Faced with scarce resources and environmental uncertainty in the past decade, colleges and universities have experimented with different modes of academic staffing, most of which are attempts to preserve or create more flexible policies and practices. In spite of tenure systems in operation at 94% of all four year colleges, institutions have at…

Academic staffing practices used at four-year colleges and universities are identified, and recommendations are offered for achieving staffing flexibility in the face of conditions such as scarce resources. In addition to considering faculty flow models (e.g., Markov models and simulators) as a management/planning tool to evaluate personnel and…