During the years of the recession that number went down five years in a row. It has declined from 64 percent of hours of instruction in 1987 to 57 percent in 1996. Right now 67 percent of all faculty are part-time instructors in the state. That is an extremely important policy because it protects the academic integrity of our profession. Furthermore, those of us who are already tenured are required to have peer evaluation as well.
Tenure is under attack.
The way to protect the integrity of tenure is to protect the integrity of our profession through the evaluation process. We have to understand that the evaluation process is a peer process and we need to resist the external forces that will take it away from us. The attack on tenure is that it is some kind of guaranteed employment. That is not what tenure is about. It is about the integrity of the enterprise of academia.