Adjunct Faculty and Community Physicians Teach Your Students, but Do They Appear in Your Faculty Data?
Consider a third-year medical student four weeks into a clerkship in a community physician’s office. That physician holds a faculty appointment with the medical school, went through a credentialing review to get it, and is not on the school’s payroll. Now suppose a dean asks Faculty Affairs a simple question: are that physician’s license and board certification current today? At some institutions the answer is a quick look at a record. At others it is a call to the clerkship office.
I want to be precise about the gap, because it is not the one most coverage describes. Most universities already have policies and processes for non-tenure-track and part-time appointments. The groups that tend not to be tracked the same way as other faculty appointments are adjunct faculty and community physicians. Both teach students, and many medical schools rely on community physicians to host learners in real clinical settings.
Most Universities Already Have Policies for Non-Tenure-Track Appointments
These appointments are no longer the exception, which is part of why policies for them are well developed. AAUP’s analysis of federal data found that about 68% of nonmedical faculty held contingent appointments in fall 2023, and its companion analysis of medical schools found that about 72% of medical school faculty hold contingent appointments. AAUP counts part-time and non-tenure-track appointments as contingent and reports graduate student employees separately, so those figures do not include them. CUPA-HR’s 2026 report puts adjuncts alone at roughly 40% of the faculty workforce, a share that has held steady since 2014-15.
With numbers like these, institutions have had to build structure around these appointments, and most have. CUPA-HR’s survey of institutional policies found that 56% of institutions say academic affairs or the provost’s office determines adjunct pay, while only 7% leave it to the department or college. In other words, the policy layer is largely centralized.
Where the Gap Actually Sits
What remains is narrower and more specific. Adjunct faculty and community physicians both teach students under appointments that look different from the full-time, salaried appointments most faculty systems were built around. Adjuncts are typically hired to teach specific courses and paid course by course. Community physicians are often not employees at all. In both cases, the question is less whether a policy exists and more whether the appointment shows up in the same record, with the same visibility, as everyone else who teaches.
Adjunct Faculty: Short Appointments, Thin Data
An appointment tied to individual courses can begin and end each term, making it harder to keep current than a multi-year appointment. CUPA-HR data also shows how narrow each appointment typically is: 79% of adjuncts teach six or fewer credit hours in a term, roughly one or two courses. Multiply that across a department, and the number of separate, short appointments adds up quickly. CUPA-HR’s policy data shows how fluid these assignments can be: at 70% of institutions, a course is canceled when enrollment falls below a set number, and the adjunct scheduled to teach it is not paid. For Faculty Affairs, that means the list of who is teaching can shift after the term has already been planned.
The sector has also been slow to see this group clearly. In 2023, AAUP’s senior researcher noted that the country had lacked nationally representative data on part-time faculty pay and conditions since the federal faculty survey ended in 2004. CUPA-HR only began collecting adjunct data at the incumbent level in its 2024-25 survey, covering 43,279 adjuncts at 263 institutions, which is a real step forward and a reminder of how recently that level of detail became available. If national benchmarking bodies are only now seeing individual adjuncts in their data, it is reasonable to ask how clearly your own institution sees them.
Community Physicians: Real Appointments, Held by People Who Aren’t Employees
What These Appointments Require
Published school policies show how substantial these appointments are. The University of Kansas School of Medicine describes more than 2,500 volunteer physicians who host students in their practices, each of whom needs a formal academic appointment that moves through a chair’s signature, the Office of Academic Affairs, and final approval by the campus dean. UCSF defines its volunteer clinical professors as community-based physicians the school does not pay, and requires them to submit licensure and malpractice information with an appointment request.
The conditions do not end once the appointment is granted. UC Davis’s policy requires volunteer clinical professors to notify the school immediately if they relinquish a medical license, board certification, DEA registration, clinical privileges, or malpractice insurance. VCOM re-credentials its clinical faculty every five years, checking board certification and an active, unrestricted license. The University of Colorado School of Medicine notes that facilitating a clinical faculty appointment takes about 30 days, a reminder that each appointment is a real process with a real timeline, not a formality.
What a Community Physician Appointment Can Involve | Published Example |
| Formal appointment approved by the chair, academic affairs, and the dean | University of Kansas School of Medicine |
| Licensure and malpractice information submitted with the request | UCSF School of Medicine |
| A duty to notify the school if a license, certification, DEA registration, privileges, or coverage lapses | UC Davis School of Medicine |
| Re-credentialing every five years, with board certification and an active license | VCOM (Edward Via College of Osteopathic Medicine) |
These are formal appointments with credential conditions, not informal arrangements. Yet the people holding them are not employees, and my read is that this is exactly why they can fall outside systems built around payroll and full-time employment. That is an inference rather than a finding, but it aligns with what my colleagues on Faculty Affairs teams tell me: the appointments exist, the policies exist, and the tracking is where the difference shows up.
What Gets Missed When These Appointments Live Outside the Main Record
The requests that reach Faculty Affairs are ordinary. Who is teaching our students this term? Are their credentials current? Which appointments come up for re-credentialing this year? How many adjunct and volunteer faculty does each department rely on? Each is simple to ask. Each is slower to answer when part of the teaching faculty lives in department files and coordinator spreadsheets.
UC Davis’s policy offers a revealing detail. Its education office reviews student evaluations each year to confirm that every physician who taught holds an appointment, and starts the appointment process for evaluators who lack one. That is a sensible safeguard, and it also shows the problem: if an annual check of evaluations is how a school confirms who is teaching, the record alone is not telling the whole story. The same logic applies to credentials. A duty to notify the school depends on a physician reporting a change to someone, and that someone is often a coordinator rather than the faculty record.
None of what follows is a finding from a study. These are the places I would look first.
Where Tracking Can Break Down | What It Can Put at Risk |
| The appointment lives in a department or program file | Faculty Affairs cannot confirm who is teaching this term |
| Credential changes are reported to a clerkship coordinator | The faculty record shows no lapse until someone checks |
| Re-credentialing dates sit on individual calendars | A due date passes unnoticed |
| Unpaid or per-course appointees are absent from payroll-based reports | Headcounts given to leadership understate who is teaching |
Key Takeaway: Policies for non-tenure-track appointments are broadly in place. The harder work is making sure adjunct faculty and community physicians appear in the same record, with the same credential visibility, as everyone else who teaches.
A simple test can show you where your own institution stands. Pick one department, or one clerkship, and ask for a list of everyone who taught or supervised students last term, including adjuncts and volunteer clinical faculty. Then check each name against your faculty record and note how many appear, how many have current credentials on file, and how many offices you had to contact to find out. The answer is usually more instructive than any policy review, and it gives you something concrete to bring to the provost or dean who asks about it.
Bringing Every Faculty Appointment Into One Record
At Mountain Pass, we built SmartPath on the idea that the system should adapt to your institution, not the other way around. For adjunct and community physician faculty, that means configuration, not workarounds. You can model each appointment type the way your policy defines it, whether that is a per-course adjunct appointment or a volunteer clinical appointment, and build the approval path your governance requires, whether that runs through a chair, academic affairs, and the dean or a different sequence.
Because SmartPath keeps the underlying data structured, the details that make these appointments different become fields instead of footnotes: licensure, board certification, malpractice coverage, appointment dates, and re-credentialing due dates. Reminders can prompt action ahead of those dates, and dashboards show where every appointment stands. Paid or unpaid, per-course or multi-year, the appointment lives in the same record as the rest of your faculty, so the answer to “who is teaching, and are they current?” comes from the system and not from a round of calls. SmartPath also supports policy-driven workflows across HR, the provost’s office, and credentialing, which matters when these appointments touch more than one office.
Want to see how adjunct and community physician appointments could be tracked at your institution?
Sources cited in this post:
- AAUP, Data Snapshot: Tenure and Contingency in US Higher Education, Fall 2023
- AAUP, Data Snapshot: Tenure and Contingency in US Medical Schools, Fall 2023
- CUPA-HR, Adjunct Faculty in the Higher Education Workforce (February 2026)
- Inside Higher Ed, Contingent faculty members report low pay, mull quitting
- University of Kansas School of Medicine, Becoming a Preceptor
- UCSF School of Medicine, Volunteer Clinical Professor roles and responsibilities
- UC Davis School of Medicine, Volunteer Clinical Professor Policy
- VCOM, Becoming a Clinical Preceptor
- University of Colorado School of Medicine, Preceptors
