ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on issues of social psychology and organizational culture. To discuss professional equity more specifically, it is useful to divide it into two categories—opportunity and identity. Professional opportunity looks at ladders of professional development that exist in the organization, whereas professional identity examines how contingent faculty members perceive the institution in relation to their careers. The teacher scholar also considers academic freedom to involve a professional educator’s sovereignty to select his or her own pedagogical techniques and practices. Certainly learning outcomes are an important consideration in evaluating whether the observed trend away from tenure track/tenured towards non- tenure line faculty is good or bad. The opposite is when a predesigned course is handed down to a teacher to merely facilitate. Increased professional equity for the contingent faculty workforce has multiple payoffs, the most immediate and direct of which is an increase in the general well-being, satisfaction, and productivity of contingent faculty members themselves.
