Lucy Hodges takes a look at universities' reliance on part-time lecturers in a THES supplement on the changing profile of academic staff and students. During the 1990s a growing army of casual staff, hired on an hourly basis or on short-term contracts, have taught Britain's undergraduates in place of the traditional full-time professor or lecturer. Almost one in ten members of university staff now works part-time, and the numbers are rising as cash-strapped universities try to educate more students more economically while enhancing the quality of their research.
Some of the new army of casual teachers are postgraduate students happy to have some extra money and keen to decorate their c.v.s with teaching experience. Others are academics who were content to take early retirement but want to continue working. Yet others are people who would probably have been recruited as full-time lecturers 20 years ago but cannot get a permanent position today.
The situation has not yet reached United States levels, where the phenomenon of the "scholar gypsy" or "freeway flier" is common. It is thought one-third of college instruction in the US is given by non-tenured staff or part-timers, many of them women. In Britain the number of part-timers increased by 71 per cent in ten years up to 1993/94 - and the trend is upwards.
Maurice Kogan, who, together with Mary Henkel, a senior lecturer in government at Brunel University, has been studying how higher education has changed in England, Sweden and Norway, says: "Wherever they can, vice chancellors have tried to swap permanent for temporary staff and the use of part-timers."
Many universities are trying to protect their research stars' time to maintain or promote their positions in assessment exercises, says Dr Henkel. "That means they need people on teaching-only contracts." Many contracts are fixed-term because universities are so hard-up they do not want to commit themselves in a changing market where courses and money comes and goes.
Alan Jenkins, a member of the centre for staff and learning development at Oxford Brookes University, has studied the effect of the research assessment exercise on geography departments. His research, published in Geography magazine, found that almost all the academics questioned in 14 university departments commented on the use of more part-timers, particularly for first-year teaching.
One academic said the aim had been to relieve the teaching burden of the most productive researchers. "These researchers will continue to teach their options . . . and then tenured staff not heavily involved in research will carry most core course teaching and fixed-term junior staff will do most of the tutorials and small group work, as well as first-year marking."
A further reason for greater use of casual workers has been the modularisation of degrees which has led to a fragmentation of degree courses. Some departments have had their own special reasons for recruiting teachers on fractional contracts. In modern languages, for example, there has been a huge expansion in non-specialist language teaching as students have sought to learn a foreign language in conjunction with the subject of their choice.
The big question is whether increasing casualisation matters. The Association of University Teachers is concerned about the effects on staff, particularly the insecurity they suffer. Part-timers get a poor deal on pay, conditions and prospects compared with full-timers. They often - depending on their contracts - have to bear the risks of unemployment, sick pay and ensuring a pension, which were previously met by employers. But they have the advantage of flexible working arrangements.
Does the use of more casual labour affect the ethos of the academy and the education that students receive? The evidence is unclear. Some professors assert that postgraduate students can teach as well as, if not better than, experienced lecturers because they bring enthusiasm and youth to their classes. Reports from official bodies like the higher education funding and quality councils refer to such advantages, but also point out that part-timers are sometimes excluded from appraisal, staff development and promotion schemes. Sometimes they are not sufficiently involved in the life of the department, which means teaching suffers from lack of continuity.
Professor Jenkins's research on geography departments suggests student experience, particularly for first years, has changed. One geography lecturer said: "Where full-timers are released by part-timers, the quality of teaching may not be worse (some of our part-timers are very good), but the student experiences a less-integrated approach and it more difficult to deal with queries and problems of course organisation."
Traditionally the new universities used part-timers more than the old universities. They employed practitioners - engineers, architects, musicians and artists - to come in and give students the benefit of their skills and wisdom. This year's figures from the Higher Education Statistics Agency show that the English institution employing the largest number of part-timers in 1994/95 was the University of Middlesex with 364 part-time academic staff.
The HESA figures are, however, thought to be an underestimate. They show only 12,000 part-time academic staff in the United Kingdom as a whole. In 1994, Edinburgh University undertook a survey of its own and found more than 1,000 staff working part-time compared to the official figure at the time of only 224. What matters, according to Professor Jenkins, is not so much whether numbers are on the rise but whether the increase is being properly planned and integrated into the university system.
"What sort of support is given to these part-timers in terms of their professional development?" he asks. "Are they given access to research and research funding? How are we helping them to manage their role of being a part-time teacher?"