Nearly one-third of the departments at Iowa State have exceeded the cap for the amount of teaching done by non-tenure-track faculty, the provost’s office said.

This has been the second year departments at Iowa State have exceeded the cap, said Susan Carlson, associate provost.

“We’re trying to clarify why,” she said.

The cap limits the amount of teaching done by non-tenure-track faculty to 15 percent university-wide and 25 percent for each department, she said.

Limits to the number of non-tenure-track faculty were set two years ago by the Faculty Senate, Carlson said. The policy was modeled after limits set by the American Association of University Professors.

According to the provost’s office, 24.4 percent of total teaching was done by non-tenured faculty university-wide, up from 19.8 percent in 2002-03.

Claudia Baldwin, Faculty Senate president-elect, said one reason for the increase was because professional and scientific staff members were not included in last year’s numbers.

Another reason there has been a rise in the amount of teaching done by non-tenure-track faculty is that many faculty lines have been eliminated, Baldwin said. A faculty line is eliminated when a faculty member retires, leaves the university or is terminated, and the department or college then does not hire anyone new to fill the position, she said.

“The danger in that is that it happens randomly,” Baldwin said.

More than 37 faculty lines will be eliminated this year due to budget cuts, she said. With these losses, the total number of faculty lost due to resignation or retirement in the last two years is more than 80 people, or the equivalent of the entire faculty of the College of Education being cut, she said.

“The impact of loss is important,” she said.

Issues with the data could lead to some inaccurate conclusions. One problem is that the actual number of people teaching in each department was not given, Carlson said.

Many of the departments on the list this year have a low amount of staff, so one or two non-tenure-track faculty could easily influence the percentage, she said.

James Melsa, dean of the College of Engineering, said one department, agricultural and biosystems engineering, was inaccurately designated as being over the cap. According to the provost’s office, that department has nearly doubled the cap in terms of non-tenure-track teaching used.

Many of the employees in the department were incorrectly identified as being non-tenured employees, Melsa said. Since the department has many of its employees at different extension offices throughout the state, they have long-term appointments that can be the equivalent of having tenure, he said.

The College of Engineering does not make a habit of relying on non-tenure-track faculty to teach, he said.

One reason many departments turn to non-tenure faculty is because they are usually paid less than tenured faculty, Carlson said.

Since there are many departments with budget shortages, administrators will turn to hiring non-tenured faculty to teach courses that would normally be taught by tenure-track faculty, she said.

“There’s an efficiency in terms of cost in teaching,” Carlson said.

Some departments have made progress since last year, Baldwin said. Three of the departments included in last year’s report were not included in the report this year, she said.

However, there has not been enough progress made to reduce the amount of non-tenure-track faculty teaching, she said.

“I believe we’re still within a negative deficit,” she said.