By Jonathan Baca, Copy Editor
CNM is hiring for 30 full-time faculty positions, 22 of which are newly created positions, and current part-time instructors who want these jobs will not have any special treatment in the hiring process, said SAGE instructor and CNM Employees Union President Andrew Tibble.
The full-time positions are open across many campuses and schools, and applications were due on Friday, January 17, and the newly hired instructors will begin in the fall, according to cnm.edu.
There has been some controversy about the high percentage of instructors at CNM who are considered part-time, but Director of Communications and Marketing Relations Brad Moore said the school has been trying to increase the number of full-time positions available.
“CNM made a commitment a couple years ago to start increasing full-time faculty rates. Since then, CNM is trying to do this in a strategic manner. So when we see a trend that says we can use more full-time faculty in a certain area, we’re moving to create more full-time positions in those areas,” Moore said.
Tibble said that in his last estimate, there were about 330 full-time instructors, and about 750 part-timers.
In a survey conducted by the Employees Union, 47 percent of the current part-time instructors polled said that they aspired to get a full-time position, and about half of those polled said they relied on CNM for a substantial part of their income, Tibble said.
Tibble also said that these results may indicate that a strong majority of those who work steadily at CNM do want full-time positions.
“There really is no preference given to part-timers. They don’t have a different process for people who are internal. It’s a very competitive process,” Tibble said.
Moore said that everyone who applies for these positions will get an equal chance of being hired, and that there is no special process for current part-timers looking for a promotion.
“CNM definitely encourages all of our part-time faculty who are interested in these positions to apply for them. Of course if they are working at CNM that will be taken into consideration. But there is an obligation on CNM that we have to hire the best candidates possible,” Moore said.
While no quota or system exists that explicitly favors part-timers already working for the school, numbers provided by Moore show that in the last several years, a higher percentage of new full-time hires came from existing part-time faculty than from outside the school.
According to Moore, 67.5 percent of the open full-time faculty positions in 2012-13 were filled by CNM part-time faculty members, and in the year before, 62.2 percent were filled by existing part-timers.
“We definitely want to provide as many full time positions as we can. We know those positions are coveted by a lot of people, they are definitely quality jobs, and we are trying to offer as many as feasibly possible within the constraints of the college,” Moore said.
Tibble said that when he has been a part of the hiring process at SAGE, he did feel that there was no hiring bias either way.
“There is the sense that everybody has got a shot at getting the job,” Tibble said.
He did say that even an exemplary teaching record at CNM may not give an instructor a leg up in an interview, and that he is aware of many instructors who feel that loyal, hard working part-timers should have a better chance of being hired for a full-time position.
“Some people do feel there should be a preference given to people who have worked as part-time for a long time and taught a lot of courses,” Tibble said.
Tibble said that if there was a clear preference for a certain group in the hiring process, there could be a danger that this bias could bring the school under criticism from the outside.
He said his opinion is that although he is not opposed to a completely fair and unbiased hiring process, he does feel that sometimes the school undervalues the advantage of hiring people who have already demonstrated their value and dependability by teaching for years as a part-timer.
“I think that if somebody has been a part-time faculty member at your institution for a few years, then you actually have a much better idea of what that person is like than somebody who comes from outside as a relatively unknown quantity,” Tibble said.
He also said that some instructors do not perform as well during the interview and teaching demonstration process, and that since these are the main factors that determine whether they will get the job, their stellar teaching record could go unnoticed.
“I think part-time faculty have to be aware of that. When they take the job here, what they’re doing as part-time faculty, no matter how many classes they teach or what contribution they make, it’s very rarely going to give them a leg up in the hiring process,” Tibble said.
Moore said that part-time faculty play a vital role at the school, and that their real world experience working in their fields is extremely important to the students they teach.
“We definitely hope they do apply if they are interested in the positions and we’d like to see them advance at CNM if they are the best candidate,” Moore said.
