Faculty labour in the United States is increasingly “contingent”, as tenure-track and tenured positions are rapidly being replaced by “adjuncts”, “lecturers”, “instructors” and other faculty who lack traditional protections of academic freedom and job security. In light of this, contingent faculty have been actively organising themselves into unions on many campuses. Unionisation efforts for nontenure-track faculty have often been highly successful, yet significant hurdles remain. Although it is common to refer to all faculty outside the tenure-system faculty as “contingent”, this umbrella term masks enormous variation in pay, benefits, working conditions, job security and inclusion in governance. The diverse range of institutional types within the United States (US) higher education system (community colleges, four-year public universities, for-profit colleges, private liberal arts colleges and elite research universities, to name a few), and its unusual degree of decentralisation, add further complexity to our understanding of precarious American academic labour.

ABSTRACT Discussions about tenure among postsecondary education dance faculty elicit a spectrum of perspectives and emotions ranging from excitement to confusion to fear. Faculty carefully weigh the potential for academic freedom and job security against the sometimes unclear and potentially unreasonable expectations regarding how to achieve tenure. These issues are complicated by how the mission of each institution – identified as either research driven, teaching focused, or community minded – affects the requirements for tenure and, thus, the make-up of professors’ dossiers. Analysis of published scholarship and 41 survey responses of faculty working in higher education dance programs across the US reveals how some tenure-track dance faculty experience working to achieve tenure. I argue that postsecondary tenure-track dance faculty create innovative strategies to achieve tenure, meet their career goals, and aim for balance in their work and personal lives. By highlighting the participants’ experiences, I shed light on some of the issues tenure-track dance faculty face. Further, this study’s emerging ideas may bring dance faculty more clarity and direction as they work toward or mentor those on their way to academic tenure.

Abstract Achieving a successful career in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) requires not only a great education, but also extensive training and preparation with dedicated and enthusiastic mentors and role models. Unfortunately, women in these fields continue to have a low rate of career advancement, even though a similar number will obtain high-level degrees compared to their male peers. It is well known that few women occupy the higher-ranked, tenured, and tenure-track positions within academia. Research continues to search for the “answer” to why women fall out of the pipeline, but there are still no clear solutions, and most consider it a complex problem. In all job markets, career development programs have historically helped people navigate and succeed in their occupation, so it has been proposed that this might also reduce the “leaky pipeline” phenomenon in academia. In an effort to address these concerns, the Central Arizona chapter of the Association for Women in Science (AWIS), based at Arizona State University (ASU), and in collaboration with colleagues from George Washington, Gallaudet, and Ottawa Universities, have developed a program to help prepare graduate students, postdoctoral researchers and early faculty prepare for a career in STEM. The Jumpstarting STEM Careers (JSC) program tackles the problem of low career advancement by hosting a series of career development seminars and workshops which provide training, mentoring and networking

Possessing contractually guaranteed terms of employment specifying that, after a period of time, the employed person will be considered for tenure status, which typically confers enhanced job security and sometimes other benefits.: #* #*

Recruiting underrepresented faculty into tenured/tenure-track engineering positions has been a goal for many universities for decades. Yet results have been disappointing. Numerous studies discuss interventions that are “best” or “effective” practices, but those activities typically focus on bolstering the portfolios and skills of individuals (“fixing the applicant”) or habits of search committees (“fixing the committee members”) rather than on changing campus recruiting, screening, and hiring processes (“fixing the system”). From the “fixing the individual” perspective, many institutions (including our own) now offer future faculty programs that provide application preparation support for diverse prospective faculty applicants or even more elaborate post-doctoral training. These programs aim to provide individuals with additional social and/or academic capital needed to adapt themselves to an existing, some would say broken or dysfunctional, hiring system. Required, or strongly encouraged, implicit bias training for search committee members has also been implemented, but this is a version of fixing the individual committee members, not the system. While these programs are valuable, they are not sufficient. Effective interventions need to be sustained over long periods of time and address both levels of change—individual and systemic. Even a desirable systemic change like ensuring diverse representation on faculty search committees or in screening interviews may be beneficial

teaching positions in the US, academic institutions use a wide array of different job titles depending on if the position is temporary or permanent, if the work Professors in the United States commonly occupy any of several positions of teaching and research within a college or university. In the U.S., the word "professor" is often used to refer to anyone who teaches at a college or university level at any academic rank. This usage differs from the predominant usage of the word professor in other countries, where the unqualified word "professor" only refe external reviewers—several nationally or internationally prominent academics in the candidate's field will be asked to review the candidate's application for promotion and submit a confidential report; based on this report and evidence of the candidate's accomplishments in his or her curriculum vitae, a committee of members from the candidate's department will make a recommendation for tenure/promotion or denial of such; the department will vote; the department decision is communicated to a university panel of individuals from outside of the department who evaluate the application and decide whether they agree or disagree with the departmental recommendation; the dean; the board of governors/president or other upper level governing body. A decision to reject a candidate for tenure normally requires that the individual leave the institution within two years (under the AAUP tenure guidelines). Otherwise, tenure is granted along with promotion from assistant to associate professor. Although tenure and promotion are usually separate decisions, they are often highly correlated such that a decision to grant a promotion coincides with a decision in favor of tenure, and vice versa. Promotion to associate professor usually results in an increased administrative load and membership on committees that are restricted to tenured faculty. Some people remain at the level of associate professor throughout their careers. However, most will apply for the final promotion to full professor; the timeline for making this application is more flexible than that for assistant to associate positions and the associate professor does not normally lose his/her job if the application is rejected. As with promotion from assistant to associate professor, promotion from associate to full professor involves review at multiple levels, similar to the earlier tenure/promotion review. This includes external reviews, decisions by the department, recommendations by members of other departments, and high-ranking university officials. Usually, this final promotion requires that the individual has maintained an active research program and excellent teaching, in addition to taking a leadership role in… An…