You have /5 articles left.
Sign up for a free account or log in.
A colleague and friend writes,
[Name of college] has never had full-time completely remote faculty, except to accommodate extraordinary circumstances. The academic deans have jointly recommended that we consider FT appointments for hard-to-hire faculty in high-demand program areas in which virtual pedagogies are appropriate to the discipline. Right now, we are looking at a position in cloud computing.
What do other colleges do? Do they have a remote tenure track? Are these appointments full-time lecturers with annual appointments? Something else? If tenure track, what does college service look like for faculty who do not live in the service region?
I can respond with what I’ve seen, but I’d love to hear from my wise and worldly readers in other places.
My own state, New Jersey, explicitly requires public employees (such as community college faculty) to live in state, unless they were grandfathered in when the law was passed sometime in the mid-'00s. Because N.J. is a physically small state, it wasn’t unusual for employees to live in New York City, or Philly, or small towns on the eastern border of Pennsylvania. When I worked at Morris County, many younger employees lived just over the Pennsylvania state line, where houses and property taxes were dramatically cheaper. But most states don’t have laws like that, as far as I know, and even if they did, they wouldn’t have mattered much until recently. If you work in, say, Colorado Springs, then commuting several days a week from out of state would be quite a chore.
Remote teaching obviously changes the equation. As long as they have good internet, in theory, someone could draw an East Coast salary while living someplace much cheaper. Every single time I make a mortgage payment, I see the appeal of that strategy.
That said, “remote” and “out-of-state” aren’t necessarily the same thing. I’ve been working mostly remotely since March, even though I’m in the same state (and county) as my college.
Prior to COVID, though, the only times I saw something like this allowed to happen were in cases of medical accommodations, usually for people who already had tenure and were toward the end of their careers. It was understood as exceptional and offered as a compassionate gesture. When you had 1 percent of the faculty do it, it didn’t call much into question.
I think much of it comes down to the definition of the faculty role.
If you have a model in which the role is teaching and nothing more, and the only difference between full-time and adjunct faculty is course load, then I really don’t see any reason to prohibit it. Some online universities have that model. They have faculty living all over the country, many of whom rarely or never show up at a physical campus. As far as I know, those aren’t generally tenured positions, though they can be full-time and open-ended. (That’s actually the default status of full-time employees in most industries.)
But if you’re starting with a college at which faculty are expected to be present for student advising and/or college events and/or shared governance and/or (fill in the blank), I see a short-term issue and a long-term issue. The short-term issue is that if half of a department is scattered to the winds, then all of the high-touch tasks fall by default onto the other half of the department. Over time, I would expect to see some serious internal friction arise around issues of workload equity. The longer-term issue would be a gradual abandonment of some of the higher-touch roles, leading to a college that promises one experience but delivers another.
This proposal sounds like something closer to the professor of the practice role that some research universities offer. It’s a way to tap into specialized expertise when the needs of those experts don’t quite align with the tenure track. Given a different rank and designation, I could imagine it existing (in small numbers) alongside the ranks of the tenured. But moving to an all-remote job at scale would require a level of institutional transformation that goes far beyond what most of us are contemplating.
All of that said, I’m sure that there are models out there that I haven’t seen. So, wise and worldly readers, I turn to you. Have you seen variations on this model that work well? Are there hazards that weren’t initially obvious, but that became significant over time? I’d love to hear from you on Twitter (tag me @deandad) or via email at deandad (at) gmail (dot) com.
