One of the first blogs that I read was the Invisible Adjunct. She retired from blogland several years ago. Too bad. We could use some of her bile today today.
Household Opera and Tim Burke point me to this article in Inside Higher Ed, which describes the salaries of adjuncts at the University of Tennessee. They've been teaching 5/5 teaching loads for $15,000 per year with no benefits.
Tim's reaction:
You could pay someone $200,000 a year, and I doubt they could teach
a 5-5 load with any degree of focus or attention to students, but
$15,000? No benefits? Seriously, Tennessee: just close down your
university system. Or just be honest and make public higher education
in the state into a volunteer system, like getting people to work the
line at a soup kitchen. And adjuncts there? Seriously, there has got to
be a better way to make ends meet, whatever your circumstances and
aspirations might be.
a 5-5 load with any degree of focus or attention to students, but
$15,000? No benefits? Seriously, Tennessee: just close down your
university system. Or just be honest and make public higher education
in the state into a volunteer system, like getting people to work the
line at a soup kitchen. And adjuncts there? Seriously, there has got to
be a better way to make ends meet, whatever your circumstances and
aspirations might be.
Amanda explains how someone could allow themselves to be so thoroughly exploited.
And, yes, this post very much fits into my ridiculous theme of the day.
Apt. 11d 
I’m really kind of replying to Tim here, but I didn’t feel like going over to his blog and I know he’s here reading anyway. 🙂
There’s a bit of academic “class”ism going on here. I teach a 4-4-4 load (trimesters), as do my colleagues, and many of them take an overload, making that 5 courses a term. And they are very good professors.
However, we don’t do research. Or, not much research. I’ve been known to write a conference paper or biographical article in the summer sometimes.
But it makes me wonder how the life of a Swarthmore professor is different than mine. Is it quality of time with students outside of class? Quantity? We don’t have theses to advise, as we don’t have English majors, but we do have students who need to meet with us. I have conferences with students and office hours. I answer questions after classes. I write a lot of comments on their papers (5 per term).
That said, I agree with that adjuncts are horribly exploited and none of this should be taken to mean I do not think that they are not exploited. Salaries vary from institution to institution, state to state, but for me the tipping point is the lack of benefits. And to some degree, the lack of respect in hiring someone “part-time” to work, essentially, full-time. Are these people who spend so much time with students part of department decision making? University-wide decision making? Or are they just treated like bodies in a classroom?
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I miss her too.
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She’s still around. I see her comment on Unfogged, for example, but not under the same name. She’s no longer an adjunct, though. She left that.
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It seems that one might as well aspire to be a ballerina or a rock star as to be a professor. It doesn’t appear to be a realistic career path anymore.
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Yup.
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A 5-5 load with strong individual attention to students in large classes? Yes, if you had no other major responsibilities that you were expected to deal with in a sustained way (administration, committees, research). But come on, it’s a heavy load by any standard. At that salary level, no benefits? It’s *bad*. Really. Compare the minimal work hours just in terms of classroom time with a lot of other jobs that might require a master’s as a minimum qualification, and I think we’ll all agree that even in a bad labor market, it’s exploitative. What I guess I need to know is how many jobs at the branches in question are tenure-track, what their loads are like in comparison, etc.
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Also, I miss IA’s site very much. Not just because she brought attention to these issues, but also because she so skillfully connected people with disparate temperments and interests.
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Allurophile – academia is great for a lucky few. Teaching a great class is such excellent fun that people have done it for free. I have. It’s really satisfying to write an excellent paper. But there are just not enough jobs out there for the demand. It enables universities to exploit workers horribly. Those who are lucky enough to have tenure track jobs turn a blind eye and rationalize the exploitations as “valuable experience.” It’s very much being a ballerina or a rock star. My cousin the cellist (with a phd) just went to law school, because he knew the odds were against him.
With a bad economy, this stuff is just going to get worse.
I couldn’t hack a 5-5 teaching load. Even if I was just teaching 5 sections of Amer. Gov. — a class I can teach in my sleep. All those papers? Maybe if I did a scan-tron test and assigned no writing assignments. And didn’t answer e-mail, go to meetings, do research (a major necessity if one wants to get out of adjunct hell), or do recommendations. But still, that would be 60 hours a week. For $15,000?
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Isn’t a 5/5 load like teaching high school? And if so, what’s the difference, in terms of what you need to do for your students in high school v college?
Now, I know high school teachers get paid more than 15K, and get benefits, and tenure, so it’s not a fair comparison. But, like Wendy, the comment that a 5/5 teaching load is “impossible” didn’t really make sense to me.
As I’ve said in other threads, I think there’s a strong vein of entitlement from a certain brand of academic, one who expects to get paid to contemplate the secrets of the universe. It’s a great job, getting to contemplate the universe, but, not an easy job to convince others to give you.
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BJ, at least in tenure-track positions in most universities, faculty are required to shoulder a considerable amount of administrative work that teachers in high schools don’t have to deal with. We have contact hours that high school teachers don’t have. And yes, I do think that in many cases, the training in terms of knowledge and expertise isn’t the same (though university faculty are often less expert as pedagogues when they start their careers)–it takes more expertise in subject matter to teach at the college level. You’re expected to have a higher level of magisterial authority and expertise in your subject matter than the average high school teacher (not to say that there are not high school teachers with extraordinary expertise). And in most tenure-track positions, you’d also be expected to remain active as a scholar–to attend conferences, produce papers, write articles.
Another thing to remember: high school teachers have to manage lesson plans for daily classes, which is a tremendous amount of work. But at many universities, every individual faculty member is responsible for the design of their courses from soup to nuts–not just what to teach or how to teach it on any given day, but what the course is, what books to use, how to use them, and so on. That’s true of private high schools and a select few high schools, but not most of them.
Remember too that in places with 5/5 loads, the class sizes are often enormous. If you know of anyone in high school teaching 50 to 300 students per class, I’d be very surprised. I’m in a very small school with high expectations about contact hours, attention to grading and so on, and some of my classes are 35-40 students, which is about the upper bound of high school classes. My colleagues at universities may be dealing with 50, 75, 100, or far more students, in some cases without teaching assistants of any kind.
But the basic thing is: 15 k, no benefits!!! That sucks for ANY job, seriously.
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bj — one difference between high school and college is that high school is compulsory for the students and badly managed by the managers; college is voluntary for the students and not managed by the managers. So there are huge classroom management issues in high school.
The other difference is that if you teach well in high school you are really adding to the skills and potential quality of life of the student (in a small way).
So, high school teaching is more valuable, by far, and more difficult, by far (on average).
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IA was one of the very first academic bloggers, and still one of the very best. There have been, here and there over the years, suggestions that she might be coming back to blogging, but I suppose that’s not to be. I hope all is well with her and her family. I never really got to know her beyond commenting on her blog–just a few e-mails on occasion–but I wish I had; from what little I know, it seems that the generosity, thoughtfulness, and passion she brought to IA was part of her character, through and through.
I teach at Friends University, a small private Christian liberal arts college, and I carry a 4/4 load, with the option to teach overload classes available to me pretty much every semester. I know several professors who teach 5 classes a semester regularly, sometimes year in and year out, and appear to be able to do so very well–lots of individual attention, a close reading of student assignments, etc. And in at least a couple of these cases, we’re not talking about these individuals only taking on small classes of 5-10; I’m thinking of the psychology program here, which one of the busiest and most popular here. But three points: 1) the faculty who seem to be able to do this well have been here a while, have built up a schedule of classes and lectures and assignments that follow a well-worn groove, and so there isn’t much “soup to nuts” rethinking that Tim mentions taking up their time; 2) these people, by large, have no interest in doing and face no institutional pressure for not doing any research; 3) we don’t get paid a lot, but we do get paid a hell of a lot more than 15K a year.
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Determining what is hard and easy (high school v. college; 5/5 v. 2/2) has a lot to do with experience and temperment.
While a high school teacher doesn’t have to go to grad school for eight years, he does have to manage around large numbers of surly teenagers. I would hate that.
The semester that I taught 4 classes I nearly died. I lost ten pounds, got about four hours of sleep at night, and alienated half of my readership. They were all new preps and all different classes. I would teach for 1-1/2 hours, then go into another class for 1-1/2 hours, then get an hour break where I would furiously make up some powerpoint slides, and then teach for another 1-1/2 hours. Two years later, with all the prep work under my belt, that might be a lot easier. But back then, it was 80 hours a week of work.
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How come I teach 4 classes and I’m not losing 10 lbs?
Actually, I teach 5 classes, but 3 are “half classes” (long story and hard to explain), so I have 14 classroom hours a week. I am the coordinator of the writing assessment program every term, which involves administrative responsibilities, and most terms I’m assessing 200-300 essays on top of my normal load for a grand total of $500 extra dollars. Before taxes. I am on the publicity committee and write articles for newsletters. I am required to attend 3 inservices a year, I am on the WAC committee, I am on a committee that puts together an annual conference in April. I am a Faculty Fellow in service-learning this year.
And I’m home by 3 pm to pick up my kids most days. That said, I have been working Sunday afternoons this past term, and I’m not sure if I’ll have to this coming term. But I also read a lot of blogs, blog myself nearly every day (sorry, on LJ, where I can be more anonymous) and comment here way too often.
I’m not Superwoman. I am lucky that I teach the same basic courses most terms (there are 4 that I teach, and I never have more than 2 separate preps). Like Laura said, it’s easier once you teach the courses a few times and have your preps mostly set. Our class sizes range from 25 to 35, but I do teach writing intensive courses.
I’m not arguing that teaching a 5-5 load for $15 or even $20K isn’t exploitative. I’m just saying it’s not the horror show you may think it is. And I think it’s worth thinking about why there is such a difference between my and BJ’s and Russell’s views and the views of those who think it’s a horror show.
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The research component of a university position is clearly different from high school. I’m less sure about the “administration”/”contact hours” burdens (except as it pertains to the research component, which I regard as another from of teaching, that really increases the 4/4 5/5 or whatever classroom teaching load).
I think university faculty underestimate the creativity, planning, and mentoring that go into teaching at the K-12 level, and that some forms of teaching done at the college level are quite amenable to a teaching heavy staffing model, like the one used in high school.
I think part of what’s happening in college is similar to what’s happening elsewhere in staffing. People in charge of staffing are trying their hardest to use everyone to their “highest” use (which can mean their most lucrative use, or their most skilled use, or other things). That means that surgeons now spend almost all their time repeating the very same surgery (with very little time for research, teaching, or just talking with their patients). Nurses spend their time re-doing IVs, since the pillow fluffing can be done by nurses aides.
The adjunct model is part of that plan for universities: Put your headliner professors into situations where they can buy prestige for your university, or research dollars, and staff the other jobs with adjuncts.
(PS: Harry — I agree about high school. I think that in a appropriately compensated world, high school teachers *would* be paid better than teaching oriented professors.)
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I miss her, too. jim, do you know if she ended up going to law school?
It seems that one might as well aspire to be a ballerina or a rock star as to be a professor. It doesn’t appear to be a realistic career path anymore.
Perhaps in the arts and humanities, but academia is pretty heterogeneous; in my discipline, it’s still fairly easy to get a pretty plum academic job (in pay, in choice of location, in load, etc.).
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The Tennessee system is spending $9.5 million on “anti-piracy measures.” And, according to Wired, facing a $43.7M shortfall in the overall budget.
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What discipline are you in Siobhan?
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Look, guys, here’s how I run through this in my own head. I think I work reasonably hard at what I do. I think I do a good job, though not without areas I could improve in. (Getting more formal publication out the door in a timely fashion, for example.)
I teach a 2/3 load of courses that I usually redesign each and every year in a college that puts a high premium on individual attention in teaching, usually carry a fairly high service load at the college, do a lot of service “extras” most years, usually do 2-5 directed readings as a voluntary overload, give 2-5 talks a year, do a significant amount of peer reviewing and writing of letters for personnel reviews and student recommendations. My publication and research commitments vary much more considerably from year to year, but I’m trying to stay active in three separate fields. And I write for weblogs. I have no idea how to measure that against people even in my own institutional world, let alone against people in very different institutional environments or against anonymous Internet commenters whose workload isn’t on the table at all.
So when someone says, “Well, you could double your teaching load from 5 courses a year to 10 courses a year”, that sounds pretty difficult. It would have to come out of something else: I would have to either take it from my family and personal life or from some other aspect of my work. From where I sit, there doesn’t look to be a lot of that other work that I could forgo and keep my own sense of professionalism intact–maybe be even less productive as a researcher, and stop blogging altogether.
And I don’t quite see what sins I’ve committed that I would be deserving of having my workload doubled at my current salary level with an insistence that this has to come from my personal or family time. I think yes, there are people in education who do more teaching than I do for less compensation. Maybe some of them are as completely at ease with that as Wendy. Then Wendy should have more compensation. As should high school teachers in most districts. But the thing is, that kind of comparison, once we start, rarely stops exactly in the place most complimentary to ourselves. There are people who work harder still, or in more unpleasant environments, than teachers in any institution, for considerably less pay. There are people who work for almost no pay in some of the worst possible jobs in the world under the worst imaginable conditions. All of which cries out for some kind of social justice, but there’s also a kind of Saturday-Night-Live skit ridiculousness about people sitting around one-upping each other with some variation on, “Well, I work harder than YOU do, and it’s EASY”.
We all seem to agree that the workload & compensation reported in Tennessee, whatever that state’s budgetary status, is exploitative. As to whether that workload is just fine and dandy in other contexts if it’s sufficiently compensated, I’m sure it can be. I’m only saying that from where I sit, it would be a huge change in my professional life to teach that many classes, and it would require that I do less of something, quite a lot of something, and most of the somethings I would do less of seem important in their own way.
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Tim, if it’s any consolation, I’ve been uncomfortable with my replies for some of the reasons you’ve stated. I think your mistake (and I use that word very gingerly–maybe I mean, the words that provoked response from me) was saying that “I doubt they could teach a 5-5 load with any degree of focus or attention to students.” That provoked the same kind of response working-full-time-outside-home parents (particularly moms) have when they hear SAHMs say “How could anyone possibly be a good mom when she’s working 40 hours a week?” It seemed dismissive of the work of people with a 5-5 teaching load, many of whom are devoted teachers. But we do the work, and we do it well, and it’s hard work and it feels good most of the time. Sometimes it causes ulcers. 🙂 But then you get 10 days off in a row, and you heal, usually by writing blog comments patting yourself on the back for how you made it through another term. 😉
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I miss IA too (why else would I be running a search in 2012 as part of a NFM Summit follow up), especially when thinking about what to blog, what I should or am expected to post (or avoid posting) and what I want to and think needs saying. The Invisible Adjunct still there on the Wayback Machine if you want to visit, pay your respects
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