Academia's Indentured Servants

[xchrom]

http://www.alternet.org/education/academias-indentured-servants



On April 8, 2013, the New York Times reported that 76 percent of American university faculty are adjunct professors - an all-time high. Unlike tenured faculty, whose annual salaries can top $160,000, adjunct professors make an average of $2,700 per course and receive no health care or other benefits.

Most adjuncts teach at multiple universities while still not making enough to stay above the poverty line. Some are on welfare or homeless. Others depend on charity drives held by their peers. Adjuncts are generally not allowed to have offices or participate in faculty meetings. When they ask for a living wage or benefits, they can be fired. Their contingent status allows them no recourse.

No one forces a scholar to work as an adjunct. So why do some of America's brightest PhDs - many of whom are authors of books and articles on labour, power, or injustice - accept such terrible conditions?

"Path dependence and sunk costs must be powerful forces," speculates political scientist Steve Saidemen in a post titled " The Adjunct Mystery". In other words, job candidates have invested so much time and money into their professional training that they cannot fathom abandoning their goal - even if this means living, as Saidemen says, like "second-class citizens". (He later downgraded this to "third-class citizens".)

[Laelth]

1. k&r for exposure. n/t

-Laelth

[malaise]

2. This is a global problem

but you see academics remained quiet while these conditions were imposed on fast food workers, factory workers etc.

Workers of the world unite...or else!!

[Skidmore]

3. Academics created some of the very

business models that is screwing them and everyone else over. Finance and MBA programs come to mind--the nexus of academe and hell.

[malaise]

6. Yes and the way in which the real economics departments were destroyed

to facilitate the business schools must be examined.

What is fascinating to me is the complete shift in views coming out of mainstream political science journals these days.
A paradigm shift is on its way.

[a la izquierda]

4. Hmm. This is a real problem.

I have a PhD in history. I worked my ass off, but also got very lucky. There is no rhyme or reason why some get jobs and others don't.
I just landed a dream job. But in the blink of an eye, I could've faced unemployment. I had contingency plans, none of which involved working as an adjunct. Instead, I'd have sold my soul for a government or corporate job. I also pondered starting a non-profit. But I refused to be exploited like I was a grad student.

[jsr]

5. Meanwhile, the administrative ruling class increased by 114% at UC

over the last decade:

http://changinguniversities.blogspot.com/2009/10/how-administrators-took-over-university.html

[GeoWilliam750]

9. Fascinating

[TomClash]

7. I have a one word reply

UNION

[JDPriestly]

32. Yes. I know a school where there were a couple of lawsuits and then

a UNION, and adjuncts started getting a better deal.

A UNION is the answer. The professors' professional organizations don't always include adjuncts. They should, but they don't in my experience.

[enlightenment]

52. Easy to say - much harder to do.

Especially at state institutions in right to work states. Many, if not most, adjuncts work on semester long contracts that very clearly indicate they can be let go for "cause" (undefined) and with no promise of employment the following semester. Adjuncts who stir the pot are simply not rehired - and there is no recourse. It's an easy way to solve the problem.

Another, not often addressed, problem is that a significant proportion of tenure and tenure track faculty will happily toss adjuncts under the train if it comes down to potentially sacrificing any advances they have managed. There is also a very large "I've got mine - too bad you weren't smart/lucky enough to get yours" attitude as well.

This is particularly true when it comes to reevaluating tenure conditions - a lot of tenure and tenure-track faculty completely reject the concept of hiring non-tenure track faculty (usually 1 year contracts, renewable) because they feel it undermines the value of tenure and could lead to its demise.

Administrations, which grow more bloated every year, foster this mostly unspoken animosity between faculty because it serves their purpose - if the peons are lined up against each other, they're not fomenting revolt against the administration.

The public doesn't care, either - and many have attitudes like those expressed above . . . that somehow, the corporatization of America and the death of the "dream" - writ large in the nation - is the fault of the academic community. Alternately, many believe that adjuncts should have known better and 1) should never have tried; or 2) should quit and find something else; or 3) should be happy they have work at all (most are, btw).

That is, of course, while they are busy complaining because their kid can't get into the classes they need to graduate.

Universities like to point to colleges - especially two-year colleges - and shake their heads over the number of adjuncts they hire; it is most often from that quarter that the tired saw of "it was never supposed to be full-time" comes from. Of course, they have ready-made labor - graduate students - to pick up the slack for the extra courses and sections that they haven't faculty to teach.

Adjuncts make up the majority of teaching faculty these days, and that isn't all the fault of the adjuncts. Given the choice of hiring one non-tenure instructor to teach six classes (a real hire with benefits and an office) and hiring two adjuncts to teach three classes each (with no benefits, no office, and at a reduced rate), it makes good corporate sense to hire the adjuncts.

So the school hire more adjuncts. Which perpetuates the cycle.

This isn't all about people who made "bad" choices and failed to find that "dream" job. This is an endemic problem in academia that is reaching critical mass. For all those who believe that higher education is a waste of time, it no doubt doesn't matter - but for a nation that is still pushing the value of education, it is a crisis.

[mike_c]

57. yes and no....

I'm a tenured professor at the California State University, where faculty are organized by the California Faculty Association, which is SEIU 1983. I'm also an officer and activist in the union. Although we've been moderately successful in negotiating benefits and job protections for our contingent faculty (lecturer rank in our system), we have not been able to stem the conversion of tenured positions to contingent lecturer positions. Management still retains the right to make hiring decisions and they increasingly favor contingent lecturers over tenure track hires, often citing the need for "flexibility" in staffing.

Still, if I were a lecturer rather than tenured, I'd rather be contingent in the CSU than just about anywhere else. The union has done a lot to improve contingent faculty terms and conditions of work.

[TomClash]

65. The last paragraph is exactly the point

But your complete response is enlightening.

[Hissyspit]

69. "Right-to-Work" state. nt

[The Wizard]

8. I did it because

I thought I could make a difference in the lives of some students. My goal every semester was to keep five kids in school who were ready to drop out.
The reward is when they graduate. The administration just takes adjuncts for granted, knowing that adjuncts aren't there to make a living wage, but rather doing something without tangible results for themselves.
Now I'm retired and occasionally meet a former student who thanks me for what I did. Teachers never die. Their thoughts get carried from one generation to another.
Planting land mines in the students' minds that would go off at a later date is another intangible that can't be measured in dollars. Teaching students how to reach their own conclusions and to think conceptually made my days of lousy pay all worth while.
I enjoyed working with students, administrators not so much, and the administration didn't like me either for teaching students to question everything, especially the blathering of authority figures.

[JDPriestly]

33. Did you raise a family on your salary?

[The Wizard]

64. No

Barely made enough for myself.

[Starry Messenger]

10. I liked the first part of this article

The second part about cult like thinking didn't really reflect the reality that I and others that I know live. Most of us stick with it because of the jobs shortage in our fields. Not all of us have skills that translate into a non-academic job, and the other ecosystems that we used to be employed in had their funding dry up 20 years ago.

At age 42 it's kind of tough with no assets to completely start over again.

[Quantess]

11. It sure is tough to start over again,

especially if you already have a degree and thereby don't qualify for the same financial aid for people without any degree. Not to mention that the cost of higher education has skyrocketed over the past 20 years. You know what it was like to pay a much lower pricetag for your college education, and maybe you also got financial aid. But these days if you already have a degree and you want to go back to school, you're kind of screwed if you don't have any financial resources.

This applies to any degree, not just those in academic fields.

[Starry Messenger]

15. Mostly agree.

Although there are PhD adjuncts I know in their 60's who are still paying student loans.

I do agree it it extremely difficult in any field to start over, but since I'm an adjunct this is the only field I can speak to.

Back when I was first working on my degree (in the arts) there were more funding streams and organizations that supported studio artists. That had all shifted by the time I was done. If I'd had some foresight I should have tried to pursue vfx work but that has its own share of labor abuses these days.

[Quantess]

18. .

I was speaking mostly about myself, and since we're the same age, your paragraph struck a chord. But OTOH, I suppose I should remember to be thankful that I went to college back when it was still feasible, still somewhat affordable, without taking out massive amounts of loans.

[Starry Messenger]

61. I was just expanding my thoughts. :) nt.

[mike_c]

58. I got my first tenure track professorship at 41...

...in 1996. Changed to my current job in 1997-- now I'm a full professor of zoology. It was hard, but it can be done!

[Starry Messenger]

60. I'm in Ceramics.

I'd like to stay near my aging parents, so options are limited. I'm pretty much waiting for all my teachers to retire.

[mike_c]

62. yeah, that definitely limits your options....

Best of luck to you!

[aikoaiko]

12. I wonder what the full time equivalent is of that 75% figure

Anywhere from 4 - 8 adjuncts could be the equivalent of 1 tenure/tenure-track faculty member.

Ironically, if those teaching loads are transferred to tenure track positions more of those adjuncts will be locked out of academia completely. In general this result is better for universities, students, and lucky subset of adjuncts who get the TT positions.

[Viking12]

31. Nonsense.

Your math doesn't add up. If the load were transferred to tenure-track positions, the current adjuncts would be happy to accept the work. Depending on the University and Department, tenure-track faculty teach 6-8 classes per year. Adjuncts teach 10-12. Creating more tenure-track positions would increase, not decrease, job opportunities and job security.

[aikoaiko]

34. Most adjuncts don't teach that much.

You're describing the high end.

At many public schools they are prohibited from teaching more than .5 FTE.

But I'm open to seeing national data that suggests other wise.

[Viking12]

38. Many adjuncts teach at 2 or more Universities.

We have several working with us that work at 3 Universities to make a full-time salary.

The ones that teach as a moonlight job are often very poor at what they do. But, hey, they save the University some money so screw the students.

[BainsBane]

78. 4-8 per year

Research universities have 2-2 teaching loads. Then consider all the time spent off on grant funded research, which brings the average teaching load down even further.

[distantearlywarning]

13. There are a number of reasons for this phenomena

First, in academia, Ph.D.-level jobs outside of the "ivory tower" are seen by those inside as second-class, or what a Ph.D. does when they aren't good enough to hack it in academia. Only non-serious, not-smart-enough people leave the academic sphere to work outside of it. There are a lot of new Ph.D.s who are taking adjunct jobs for the social status (really!), because being an adjunct is still seen as conferring higher status than is working in industry or for the government. In fact, there are probably many departments around the country where a new Ph.D. moving to industry is seen as some kind of intellectual failure. After 8+ years in the hell that is grad school, people can't bear the thought that they 'failed' - even though to outsiders, getting a Ph.D. is a big accomplishment and making money with it is a Good Thing. It's completely ridiculous, but it's a big part of the culture.

Second, the truth is that many types of Ph.D.s don't actually qualify you to do anything BUT teach at the university level - especially those degrees in the humanities. For some people, there are literally no other options but a tenure-track or an adjunct job. Nobody wants to spend 8 years in the hell that is grad school and then go work at Starbucks again and be Dr. Barista. And that's assuming they would hire you at Starbucks with a Ph.D. I suspect those people hear the word "overqualified" a lot during non-academic job searches.

Third, in many fields, if you leave academic even once for the "outside world", there is basically no chance of ever getting back in. Nobody will even look at your CV if you have 5 years of government work or consulting after graduation instead of something academic, and a lot of those industry/govt. jobs don't help you continue publishing either. So if you trained to be a professor, and you feel your social status is tied to being a professor, and you love research/teaching, the only way of ever someday achieving your goal/dream is to stay tied in some way to a university, even if that means being an adjunct for some interminable length of time. I have heard stories of people staying adjuncts for 5+ years, applying for the ever-shrinking pool of tenure-track jobs every fall and failing to land one, surviving on $1000 a month in the meantime, before finally "giving up" and going into industry or whatever.

As for me, personally, I realized the social status stuff was BS a long time ago, I figured out in grad school that I don't actually like teaching undergrads, I served on a search committee for two years so I got to see first hand precisely what I would be up against for a tenure job, and I would in fact rather work at Starbucks than be an underpaid indentured servant, aka adjunct. So this month I've been busily applying for all the government and industry jobs I can find (I'm likely defending in June). I was also lucky enough to have chosen a field where I got a lot of applied training in stats along with all the other Ivory Tower stuff, so there are a lot of social science/research/marketing jobs I am well-qualified for. I have high hopes - all of my graduating lab mates over the last three years have gotten very decent industry jobs, and nobody is unemployed or adjuncting. I will be thrilled to have a 40 hour work week and make more than $20K a year - that alone will be a big step up from my life in grad school lo these many years. Fuck adjuncting. Let someone else be the university's thrall, waiting for their masters to throw them a few scraps.

[RVN VET]

22. I didn't sell my soul, but I did get out

When I was a Grad Student many years ago, the Assistant Head of my Department many showed me 3 stacks of applications for one potentially tenured position. One stack of about a dozen were people who had more than 3 published papers, another -- actually it was several stacks because gravity would have pulled them down otherwise -- was recent PhD's without fewer than 3 published papers, or none. The third stack was short, only 3! They'd published books and papers, 2 were ivy League, one was Oxford.

Which pile of CV's got serious attention? i didn't need to be told.

I got the message, and realized that I would have been in the "discard" pile had my CV been among them. So I left to a good government job, stayed for 32 years and retired comfortably. I won't say that working for the Federal Gov was the most rewarding thing in the world, but it was OK; and I had the immense good fortune of working for some really great people (a couple of callous s.o.b.s -- but you get that everywhere, I guess.)

But my flight from academia was almost 40 years ago. Things were so bad then that I thought they'd have to get better over time -- I just didn't want to hang around waiting for it to change. Turns out, I was a tad optimistic, wasn't I? Things have gotten much, much worse and I really feel bad for the thousands of truly bright and dedicated people who are being abused and mistreated by a callous and corrupt system.

[distantearlywarning]

25. That is exactly what my experience on the search committee was like

One of our departmental applicants who got an interview had 45 (yes you read that right) publications coming out of grad school. He didn't get the job offer. The one who got the job offer had that many publications, 5 years in a non-tenure track position at an R2, stellar teaching credentials, and gave a near-perfect job talk. There were 150 other applications which went to the circular file - all Ph.D.s, many with 10+ publications on their CV, post-docs in famous labs, etc etc. Many of those will be adjuncting next year for $1200 per class, teaching Intro to Whatever to 400 bored undergrads, in the desperate hope of keeping an academic career alive. It's very sad. It's a horrible waste of talent and intelligence. The system is completely fucked.

[reformist2]

45. The academic system is set up like a pyramid.

It ought to be obvious to any grad student in any university department that it's kind of a pyramid scheme. An example: take a department with 3 tenured professors that have 10 grad students among them, and the department is awarding one new PhD every year. Now where are these PhDs going to go? Assume one of the professors retires every 10 years. Well, that department has pumped out 10 PhDs in that time span. So extrapolating these numbers to the whole university system in the country, it's fairly clear that only about 10% of those PhDs will ever get to become a tenured professor.

[Viking12]

48. Except only a relatively small recentage of positions are at PhD granting institutions

New positions are created through growth and attrition in many non-PhD granting institutions. You're on point but the way you get there isn't.

[WinniSkipper]

75. Excellent post

I know absolutely nothing about academia. But I do about industry (marketing).

The way you captured it, and explained it so well, in three paragraphs, tells me I would hire you, and pay you quite well.

[snot]

14. There's an obvious fix to the part of this problem that affects workers in other fields as well:

enact legislation requiring employers to provide benefits proportionate to time worked.

I.e., in this case, if a full-time prof. teaches X hours and gets healthcare, unemployment and workers' comp. insurance, etc., and an adjunct teaches 1/3 of X hours, require the employer to provide to the adjunct the equivalent of 1/3 of the same benefits.

So all workers working 2 jobs that are each 1/2-time would end up with benefits equivalent to those of a full-time job; and current incentives to split a full-time job into 2 or more part-time jobs would be eliminated.

[aikoaiko]

16. I think half the premiums would crush their take home pay.

[2Design]

28. obamacare would do that for over 30 hours - so colleges are cutting teaching load so they don't have

give benefits - the colleges do not want to pay more

[SteveG]

29. Many tenured faculty

work much shorter hours than adjuncts. A typical Adjunct may teach as many as 5 or 6 course at several different colleges and universities per semester, meanwhile tenure track and tenured faculty frequently teach only 4 or 5 courses per year plus their research responsibilities.

[JDPriestly]

35. And yet I know a person who has been an adjunct for many years

and still manages to publish -- probably more substantial work than his tenured colleagues. The system is arbitrary and makes no sense.

[Viking12]

36. Fewer classes, yes. Shorter hours, probably not.

Tenure-track faculty have other obligations beyond teaching. University service, advising, research.

[glinda]

49. My husband was Tenured and worked sometimes until 10-11 pm at night

frequently. He worked most weekends. Yes he attended meetings, worked individually with students and did many many other things. He had to defend his job sometimes from Adjuncts who wanted his job and felt they knew more than him (which wasn't usually true) and yet these same new Graduates wanted his "Tenured position meanwhile all the time disrespecting his Tenured position. I agree our education system needs help. I also think the Unions have sometimes failed these same educators. Not all of the time but have sold out at times to less than helpful positions.
He is really glad to be out of there!

[snot]

63. That's the point. If the adjunct is doing more total work, the adjunct should

receive more total benefits. E.g., if a regular prof teaches 4 courses at one school and receives (in addition to salary) insurance and other benefits worth $4,000 per year from that school, and an adjunct teaches two courses each at three schools (and assuming the benefits given to regular profs is the same at all the schools), then the adjunct should receive $2,000-worth of benefits from each of the three schools, for a total of $6,000.

In short, if each school only pays its proportionate share of what it would pay a regular prof at its own school, the incentive to artificially divide full-time jobs into more part-time jobs is eliminated, and adjuncts piecing part-time jobs together should end up with benefits at least somewhat commensurate to the amount of work they're doing.

[GreenEyedLefty]

17. Also wondering what kind of effect the corporatizing of university education is having on students?

I have a daughter who is a senior in college. We have made some pretty serious sacrifices so she can get a quality post-secondary education. But, if I really allow myself to stop and think about her and her peers' and my younger children's future prospects, even with a college degree, it's depressing as fuck.

What has to happen to bring about real and meaningful change? Honest question...

[daleanime]

19. Bookmarked....

for later study.

[Buzz Clik]

20. A lot of forces are at work to create this environment:

1) Extreme pressure is put on tenured faculty to engage in well-funded research. This generates peer-reviewed publications but it also generates cash for the university in the form of overhead (indirect costs), which amounts to 40-60% of the total grant budget. A member of the faculty that is busy conducting research, writing grants, and writing publications has little time for teaching introductory courses. The cheaper alternative? Adjuncts and non-tenured instructors.

2) State legislatures have bled so much money from public institutions that they have to become creative in how they finance themselves. Some means of cutting costs are inventive and useful (extended summer offerings), and others are awful (adjuncts and instructors).

3) As mentioned up thread, university administrations are exploding is size and costs. Enormous salaries for a sea of vice presidents and all their staffs. Administrative assistants making $100,000? Yep.

It isn't a pretty sight, and it is getting worse by the day. The new paradigm will be large, metropolitan universities in which the faculty are expected to teach a lot with very little research. (Not to be confused with the community college model which takes the adjunct/instructor model and turns up the volume to 11).

[Viking12]

41. Yep.

Your 1) is certainly true at R1 Universities but has less of an impact on the comprehensives.

2) & 3) are factors at all levels. Ironically, much of the administrative work used to be done by the tenure-track positions that have been eliminated.

[Buzz Clik]

54. You are so correct.

Ten years ago at R1 institutions, the Vice President for Research was a tenured, senior member of the faculty who did the job part time. The position might have a partially funded clerical, but maybe not.

Today, the VPR position has risen to a level of shocking prominence -- full time, massive salary, huge staff, and a staggering budget. At my institution, the current VPR was elevated in stature over the provost, and went from a cubicle in a large office complex to having an entire floor (40 offices) of a large building. He is building an empire that includes hiring of "research professors" that are untenured. These positions are slowly getting teaching assignments and displacing tenured faculty. His budget went from $0 to $8 million in two years. Everyone (except students) at this university is to blame for either causing this to happen, benefitting from it, or watching without reacting.

[davidpdx]

21. One of my friends left South Korea and tried to go back home to teach for a year a few years ago

She could get nothing but adjunct positions.

I'm currently working on my doctorate in Business Administration and hoping to teach. The only nice thing is I will have the choice of jobs both here in South Korea and online positions as well. At the school I go to almost all of the professors are adjunct and also work at other universities.

My hope is with a few years experience I can get on tenure track here and possibly still teach online along with doing consulting.

[alcibiades_mystery]

23. Just a note on salaries

The Times is playing a bit of a trick here: taking the generally lowest level of adjunct salary and the generally higher level of tenured faculty salary, thereby ending with the range $2,700 / course and $160,000.

Now, the adjunct salary is not that far off. In my institution, adjunct faculty make between $3500 and $4000 per course.

The salary for tenure-track and tenured faculty applies to a much smaller class of faculty. Most assistant professors (untenured but tenure-track probationary faculty) make between $50,000 and $70,000 / year, depending on the kind of institution (teaching, research, etc.) and how much they were able to negotiate at hiring. A few years ago, I heard of an assistant offered $82,000/year right out of grad school - that was a shock for everybody.

Different rates apply for different disciplines. Business school professors tend to make more than humanities professors, for instance. An English professor making $160,000 a year is a pretty rare thing, I suspect.

Next, we have associate professors, who are tenured. You usually get a salary bump at tenure. In some institutions (most), that would be in the $10,000 range for most disciplines. So, an assistant professor making $63,000/year gets tenured and promoted to associate, and the salary bump is to about $75,000.

The next jump is "full" professor. That's another bump, and a pretty good one, since this is the highest you're going to get unless you go into admin (Dean, provost, etc.). Near a $20,000 jump in lot of places (from $75,000 to about $95,000). Maybe in some research heavy schools and STEM and business disciplines, full professors could be nearing $160,000, but even that is rare, I think. Full professors at most institutions are in the $90,000 to $110,000 range. I should note that this is possibly the lowest salary for people with advanced degrees who have reached a pinnacle of accomplishment in their fields of any field. Engineering students right out of college often make more than tenured (associate) professors.

If you consider a full professor to be the career equivalent of a partner in a law firm, you get the idea of the much lower payscale. Even a full professor with an endowed chair makes less than a senior associate in most corporate law firms.

All that said, the reliance and exploitation of adjunct faculty is very real indeed. If you think college is expensive now, though, consider how expensive it would be if 70% of the faculty workforce suddenly had their salaries doubled, tripled, or quadrupled. Because that's what returning to a reasonable level of responsibly paid faculty would look like.

[JDPriestly]

30. This is another example of how our exaggerated disparity in wealth

harms us.

A young person starting out looks at those salaries and thinks they had better go to business school or law school if they want to enjoy a good life with a spouse, kids and a house.

A big problem is the disparity in income between the administrators and teaching staff. Administrators in colleges and universities are very often just plain overpaid.

A college administrator's job isn't that hard. University professors shouldn't need all that much management, considering their education. Hiring and firing faculty members is often done by the full professors on the faculty committee.

Raising money is probably the biggest challenge for a college or university. Managing the facility, the grounds, etc. is no more demanding that it is in other workplaces -- probably less so. Of course, in some schools dealing with alcohol and drugs is a big problem. But it's probably not a major concern of the best paid of the administrators unless it is really out of hand. Other than that . . . I think the administrators should be paid just like the faculty -- same rates. If the highest salary in the English Department is $80,000, then that should be the highest salary for an administrator.

Of course, college professors probably do not put in the long, grueling hours in the office that lawyers (and even secretaries and paralegals) and doctors do.

And university teaching is probably a lot less stressful than practicing law or medicine. I haven't heard of too many university professors being sued for malpractice. In spite of the pay, university teaching, even for adjuncts, has its advantages.

[alcibiades_mystery]

37. I'd dispute a few points here

1) College professors probably do not put in the long, grueling hours in the office that lawyers (and even secretaries and paralegals) and doctors do.

Perhaps true in some cases, but in my experience, the workload is comparable. Assistant professors (working toward tenure) work 60-80 hour weeks. When you're probationary faculty, you're basically always working. I never considered myself to have a vacation or not be "on." Certainly the number of hours during which you're required to be present in a specific location seem small to outsiders. But it is a different kind of job. Between prepping and grading for classes, building new curricula, writing and researching for publication, and engaging in department level, college level, and university level service commitments (I was at one point on twelve separate committees - all of which, in my view, were doing important work; I am currently on seven committees), you're not doing a lot of "hanging around." It's different rhythm, to be sure, but just as grueling. Now, to be sure, some of this drops off at tenure, but not really for most. There is a lot of mythology about professor workloads that does not really reflect reality, even post-tenure. Similarly, there's a mythology about lawyer and doctor workloads. I would say that they're about even. Now, the stress of malpractice suits may differ, but there are certainly other stressors.

2) University admin are largely unnecessary - I can't believe I'm defending admin here, but this also strikes me as largely mythology. Is there admin bloat? Yes, of course. Even massiv bloat. But I have sometimes looked around my own institution for admin jobs to eliminate. It's not as easy as an outsider might think, once you look at actual job tasks. Now that I've defended university admin, I have to go take a shower.

[JDPriestly]

40. I strongly disagree about the workloads.

I have never heard of a college professor working 36 hours straight, much less 72 with a short nap.

From what I have seen (and I am very familiar with the life of university faculty and adjuncts), the worst source of stress is rivalry and backbiting among faculty members. And much of that stress is created by the shortage of jobs that pay for a decent lifestyle.

The problem with adjunct salaries and jobs may be worse in big cities like Los Angeles where you have freeway flyers rushing from one class on the West side to something else way on the other side of town.

[alcibiades_mystery]

42. Ha!

Yes, certainly the rhythm of young doctors' work is different. That said, I routinely worked 16 - 18 hour days for weeks and months on end, both in grad school and as junior faculty, as did most people I knew. Many also didn't, but they didn't get tenure track jobs out of graduate school, or tenure. I also worked in a corporate law firm, pulling the all nighters at the printers and doing the whole 36 hours straight thing. But it was always a high intensity short duration thing; work as a professor was always more constant, rather than periods of high intensity punctuated by slow time, like law firm work. Put plainly, you're never off work - you never clock out. Like I said, different rhythms.

[Hissyspit]

66. No, the worst form of stress is that I don't have any medical

insurance and could be fired here in this right-to-work state at any minute and that my income has been basically cut in half over the past several years.

[JDPriestly]

68. That I will agree with.

[HiPointDem]

71. that commute time is part of the '36 hours', i'd imagine.

[JDPriestly]

79. No. In some schools, the adjuncts are expected to do more than teach,

like attend meetings, etc., meet with students outside office hours and of course grade papers. If the employer agrees to an hourly rate in the employee's contract, each hour of work should be paid. What I was saying is not about transportation time.

Law offices keep awful hours sometimes, just incredibly long.

[hfojvt]

77. in my two years of graduate school

I never saw any prof putting in those kinds of hours. Even most graduate students did not put in those kinds of hours, and I am pretty sure we worked harder than the faculty.

[Viking12]

43. Not necessarily.

If you think college is expensive now, though, consider how expensive it would be if 70% of the faculty workforce suddenly had their salaries doubled, tripled, or quadrupled. Because that's what returning to a reasonable level of responsibly paid faculty would look like.

Much of the admin work used to be done by tenure-track faculty as part of their service requirements. At my University we have dropped from a high of 450 tenure-track positions to about 250 while at the same time adding scores of administrative positions. The real driver of tuition increases is lack of State support (at least at public institutions).

[alcibiades_mystery]

46. Absolutely correct

The reduction of state subsidy and admin bloat are certainly drivers of college costs today. Also, new technologies and facilities (we want STEM disciplines and hands-on learning , yeah?) That said, I don't think even returning these costs to previous levels would completely offset the labor cost issues. Also note that pedagogy in general has moved away from the big lecture classes of old, at least in f2f settings (MOOCs notwithstanding... ; adjunct work has been concentrated in the small class (20-35 students) with lots of grading and interaction (first-year writing, 100-level mathematics and science courses, etc.), but that's because we tend to conceive of real education that way now. Not plug-and-chug, but project-based, and that requires warm bodies in the room, and margin comments made by people. We're not likely to go back to the large lecture model that dominated the mid-century pedagogies and that allowed lower labor costs with mostly tenure-track/tenured faculty.

[Overseas]

24. I want my taxes to go for free university education and Medicare for All

If our taxes were allocated as we want them and not as corporations dictate, we could afford to employ a lot more professors.

I would much rather subsidize university education than the oil industry or our corrupt privatized military industrial complex.

[JDPriestly]

26. And then kids from the third world, some of whom are not bright

Last edited Sun Apr 14, 2013, 11:12 AM - Edit history (1)

enough to get into schools into their own countries, come here and get their education. Who pays the most for that education? Our second-class, adjunct university and college professors.

Foreign students at our first-class American schools would be OK except that their way is paid for by these professors who are treated by those first-rate institutions like second-rate employees.

Let's at least thank these dedicated scholars for their sacrifices.

[dkf]

27. And why is college so expensive again?

At least they could be hiring the best and brightest at a decent salary.

Something is very wrong here.

[reformist2]

39. Good question. The gov't loan programs need to push back against tuition increases.

[dkf]

47. Especially if it doesn't go towards decent salaries.

It makes even less sense to pay so much.

[Coyotl]

44. Been there, done that. Ten years of education to earn a pittance is not a viable career path.

There was no upward mobility in our system either. When a full-time position opened, it went to an outsider. I quit after that.

[jimlup]

51. moi assui

right there with you.

[jimlup]

50. Been there done that...

Yes, this was my life after graduate school. I was at least lucky enough to get visiting Lecture and finally Lecturer positions. These gave me health coverage and benefits so I wasn't at the poverty line. The main problem was that I was sometimes at the "part-time" line. If my appointment ever fell below 50% then no benefits. Also, I faced renewal every term, depending on demand and the state of the university's economy.

Eventually, I obtained an appointment teaching HS with an Independent school. I'm happy in that position and would recommend it to others. I also feel sorry for the lucky ones who do obtain tenure track appointments. Life isn't a picnic on a tenure track either. Basically, bust your butt for 5 years and still run the risk of falling back to the visiting/adjunct indentured servant hood.

I recall one particularly striking case of a post-doctoral researcher who wasn't given tenure by my University. He left and about a decade later won the Nobel Prize in physics. Now my University is eating their hearts out at that dumb mistake.

[exboyfil]

53. Lecturers/adjuncts are sometimes the best teachers

I recently sent my daughter the syllabus for Thermo II at the college she is planning on attending. It was filled with grammatical errors that represented obvious issues with English (the tenured professor is originally from China). I said she had better hope she gets the lecturer who sometimes teaches this class and Thermo I. You look at the rating sites and the lecturer gets high marks and the tenured professor gets very poor marks.

Thermo is the worst course in M.E. for someone to have communication issues. I worry about my daughter. Unfortunately for her it is probably my worst ME subject so I won't be of much help.

I hope the lecturer hangs around. He is a PhD and should do much better. I know him by reputation as well.

My father in law (former head of a Math department) had his go to adjunct who has been doing it for over 20 years. The students love him. In his case he has a Masters so it is not as painful thinking he doesn't have tenure compared to some of the worthless professors at our local university. Still it is a hard life for his family compared to the alternatives.

[Egalitarian Thug]

67. Similar situation with my organic chem professor. First rate mind, third rate speaking, writing,

and grammar skills combined with a complete lack of any affinity for teaching.

[exboyfil]

72. Poor you

Organic Chemistry and communication issues. I shudder to think about it. It makes issues with Thermo pail by comparison. My older one has taken her one semester of Chemistry, and she intends to never take another course. The younger one alas is planning on majoring in Biochemistry (and then off to Med School). Lots of potential doctors crash on the shores of Organic Chemistry.

[Egalitarian Thug]

74. Sadly, we all go through it. Every practicing physician I talked to/begged for advice said the

same thing, "I don't remember anything from organic chem, and with any luck, I'll never have need of it again". Some people seemed to just get it intuitively, the rest of us had to work stupid hours on hours drilling it into our heads just to get through. Organic chem cost me summa cum laude.

My Prof was one of those intuitive people that really understood it. It's just too bad he had no affinity for transmitting that knowledge to other people. It always seemed that if I could just get over that hump into truly understanding how it all works, it is a completely fascinating field. Alas, my talents lie elsewhere.

[Apophis]

55. This makes me sad.

I was thinking about getting my PhD after my Master's (which I'm really close to getting), but after reading this article, I'm not so sure.

[Coyotl]

56. One more realm where lack of universal health care has negative consequences

When you buy an education, you're paying for health insurance for myriad employees of the institution. Adjunct are keep as contractors or limited in hours to avoid providing costly benefits, like health care. Buy a car, you are buying health care for workers, even sales people, accountants, etc. Countries with universal health car can produce cars for less.

If colleges did not have to provide health care to staff, a huge impediment to improving this situation would be removed.

[undeterred]

59. Which explains why so many of us end up doing something entirely different

and leave the PhD off the resume. We have to eat.

[HiPointDem]

70. been going that way for a long time.

[aint_no_life_nowhere]

73. Wow, and yet college costs keep going up

I didn't know this about the teaching profession. I went to the University of California in the early 70s. The tuition was pretty low and most (not all) of my professors were tenured and living in very nice homes, where some of my graduate classes were held at night, before a roaring fireplace and with a glass of wine. I'm not sure what it's like now but I'm glad I'm no longer in school if this is what it's like.

[hfojvt]

76. that is amazingly low

I was making $2035 per course as an associate lecturer in 1990, which would be $3,600 per course. I only had two courses, although they had offered me four (two were in another town some fifty miles away and I did not own a car).

Some of that may depend on where you live. I would quit my current job in a heartbeat to teach three courses a semester at $2700 per course.

I had an office though because I was filling in for a professor who was studying in Norway for a year - so I had his office.

And really, I would consider it a benefit to NOT have to attend faculty meetings. I was invited to the Dean's Christmas party (and it was actually kinda dull, it was like nobody wanted to be there, whereas I thought it would be cool to hang out with a bunch of educated people) and I happened to be in town for his retirement party so I kinda crashed that too some ten years later.

But really $2700 per course is more than a graduate student gets paid. As a graduate student, I got paid $6100 to teach four courses, or $1525 per course, compared to the $2100 I got after I graduated. I figured the two courses was decent money for a part-time job, depending on how many hours you put into it. Making about $250 a week, if I put 20 hours a week into it would be $12.5 an hour which was a decent rate for 1990. When I took that factory job in Feb 1993, I was only making $5.1 an hour to start, and the benefits sucked so bad they might as well be non-existent.

But I suppose that everybody should remember than tenured professors are part of the 99% just like the adjuncts. Solidarity. Don't call them rich. It's not like they benefit from the low pay of the adjuncts and graduate students. Solidarity, we are all in this together. The $90,000 a year tenured prof and the $10,000 a year graduate student.