Who and where is the adjunct Pied Piper?

[mahagonny]

In summary, the world has changed and job applications need to be realistic about how their credentials stack up against the others in the pool.  For positions that will have hundreds of applicants, being only average means never getting the job.

Never? You could have been the chair's drinking buddy in grad school days.

That's not enough pull for a TT position that requires approval by the committee and then the dean and then the provost/president and then the board.

Adjuncts get hired by convincing one person; TT hires require a group agreeing based on a national search with written qualifications.

Oh, I was thinking of a full time visiting lecturer position. Anyway, Eric has already made his decision. He may be gone already.
Despite the many hands involved in deciding to start the absolutely right person on the tenure track, we still get expensive, fully tenured profs in the twilight of their career with very light schedules, owing to shifting enrollments, department infighting, etc.

[polly_mer]

In summary, the world has changed and job applications need to be realistic about how their credentials stack up against the others in the pool.  For positions that will have hundreds of applicants, being only average means never getting the job.

Never? You could have been the chair's drinking buddy in grad school days.

That's not enough pull for a TT position that requires approval by the committee and then the dean and then the provost/president and then the board.

Adjuncts get hired by convincing one person; TT hires require a group agreeing based on a national search with written qualifications.

Oh, I was thinking of a full time visiting lecturer position. Anyway, Eric has already made his decision. He may be gone already.
Despite the many hands involved in deciding to start the absolutely right person on the tenure track, we still get expensive, fully tenured profs in the twilight of their career with very light schedules, owing to shifting enrollments, department infighting, etc.

Even a full-time visiting lecturer position is likely to be a group decision.  The only faculty hires that remain one-person decisions are intended-to-be-temporary, one-term adjuncts.

[mahagonny]

In summary, the world has changed and job applications need to be realistic about how their credentials stack up against the others in the pool.  For positions that will have hundreds of applicants, being only average means never getting the job.

Never? You could have been the chair's drinking buddy in grad school days.

That's not enough pull for a TT position that requires approval by the committee and then the dean and then the provost/president and then the board.

Adjuncts get hired by convincing one person; TT hires require a group agreeing based on a national search with written qualifications.

Oh, I was thinking of a full time visiting lecturer position. Anyway, Eric has already made his decision. He may be gone already.
Despite the many hands involved in deciding to start the absolutely right person on the tenure track, we still get expensive, fully tenured profs in the twilight of their career with very light schedules, owing to shifting enrollments, department infighting, etc.

Even a full-time visiting lecturer position is likely to be a group decision.  The only faculty hires that remain one-person decisions are intended-to-be-temporary, one-term adjuncts.

Sure, but that doesn't mean it's being done legitimately. I've seen a full-time visiting lecturer hired on a public interview in front of students, who didn't even complete the required steps. The students were talking about it. Of course these things blow over. The students who really paid attention graduate and a new year comes.

[FishProf]

Even a full-time visiting lecturer position is likely to be a group decision.  The only faculty hires that remain one-person decisions are intended-to-be-temporary, one-term adjuncts.

YMMV.  Hiring 1 year NTT is still a solo job at my school.

[polly_mer]

Even a full-time visiting lecturer position is likely to be a group decision.  The only faculty hires that remain one-person decisions are intended-to-be-temporary, one-term adjuncts.

YMMV.  Hiring 1 year NTT is still a solo job at my school.

Is that a VAP or something else?

[mahagonny]

'

[Kron3007]

Even a full-time visiting lecturer position is likely to be a group decision.  The only faculty hires that remain one-person decisions are intended-to-be-temporary, one-term adjuncts.

YMMV.  Hiring 1 year NTT is still a solo job at my school.

Meanwhile we have committees even for adjunct positions.  Moral of the story is that things vary greatly among locations.

[FishProf]

Even a full-time visiting lecturer position is likely to be a group decision.  The only faculty hires that remain one-person decisions are intended-to-be-temporary, one-term adjuncts.

YMMV.  Hiring 1 year NTT is still a solo job at my school.

Is that a VAP or something else?

Essentially.  One year - Non-tenure track.

[polly_mer]

I just came from writing a lengthy post that required research so now I wonder: how big are some of these departments we're talking about?

I can see it going both ways with a tiny department being unable to field yet another committee for only a temp position and a huge department not even noticing one more person for only a year.  Or, the tiny department insisting on having a say because adding a third to a department of two is pretty noticeable and a huge department having mechanisms in place where every hire requires a committee of 5 because 100 people can easily field a committee to figure out whether they need a committee for ordering lunch.

This might matter to the discussion because one  or two part-time people augmenting a department of 1-3 is a very different situation than having dozens of part-time people who are carrying a load that's almost invisible to the other dozens of full-time people.  It always blows my mind to go from a tiny place to a large place and realize that people have very different expectations on what constitutes being part of the regulars through interactions.  It also blows my mind every time I go up a level in responsibility to realize how little people know about the big picture when their day-to-day job is all about the small picture and they are only vaguely aware that the large picture exists.

For example, https://www.nsf.gov/statistics/2016/nsb20161/#/figure/fig05-16 shows the STEM academic employment as having under 10% of doctoral educated folks employed in academia as having part-time faculty jobs.  There's no adjunctification crisis in fields where the data look like this.

[FishProf]

I can see it going both ways with a tiny department being unable to field yet another committee for only a temp position and a huge department not even noticing one more person for only a year.  Or, the tiny department insisting on having a say because adding a third to a department of two is pretty noticeable and a huge department having mechanisms in place where every hire requires a committee of 5 because 100 people can easily field a committee to figure out whether they need a committee for ordering lunch.

in my case, 13 T/TT, 22 FTEs.  so, in the middle of the bookends you listed.