To the editor:

The petition concerning Jischke’s performance charges that undergraduate teaching has been devalued relative to research. That charge is true.

A glaring illustration is that research faculty are hired into permanent positions, while faculty who exclusively teach are hired into temporary positions.

Apparently, teaching undergraduates doesn’t merit permanent status. Undergraduates might want to think about that as they consider the petition.

The ballooning of the temporary faculty has been a national trend, as the demands of tenured faculty have led administrators to dodge those demands by hiring temporary faculty, sometimes known as “suitcase faculty.”

“Suitcase faculty” may better describe the untenured, but tenure-track, assistant professor moving from school to school until he finds a group of colleagues who are already sufficiently like-minded concerning the issues in his discipline so as to grant him tenure and apparent “academic freedom” someday.

A former university professor in another state tells me that a new term for the temporary faculty, is the “Kleenex faculty” — totally disposable.

The trend toward greater numbers of temporary faculty may be starting a reversal as students, taxpayers and faculty protest this situation.

Progressive schools are improving the situation by taking such steps as creating a rank of permanently-employed teaching faculty. Iowa State isn’t there yet.

Do the temporary faculty deserve their current treatment on the basis of their performance?

No. It is routine for temps to be told by the administration and permanent faculty that temps have a reputation for being especially fine teachers and that we are indispensable to the teaching efforts of our departments.

This helps to remove the sting of being told in November that we may not be hired “again” in January or August.

What can ISU undergraduates deduce from the university’s stand that its temps are fine teachers, and as such, are not entitled to permanent employment?

Administrators embarrass themselves when they claim that temporary faculty provide a needed budgetary “flexibility.” The claim is ludicrous when large portions of core student class hours are taught by temps.

In math, it’s 41 percent. Similar figures hold in other departments. No department needs that kind of “flexibility.”

You have to imagine that ISU administrators live with a constant dread that, after decades of a nearly-steady or slowly-growing student body, there may be in the very next semester an inexplicable educational calamity, cutting enrollment in half.

I am a free-market conservative — that is, a classical liberal — but I am tired of hearing administrators extol the virtues of free labor markets without also hearing from them an explanation of why they want the temps to enjoy the adventures of total flexibility all by themselves.

I challenge President Jischke and the Board of Regents to hold a public forum on the status of temporary faculty and their role in undergraduate teaching.

They should also consider the possibility of formally transforming the current temporary faculty into a class of teaching faculty.

We already constitute such a class, informally.

Dr. Frank Hummer

Temporary assistant professor

Mathematics