Part Time Work in the Legal Academy

Over at Crooked Timber, they're talking about academics who choose (often for family reasons) to work part time.   Lots of reasons why one might want that.  A lot has to do with having more time to spend with families.  Sometimes, also, graduate students will work part time (to put bread on the table and self-fund their research).   And they're talking about the pros and cons of this, particularly its implications for research.  As Ingrid Robeyns says:

But my biggest doubt whether part-time work is such a splendid idea for academics who are doing research has to do with the nature of research: whether one works on a full-time contract or a part-time contract, the literature that one has to follow to keep up to date with one’s area of research remains the same. There are ‘fixed costs’ (in terms of time and effort) for each line of research that one pursues. The consequence is that a part-timer spends as much time (in absolute number of hours) on keeping up to date with the literature, implying that she has fewer hours left for actually developing new research.

I suspect that use of part time academics, like increasing use of adjuncts and non-tenure track faculty, is another strategy of cost-cutting and benefit reduction that we're seeing throughout the economy.  The academy's being transformed (for good and bad) just as the rest of our economy.   As schools, understandably, look for ways to cut costs, use of part-time faculty is going to be yet another popular response.  This is a topic on which I hope to spend a lot of time talking this summer.

Alfred Brophy