What happened after the last LCPL cap increase?

Miami AAUP appreciates the arguments made in favor of increasing the cap on non-tenure-line continuing faculty from 20% to 25% of the number of tenured/tenure-track faculty. But good decisions are informed by history, so before voting, the community should consider what happened last time and vote to amend the current cap change resolution.

In 2010, the LCPL* cap increased from 10% to 20%. Here’s what then-Interim-Provost Skillings offered as rationale during Senate discussion:

• • Retaining the service of exceptional instructors beyond a period of five years.

• • Reduce the number of visiting faculty who do not have a continuing or long-term commitment to the University.
  • The salaries of LCPL are generally lower than salaries of full professors and, in some cases, lower than visiting faculty; therefore, increasing the number of Lecturers/ Clinical/Professionally Licensed Faculty would create savings.

—University Senate Minutes, 9/13/2010, 11 (305 of pdf)

So: were visiting faculty reduced after the cap increase in 2010? No. Hiring off the tenure-track increased. VAPs** rose by 58%, and overall full-time non-tenure-track positions shot up 95%. While Miami is now less dependent on part-timers (a fifth of adjunct positions were replaced by VAP lines, a welcome trend), total non-tenure-track numbers climbed by 18%.***

Enrollments did increase over this period, requiring additional hiring. So did revenues. Miami’s worth rose from 2011-2016 by 18%, from $862 million to $1.02 billion, and the university ran budget surpluses every year averaging $87 million. But despite the surpluses, tenure-line numbers have slightly declined since the cap increase, and tenure-line as a percentage of full-time dropped from 73% to 63%.

Again, a decision on an LCPL cap increase—this time to 25%—is before us. Again, we’re told that new LCPL hiring will reduce our dependency on visitors and won’t affect tenure-track numbers. But given what happened last time, it’s not clear whether we can count on these assurances. Hiring continuing faculty is obviously preferable to hiring more precarious faculty. Can we hire the continuing faculty that departments desperately need—while preventing tenure erosion and sustaining Miami’s teacher-scholar model?

It can be done if we amend the cap-increase resolution as follows:

• Decisions to create new TPCPLCL**** lines will not reduce the proportion of tenured/tenure-track faculty to full-time non-tenure-track faculty.
  
• New TPCPLCL hiring will maintain, and, where possible, increase the proportion of continuing faculty (tenured/tenure track and TPCPLCL) to total full-time and part-time faculty.

Senators: Please consider voting in support of these resolutions. Miami community: let your senator know of your support. Thank you!

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*LCPL: Lecturers, Clinical and Professionally Licensed faculty, a category renamed this fall to Teaching Professors, Clinical Professors, Lecturers and Clinical Lecturers.

**VAPs: Visiting Assistant Professors.

***Data are for all campuses. All data used in charts or discussed above is from the federal IPEDS database, the Office of Institutional Research, and Miami audited annual financial reports.

****Teaching Professors, Clinical Professors, Lecturers and Clinical Lecturers