Using the NCW to advocate for full-time, tenure-track faculty

I started work on the National Census of Writing (NCW) because I longed for comparable data from institutions similar to my own. Like all of us who have read any of the listservs for the discipline, I have seen the multiple emergency requests for data—and have even made a few—and I hoped to help create a resource that provided this information so that we, as administrators, would have this information as we need it. 

And I believe we have created just such a tool, for it has already helped me in one of an administrator’s most frustrating jobs—arguing for more full-time faculty.

Like other small, tuition-dependent private colleges, Bloomfield College runs on a tight budget. As such, tenure-track faculty lines are precious. When a line becomes available, often through a retirement, it is not guaranteed to the department from which the retirement is occurring. Instead, an open line is vigorously contested, and each department must make its case.

Last semester, one of my writing colleagues announced her retirement, which led to some maneuvering about her line. Other departments were eager to use local and national data to make their cases for why they deserve the line. It was left to me to make the case for keeping the line in first-year writing, and this is where the Census’s easily available data saved me from begging for spotty data on the listservs.

One of the questions the Census asks is about who teaches first-year composition (FYC). To capture the diversity of responses, there were thirteen possible answers, including tenure-track faculty, non-tenure-track faculty, part-time adjuncts, and graduate students in Writing, English, and other fields.

The table below is a simplified version of the database that collapses the discipline categories but leaves the teaching rank categories, thus showing the number of responding four-year institutions that have a given percentage of FYC courses taught by a given faculty rank.

Table 1: Number of four-year institutions where the percentage of FYC courses are taught by a given faculty rank (n=421).

If I situate my institution within these data, I can start to build a case for replacing my colleague. With only three full-time faculty teaching FYC, at Bloomfield only 15% of FYC courses are taught by full-time tenure-track faculty, with the other 85% taught by part-time faculty (we have no full-time, non-tenure-track instructors nor any grad students). This means that of the 421 schools in this sample, only 22 institutions had a higher proportion of FYC classes taught by part-time adjuncts. This also means that if we lose a full-time line in writing, the percentage of FYC courses taught by part-time adjuncts jumps to 90%.

While the national data give me a baseline for my argument, they do not give me enough to convince an administrator, who could argue that the Bloomfield’s institutional context makes the national data inapplicable.

To address that, I would need to use the basic filters. The NCW database allows users to sort the data by a variety of filters: size, region, mission, etc. These can provide more specific information on a question so that the results more closely match the institutional context.

When I filter institutions by size (1,000-4,999) and region (the mid-Atlantic and Northeast), these are my results:

Table 2: Number of small (1,000-4,999) four-year institutions in the Mid-Atlantic and Northeast where the percentage of FYC courses are taught by a given faculty ranks (n=47).

These data show that only six schools of our size and region depend upon part-time labor more heavily than Bloomfield, thus contextualizing Bloomfield’s dependence upon part-time writing instructors and contributing to my argument for keeping the full-time line in writing.

But Bloomfield’s identity, while influenced by size and location, is truly based on whom we serve. We are a Minority-Serving Institution (MSI), and the student body is over 80% students of color. That, above all, is key to my institutional context and is central to making any arguments to my administration, for it is what they value.

The NCW database does have a filter for MSIs, so if we filter the question about who teaches first-year composition by MSI status and size, the results are:

Table 3: Number of small (1,000-4,999) four-year Minority-Serving Institutions where the percentage of FYC courses are taught by a given faculty ranks (n=20).

And thus we see that only three MSIs of a similar size use part-time writing instructors more heavily than Bloomfield. So this one Census question, unfiltered and then filtered in different ways, provides me with solid, dependable data that I can use in my argument to hire a tenure-track writing instructor.

Armed with these data, especially the data points that I know my administration truly cares for, I was able to craft an argument that combined this information with the research about retention and student contact with FT-TT faculty—resulting in replacing the line.

The data from the Census are not the only reason for replacing the line; there were other political motivations to consider, but the fact that I had concrete data from such a large sample of schools gave the dean the data she needed to support the writing line and justify it to the president and the board of trustees.