There’s a cottage industry of writers talking about the atrocious salaries and working conditions of adjunct professors. In the past few year, there have been dozens and dozens of articles. It’s been a side topic on this blog for ten years, because when I started blogging, I WAS an adjunct at an Ivy League college. No office. No benefits. $3,000 for the semester with 30 hours per week of prep work. It actually cost me money to teach that class, because I had to pay a babysitter. A year before I started blogging, both my husband and I were adjuncts and were so poor that we recieved government food vouchers.
In Salon, a writing professor asks the Association of Writers and Writing Programs to stop ignoring the fact that 70 percent of all college classes are taught by contingent labor.
I think it’s time to have a stern talk to those who are in those situations. Time to walk away, folks. No more work for free. Universities will not change as long as there is a long line for these jobs. It’s far better to do a job that is slightly boring, but comes with a weekly paycheck, than to do your dream job for free.
Apt. 11d 
What with the difficulties of coordinating among large numbers of people and the tendency of people to think that everybody else should change first, I don’t see how telling people to do something else will work. I think you’d need to start by suing universities (for violating minimum wage laws) or creating unions that can one way or another define and penalize scabbing.
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Yeah, I always thought that shaming (universities) and informing (adjuncts) were useful tools to bring about change, but there’s been a whole lot of shaming and informing and no change. When Steve first started working a real job with the dependable checks, we tried to convince friends to join Steve. We offered to get them real jobs, and no takers. One took a job with Steve for a short term thing, so she wouldn’t get kicked out of her apartment, but she scorned the whole business and left as soon as she could.
I think that the government will start making the universities follow national labor laws at some point.
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I have a relative who just won a non-trivial amount of money suing on behalf of people classified as “managers” in order to avoid having to pay time and a half. Maybe I’ll mention this thing to him. I don’t actually know what happens when minimum wage law and piece-work contracts crash into each other.
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Maybe it’s the adjuncts who should be shamed rather than informed. Think of it as deprogramming.
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A GW Bush era law outlaws unions at private universities, since grad students are “students” and not “workers.” Getting this law overturned would be very helpful for unionization efforts.
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Is this a law in the sense of something passed by congress? I think it’s a ruling by the NLRB, but am not 100% sure. (If so, it’s technically a ‘regulation’.) If it’s the later, all that’s needed is a contrary ruling by the NLRB, which would be a lot easier than passing a law through congress, but would suggest that more attention should have been spent on getting good people appointed to the NLRB.
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March 3, 2014: “Another sure sign that change is in the air is that in February the NLRB sought advice from the public on issues related to the scope of its coverage. In the first case, Pacific Lutheran University … argues that the Board lacks jurisdiction because it is a religiously-operated institution and that the adjunct faculty members are managers under Supreme Court precedent.”
http://www.lexology.com/library/detail.aspx?g=b6482cce-ae10-434c-bbdb-81171d2c7947
Feb 11, 2014: “The National Labor Relations Board on Monday posed a series of questions that could lead to rulings on whether adjuncts have the right to unionize at religious colleges, and whether a 1980 Supreme Court ruling should continue to effectively bar tenure-track faculty members from unionizing at private institutions.”
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2014/02/11/nlrb-seeks-guidance-adjuncts-religions-colleges-and-relevance-yeshiva-decision#ixzz2wKVDVJWF
“Briefs not exceeding 50 pages in length shall be filed with the Board in Washington, D.C. on or before March 28, 2014” — have at it!
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I believe it was an NLRB ruling, and one that has stood for many years because from Dec 2007-June 2010, the NLRB had only 2 members, and no quorum. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Labor_Relations_Board
I think that’s another example of the ways in which the law (and regulations) have been undermined to weaken the power of workers in the economy, while arguing that free market forces are at work.
Krugman recently had a blog post, wonkishly addressing the Picketty book on growing income inequality. In it, he said that dynastic wealth can be preserved if the rate of return on capital, r, is greater than the rate of growth of the economy in general, g. Krugman showed historical data that showed that this relationship existed for much of history, but there was a 1920-2000 (or so) period in which g was higher than r, reducing inequality and dynastic wealth. Krugman said that Picketty generally presumes that this was the effect of economic differences, but Krugman raises the question of how much of a role government and war played in the relative difference between r and g — through wide scale confiscation of dynamic wealth (which both wars and government policy, like high task rates and deficit spending can accomplish).
I think the shaming of individual choices should probably play a role here– people have to stop accepting adjunct jobs that do not satisfy their needs in the hopes of winning the lottery, and unlike McDonalds workers, they do often have other choices. But, I am glad others have reminded me of the roles that policies play. Little is fixed and we are making choices as a society that produce these outcomes.
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I think that the biggest culprits of adjunct abuse aren’t private colleges. It’s the large public universities that have been under pressure to A)keep costs down and B)increase reputation by increasing research output of TT faculty.
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MH, it’s not as hard as everyone thinks to start an adjunct union — I did it while teaching (with the support of a local, big teachers’ union and a few dedicated colleagues). The first rule? Don’t go to the full-time faculty for help. If you can, don’t tell the FT union until it’s a done deal. Talk to the service union or the campus police association instead. They’ll tell you how to deal with the administration, your first, but not only, source of frustration.
The problem is that any one adjunct union will make just a small gain in an industry that is based on doing “your dream job for free.” One union, alone, provides a feeling of control more than a solution.
The thing is, that feeling of control becomes dignity, whether individual, communal, or as a profession. That dignity creates a wellspring of people who are willing to take a break from their dream jobs and do some organizing for a few years. Cold comfort for those on food vouchers now, but with contingent labor, we’re already talking about the long-term.
There have been sporadic attempts to coordinate adjunct unions within whole states or even nationwide, with big ideas (like learning from the trades about how to change a whole industry, or developing solidarity among aspiring researchers and lifelong teachers).
Although national unions are great at supporting adjunct unions as long as they look like K-12 unions, it’s hard to get around the fact that a that there aren’t enough adjuncts to interest them in bigger projects. And adjuncts don’t have time to do the organizing themselves. Former adjuncts would be very helpful, but most don’t want to revisit that experience after moving on — and many have a contemptuous attitude toward those who “haven’t figured it out yet.”
It’s been ten years since I learned how to walk up to a stranger with a PhD and ask for an authorization card. That new cottage industry, those dozens of articles: they are a godsend.
Adjuncts aren’t people who are acting against their self-interest and need to be saved. They’re people who choose an occupation that is near the bottom of our society in terms of power and remuneration. They make that choice for good reasons. To abstract from MH’s point about minimum wage: the question is what our society does with people who work at the lowest levels of pay.
Right now, we punish them for not meeting the desires of our magnates for the right kinds of educated worker in wage-suppressing abundance. We give them a stern talking to, that they should have made different choices if they want adequate food and healthy children, if they want sick days and a minimally stable source of income.
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“To abstract from MH’s point about minimum wage: the question is what our society does with people who work at the lowest levels of pay.
Right now, we punish them for not meeting the desires of our magnates for the right kinds of educated worker in wage-suppressing abundance. ”
It’s lose-lose, really, because the goal of having the right kinds of educated worker at wage-suppressing abundance is to *wow* suppress wages. The humanities folks hear the cry of having chosen the wrong training and majors, but the goal in CS & engineering is to have an internationally available workforce that is available in such abundance and such depth and breadth of training that individual workers can be chosen from the pool for the short-term need at wages that transfer as much of the profits of their labor to the owners as possible.
Those engineers aren’t “low wage employees who can’t pay for adequate food.” But, they are an example of the growing shift in the portion of the economic value being captured by the individual wage earner v others.
I think minimum wages, unions, free-lancing (i.e. owning the value of your labor) are all tools to try to address this balance in a variety of ways, but I also think that understanding the forces facing different workers is important, too, to look for common ground.
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Think when an intervention can be effective. When you’ve just shot seven years on getting to where you can seek a position and you have no record in anything BUT academia, it’s hard to sell you on not giving it a shot. And it worked for your major professor, etc. So you blow another five years and the last embers of your fertility and your first marriage still chasing this dream. It’s when you graduate with your shiny B.A. in history and you COULD do something else without walking away from enormous sunk costs that you may be able to hear the news.
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The American Philosophical Association had graduate schools send a fluorescent-colored sheet of paper along with all graduate school applications. It contained strong and unambiguous language regarding the prospects of employment for future MA and PhD holders. I received a dozen of those sheets, and I read them and considered them carefully.
I was 20, I had an engineering degree — and I thought that was the only moment in my life when I could walk away from the money and try academia. I still think that was correct (for me, not for everyone).
Good luck with the “Just Say No” campaign aimed at BA recipients.
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Yes, convincing the young and invincible to just say no to a future they dream of (and that someone is going to win) sounds a little bit more difficult than convincing them to sign up for health insurance.
Maybe we can try to also make them develop an insurance plan, for when the PhD in philosophy doesn’t result in an academic job. There’s some interesting work on looking at the trajectory of post-dance planning for dancers. Some countries allow dancers to retire early. A number of dance companies are trying to develop retraining for the 35+ year old dancers whose careers are over (careers that they may have invested their entire remembered lives in). I think folks planning on PhDs need to develop similar plans.
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It’s so easy to blame it on us, right? I refuse to answer and argue with people who do that.
and… WOW… years before I became one, right around the time I was finishing my degree (actually before in the post you linked to ’cause I finished in 2008) you were already talking about these issues.
whatever. Did you read the latest one on “The New Faculty Wife”? (Chronicle). I just blogged about it.
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Isn’t that (The New Faculty Wife) from Feb., 2009?
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Yes, it is, Tulip! Funny someone tweeted it recently & I never even looked at the date. Ha!
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oh, and bj, some of us are neither young nor invincible. Some of us have many other reasons (including the latest one — the faculty wife one) and many other stories that led us to this place. Sigh…
and some of us didn’t even dream of a future in academia, we just enjoyed the work and got caught up in it.
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L — I’ve been there, caught up in the work and enjoying it. And, I don’t regret it for a minute. But, I had backup plans every step along the way (some of which were available only to me in my individual circumstances) and also reminded myself at every juncture which compromises I was willing to make to continue. Although I see the structural issues, I also believe the structural issues won’t change as long as individuals chose to participate in the lottery and then are surprised when they don’t win.
Enter the lottery, but have a backup plan; don’t give up anything really important to you; and know ahead of time if some things (say, moving, are unacceptable to you). That’s a short list. And, unlike giving the same advice to a McDonald’s worker, I’m pretty confident that there is decisions being made along the way in the path to an academic career.
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For my wife, adjunct work has been wonderful: intellectually challenging, likes the students, she feels it keeps her fresh as a practitioner. This has worked only because we both have other work, and, well, ‘husband with benefits’… For the prototypical English or History PhD freeway flyer, I see nothing but heartbreak ahead, and these are very smart people who have never failed at anything.
My father got his PhD in 1952, in Econ, and he said once that there’s a Ponzi aspect to it – any major professor will mint ten or twelve PhDs in a career, and you can’t expand the academy 10-12 times every generation. The boom times of expanding existing colleges and founding new ones went on for some time, but like everything which can’t go on forever, it didn’t. I’m impressed with Will’s ‘fluorescent colored sheet of paper warning’, and that it didn’t scare enough people off.
High schools fear to take on PhDs, because of the way the salaries are structured there. Maybe it would help to remove the wage premia for advanced degrees, and that would encourage more secondary school hiring. Then you would have these guys working for a lot less than they might have hoped, but at least not flipping burgers.
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Are there actually PhDs flipping burgers? Because this feels like the ultimate strawman. Last I heard, “failed” PhDs moaning are getting white collar jobs like teaching in secondary school or working in college administration. There’s also a ton of non academic work that a PhD is beneficial for, but which is still considered “failing” by academia: consulting, marketing, NGO work, etc. If I wanted to join the military, I could be making six figures the day after I defend. I would be dead to my current grad school, but I would be far from begging on the street. I’m not an English or history PhD, but they have options too. Elite private high schools actively recruit humanities PhDs, and some pay very nicely. PhDs are not high school dropouts. We speak of them like Walmart workers, but there’s such a huge gap it’s offensive to compare the two. I do think academia is deeply messed up and is representative of a larger assault on middle class jobs, but as of now PhDs can land on their feet if they choose to.
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http://www.theatlantic.com/infocus/2012/06/not-where-they-hoped-theyd-be/100320/
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Laura, you wrote: “Yeah, I always thought that shaming (universities) and informing (adjuncts) were useful tools to bring about change, but there’s been a whole lot of shaming and informing and no change.”
Just a thought: What if what we’re seeing now would have been even worse for far more people if not for that decade of shaming and informing?
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Here’s an adjunct who has discovered he has gone beyond his college’s limits on speech: http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Government/2014/04/28/Boehner-Challenger-Loses-Adjunct-Job-Over-Electicle-Dysfunction-Ad
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