When I finished my doctorate a national trend had just begun to gradually begin replacing tenure-track faculty with non-tenure-track (NTT) lecturers. In 1996, I applied for several tenure-track positions, but was offered and accepted an NTT appointment as the Director of the Biology Computer Resource Center at UMass Amherst.

At the time, NTT faculty were a tiny fraction of the faculty. They were kind of an oddity and tended to be short-term appointments — often for sabbatical replacement. Every year that followed, however, the proportion increased. And more and more of the NTT faculty were long-term employees. Now about more than 30% of faculty are NTT, they do 75% of the teaching, and they make a bit more than half as much money.

I was on the front-lines of trying to improve the treatment for NTT faculty. (My efforts were recognized earlier this year with a Delphi Award.) When I arrived there were no promotional or professional development opportunities for NTT faculty. Now we have two (and soon to be three) promotional levels and a professional improvement fellowship, which gives NTT faculty a semester of release to work on a significant academic project.

The perception of NTT faculty has also improved. For many years, tenure-system faculty and administrators tended to view NTT faculty as not REAL faculty. They would say things like “Our faculty and lecturers…” as if lecturers were not faculty. Many tenure-system faculty fundamentally believed that to accept an NTT position was to have failed at life.

Over the years, I spent a lot of time thinking about what the actual difference was between tenure-system and NTT faculty. Eventually, I put it like this: Tenure-system faculty are fundamentally investing in themselves, developing an independent national/international reputation in their field, which belongs to them and which is portable. NTT faculty, instead, commit to working to make their host institution as good as it can be.

During the transition from tenure-system to NTT faculty, some units at the university didn’t really get the distinction. In one college, they hired some tenure-system and NTT faculty with identical job descriptions. After several years of wrangling with the union, they offered those faculty the option to go up for tenure. One of my colleagues encouraged me to pursue tenure, but I declined. I had chosen not to invest my effort trying to develop an independent reputation in my field: my goal had been to run my facility and to serve my faculty and students as well as I could. I had no confidence that my faculty would consider that work worthy of tenure.

Now, as I transition to retirement, I have increasingly turned my attention to authorship, publishing short fiction and a number of books. For that, developing an independent national/international reputation is important. The irony that, at the end of my academic life, I’m starting over with what I shunned for my whole professional career is not lost on me. But it’s been fun and interesting to do something new.