Don Boudreaux, chairman of George Mason University’s economics department explains in the following letter why he isn’t impressed by the AAUP’s campaign against at-will employment.

29 August 2009
Prof. Cary Nelson, President
American Association of University Professors
Dear Prof. Nelson:
In the mass e-mail that you sent on Thursday to us college professors, you brag of how your organization, AAUP, is working to end “at-whim employment” of adjunct and other part-time professors. You want all such professors to be dismissable only “with cause.”
Sounds noble. You will, however, pardon my skepticism.
If you make the dismissal of adjunct professors more difficult, you’ll thereby raise colleges’ costs of hiring adjuncts. As a result, fewer adjuncts will be hired. So it’s doubtful that your efforts will help the very persons whose well-being you claim to champion.
What IS clear, though, is that success at increasing the cost of hiring adjunct professors will benefit those of us who work as full-time faculty. Because adjuncts compete with full-time faculty, making adjuncts more costly to hire will raise the salaries of full-time faculty and prompt colleges to hire greater numbers of full-time faculty. Each of these consequences benefits us full-timers, both by fattening our wallets and improving our access to other full-time scholars in our fields.
But our windfall will be paid for by unemployed part-time faculty — and by students and taxpayers who’ll have to foot the bill for the resulting higher cost of supplying classroom instruction.
Sincerely,
Donald J. Boudreaux
Chairman, Department of Economics
George Mason University
Fairfax, VA 22030