I’ve got to run out the door, but before I leave, I thought I would throw a little meat into the bear pit.
In yesterday’s Atlantic, Jordon Weissman wrote about a new study that “finds that faculty who aren’t on the tenure-track appear to do a better job than their tenured/tenure-track peers when it comes to teaching freshmen undergraduates.” The Times also had an article on the study.
I should have linked to this hoopla yesterday. It’s now going crazy on Twitter and Facebook. The study is flawed, but it does give some insight to a reality at most (though not all) colleges. Here’s the take-away:
The vast majority of undergraduate classes are taught by adjunct professors. These professors are paid less than minimum wage and have no job protections. For many, those Intro to Sociology classes and remedial writing classes are their bread and butter. They are not teaching those classes to get a little teaching experience before getting a full time job. They aren’t picking up a little side cash, while they have another full time position somewhere else. They are paying the rent with their adjunct salaries.
And they are doing a damn good job at it. Their classes are double the size of the advanced classes. They are teaching more kids.
Therefore, they should get proper wages for their services.
Apt. 11d 
How receptive are academics (adjunct and tenure track) to establishing a two-track system with a split between teaching and research? My guess is that even adjuncts are not very receptive but I don’t really understand why. Can you clue me in?
LikeLike
Scantee, I’m an adjunct and I would be THRILLED to see a two-track system in place. At my last gig, the chair of the department was trying to establish a teaching-only line — she was getting no traction from the administration. At my present school, a very small number of such lines exist; you have to establish a good track record and then apply for them. They require you to teach more courses than tt positions do but they don’t pay as much. Still, they are a big step up from adjuncting.
As far as I can tell from discussions with my colleagues, most adjuncts would welcome non-tt positions. Health care, better job security, a living wage, spending your time at one school instead of three — what’s not to like? The naysayers, I think, are the adjuncts who still believe that they can jump the rails to a tenure-track position (statistically unlikely).
I don’t know what tt faculty as a body may think; a few that I know personally are in favor of two tracks (one teaching, one teaching/research), but then, that’s a skewed sample. Scientists (with their research grants) may be more supportive — humanities people know that emphasizing research is a financial dead end.
LikeLike
I think the economic forces favoring adjunct labor from the employer’s point of view, the contingent worker, are huge and I don’t think they’ll go away. Unions might offer some respite, or labor laws, but both of those forces are pretty weak now.
Universities have no incentives to convert those positions in to full-time positions with benefits and even those who want to do the right thing face enormous disincentives (i.e. competition from other schools that don’t do the same thing).
LikeLike
That’s my sense – the universities are loving the study that just came out, because it allows them to justify charging me 60,000 a year and paying my kid’s teachers 2700 a course. Gee,I wonder where all that extra money goes? (Hint: Not to the adjuncts)
LikeLike
Methodologically there are so many problems with this article I’m shocked the Chronicle ran it. Just a few quick observations:
1. How are you measuring “a good job teaching?” It seems this was operationalized using student grades. You can’t even believe some of the stuff that happens among adjuncts. One adjunct provides students with the answers to the exam, and assigns no textbook. Another showed up for less than 50% of the class.
2. What percentage of the adjuncts in this study hold a Ph.D. v. master’s degree? Students love the adjuncts in our department and the majority do not hold Ph.D. I have to think that there is a correlation.
3. The study only looks at students at one university. Are the findings generalizable to other universities?
4. The pressure to publish places tenure tract faculty in a very difficult position: publish or perish. To do so, greater emphasis must necessarily be paid to one’s researcher whether you like it or not. Is it the fault of the tt prof or the system?
Overall, the article is divisive–pitting tt v. adjuncts against each other. I think it got a lot of play because of this. I doubt the merits of the findings due to the research design.
LikeLike
“What percentage of the adjuncts in this study hold a Ph.D. v. master’s degree? Students love the adjuncts in our department and the majority do not hold Ph.D. I have to think that there is a correlation.”
Why would there have to be a correlation?
LikeLike
“It seems this was operationalized using student grades.”
Oh my goodness!
LikeLike
Exactly!
LikeLike
I believe the study used grades in a follow-up class to the one the adjunct taught, not the adjunct’s class. They also used a measure they called “inspiration” which measured whether a student was likely to follow up on the subject area (taking more courses, or something like that).
” Controlling for certain student characteristics, freshmen were actually about 7 percent more likely to take a second course in a given field if their first class was taught by an adjunct or non-tenure professor. They also tended to get higher grades in those future courses. Taking an intro class with a non-tenure track instructor increased a student’s mark in their second class by between .06* and .12 grade points, depending on controls.”
The Atlantic writer also raises the concern that Northwestern might be different from other schools because if its access to higher quality adjuncts. (from the Atlantic article)
I’m sure there are methodological issues to be worked out (and, the study itself was small and the effects small), but I don’t find the result surprising — tenured & TT professors are usually not rewarded for doing more than an adequate job at teaching. My guess, though, is that the positive impact seen here would disappear to near zero on bigger samples (but I wouldn’t expect to see TT/T folks out score the other students, either)
LikeLike
“I believe the study used grades in a follow-up class to the one the adjunct taught, not the adjunct’s class. They also used a measure they called “inspiration” which measured whether a student was likely to follow up on the subject area (taking more courses, or something like that).”
That sounds better.
From what I hear, being able to teach the large introductory classes well is an unusual talent. Heaven knows we’ve all been in bad ones…
“The Atlantic writer also raises the concern that Northwestern might be different from other schools because if its access to higher quality adjuncts. (from the Atlantic article)”
That’s true, too. I expect the pool of adjuncts would vary hugely, depending on various geographical factors. To give an extreme example, one of my neighbors is an adjunct married to a tenure track professor. We are in a medium-sized city that contains a large college and a well-loved community college as well as a technical college, and we’re also within not-totally-ridiculous commuting range of other cities (or at least it wouldn’t be a ridiculous commute in California), so there are a lot of people qualified to adjunct sloshing around–spouses of faculty, recent graduates, etc. Meanwhile, I have two relatives who are adjuncts at a community college branch campus in a town with four digit population, 90 minutes from a town with five digit population, and four hours away from “the big city.” The talent pool in those two environments is very different.
LikeLike
My question is what is meant by the term “adjuncts.” It seems clear from the article that the term “adjunct” doesn’t apply to the Northwestern case, and that’s confirmed by a look at the website. What the study does is support the idea that two tracks of teaching might be effective: one for teaching, and one for research. The “adjunct” faculty at Northwestern seem to be full-time non-tenure track faculty. That is very different from what we generally think of as adjunct faculty–the exploited part-time teachers who work for $3000 a class.
I think we have to be *very* wary of using the term “adjunct.” Because if “adjunct” faculty get the rep for being “better” than TT faculty, there will be *more* exploitation of part-timers.
The university finance people don’t give a crap about tenure-track vs non-TT. What they want (as most businesses do in this age of increasing income inequality) is more easily exploited, *part-time* employees. We should fight everything that leads to increasing part-time employment of people who should be full-time.
LikeLike
I agree with Wendy’s point above. If there are “adjuncts” at NU – and not these full-time non tt faculty she mentions – I bet they are more like postdocs, or perhaps one of the army of University of Chicago grad students that teach in the area while in the 10 or 12-year dissertation writing process (I exaggerate, but only a bit). Or they are like the guy from my top-three Ivy-league program who turned down a tt job at Indiana University in favor of adjuncting in Chicago – he couldn’t take not being in a city. Younger teachers tend to do better in generating enthusiasm for students, and in these cases they may teach there for 1-2 years and be on their way to a good tt job.
This is not to dismiss the greatness of many adjuncts, just to put the study’s findings in context.
LikeLike
We’re in a lose-lose situation. If exploited adjuncts are better than TT faculty and make less money, then some will take that conclusion to mean they should pay everyone $3000/course.Back in the day, lived in a world where, if you did a great job at a part-time job, you’d be moved into a full-time job. That’s how I went from tutoring students part-time to a full-time job running the whole program on three campuses (which I then promptly left to take temporary teaching jobs and have my kids, but that’s another story). That’s how a friend of mine went from being an adjunct to currently being head of the ESL department at my current PoE.
But there are strong indications that the world simply does not work that way any more. The market isn’t rewarding hard workers. It’s broken somehow. This is what we have to fight. I just don’t know how. 😦
LikeLike
$3000 a class ain’t bad. As I’ve ranted many times before, the adjuncts at our local cc make $1,800 per class.
I don’t know a single person who has translated an adjunct job into a tt job. Like-wise for any other non-tt job. [deleted personal stories….]
Non-tt faculty of all stripes need to be paid fairly and to have some sort of predictability to their employment. Until that changes, I’ll keep blogging about it. That’s my own way of making change. Just being a general pain-in-the-ass.
LikeLike
I know a half dozen people who were adjuncts either while working on their diss or for a year or two after and then landed tt jobs. I did this, then took a visiting asst prof job which got converted to tt, and I can think of at least two others who did the VAP to TT move. This was right before the recession, though – we were super-lucky. Feel free to rant, though; it doesn’t work for most people.
LikeLike
We had a recent crackdown on adjuncting at other nearby institutions while a graduate student here–the extra money was tempting to some of the graduate students here with growing families, but extremely deleterious to them finishing up their dissertations with funding. (I believe current policy is that graduate students have to get permission before moonlighting.) The word “adjunct” seems to cover a lot of different situations. .
LikeLike
Ranting works when lots of people do it and in highly visible places. That was just a two-second google search.
I do think a two-tiered system would be very fair and workable. My guess is that we’ll end up in that place eventually.
LikeLike
Here’s something I missed in the original: “99.4 percent of the untenured faculty members in the study had taught at Northwestern for at least six quarters” and “Northwestern’s part-time faculty members earn from $4,200 to $7,334 per course, according to eight respondents to The Chronicle’s Adjunct Project, a Web site that crowdsources salary data for contingent faculty members.” Per course – and NU is on a quarter system, not a semester system. That’s amazing.
LikeLike
Obviously, you can call it whatever you want, but it is certainly true that “adjunct” professors at places like Northwestern (I have a friends who teaches as an adjunct at Columbia) get paid something approaching a living wage, and have a reasonable chance of obtaining a tenure track position at a (lower-tier) university. It isn’t the career path for academic superstars in hot fields, but it is a career path.
LikeLike