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djunctification of American universities has been the subject of a lot of talk. For my project I’m interested in doing an exploration of this phenomenon in one specific university and do interviews that might begin to capture the campus temperature on the issue. With tenure-track positions drying up nationwide, this story would be a glimpse into how one particular campus looks and feels at this unique moment.
The data visualization component of this project would involve creating a graphic or table that would allow the user to see a representation of all faculty members at a university and then subdivide that whole into portions or categories based on job title (adjunct, lecturer, instructor, assistant/associate/visit
ing professor etc.).
I looked into using Texas State University but the faculty directory online no longer works. UT’s is functional , so I am currently eyeing them as my school for the project. One difficulty, however, is that while their directory does let you search by job title, you are limited to pulling up 50 results at a time. This is obviously not nearly enough to complete this project. I need to dig into whether or not it is possible to access the entire faculty database that must exist for the directory search option to pull from. If this is not doable I will need to either locate a different university, perhaps St. Edward’s in Austin, or find another project idea.
For an engagement function I think it would be interesting to let users select which specific job-title they want to see compared to the whole, or select whether they just want to compare the amounts of non-tenured/tenure-track or tenured/tenure-track positions to the whole. Depending on how workable the data is I think it would also be interesting to find a way to let users search by department or more broad academic affiliation (hard sciences, arts, humanities, social sciences, etc.) to see which areas are most and least subject to the drying up of tenure track positions.