One Faculty
​More to come soon. In the meantime….
One Faculty: A Primer
What if all faculty were full-time faculty? Really, what if the only difference between them was the percentage of their load? Everything else scaled proportionately—pay, benefits, responsibilities. If you could build a system from scratch, wouldn’t that make more sense?
At its core, the message of One Faculty is simple: The people doing the work of teaching, supporting students, and sustaining programs should be recognized and resourced as full participants in the profession. A single faculty body is a stronger faculty body, and a stronger faculty body better serves students.
To that end, One Faculty seeks to reimagine the two-tier system in higher education, the one in which full-time faculty occupy one tier and contingent faculty another. It proposes a unified model in which rights, responsibilities, and compensation are proportional to workload rather than determined by category of employment .
It’s not a slogan in search of a problem; it’s a response to a structure that has, over time, stratified a profession. The One Faculty model envisions a framework in which pay is proportional to load, job security is predictable and transparent, professional responsibilities are shared in proportion to assignment, and all faculty are integrated into the academic life of the institution. In short, it insists that the same profession should carry the same dignity, scaled by work rather than by label.
The current system didn’t emerge overnight. Its origins trace to the rapid expansion of higher education in the mid-twentieth century, when colleges sought flexible and cost-effective ways to meet growing enrollment demand. Part-time faculty were initially hired as a practical solution, allowing institutions to offer more courses without the long-term commitments associated with full-time positions.
Over time, however, a combination of funding constraints, enrollment fluctuations, and administrative incentives for cost containment transformed this temporary measure into a structural norm. Today, part-time faculty represent 70 percent of the faculty in the California Community College system. They teach the majority of courses. They are essential to the system, yet, paradoxically, they are designated within the institutional framework as supplemental—literally, adjuncts.
The One Faculty movement arises from this tension. While it builds on decades of adjunct advocacy and faculty union efforts, it advances a more integrated vision—one that doesn’t merely improve conditions within the existing tiers but questions the necessity of those tiers altogether. No more tiers?
The need for One Faculty becomes even more clear when examining the distortions and dislocations produced by the current model. Students encounter uneven access to faculty support, mentorship, and continuity. Part-time faculty face precarity in the form of unstable assignments, compensation systems that exclude essential work such as preparation and grading, and limited participation in governance. Full-time faculty, in turn, absorb the strain of this imbalance through increased workloads, pressure on shared governance systems, and the gradual erosion of professional norms. Consider these groups in turn in more detail.
For part-time faculty, the existing system results in a fragmented professional experience. Assignments are unpredictable, compensation fractional, access to institutional resources limited. Many are expected to perform the full intellectual and relational work of teaching without the structural support that makes that work sustainable. One Faculty aims to align recognition with reality by advocating for proportional pay for all work performed, more stable and predictable assignments, compensated time for student support, and meaningful inclusion in governance and professional development. These are not conceived as supplemental benefits but as foundational conditions for effective teaching. Without them, faculty capacity is constrained, and the quality of the student experience is correspondingly diminished.
For full-time faculty, One Faculty is sometimes perceived as a threat, particularly in relation to tenure, hiring, or workload. But it is better understood as the opposite—a bulwark for tenure (and its attendant academic freedom), a guarantor of uniformly robust hiring, and a safeguard against inequitable workloads. A system built on structural inequality inevitably redistributes its pressures. Departments become reliant on part-time faculty who may lack compensated time for coordination and collaboration, shared governance becomes uneven when a majority of faculty are excluded from it, and maintaining consistent professional standards becomes increasingly difficult. By integrating faculty fully into the institution, One Faculty strengthens departmental cohesion, promotes a more equitable distribution of responsibilities, and reinforces the collective identity of faculty as a profession. It revitalizes tenure, situates it within a more coherent and sustainable ecosystem.
From the student perspective, the idea of One Faculty already exists in expectation, if not in practice. Students generally do not distinguish between categories of faculty; they experience the person in front of them simply as their professor. They expect access, guidance, feedback, and continuity. Yet the current system delivers these unevenly. Faculty who teach across multiple campuses or lack compensated time for student interaction may be limited in their ability or unwilling to provide consistent support. This inconsistency disproportionately affects students who rely most on faculty engagement for their academic success. By aligning working conditions with student expectations, One Faculty enhances access to mentorship, strengthens connections between students and programs, and improves the overall coherence of the educational experience.
For institutions, the prevailing system can appear efficient, particularly in terms of labor costs. This efficiency, however, is a Faustian bargain. Institutions rely on a model that, while cost-efficient in the short term, undermines their long-term mission. Fragmented faculty engagement leads to reduced student retention and completion, increased administrative complexity, and heightened exposure to legal and labor challenges. (For those who haven’t yet heard, Long Beach Community College is out $18 million because it—like Palomar and colleges across the state—refused to pay its part-time faculty for prep and grading. Palomar is named in a lawsuit, and more districts will follow.) A more unified faculty model offers a different path—one that aligns institutional practices with stated commitments to equity and success and improves student outcomes. Rather than continually addressing the symptoms of a strained system, One Faculty proposes a structural reintegration that obviates the need for piecemeal interventions.
It’s a question of coherence. One Faculty asks whether our systems match our values, whether the way we envision faculty work supports the standards that we claim. Students enter our classrooms, unconsciously or otherwise, with expectations—beliefs about us and in us as embodiments of visible and invisible support. They place their faith in us—in faculty. They expect one faculty. One Faculty is a call to us to bring our structures into alignment with our purpose. It’s a call to us to realize the unity we already claim.