“A Known Quantity”: Adjunct Instructors in North American Graduate Archival Education

Abstract

This exploratory mixed-methods case study poses the following research question: How do adjunct instructors fit into the larger ecology of graduate archival education? We draw upon semi-structured interviews with 33 full-time, tenure-track faculty members from North American graduate archival programs to discern how adjunct instructors are recruited or located, prepared or trained, evaluated, and retained. Additionally, we conducted a survey of 406 North American graduate students and early career professionals (five or fewer years in the field). As part of the survey, we teased out these students’ and early-career professionals’ perspectives on the pedagogical merits of full-time, tenure-track faculty versus adjunct instructors. Findings suggest that with rare exception, graduate archival education programs’ dealings with adjuncts are ad hoc and informal. Furthermore, practices remain inconsistent across programs. Students and new professionals, meanwhile, indicated ambivalence about learning from full-time tenure-track faculty as opposed to adjuncts. We address the implications of these findings for practice and for future research.