curriculum. Oh, I'm wondering just to rip off of that really quickly, what have you seen in terms of the during the pandemic and kind of thinking post pandemic? What was the impact? I mean, you must have had to answer this question a couple of different ways, sort of the impact of the pandemic on non-tenured faculty?

Adrianna Kezar:
Well, so this is this is the kind of a rough time, right, so we as an enterprise, I don't know if I was aware of this let go of half a million largely adjunct employees who, unfortunately, given the way a lot of them were let go, weren't weren't able to get unemployment. And this is one of the things that I always ask campuses to try to consider is the ways that they file, don't file, can impact whether adjuncts get unemployment, have access to any kind of health care, or do they even some institutions do offer like like some form of a COBRA (health insurance) for their adjunct so they can at least buy into. But, you know, there is a lot of. Pain amongst the aging populations across the country because of, you know, the severe financial hardships, the fear around not having health care during that time period and those who remained employed, particularly lecturers who had more ongoing appointments. Still felt, you know, an incredible burden, because I think you saw faculty members, you know, on some campuses largely tenure track, saying things like I'm I'm not going back at person, but like I think there was a lot more pressure amongst those who don't have tenure to not be able to advocate for themselves in what was a really troubling time. So I think we have a lot of. Honestly beat up people, people who feel that a lot of pain, Gael's got her hand up

Michele Campagna:
Because I have a question about that. Also post pandemic, you see the role of faculty changing as more classes have been offered online. There's more like commodity sizing and higher education. If you take by one on one, does it matter if you're taking it at UCLA or it was just too hot? How do you see that impacting faculty and then.

Adrianna Kezar:
Well, yeah. I mean, so, you know, I think it's really this may go beyond what I can predict, but I will I will say that, you know. Right. So students, it's going to be a mix. I think there are, you know, a great deal of our traditional institutions where students want to go back to being residential. There's a there was a lot of resistance against students, didn't like being online. A lot of students. OK, but then we have students who weren't residential. Right. So when you think outside of our residential students, they seem to want to come back. They seem to want things to be back to normal in our non-residential sort of environments where campuses that were largely or only commuter based will will this like, you know, and we already had swirling, by the way, like we're students, even when they are residential colleges, we're still taking classes online over at X, Y, Z Institution. That was becoming really normative for a variety of reasons, sometimes because they couldn't get a class at their institution or, you know what, whatever the various reasons or they wanted to, you know, get additional units. I think that, you know, that it may we may see a push that, quote-unquote, commuter students want to just become online students because, like, why did I want to bother to drive when, you know, am I getting that much of a different experience, you know, for that? Because I'm looking for convenience. And so down the line, that may push a difference and then push the faculty to have to have more on online offerings.

David Tegeder:
And we now have faculty that are largely more adept at doing that kind of oil. They've been. They're getting more adept, right? I mean, they had to a lot of faculty had to to try to create engaging environments. I mean, I know faculty that were always very resistant to technology who like, you know, they had to make it work. So they they were very innovative in ways that I think a lot of people didn't expect. So. That's the best I can for now. I mean, the pandemic, I think, is beyond what it's done to adults in terms of the kind of the sort of pain that they're feeling. The I think for faculty writ large, though, we had the one I'll call it silver lining that I saw was that faculty in general perceived that professional development was something that they. Needed, wanted and got much more familiar with, so I think if we have a silver lining, it's the now sense of yeah, you know, like I you know, I should seek out professional development more often. I think there were a lot of faculty. I mean, I know every you know, every campus that I talked to, they offered more faculty when they had the highest levels of professional development going on. So that could be a silver lining in terms of and for everybody. Right. It was the first time that a lot of campuses offered professional development for their lecturers and adjuncts at at Mass. So those could be things we could build on.

Randy Bass:
Let me go slightly different direction that Gail had asked a while ago, kind of gets the heart of faculty culture. So if you could just solve this problem for the last couple of centuries, this next answer, that would be terrific. Gail asked, and of course, you can chime in and elaborate this this is in my experience, has often been two classes of faculty tenured who do not want adjuncts to have too much of a voice because of the others who were who do. And they feel that it jeopardizes the role of tenure or diminishes their role. There's a lot of anxiety sometimes about departmental governance. I know. I see that at my institution a lot. How do we overcome this or how have you seen campuses negotiating this?

Adrianna Kezar:
Yeah, I think that a couple of things are are helpful, I think, in making the linkages between what I started with is if you have participation of all of your faculty in governance, you will be able to create a better teaching and learning environment. You will have better student success in the ways that this links into a much broader objective usually starts to convince faculty members about, OK, so there's a there's a burning big underlying reason to do this and it moves it out of the even though it is about political power. Right. I mean, but it moves it out of the purely political power space into some of the objectives around governance that people can have more of a shared vision around and move it out of the realm of the political power question, which is whoever has voice can then, you know, creates the environment more. And I'm not sure, you know, there's always this fear. I sat on all these committees before us. We had expanded to let you know, adjuncts and not tenure track faculty members into governance. And it was very I mean, I'll be honest, paternalistic, like feeling like I'm protecting them. They like I have all this knowledge because tenure gives me all this knowledge they don't have. And I'm trying to do this for their well-being, to its fault. They're vulnerable and see if they're involved. It's really going to hurt them. So there's this there's this sort of feeling. And so and so you have to sort of. You know, in a delicate way, help people to see the ways that that perspective, right? It's like, you know, yes, there is a vulnerability, but there are ways we can protect people in our handbooks and in moving towards I was advocate for, you know, longer term contracts when you can to get around these issues. But so there are ways that you can try to help but understand that even while are those vulnerabilities there, but the outcomes of including outweigh those risks is usually what I've advocated for.

Randy Bass:
On that point, one thing I've been thinking about this whole conversation, one of the things we, of course, emphasized throughout all these institutes is evidence based practices, evidence based pedagogies and evidence based professional learning practices. Is there an evidence base specifically related to adjunct and contingent faculty related to something came up in one of our cohorts last week about retention of faculty, that it actually saves money by retaining your best adjuncts, if you can demonstrate what professional learning does, retain them or impact on large numbers of first year students and student retention to second year. I'm just what is what is the evidence base or are there a couple of things you can point us to around that?

Adrianna Kezar:
So that's one of the main. You know, if you will, objectives of The Delphi Project, the changing faculty student success was to correct sorry, collected the evidence base as it relates to what do we know about the impact of, you know, students relying on on tenure track faculty members that don't have the support of working conditions? What has that impact? The learning environment, student outcome. So we you know, we collected things like that. We've also collected data on what are the detrimental policies and practices on campuses that most affect the ability of adjuncts and non-tenured track faculty members to teach in effective way. So like, what is the evidence about the negative practices? We've collected some information about costs. So there's a document called Dispelling the Myth that looks at both kind of aggregated return on investment, but also the actual cost. And like, how do you pay for if you're going to support more faculty, how do you do that? So because so many campuses wouldn't get off the starting block because of the resource question, I tried to collect some of the data that we have about that issue. The Delta cost project also has and AIR did a follow up study.

Adrianna Kezar:
This is looking more largely at do cost savings of hiring adjuncts. Actually, where does that go to? And it and it doesn't go to instruction, by the way of it. You know, we're not like saving money. We're not like lowering tuition because we're hiring objects and things like that. So sometimes there's been studies that look at the actual economics of this model. And because there's been an argument that it's like out of economic like we have to have it because it's the only viable option, which is not true if you look at the economic studies. So we try to collect all of all of that to guide, to help guide the actions of campuses and to be evidence based so that that is one of the primary objective. So you can look there and get a lot of different summary. And what we've done is try to collect this so that you can pass out to colleagues who are saying. What should we be doing so that you can base campus practices off of evidence based on research?

Randy Bass:
Perfect and I just uploaded, as people may have noticed, but I dropped The Delphi Project link into the chat and there's all kinds of resources there because you guys have been really self-contained, very conscientious from the very beginning of the project in collecting case studies, collected resources, materials and distributing those. So it's very, very wonderful saying there's only one other question that I see in the chat, but others are invited to chime in with their last few minutes. We are getting up to the top of the hour. Oh, oh, got it. Got it. OK, sorry, I was looking only in the chat...

Randy Bass:
Yeah, go ahead, David.

David Tegeder:
Adrianna, you just, what you were just talking about. The thread reminded me of what's this question of cost and unintended cost, I mean, I'm at a community college has been a feeder to, you know, two plus two program to the University of Florida, and we've been blessed as a community college to have a huge pool of adjunct faculty, grad students who are coming out, needed some work or writing a dissertation and all of that. And for years, you know, I'm one of them. I taught part time while wrapping up my dissertation and ended up getting hired full time. The problem is, is that that model has broken down because those graduate students aren't getting jobs. And previously, you could rationalize the contingency in a low wage with, well, this is just a journeyman here and I'm going to move on, but no one's moving on. Right. And I think it's and yet, you know what savings we have in our case, we're contingent. We're dependent upon a legislature to fund us. Right. Right. That's making it more difficult. So it's a difficult challenge, at least from our perspective.

Adrianna Kezar:
Well, it's kind of like we've created our own nightmare. Right? So we because we didn't push how problematic this was and we became ever reliant on an unsustainable model. People got used to us making those kinds of choices, right, so so we this is where we really need stronger leadership nationally and I've really been trying to push for it, like among, you know, say, you know, the national associations groups just to kind of build the case, how this is no longer a sustainable model. There are. So the Roosevelt Institute has published a paper on this very fact that and they said that recovery and kind of as Biden comes in and the new administration should be thinking about the lack of living wage for faculty members as a significant issue for the administration that we have now this broken. Also, there are policy research institutes making this case. We need more people to be behind it because we've gotten ourselves into a really, really challenging place. And it's going to take broader changes at state and federal level to write this. Thank you for that, David.

Randy Bass:
Thank you. Yeah, that we've built ourselves an unsustainable model, that that's a powerful line. Thank you for that. So let me just ask if there's any last questions that anybody wants to ask? A chance for someone to unmuted a couple more minutes, and then I want to make sure that we preview the upcoming other community conversations before we sign off at five.

Gail Fernandez:
I just to follow up again, like with the contingency professors, and again, everything is changing, there's fewer college age students and we need to be thinking of newer models as well. And are we just trying so hard to hold on to a model that maybe needs to be updated? Me working hard, working adults coming back and such.

Adrianna Kezar:
Yeah, now we have all all sorts of I think these kinds of other, you know, like I always say, like the question around the faculty is tied up into our broader question of like, what do we do as a sector? What are our missions as institutions? And there should be alignment there between what who the faculty are. So those of you who haven't seen it, there is a line of work on the Delphi Project site that that looks at new faculty models and is a whole series of things about how do we think about the future of the faculty and being aligned as your questions as Gail to where the enterprise is going? What are what do we doing as campuses? Where should we be going? And the lack of alignment between those two actually led to our problem right now. I mean, because the faculty model never changed as higher ed was changing. That's that's been a system; that's been an ongoing issue. And we could write that now.

Randy Bass:
Michele, You get the last question.

Michele Campagna:
Thank you know, as you're talking, I'm really thinking about, you know. We can view adjunct faculty as probably the population of teaching faculty that. Are dealing with the greater inequities as far as faculty teaching faculty are concerned, and we know that our students at community colleges and MSIs rely heavily on adjunct faculty. And as we think about the re-entry back into campus, you know, we're looking at our students and thinking about how do we address their needs. But I don't, I mean, I think for as far as our campus is concerned, I don't think we're really thinking about...the impact of the adjunct faculty on our students and if we don't address that issue, what does that mean moving forward? And, you know, these are the institutions that are the most under-resourced at the same time, which makes it even harder. But this conversation is really as far as student success and inequities are concerned. This conversation has really brought to light for me the need to look at our adjunct faculty and see what kinds of support and and how integrated they are because our students are relying on them as well. You know, they're go into the adjunct faculty with their concerns. And how equipped are they really to address them? Are they integrated into the campus resources, mentoring systems? So thank you for all of this.

Adrianna Kezar:
Of course. Michele, I just want to mention one other piece of work you might want to look at. So Becky Pacard at Mount Holyoke does work on micro mentoring or advising. And it's like the faculty members who just insert like three to five minutes at the beginning of their class about things like resources on campus, like student support staff, and has found it has a really powerful impact on student success. So even little things that you could help adjuncts learn about can really make a difference. I just want to plug that as like another, you know, really small thing you can do. They can have a gigantic impact. Thank you.

Randy Bass:
Well, thank you for all of your questions, just it's really amazing to have this community here and the feel of these questions and the concerns and commitments just really reinforces the power of this community. Let me just quickly share my screen here just to I also uploaded just these this slide into the chat so you can take it away with you. But to remind you that we also have three more of these conversations coming up. Mary Deane Sorcinelli who is on the call today. Hers is coming up next on Wednesday, the 31st than Jose Moreno and Peter Felton. They're also coming up over the next six weeks. Again, I uploaded into the chat window the slide of this. You can take that away. And as of like 18 minutes ago, we have a brand new website, Futures, Dot, Georgetown.edu, New learning Compact projects that are getting you up the slides so you can have that URL. But the links to all the videos are there on the website, as well as links to the ATD toolkit and the NLC framework and some other resources. So let me just again, then thank Adrianna for a wonderful hour and for all of the work you do and the video resource, and so

Randy Bass:
Thank you all for being here.

Randy Bass:
Appreciate it. Just just fantastic. That was just an action-packed, inside packed hour. And again, in behalf of my colleagues, Laura Gambino, Bret Eynon and Jon Iuzini. Just thank you all for taking an hour out of your day. Of what I'm sure you had many other things that we're calling to you to do with this hour, but very grateful that you spent it here and were able to come to this conversation. So thank you all. We look forward to seeing you in future ones.

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