Part-time faculty is important to the instructional mission of community colleges. Community colleges rely on part-time faculty for a majority of their instruction and will be forced to hire more of these faculty to serve increasing student enrollments. This study was designed to determine and compare the perceptions of chief academic officers (CAOs), the academic department heads in technical/career programs (DH-CTs), and the academic department heads in pre-baccalaureate/transfer programs (DH-PBs) about the importance and presence of part-time faculty employment, professional development, and integration practices at community colleges located in the Appalachian regions of Kentucky, Ohio, and West Virginia. In addition, the study concerned a description and analysis of participant descriptions of the importance of employing, and the perceived ability to employ in specific disciplines as well as participants' perceptions of the reasons why part-time faculty were employed at the institution.
A questionnaire was mailed to all 23 two-year, public community colleges in the Appalachian regions of Kentucky, Ohio, and West Virginia. The results were analyzed using descriptive statistics including frequencies, means, and percentages; and Analysis of Variance (ANOVA).
Major findings of the study include: (a) CAOs, DH-CTs, and DH-PBs placed all practices presented in the study in the "important" to "somewhat important" range indicating a positive approach towards the utilization of part-time faculty; (b) CAOs, DH-CTs, and DH-PBs have different mean scores for most employment, professional development, and integration practices indicating different perceptions about how these groups perceive the importance of the practices; (c) the most important employment practice is "institutional policies" and the least important is "institutional benefits package"; (d) the most important professional development practice is "departmental evaluation" and the least important is "paid membership"; (e) the most important integration practice is "equip with a syllabus" and the least important is "participation in academic senate"; (f) the most common employment practice in place for all three groups is "established salary policy"; (g) the most common professional development practice in place for all three groups is "departmental evaluation"; (h) the most common integration practice in place for all three groups was "equip with a syllabus"; (i) disciplines that are ranked as important to institutions vary by respondent group and have no correlation to the ability to employ in the same disciplines; (j) the most selected reason for employment of part-time faculty was "meeting student demand."