Core Fellows Addressing the Catholic Intellectual Tradition's Incompatibility with Adjunctification

Abstract

As higher education emerges from COVID-19 restrictions, the post-pandemic transitional moment provides Catholic institutions the opportunity to reconsider their reliance on adjuncts in core curricula.  As tenure-track positions decline nationwide and universities increasingly source out coursework to temporary or part-time adjuncts and other contingent faculty, Catholic liberal arts universities should reevaluate how their use of adjuncts aligns with the church’s cosmological and anthropological tenets. The Catholic intellectual tradition is uniquely qualified to identify the underlying causes of and the solutions to higher education’s adjunctification. While we acknowledge thatadjuncts can include retired academics and those teaching part-time for supplemental income or leisure, when we discuss “adjunct professors,” we primarily refer to underemployed adjuncts seeking full-time work in academia without finding it. Based on Catholicism’s vision of reality, the human person, and the economics of receptivity and gift flowing from both, Catholic universities should hire Core Fellows (non-tenured semi-permanent faculty lines exclusively teaching in their core curricula) to replace positions normally filled by adjuncts with positions enabling talented teachers to pursue pedagogical vocations with security and just honoraria.