Adjunctification

William A. (Bill) Coish, Department of Physics, Faculty of Science, McGill University

From Wiktionary:

adjunctification (uncountable)

1. The tendency of universities to have as many faculty members as possible be adjuncts (who receive lower pay and/or benefits, lack tenure, etc).

In the United States, an “adjunct” is any member of academic staff working on a contract (without a path to tenure). At McGill, an “adjunct professor” is usually an unpaid appointment for someone with a permanent position at another institution. At McGill, we use the terms “course lecturer” or “contract academic staff (CAS)” for what would be termed an “adjunct” in the United States.

Summary:

• Ranked contract academic staff (CAS) at McGill are seeking a path to tenure. This is an important bargaining pillar for AMPS and for the Confederation of Faculty Associations of McGill (COFAM).
• Ranked CAS at McGill are a highly valued part of our workforce. They include Faculty Lecturers and Senior Faculty Lecturers, as well as Assistant Professors (CAS), Associate Professors (CAS), and Professors (CAS).
• Over the past two decades, McGill has become increasingly reliant on contract academics and progressively less reliant on tenured and tenure-track (TT) professors. This shift has occurred systematically and largely without open discussion of the plan or its implications.
• A shift away from tenure removes a key protection of academic freedom. Over the long term, it could lead to less creativity, innovation, and exploration, both in the classroom and in research.
• Extrapolation of the past 22 years of data (2004-2026) suggests a potential “extinction event” for tenure-stream academics at McGill in the next 10-15 years.
• While a shift to more contract academics with lower salaries may save money for the university by reducing the academic salary mass, all academic staff pay for this shift with lower merit allocations, which have been historically scaled as a percentage of the total salary mass attributed to all eligible academics (CAS and TT).

Note: As I described in another blog post, I was a member of an MAUT ad hoc committee in 2024-2025, leading to the 2025 MAUT report on salaries and benefits (1-page summary here). As a member of that committee, I was elected to the joint MAUT-administration Committe on Academic Staff Compensation (CASC). I have attended most CASC meetings since then and I continue to act as an MAUT-CASC advisor. I personally first realized most of what is written in this blog post while serving on those committees and many of the findings have already been revealed in the MAUT report and accompaying summary. These things became clear through many discussions over the past two years with members of those committees and through discussions with senior university administrators. I am grateful to several AMPS members who made useful suggestions that helped me to improve earlier versions of this post.

Contents:

• The roles of contract academic staff (CAS)
• The long-term trend of adjunctification is clear
• The extinction of protections for academic freedom?
• Canary in the coalmine: A drop in tenure-track Assistant Professors
• A solution: Tenure for ranked CAS
• This affects the bottom line for all academics
• Conclusion

The roles of contract academic staff (CAS)

The regulations relating to the employment of contract academic staff detail a zoo of job titles, designations, and roles for various levels of CAS. These include clinical or professional positions for CAS working off campus (at, e.g., university affiliated hospitals), often with part-time designations or with nil-salary positions. For many of them, these titles are required under provincial regulations so that they can practice medicine and train other medical professionals. There are thousands of these positions. For the purpose of this blog post, I am going to focus only on full-time CAS who receive a salary, listed in the table below:

Unranked CAS	Ranked CAS
(primarily research or service)	(primarily teaching and service)	(primarily research and service)
Academic Associate	Faculty Lecturer	Assistant Professor (CAS)
Senior Academic Associate	Senior Faculty Lecturer	Associate Professor (CAS)
		Professor (CAS)

Tenured and tenure-track (TT) professors are expected to perform in all three academic areas (teaching, research, and service), while ranked CAS (Faculty Lecturers and CAS professors) are expected to primarily perform in two roles (e.g., teaching and service or research and service). Historically, CAS professors have been predominantly engaged in research, while Faculty Lecturers have been predominantly engaged in teaching, although some Faculty Lecturers remain active in research and some CAS professors are given a “(teaching)” designation. Academic Associates (classified as unranked CAS) often provide important contributions as lab managers, academic advisors, and program directors. Unranked CAS such as Academic Associates and Senior Academic Associates do qualify for merit and across-the-board pay increases under McGill’s salary policy (just like ranked CAS and TT professors), but they are not counted in the Academic Salary Data (the primary resource for the analysis below), so the focus of the rest of this blog post will be on a comparison between full-time ranked CAS who receive a salary and tenured and tenure-track professors.

The long-term trend of adjunctification is clear

The figure below shows the ratio of the number of tenured and tenure-track (TT) professors to the total number of full-time ranked contract academics (CAS), counted in the Academic Salary Data. The trendline is a least-squares fit to data from 2014 to 2026 inclusive.

There is a jump in the data in 2014, which is explained in the 2014 staffing report.

2014 staffing report, p. 4:

“[Over the preceding five years, the r]anked full-time Contract Academic Staff increased by 61.5% to 197. This category now includes all ranks, whereas prior to the implementation of the CAS Regulations (September 2010), it consisted primarily of full-time Faculty Lecturers.”

Prior to 2014, the Academic Salary Data included Faculty Lecturers, but not CAS professors. CAS professors who had been hired previously were not reported in the data until 2014. See section 1.2.1 of the 2025 MAUT report on salaries and benefits for details. Another minor comment is that the Academic Salary Data exclude approximately 130 TT clinicians who work at university hospitals and research institutes (coded GFT-U at McGill), but this number has been slowly and steadily declining, at least since 2011/2012 (see Table 1.1 of the 2025 MAUT report on salaries and benefits).

Perhaps the most striking thing about this graph is the regularity of the trend after 2014. The ratio follows an almost perfect straight line. As a member of the committee on academic staff compensation (CASC), I asked senior members of the administration in December 2024 about this increasing reliance on CAS. I and others who have asked this question in the time since have repeatedly been given the same answer: that hiring priorities are decided by units, and that there is no deliberate effort to drive this ratio. This is an interesting answer given what is written in the 2016-2017 staffing report, presented by the Provost and the VP (Administration and Finance):

2016-2017 staffing report, p. iii:

“It should be noted that at present, the University has no position control mechanism for any category of employee other than tenured and tenure-track professors. The implementation of the R2R program will provide the tools and reporting capabilities for position control for other categories of employees.”

R2R was “Recruitment to Retirement” (the mid-2010’s equivalent of Horizon McGill), a program designed to better track staff across the university. So, according to the staffing reports, the tools were in place to monitor and control this evolution (at least after 2016-2017). But were the senior administration aware of the rapid change in CAS vs TT? There’s some more evidence in the staffing reports:

2016-2017 staffing report, pp. vi-vii:

“[Over the preceding three years, FY2014-17, the r]anked full-time CAS increased from 195 to 294 (a 50.8% increase). These comprise CAS professors (mainly researchers) and Faculty Lecturers;”

There was a >50% increase in full-time ranked CAS in the span of only three years. This increase followed on a 61.5% increase in the previous five years (see the quotation above). Such an increase could be a very good thing for the wellbeing of the university. Having specialist teachers can improve the quality of education we provide and it can improve research output for faculty who may have a lower teaching load as a result. However, the significant majority of new full-time ranked CAS positions created were CAS professors and not Faculty Lecturers. According to the Academic Salary Data, CAS professors grew from 66 (in 2014) to 159 (in 2026), a net gain of 93, while Faculty Lecturers (and Senior Faculty Lecturers) grew from 127 (in 2014) to 175 (in 2026), a net gain of 48. This is a surprise for many of us who come from Faculties where CAS Faculty Lecturers may be common, but CAS professors are less common. As mentioned above, CAS professors can apply for research grants and so they can generate extra revenue for the university. This could also be good for the overall wellbeing of the university, but this type of policy shift may lead to serious questions surrounding academic freedom. When the policy is enacted in the dark without widespread discussion, it can lead to suspicion. Why not hire TT professors instead? What about protections to academic freedom for the newly hired specialist teachers and researchers? Indeed, it’s not just that the number of CAS has increased, the number of TT professors has also fallen very sharply since 2021 and there has been an overall deceleration in new TT hires over more than 20 years.

In my home department (Physics), our last Faculty Lecturers retired nearly a decade ago and we had one CAS professor who has just recently retired. We no longer have any ranked CAS in Physics. From this perspective, it may appear that the trend toward a reliance on CAS faculty is only an issue outside of the Faculty of Science.

Indeed, Science is a little behind McGill as a whole, but the trend is nevertheless very clear:

The extinction of protections for academic freedom?

If we take the trendline seriously, it would suggest an “extinction” of tenure-stream faculty in as little as ten years. Although the trendline has been followed quite convincingly for more than two decades, I don’t necessarily believe it will continue to the point of complete extinction of all tenure-stream faculty. However, I find the trend very unsettling when I think about how we value individual academics, how we provide them with the security and comfort needed to perform well, and how we need to protect academic freedom both in the classroom and in a research setting.

Canary in the coalmine: A drop in tenure-track Assistant Professors

To see where this policy shift is going, we can look at the number of tenure-track (TT) Assistant Professors (the “canary in the coalmine”), and how this number has evolved relative to the number of full-time ranked contract academic staff (CAS):

The recent drop in Assistant Professors (TT) due to a series of hiring freezes is highly concerning. We have fewer Assistant Professors (TT) now than at any point in the last 22+ years. Assistant Professors (TT) are typically promoted after 5-6 years and they may have a career spanning approximately 35 years before retirement. To maintain our current cohort of approximately 1500 non-clinical TT faculty (down from 1593 in 2021), we need approximately 1500*6/35=257 Assistant Professors (TT). There are currently 214 Assistant Professors (TT) at McGill and the current university policy to replace two retirements with only one hire guarantees that number will continue to decline. The estimate above assumes that mid-career departures are balanced by senior hires, but that may not be possible if there is an exodus of TT professors who are put under new pressures due to the changing landscape at McGill.

The situation in the Faculty of Science is not better than at McGill as a whole:

Across all of McGill, the number of Assistant Professors (TT) has declined from 328 (in 2021) to 214 (in 2026). In the Faculty of Science, over the same period the number has gone from 66 to 24. The Faculty of Science has only 17% of all tenure-stream professors at McGill, but Science has absorbed 37% of the total loss in Assistant Professors (TT). Why is that? One possibility is that professors in Science may be more mobile, having an easier time finding positions elsewhere. In Physics, we recently had two pre-tenure Assistant Professors (TT) leave for other institutions in the same year, something that my more senior colleagues could not recall ever happening before.

A solution: Tenure for ranked CAS

Teaching staff at the University of British Columbia (UBC) have a path to tenure, while receiving salaries comparable to those of Assistant Professors at UBC and they have a pension that is vastly superior to that at McGill. At the University of Toronto (UofT), teaching staff are paid salaries that exceed those of UofT Assistant Professors and they qualify for a generous defined-benefit pension plan. McGill pays our contract academics significantly less than even our Assistant Professors, who are already underpaid relative to those at most research-intensive universities in Canada (the Statistics Canada category “Rank below” refers to Faculty Lecturers and Senior Faculty Lecturers at McGill):

	Assist. Prof	Rank below
McGill	$119,375	$102,825
UBC	$149,325	$145,850
Toronto*	$142,125*	$150,925*

*Statistics Canada data for the University of Toronto have not been updated for the past three years (since 2022/2023). It is likely that the salaries at the University of Toronto are now significantly higher.

Our ranked CAS are seeking a path to tenure, an effort that has been championed by the Confederation of Faculty Assocations of McGill (COFAM) in negotiations. By providing ranked CAS with a path to tenure along with reasonable salaries and benefits, we can empower them to discuss controversial topics in the classroom or to do research that may not be in the immediate financial interests of university administration, without fear of dismissal. At the same time, we can minimize the added financial incentive driving the adjunctification of McGill.

This affects the bottom line for all academics

A price that is being paid by all current academics for the shift of the past two decades is in future salary. The method currently used to calculate the budget for merit pay at McGill involves a specific percentage of the total salary mass for all eligible academics (including contract academics and tenure-stream academic staff). Merit-based salary increases have the same value at the same merit category for all academics, independent of rank. By replacing high-paid tenure-stream professors with more low-paid contract staff, the total salary mass decreases while the number of “mouths to feed” increases. For the same percentage of salary mass, merit-based salary increments diminish for all individuals.

In 2011/2012, there were 285 contract academics receiving merit pay. This is based on the difference between the number of tenure-stream faculty at the time (1684), see Fig. 1.1 of the 2025 MAUT report on salaries and benefits, and the number of academics receiving merit pay in implementation year 2012 (1969) reported in a 2014 presentation by then MAUT President-elect David Lowther. It is unclear how many of this number (285) were part-time employees and what was their full-time equivalent status, but in any case that number has skyrocketed. A total of 697 ranked contract academics (57% full time) and 141 Academic Associates/Senior Academic Associates, who also qualify for merit pay, are reported in the 2025 staffing report to senate. That is 838 heads, some of whom work part-time.

Merit-pay increments are scaled to the fraction of a full-time workload held by an employee, but even the most conservative estimates would suggest that the fraction of merit pay distributed to contract academics has more than doubled, and it may have tripled since 2011/2012. That fraction is now more than 25% of the total merit-pay budget. All current academics, both contract academics and tenure-stream professors, are being paid less because of this transition. I should emphasize that this is not “the” reason for the underfunding of academic salaries over the last decade. It is a compounding effect in addition to decisions made to decouple salary policy from inflation (see the 2025 MAUT report on salaries and benefits, “Reflecting on Academic Salary Policy” from R. J. Hill, MAUT President-elect, and my recent blog post “Preserving McGill”). The money “saved” by the university through these strategies is being rolled straight into administration executive/manager salaries. Is this an effective way to achieve our mission to advance knowledge?

Conclusion

A transition to more specialized roles at the university may make sense, but it should not come at the cost of academic freedom and through exploitative labour practices. The personal financial incentives that are apparently in place for senior administrators (transferring expenses from academic to administrator salaries) are also highly concerning. I think it is important to remove these incentives by ensuring that contract academics are treated with dignity, making these positions more expensive for the university, while ensuring that all academics who fill these roles enjoy robust protections of academic freedom.

We need to work together to protect academic freedom at McGill. If you are an academic in the Faculty of Science and you have not already done so, please sign a union card. Signing a card means that you can vote on the executive or for motions at AMPS general meetings. As of right now (March 2026), more than 2/3^rds of eligible academics in Science have already signed.