The front page of the New York Times declares that "The Decline of Tenure Track Jobs Raises Concerns."
"Raises concerns" is such a mild phrase. Lots of things raise my concerns. Britney Spears’ driving habits, my over use of hair product, the fact that we’re down to only two Coronas in the fridge. All those things cause me to scratch my head for a moment, mumble "something should be done," and then I go about my day. The decline of tenure track jobs or, more specifically, the abuse of adjunct faculty makes my blood boil.
The article provides a few useful statistics.
Three decades ago, adjuncts — both part-timers and full-timers not on a
tenure track — represented only 43 percent of professors, according to
the professors association, which has studied data reported to the
federal Education Department. Currently, the association says, they
account for nearly 70 percent of professors at colleges and
universities, both public and private.
Tenure, the grant of permanent employment for faculty, may be on its way out, and I don’t really bemoan that development. I’m not sure how many professors would lose their jobs for making unpopular statements. We’re a pretty conservative lot (in behavior, not politics).
The gap in pay between tenured and non-tenured positions is the more serious problem.
Keith Hoeller, who has been teaching philosophy for 17 years as a
part-timer in Seattle, described it this way: “It’s a caste system, and
we are the untouchables of academia.”
Aletia Droba taught for
10 years as a part-time philosophy professor in the Detroit area. She
said she was paid as little as $1,400 a course at community colleges
and as much as $2,400 a class at universities.
One class can consume about 20 hours per week devoted to lecturing, lecture prep, grading, and student conferences. Over the course of a semester, adjuncts, many of whom have spent a decade in graduate school, make less than a worker at McDonald’s. Tuition for one student in the class exceeds their pay.
Adjuncts live in the shadows of universities teaching Intro to History and writing classes and survive on ramen noodles and coffee. Universities, which have been tauted as bastions of liberal thought, turn a blind eye to this injustice in their midst, because nobody really wants to teach Intro to History or those writing classes. How many of those adjuncts are women with children who don’t have the freedom to relocate to tenure track opportunities across the country?
The article mentions some feeble attempts by unions to raise their pay, but the results are laughably poor. State legislatures are slashing the budgets of public universities. Tenure faculty feel that they aren’t paid terribly well either. Change is going to have to come from students who grow tired of exhausted and disgruntled adjuncts. They will have to grow tired of plugging in frowning faces into Rate My Professor and march into some Dean’s Offices with demands.
I’m not going to hold my breath.
Apt. 11d 
‘Untouchables’ is about right. I was astonished to read a thread about hiring practices in the US where it was regarded as shockingly soft and unserious to take the view that having worked as an adjunct should not count against a candidate for a TT job.
In any rational world it would count as an advantage
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Don’t underestimate the power of reforms to make things worse for adjuncts. I have an aunt who has adjuncted for a single community college for many years, generally teaching two or three courses. At some point, the state legislature decreed that anyone who taught two courses or more should get health coverage. Unsurprisingly, the college’s next move was to reshuffle their schedule, trying to minimize the number of adjuncts with more than one course. So my aunt had medical only very briefly, and has had to be VERY creative in order to get enough courses.
Here’s another option: pay less to tenured faculty (or at least flatten the pay scale–senior faculty aren’t that much more productive). My husband just got tenure and this is our bread and butter, so this is not my favorite solution, but it makes a lot of sense. Another solution to cut university costs would be to cut down on those extracurricular amenities that colleges have been going nuts with lately.
College costs have been exploding for a long time, without obvious cause. I’ve seen the argument made that the growth in costs is fueled by the availability of student loans, much as the housing bubble was fueled by easy credit. This seems plausible to me. Parents ought to know better than to set kids on a path that ends with tens of thousands of dollars in loans, but without guidance, kids in their late teens just aren’t going to understand how much money $20,000, $40,000, or $60,000 in debt is. I started to pay off an itty bitty $6,000 loan in the mid-nineties (with some time off for Peace Corps and graduate school) and am just now within sight of the end.
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Or, of course, cut pay for administrators (or flatten the payscale – I’m sure top administrators are no more productive than junior ones 🙂
Or make it easier for people to move from adjunct to full-time positions…
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Give me a break. Adjuncts are “modern day slaves”? Seriously? How incredibly offensive.
Yes, universities shamefully exploit adjuncts. But last time I checked, they’re not importing their instructors from Africa in chains. Universities will continue to exploit adjuncts as long as bright, talented people continue to eagerly line up to be exploited.
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None of these articles connects the dots. Making everyone adjunct means all teaching and no research. No research — in partnership with the executive branch’s attempts to kill science — puts an end to the one thing the US still excels at. How to demote a nation in two easy generations!
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To Amy’s point, I just don’t understand where all that tuition money is going. If you’re teaching a class of 20, and your pay — which should be a large chunk of that college’s sunk cost in running the course — is covered by a single student? Let’s even assume a tenured prof is doing the teaching; again, it’s not like these people are making billions. Let’s be extremely generous and assume that it takes half that class’s tuition to cover the professor’s salary for that time period.
Where is the rest of the income going? I just don’t believe the gas bill is quite that high.
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Is info available somewhere on what proportion of student class hours is taught by adjuncts?
The problem is that counts don’t adequately capture the change. I expect that 3 decades ago, most adjuncts were like the adjuncts that I met when in college; they were specialists. So, yes, the English department was 25% adjuncts. But neither of them were teaching freshman composition; one was a nationally-known novelist, teaching an advanced fiction class; one was a local journalist, teaching a non-fiction class. They weren’t wanna-be tenure-track professional professors; they were professionals in another area.
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The money is going to marketing/admissions. This is why privatizing public schools is a bad idea. It will increase costs for schools because they will have to have a marketing budget now because competition isn’t about competing on the basis of quality any more; it’s about competing on the basis of image. This is one of the reasons why Coach purses make me insane. 😉
Of course, no one will listen to me, even though I am right. 🙂
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frolic – didn’t mean to offend or to minimize past acts of slavery. “Slave labor” is just one of the phrases that everybody uses today. Maybe it is over used.
I was just pointing out that adjuncts are talented, smart people who, for whatever reason, are working for pennies an hour.
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OK, redacted the phrase down.
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“The money is going to marketing/admissions.”
That’s probably true if you count the amenities that colleges use to attract students. I think I’ve seen an article or two on this, actually.
My sample size is small, but I think a lot is happening to improve student quality of life. In some places, dorm bathrooms are now shared by four students, rather than 50. Likewise, there’s a renaissance going on in campus architecture–those brick and concrete boxes of the 60s and 70s are being joined by appealing and well-designed new buildings. There’s a lot more attention to student quality of life. And students expect a lot more physical comfort from their campus experience. I arrived at college every year with a suitcase, a bag or two, and a couple of boxes of books in the mail, but today SUVs and moving trucks crowd the sidewalks on move-in days. (There’s a good passage from I am Charlotte Simmons where the heroine meets her roommate, whose possessions occupy 3/4 of their room.)
A lot of this is a good thing. I welcome the new campus architecture and think that dealing with a shower clogged with other people’s hair is not a necessary rite of passage. However, if a big donor came to me, I’d ask them to put at least half their money into scholarships.
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OK, I’m on to my second question-that-seems-so-obvious-it’s-stunning (after the discussion of where the money is going).
So what is the reason, Laura? Why are people working for pennies an hour, schlepping all over town?
In particular I find it interesting to compare this to corporate training or education, where the people are generally well-paid, put in reasonable hours, and get a rougly equivalent daily experience in terms of how they interact with people.
I wonder if the difference is the subject matter, and it’s just that simple? People love their subjects — I believe people in the article are mentioned as teaching Spanish and philosophy, among other things — that they are willing to do anything for it? Or is it that these skills have few direct applications outside of academia?
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My wife has had fun as an adjunct – likes to teach, enjoys the interaction with students. Her situation is similar to yours, Laura – other income (both hers from her firm, and mine) to make up for the dreadful money it pays. Not something a grown-up institution with self-respect ought to be counting on, and appalling for the people who don’t have another income flow. The best hope for changing things seems to me to be pressure from the market – US News & WR rankings should give a big percent of rating to fraction of faculty who are full time career, accreditation committees should bash big adjunct users. This should not just be on percent adjuncts used, but should also be on adjuncts getting less than, say, 70 per cent of what entering career track people get per class taught.
Adjuncts should be a good way for institutions to respond to sudden demand (wow! three additional sections of english comp over last year’s demand!) and for young scholars to think whether the professor life is what they want. It shouldn’t be a fifteen year dead end.
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Why do people actually agree to do work for pennies on the dollar? Lots of different reasons. For some, like Dave’s wife, money is not an issue and they love the work. For others, they adjunct while waiting for a tenure track job. Others need more flexibility than a tenure track job, but the university doesn’t offer part time work. Some have no training to do anything else with their lives after wasting a decade in grad school. Lots of talent. Not a lot of t-t jobs.
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One of the problems, it seems to me, is that academia has two tracks–tenure or not. Tenure involves some combination of teaching and research and 6 years of labor that may result in losing your job. The not track is mostly adjuncting. Very few places offer a full time job that is just teaching that approaches anything reasonable. The loads are heavy–4-4 or more. The classes are large–lecture size or 20 or more for writing courses. And there’s no job security. If places could come up with positions with benefits and reasonable work loads, they could get their classes taught. People who enjoy teaching can teach and not feel like they’re selling their soul in order to do so.
It doesn’t completely solve the problem of people who are adjuncting and want tenure-track positions. I suspect many of them are people, who can’t relocate. I might pursue a t-t job myself if it weren’t for that. And the career path for someone in my position sucks. 1) Take a crappy job someplace no one else wants to go. 2) Work your ass off writing, publishing, teaching and apply for better jobs. 3) Get better job and work your ass off writing, publishing, teaching and hope to get tenure. 4) Get tenure or 4a) Go back to #1. No thanks. It’s just a crazy-ass system all the way around.
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I wonder if part of the problem is that there is just so much talent, so many people panting for jobs in academia? I can see why it would appeal – the fun of teaching but not the hassle of teaching small children who don’t necessarily want to be there, plus all the intellectual perks. I surmise that enough people think of academia as a fun and glamorous job that there is a plentiful supply of people willing to work almost for free, which means lack of leverage.
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It’s funny–I was hired at my current job under circumstances that no longer apply–the chairs were being pressured to hired people with terminal degrees, and I had one. I also had a slight connection via a friend of a friend. But nowadays, my chair swears she will hire full-time faculty *only* from our adjunct pool. She fears that outsiders don’t understand the culture of the university.
At a university I used to work at, I was an academic administrator and adjunct faculty, and though the department made a show of supporting adjuncts, they didn’t seem inclined to hire them as full-timers, which is why I left.
I can’t really add anything to what you all have been saying, because I agree. But it does strike me that though everyone knows this system is wrong, it doesn’t change. I do feel tenure is important (though I work at a university without tenure, fwiw). But when people get tenure, they don’t change the system. This may be mainly because faculty do not actually have control over the system–or at least they never have had control anywhere I’ve taught.
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I think faculty do have power over personnel issues within the department, although I’m not sure exactly how the adjunct process works. However, once you have tenure, what is in it for you? A decade or so of scrambling up a greasy pole, fighting off hundreds of competitors, is bound to make you less rather than more compassionate towards those left at the bottom. (I’m also skeptical that you can forge a meaningful political alliance between the upper-middle class and the lower-middle class, which seems to be the mission of the contemporary Democratic party. Those two groups would seem to have diametrically opposed economic interests.)
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Amy, departments (i.e., faculty) request tenure lines and/or full-time positions. Then those are approved or denied by the higher-ups (provost/academic VP). If you have fewer full-time faculty than you have courses that meed teaching, you request funding for adjunct faculty.
Also, you’re not fighting off competitors for 10 years. Once you get the job (the job hunt is where you fight off competitors), the only competitor is yourself. It’s more like, can you finish the marathon.
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Totally agree with the above.
ericr@masonshaw.com
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Now, God, stand up for adjuncts.
Adjuncts aren’t a monolithic group, of course. They differ by personal circumstances, by discipline and by institution. Still, “pennies per hour” is an exaggeration. It may take 20 hours a week to teach a course if it’s the only course you’re teaching and it’s the first time you’ve taught it, but there are economies of scale when you’re teaching more than one or more than once.
Why might someone be an adjunct?
1. It’s genuinely a part time job. Some of us don’t want a full time job, others can afford to accept a part time job if other aspects are desirable. We just teach. We don’t have a service requirement; we don’t have a research requirement. I don’t have to create grant applications and then worry about tenure being refused if they aren’t approved. I don’t *have* to publish. I’m not involved in departmental politics.
2. It’s clean work, both physically and morally. Some of us are glad of that.
3. You have access to the intellectual resources of the university: library, databases, etc. This is more important at R1s than CCs, of course, but it matters.
4. The work is very lightly supervised. There are no PHBs. There is no tenure file. It’s just you, in your room, with your students.
5. The work is meaningful.
What irks is the pay gap between t-t and adjunct, and the status gap.
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I’m not sure if I’m exaggerating about the time invested in teaching, jim. Small schools don’t have enough course offerings to allow adjuncts to double up. They are often brought in at the last minute to teach, so they have little time for advance preparation. In my field, the texts are always changing, so the reading never ends. I spend an hour per week just responding to student e-mails. Grading papers and exams is very time consuming.
Adjuncts could teach a 3-3 load, a full time course load, and walk away with $12,000-$18,000 per year. It’s hard to live on that.
Even with the extreme low pay, there are very rational reasons to adjunct, as you pointed out. Still, finding people willing to do the work does not justify their low pay.
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Why depend upon the tenured staff to change this system? One thing that would change treatment of adjuncts, it appears to me, is if the adjuncts themselves refuse to work for peanuts. This could be accomplished either via striking or via simply leaving the field completely. Another possibility, as people have mentioned, is if adjuncts are further devalued in the eyes of the student and they start refusing to attend schools that over-use adjuncts. This seems to me less helpful, as it just reinforces the ‘untouchable’ status.
If it were difficult to find people to do this work, then the conditions would improve. It’s not absolutely that simple, but it goes quite a ways.
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Wendy,
You’re describing the optimal situation. A lot of people take 8 years to finish their doctoral work and then get a couple of one or two year appointments, before landing on the tenure track. So that’s a decade, easily. My husband took 10 years from the start of doctoral work in his area until tenure, but he had done a previous PHD, so it was actually 10 years PHD program, 5 years tenure track, for a total of 15 years leading up to tenure.
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How is it we haven’t yet addressed the issue of over-production of PHDs?
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In view of the over-production of PHDs by universities, there is no way that unionization would work. For one, what is the motivation? Let’s say I’m an adjunct in a crowded field. Under the unionization plan, I’m supposed to leave the field so somebody else can have a well-paying adjunct job. That’s great–for them, but there’s nothing in it for me. I lose both my low-paying job and the psychic compensation I used to get from it, and start temping or whatever, and a decade or so of personal investment is down the drain. Teaching high school is another option (at least in some fields), but we’ve already discussed the reasons that this might not be appealing–lack of freedom, lack of respect from students, etc.
One more thing–it’s not obvious that students are that much worse off being taught by adjuncts rather than by senior tenured professors.
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Sorry, that last item should have been addressed to jen, not wendy.
A family my husband knows have a house full of kids and the husband was furiously adjuncting all over town for a long time, but just couldn’t make it work. Eventually, he was working at Home Depot, before moving on to teaching at a private high school.
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Amy, you’re talking about two different things. The competitive part isn’t the achieving of the PhD or the being on the tenure track. The competitive part, where you’re competing against 100s of others, is the job hunt.
And as long as I’m here, I have to address a previous point. You asked about why tenured faculty would care. The thing is, a lot of tenured faculty *do* care about their institution. There’s a myth that when faculty achieve tenure, their compassion for others and interest in their work disappears. That has rarely been the case in any tenured faculty I have known.
The problem has to do, I think, with the corporatization of the university. I remember the UPS strike and I always thought there was a major parallel to be drawn between part-time UPS workers and adjunct faculty. Maybe Jen is right, and what adjuncts need to do is strike. Then what tenured faculty need to do is support them the same way that the showrunners are supporting the writers in the WGA strike.
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Amy, you have hit the nail on the head. When will people wake up and realize what a bad deal graduate school is? And why do we continue to offer student loans for people with no work prospects waiting for them? I personally find it usurious and shameful. You would never offer a 20-year-old $80K in loans to travel the world for three years, as much as it might improve them as people. Why is that OK if it’s an institution of higher ed taking their money?
But let’s assume you already have the loans and the degree. There is still life beyond academia. I believe it’s Laura’s husband who is a former academic who went for-profit. Now he does quite well in financials, correct? Say what you want about his day-to-day enjoyment of work, but he’s driving his own bus much more than he used to.
I can’t tell you how many music PhDs and former teachers, etc., I have seen successfully move into computer fields. Get them going on technology, and three years later they’re making manager. Astonishing, really, that more people don’t do it. Not to mention the fact that having people from such backgrounds really improves the diversity of thought within any business.
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One more thing that makes people take adjunct jobs is marriage and children. A number of my friends teach adjunct because they are tied down a certain area; if they weren’t they’d be off to the Middle East where there’s lots of work. This goes doubly for my divorced friends, who would never see their children if they moved any distance away.
It’s a shameful situation. The solution cannot be to abandon tenure: this, as Meg points out, would make us all vulnerable, and though few of us would be fired for our opinions, many of us might be fired because of shifting and arbitrary perceptions of educational needs on the part of administrators. The other proposed solution — for tenured faculty to fight for more tenure lines — makes a lot of sense, though it will only work so well against cash-hungry infrastructure-crazy administrations. The only other thing I can think of is to teach our students to respect and cherish the university as an institution, so that when they grow up and get jobs in government they don’t become part of the dismantling process.
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One other point: a strike at a college or university has a much better chance of succeeding than, for example, a UAW strike. These teaching jobs are much more difficult to send overseas or otherwise outsource.
And I would imagine the entire institution — students, tenured faculty, support staff — sees the adjuncts up close and personal all the time and knows how much support they deserve. (Or so I would hope.)
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Wendy,
Tenured and tenure track faculty are the university–if adjuncts do not have a living wage now, it is because tenure track faculty have chosen not to give it to them. (All of my inside knowledge is from private universities–this may not apply to state institutions. From what I’ve seen, individual departments have a lot of control over hiring, tenure, salaries, etc.)
We all know senior professors who are generous and hospitable. I don’t think compassion disappears, but I think that the graduate and tenure track environment are almost perfectly designed to make one less compassionate than one might otherwise be. One needs to make a conscious effort to preserve one’s humanity. Likewise, speaking as a mother, while it is true that hormones trigger a sort of mother-of-the-world state where one feels injuries to children acutely, it is possible to simultaneously develop mother bear concern focused on one’s own children, whose interests one is willing to advance at all costs. In any given woman, the proportion of mother-of-the-world and mother bear will vary a lot at different times, and so perhaps for faculty.
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Anyone on this thread with the appropriate access might want to read an article by James Twitchell in the Summer 2004 article of the Wilson Quarterly called “Higher Ed., Inc.”
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Jen is right. Come to the private sector. We’d love to have you all. And the money is pretty nice to: http://dealbook.blogs.nytimes.com/2006/12/20/goldman-chairman-gets-a-bonus-of-534-million/
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Tenured and tenure track faculty are the university–if adjuncts do not have a living wage now, it is because tenure track faculty have chosen not to give it to them.
Amy, this is simply not true. I have worked at 3 private universities, and never was it in the hands of the faculty. It was in the hands of upper administration.
Maybe I’m wrong though–what are others’ experiences? My experience is the department asks for a line, and the provost-type person approves or denies, based on budget. And that situation is never good.
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Wendy,
But tenure track folk do get raises, right? If it’s possible to get merit raises for tenure track, it should be possible to do the same for adjuncts.
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amyP wrote: How is it we haven’t yet addressed the issue of over-production of PHDs?
and jen brought up a good follow up point. honestly, i see this as a market situation. as long as there are loads of PhD’s wanting teaching jobs in their fields of interest, they’re going to get paid less. and honestly, i do not feel sorry for the poor underpaid adjuncts? why?
because they made the conscious choice to, as laura said “waste a decade of their life in grad school”. grad school isn’t something that happens to people accidentally to put them in dire financial straits, like divorce or unplanned pregnancy, or being unable to afford college or whatever.
is it news that going the grad school route, especially in liberal arts majors, doesn’t allow for a strong job market like choosing to study something more utilitarian but less enjoyable? that was the situation that was presented to me, and i graduated from university nearly 20 years ago.
for me, this is similar to pitying the pooor middle class college grads who can no longer afford to back pack around europe.
i see people with more choices and options than most – making choices that put them in a bad financial situation, with plenty of foresight & warning. and working very hard & putting themselves into debt for the honor.
when students stop opting for the grad degrees in liberal arts and instead engage on educational endeavors that will get them lucrative reliable stable jobs – for example, accounting or med techs – then the few that do fight through the battle will be in a better position to negotiate better pay.
and having a stable job doesn’t mean completely giving up your passions. it just means compromising in a different area of your life.
sorry to be a party pooper here (again).
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To reiterate Jen’s point: there are simply too many people panting for positions as college instructors/professors and willing to do an-nee-thing, move to Podunk, work for peanuts, whatever, in pursuit of that elusive Holy Grail.
There was a post on Invisible Adjunct a while back, where the poster stated that PhD’s ought to think of a career as a tenured professor much like that of a prima ballerina: highly coveted, insane competition, almost impossible to attain.
I differ with Trishka in the “liberal arts degrees are worthless” however. I know people with Masters and PhD’s in various liberal arts who have parlayed that into really good careers, in private industry or at least outside academia. It also helps to live in an area with a thriving and diverse economy – i.e. not one where the only people who can find work are nurses.
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Yeah, my husband parlayed his history phd into a finance job.
I also think that a lot of grad students aren’t really told the horrors of the job market. They aren’t aware of how the tough the market is until they get there. I don’t think that anybody enters grad school with the plan of adjuncting.
(Trishka, party poopers are welcome on this blog.)
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Re: wages and who’s in control of them – my experience is with three state and two private universities, and the wages were controlled by the upper administration, not by the faculty themselves. Even at the uber-faculty-governance state school where I once worked, salary monies got handed down from the system president, and what our branch campus did with the pittance we got was decided by the dean/chancellor. I don’t know of any departments that really get to set salaries.
Actually, I take that back – at my big state U grad program, I’m pretty sure the department did get handed a lump sum of some kind and told that was their money for adjuncts. But you can bet that that money was calculated by the admin to cover X number of adjunct courses, and if the dept chose to pay their adjuncts more, they would have to offer fewer courses; and while I’d love it if a dept chair in such a situation said, “We won’t pay our adjuncts less than X,” chances are good that the admin will say, “Then you only get Y number of courses.” In some cases this kind of pressure might work, if the admin itself would suffer due to lack of courses, but frequently all that happens is that the dept has to juggle where to put the extra students (i.e. raise caps). I’m not saying dept chairs et al. have no role to play, but I don’t see adjunct wages being up to departments.
As for raises: actually, many schools don’t offer merit raises. At a lot of places, raises are simply an across-the-board percentage, calculated by (you guessed it!) the administration, based on cost of living increases and whatnot – they have nothing to do with merit.
And I think that if there were merit raises issued for adjuncts, the situation would turn out like the decision that adjuncts should get health insurance. You have to be in a position to get evaluated to get a merit raise – so there would be little incentive for institutions to rehire an adjunct, rather than have turnover every year so that there could be no merit review/raise.
Re: tuition – FWIW, each semester when you registered at my big state U grad program, there was a little note at the bottom of your schedule which stated that tuition only paid something like 30-40% of the university’s operating costs. This was a huge institution which would have had vast numbers of people whose pay wasn’t remotely connected to students, and of course, tuition was way lower than at private schools – where I completely agree that marketing is a huge drain on resources.
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Thanks for shedding some light on the issues, New Kid on the Hallway. Correct me if I’m wrong, but job offers from rival institutions can also lead to raises for tenure track faculty–the rival institution can offer a higher salary, and then the home institution has the option of matching the offer.
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Amy P, I can confirm that does occasionally happen. Again, though, if that money comes from somewhere to keep a faculty member around, there’s money taken from somewhere else. Maybe we’re given no adjunct money at all for on-campus courses or the summer courses are cut back to just the distance offerings. Maybe another department feels the pinch. For some reason, despite the fact that adjuncts are an amazingly cost-effective way of delivering course content, there’s not always that much money in the budget to pay for them!
And while at least I can point with pride to the fact that we’ve managed to unionize our part-time faculty and adjuncts so that they’re paid a little bit more and given a chance at conversion to a full-time or even t-t position if one’s ever available, the money involved certainly isn’t enough to cobble together a living wage all on one’s own, even with a full course load.
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I work in a relatively obscure corner of the humanities – I spend a lot of time translating underloved manuscripts in languages that not a ton of people feel comfortable with. Now, I don’t eschew teaching. Though it’s not my strength, I get that it’s part of the job description and I hope I am able to get students excited about what I do. But frankly, no university would hire me to teach classes. The mainstay of my job apps is going to be my ability to do research, and it’s the reason I want to be a professor in the first place. If tenure didn’t exist, I wouldn’t have chosen to invest the time in this, for exactly the reasons that other posters are faulting the doe-eyed grad school applicant: it wouldn’t be economically feasible. Tenure makes it feasible. Yes, it might mean several years of postdoc and relocation, but in the end, I should be able to make a decent salary. Less than my invest banker friends, but, you know, I don’t really care about the Coach purse. For sure, adjuncting is a problem, and I think it’s a scandal how little adjuncts are paid. But if we do in with tenure to make it more fair for the adjuncts, we’re going to end up with teaching for everyone at very low pay. And then I’ll really have to move to Canada.
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Oh, it’s not all that bad. When all is said and done, I make around $50k a year as an adjunct. Not bad.
I’ve been at this long enough now that preparation is largely a non-issue, so I save time there. I also never assing a paper longer than, say, two or three pages, (for Frosh. Writing) and for Intro to Lit. I have resigned myself to giving tests and quizzes to off-set the fact that it would be impossible to grade the standard three or four essays per semester.
Fortuantely, the Intro. LIt. students don’t seem to mind, and my evals remain positive, and thus I remain … employed.
I’d love to get out, but every time I have tried I am slapped upside the head with the “over qualified” moniker. So … I’m stuck. But again, at $50k, I could be doing worse.
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I’m excited to read these comments as I enjoyed your post.
I’m planning on continuing a series of comics and cartoons about adjuncting:
http://armzrace.com/blog/?p=3344
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Wise not holding your breath
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This is really sad. Even though they are considered “temporary” workers, they should receive the benefits a tenured professor receives. Adjuncts work as hard as those who have tenure and yet they do not receive the same amount of salary as them. What benefits do these adjunct professors have? Are their children qualified for a tuition discount?
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Interesting post. I’d have to agree with Natalie. These adjunct workers work hard and they deserve to have the benefits tenure workers receive. Some are only given less than a year to work and I think it would be fair to give them what they deserve. They could be tenure workers or you could give them a higher salary.
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I like ANMJ on FB & just subscribed to the email feed! 🙂
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