Question:
Is it common for you to have a lot of classes taught (at least in part) by people who are not official faculty members of your university/college?
I've probably had at least one class every semester that was taught in such a manner. This semester, I've got two. One is an Orchestration class for Music Industry Studies students, which is being taught as a sort of "commercial music arranging / composing" class. We have a professional songwriter from Nashville coming every other two weeks or so to talk to us about commercial songwriting. The other class is a Music Finance class, which is all about how to write up a financial plan to get money from an investor for the purpose of starting a music enterprise of some sort. For that class, we have an entertainment attorney (also from Nashville) who comes and administers the class alongside our head music business professor.
I have mixed emotions about adjunct / outside professor situations. On the one hand, I like having access to such expertise as I've described above. On the other hand, I don't like the fact that the people coming in to teach us are not familiar with our degree program and don't know what we've already learned. Seems like we get a lot of repetition of material that we learned years ago in a different class.
What are your experiences with adjunct / outside professors and what are your thoughts about those situations / experiences?
In His love,
Nate
Answer:
We have an adjunct or two here that are wastes of space, but we have other adjuncts that have been teaching at our college for over 10 years. They're just considered adjunct now b/c they're not "technically" full-time (although my statistics adjunct is here all day, every day)
Answer:
The adjuncts I've had were pretty good. There's this one guy who has a ton of practical field experience, and yet can't become a full prof because he only has a BS, and until he gets an MS he can't get an associate or tenure-track position. But he's very familiar with our program and is one of the best teachers I've had.