Flexibility in Academic Staffing: Effective Policies and Practices. ASHE-ERIC Higher Education Report No. 1, 1985.

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 fiscal strategies, four reallocation and reduction strategies are examined: across-the-board attrition, across-the-board decrements, selective attrition, and selective decrements. General factors that limit an institution's flexibility in managing scarce resources and adapting to environmental uncertainty include: excessive external budgetary controls, limited time to respond to change, limited capacity to reallocate resources, and internal opposition. The following 13 staffing practices are examined: flexibility in tenure and staffing, control of academic positions by attrition, contract systems, nontenure-track appointments, part-time appointments, tenure quotas, extended probation and suspension of "up-or-out" rules, stricter tenure standards, review of tenured faculty, early retirement incentives, retrenchment, closure of academic programs, and retraining and reallocating faculty. (SW)