Semester Award Granted

Spring 2025

Submission Date

May 2025

Document Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Thesis/Dissertation Advisor [Chair]

Patricia Maslin-Ostrowski

Abstract

This phenomenological study sought to discover the essence of academic freedom as experienced by adjuncts working in Florida State Colleges. It explored the meaning of, constraints on, and reservoirs of (Clausen & Swidler, 2013) adjunct academic freedom in the absence of the traditional academic freedom protection of tenure. Adjunct academic freedom was defined as protection for adjuncts in Florida State Colleges from suffering deliberate reprisals (Eastman & Boyles, 2015) if they engage in controversial or unpopular topics in any aspect of their academic work.

Even though tenure is the traditional protector of faculty academic freedom in the United States, adjuncts in the Florida State Colleges do not have it. In addition, the proportion of faculty who do have this traditional protection is declining as a result of neoliberalism, which has caused a wave of casualization of faculty work. Although non-tenure-track faculty who work less than full time, or adjuncts, are the largest subcategory of contingent faculty, there is a lack of research about adjuncts’ meaning of, and lived experience of, academic freedom in the absence of this traditional protection. This is significant as the shrinking number of tenure-track faculty diminishes academic freedom as a whole (Reichman, 2021; Schrecker, 2010). In this study, snowball techniques and targeted email outreach were used to identify 15 information-rich participants from Florida State Colleges. Data collection consisted of in-depth, semi-structured interviews conducted between June and October 2020. To illustrate the phenomenon, a visual aid was developed to serve as a framework depicting the adjunct experience of academic freedom. This framework was related to: (a) the idea of formal protection for academic freedom, (b) the context of neoliberalism, and (c) Clausen and Swidler’s (2013) ideas of constraints and reservoirs of academic freedom. This framework of the phenomenon guided data analysis, which resulted in five findings that flowed from the participants’ interview narratives. These findings were that adjunct academic freedom is

1. Student-oriented

2. Cyclical

3. Rewarding

4. Constrained from the inside out

5. Created up from the bottom

In turn, the findings were examined through the lens of Boyer’s Model of Scholarship, leading to two conclusions that represent the authors’ insights from the findings. The first conclusion of this study was that the initial conceptualization of the adjunct experience of academic freedom needed to be updated with neoliberalism, and its related job insecurity, as its main context. The second conclusion was that, to be applicable to adjuncts, Boyer’s Model of Scholarship needed to be reconceptualized to include this main context. Finally, the findings and conclusions formed the basis for recommendations for policy, practice, and future research related to adjunct academic freedom.

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