I’m in the midst of some research on adjunct professors right now. Quick question. Do you think that people outside of higher education know the difference between adjunct professors and tenured professors?
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Apt. 11d 
I’m not in academia but I come from an academic family so my answer may be a bit suspect but — I think not. The general perception of all professors still is that they are tenured and ivory-tower focused. There might be a bit of traction on the pieces about adjuncts among certain UMC circles.
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One of my bartenders is an adjunct on the side.
Anyway, I think that most people outside of academia would, if they knew about it at all, think of an adjunct professor as a working journalist or lawyer or something who teaches a class on the side.
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I bet people outside academia don’t really think that hard about it. Presumably college-educated people know that there are tenured professors (who can all but commit murder and get away with it), working professionals or retirees that teach occasional classes (recently retired political stars all seem to get visiting professor gigs at major universities and that gets publicized), and science TAs with hard-to-understand English (there’s a fair amount of griping about that). I assume that what they aren’t at all aware of is the existence of semi-pro adjuncts (unless they take a lot of interest in academia).
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I agree with AmyP. I don’t think I would have been much aware of the difference between “professional” adjuncts and graduate student TAs teaching courses until I started reading this blog. In part, this ignorance may reflect that places like Yale and Emory don’t have too many adjuncts.
Interestingly, my wife was an adjunct who made a good deal. She had been working as a journalist; she signed up to teach journalism as an adjunct at BU in return for free tuition at their law school; and abandoned journalism for law.
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I suspect not. And I doubt there’d be much sympathy unfortunately. Probably more comments along the lines of “well they can always do something else” or “who told them to get that degree?”.
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I think that most people wouldn’t fully-comprehend the difference. I asked the spouse (ABD, Philosophy) and he believes that it would be 50/50 on folks understanding the difference. However, his opinion would come with a caveat, as he formed an adjunct union at his community college.
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I think you should ask the question at College Confidential. A relevant audience, I’d think.
My guess is that most people wouldn’t know, and that, as MH points out, that many would think of adjuncts as someone who teaches an occasional class in addition to their real job (not uncommon among lawyers, who sometimes funnel their pay to their firm, because they can’t accept outside compensation).
I’ve seen folks start referring to the “adjunct” issue as “contingent” faculty. I think we are better off finding a new word for the phenomenon of temporary, at will instructors, that the term adjunct contains too many different kinds of workers.
(for example, this report at the AAUP site on part-time faculty: http://www.aaup.org/article/who-are-part-time-faculty#.VTVNBK1VhBc)
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I agree that contingent faculty is a better term and that there are too many kinds of workers under the umbrella of “adjunct” — I’m full time & a lecturer, but still very much an adjunct because my labor is contingent to them wanting to renew my contract. I will try to stop now, I can go on, and on, and on about this subject.
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No, most people without a college degree don’t know the difference. The word “professor” implies tenure and good pay/benefits; “adjunct professor” seems to imply part-time-by-choice from what I see and hear. People assume adjuncts get the same pay and benefits as full professors, but that they only work ten hours a week or so, purely by choice.
Academia is really a world apart, and with the cost of college going up, up, up, is only going to become more so. People struggling to attend community college part-time to get a leg up assume that the high cost is going towards high professor salaries, instead of where it’s really going: high administrator salaries, with perks like a housing allowance and country club membership. (seriously—the college president at the community college I attended got free housing and membership to the local country club and another fraternal organization that was basically a country club. what a racket.)
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The administration salaries is another thing nobody outside of academia knows about. Some critics will complain about the growth of administration by counting thing not spent on teaching as “administration” as if it wouldn’t be an actual crime for us to spend the research money on teaching.
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I have a ton of personal anecdotes and research links about adjuncts here on Apt. 11d, so an article on adjuncts is perfect for me. I was poking around over the weekend trying to find my angle.
There’s already been a lot written. There’s a new study that 1/4 of adjuncts are on welfare. The adjuncts in Chicago are on strike asking for $15K per class (good luck with that one). Lots of coverage of both topics. I was worrying whether there’s been too much written and not enough people caring.
I think my angle is going to be why parents and students should care that their professors are on welfare.
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I think I’ve met some of the people trying to unionize the local adjuncts. They go to that same bar.
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I think that’s a good angle to work on. But, I also think it’s a tough one.
I think folks have a tough time buying into higher salary for someone they’re going to be paying (nannies, child care, home health care, K-12 teachers, . . . .). Of that group, the ones whose salaries I care the most about are the K-12 teachers.
I’ll be interested to hear the case you make for avoiding adjuncts, especially for what you come up with as direct impacts (in addition to the indirect impacts to the state of colleges). I have this discussion about the temporary work force (post-docs, research associates) who fuel most of the bio research done in the US, and, the bottom line is that unless people walk away and decrease the quality of the work force substantially, the argument is built mostly on morality and not practical benefits.
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that’s a great question. I assume most people don’t know it and I already explain it upfront my “work situation” — and there are all kinds of adjuncts, the definition as someone wrote above is not someone who teaches “on the side” — an adjunct can teach full-time, and even receive a full-time salary, but still be contingent labor on a year by year or semester by semester contract work. Sigh… I guess some people won’t be sympathetic, but when explained the difference and the bad working conditions, most people become more sympathetic. Sigh…
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YES, great angle — why parents and teachers should care. And not only that their teachers are on welfare, but that they’re paying and not knowing what they’re getting because us adjuncts would be WAY better teachers if we were given the right conditions. If we didn’t have to stress out (sometimes unwittingly in front of our students!!) if we’re going to have a renewed contract.
Parents and students should pressure universities AND — MOST IMPORTANTLY — rating agencies to report the percentage of non-tenure track instructors on each campus that is rated. Students know that “TAs” aren’t necessarily good teachers and while most adjuncts and lecturers are well qualified, we still are overworked and stressed out and I think our students are suffering because of that.
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The angle on why parents should care rings true. Eldest is wrapping up her sophomore year at one of our nation’s top universities. I don’t think she had a single tenured or tenure-track faculty member teaching her in her major field (4/5 of her courses this term). Now, mind you, most of them are very good instructors, in her opinion, but it’s hard to get a letter of recommendation for grad school when your faculty members only get to know you in your third year courses, if then.
Contingent faculty situations are precarious for the educators and the students. She had one course almost completely derailed when the grad student union was on strike for five weeks – the news media said ‘well, this doesn’t include professors so it just messes up some labs and tutorials’ when, in reality, a lot of instructors were members of the grad students’ union! In her case, the undergrad chair came into their class weeks into the strike, made some major changes to the marking scheme and course coverage, and left them all to deal with that courtesy of a few random guest lecturers. I expect better from a top 25 world-ranked institution, but undergrads don’t get that level of support, do they?
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” Eldest is wrapping up her sophomore year at one of our nation’s top universities. I don’t think she had a single tenured or tenure-track faculty member teaching her in her major field (4/5 of her courses this term). ” wow
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Yes, and this is not the US, right? so an international phenomenon?
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No. 70% of classes in the US are taught by adjunct professors. Not in the elite private colleges, but everywhere else. Especially in public schools.
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Actually, I meant international as well, not that the numbers weren’t similar in the US. But, I am guessing that this is another divider between the elite universities and the rest.
The publics seem to moving towards a model where many of the faculty are contingent. In medical schools now, most faculty are dependent on external grants for their salaries, and do not have any guaranteed salary if they don’t generate it by winning grants. It’s a longer cycle(3-5 years) than being awarded classes on semester/quarterly basis, and, they are required to pay themselves faculty salaries, but, employment is still contingent.
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That has not been our experience. To the best of my knowledge, in her years at Wake Forest and Emory, Little Miss y81 has had one grad student teaching a course (she was terrible) and one VAP, whom she liked. (I don’t know if they count as contingent.) In my time at Yale, I had some grad student TAs who led sections, one grad student who taught differential equations (he was pretty good), one visiting professor (I don’t recall his tenure status), and one true adjunct (a law student who taught a first year Spanish section).
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Universities hate committing to full-time foreign language faculty. We currently have one full-time foreign language professor after the other retired last year. So depressing.
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I think most people aren’t aware, unless they are connected to the academic world or the parent of a college student. I had always envisioned freshmen courses taught by revolving door of adjuncts. What shocked the hell out of me was when I realized that the mainstays of my son’s university music department – people he has known or known of since in high school, because he participated in some prep programs there, people who were the face of the department and visably invested in students – were all adjuncts. As a senior, his professors are still mostly adjuncts. They are great instructors, almost to a one. But there’s been more of a revolving door than is good for the students.
My other son (at a pricey private liberal arts school) has had some of the one-year contract instructors who have completely sucked. Yes, they’ll be gone next year, but one quarter of his classes freshman year were pretty much a waste. People feel there’s little accountability for tenured staff, but there’s even less when someone is in for only a term or a year.
I like your angle, but I think you should focus less on the fairness issue and more on how it hurts the student (risk of revolving door of instructors, difficulty in getting good advising or recommendations, ramifications of not working with faculty until your junior or senior year). And how to balance raising their salaries and benefits with cuts elsewhere in the average university budget.
I don’t think most people will agitate around the fairness issue, but you could get some loud voices around the “I’m paying $50k, who the hell do you have teaching my kid” angle.
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Right. That’s what I”m doing. Thanks a ton, guys. Crowd sourcing articles is very helpful.
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I asked on my FB. I have a variety of people among my FB friends, including suburban NYers and parents of HSers/college students.
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Yes, but three reasons come to mind. I was still taking classes until I hit 40. I’ve done the college search with my kids in the last five years. I have lots of friends in academia.
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My dad was a professor, so I’m aware – but truly I don’t think most people are. It’s made the news here in Madison lately, though. UW Madison has an 18% adjunct rate, but Walker is trying to cut funding to increase that number. (He has stated that he thinks professors make too much money and don’t do enough work…)
https://badgerherald.com/news/2015/03/09/uw-could-see-increase-in-adjunct-faculty-under-proposed-budget-cuts/
http://www.attn.com/stories/807/scott-walker-professors-should-work-harder
I think his opposition to the UW system will be his downfall in WI. His statewide popularity has taken a nose-dive. (…and my apologies to the rest of you if you need to endure him as a candidate….) Almost everyone here went to UW…and they are loyal!
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Almost everyone here went to Penn State …and they are loyal! Which has been a problem.
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Most people in Wisconsin, like most people everywhere, didn’t go to college at all, much less to a flagship state U. As the Republicans increasingly become the party of the white working class, they will probably become even more hostile to academia than they are now.
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That’s a good point – I think we are at about 25% with a degree here in WI. But Walker is also gutting the technical colleges and the K-12, and I do think the tide is turning against him here in WI….finally.
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As a second-generation college student at Rice in the mid-1990s, I had no idea which of my instructors were graduate students, which were adjuncts, assistants, associates, or professors. They were teachers, but you were in college, so they were professors until they told you otherwise — usually by either insisting you not say “doctor” or by doing that obnoxious first-name thing. I suspect that that perspective is the overwheming majority among most families for whom academia isn’t the family business, and graduate education means law, medicine, or an education degree.
You could sometimes sort grad students from other early-career instructors by their office settings when you visited with them during office hours — if they shared an office, they might be lower on the career ladder. However, it really didn’t seem to make a lot of difference in instruction, particularly when many of the in-major courses that interested you were taught by juniorish folks.
That was true in Linguistics, but in Computer Science, graduate students only TAed lab sessions and did grading. As AmyP points out, they generally were foreign. I have no idea which of the CS courses might have been taught by adjunts. Maybe one or two in my whole curriculum.
I’d really like to know why parents and students should care about academic labor conditions. I have a lot of friends in academia, and so much of it doesn’t make sense to an outside. I mean, we don’t have tenure in the tech world, but we also don’t have not-tenure — if you don’t get a promotion you were striving for, you walk across the street and get another job. The only analog to adjuncting in my world is the software developers in the gaming industry, which milks a ready stream of intelligent people who love working with the material so much they’re willing to deal with terrible hours, pay, and work environments. I’m not sure how an adjunct would feel about that comparison.
I learned a lot from tenured profs, and I learned a lot from graduate students. In one case a Hebrew class conflicted with a course required for my major, and the instructor let me audit the same class she was teaching at another school in town. (I now suspect she was an adjunct.) I think that this gets to one of the challenges anyone arguing for better conditions for adjuncts will face: parents are paying for instruction, the quality of which doesn’t seem to be correlated to rank or employment status.
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Yes, I think many parents are not particularly bothered by whether a class is taught by a PhD who gets paid not very much for the class. I think the general perception in the rest of the working world is that academics is a pretty cushy job, especially with arguments about job stability.
The non-entitled answer to this general disinterest about stability is the “not-tenure” aspect of academics. A critical, and, I think necessary aspect of academic employment is extremely specific training in a highly specialized area. That’s the point of a PhD, and the point of research (in many cases). In general, though one might be able to generalize the skills to another position, it’s the wrong training in many cases for doing much other than what you have been specifically trained for. Thus, without stability, we are relying on love to staff the field. It might work, but I’m not sure it will, especially in the sciences.
In an unstable labor environment, you have to develop the generalizable skills that let you shift direction in preference to the highly specialized skills (say, for example, learning to record ion channel activity with glass pipettes — which, in the current model, you first learn, and then teach others to do, when you set up an independent lab). There are structural issues, too, as Laura has pointed out, tenure means that you can’t hire new people; the field is very agist, . . . .
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I have the impression parents paying college tuition are aware of the issue, if they’ve done their homework. Trying to guess what someone else thinks about an issue is always tricky for me; what someone else should think about an issue is really what I think about an issue, but time and again, people make inscrutable decisions. See through tights as a replacement for pants, for example, or cars so big the drivers can’t back up safely.
Anyways, from many many college visits, it seems the Parental Public is aware of the issue of class size. Private college tour guides and admissions officers were quick to trot out statistics about class size, X% of classes below 20 people, Y% of lectures above, etc. Olin College bragged for a time that their instructors did not have tenure. I don’t know if they’ve kept that up, as I suppose that means their entire teaching body could be hired away by other colleges.
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“I’d really like to know why parents and students should care about academic labor conditions.” Perhaps one reason is that TAs and contingent faculty typically know little about the student’s major program: which courses will not run next year, which course can be substituted for another course, the relationships between departments, which faculty member a student might wish to work with in another department, which internships / opportunities are available only to students in that department. At some colleges and universities, undergrad advising is divided up among all full-time faculty; the fewer of the latter there are, the more students each faculty member is assigned, which can mean less quality time with each student. High-quality advisement can be just as important to a student’s postgraduate career as his/her choice of major.
Full-time faculty are also more likely to know who to contact and which strings to pull so that students can graduate on time with the courses they need.
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This is the first time I’ve seen this argued, and it’s really, really compelling. Parents want their children to graduate on time, and that desperation will only increase as tuitions skyrocket.
Unlike the “recommendation-letter-for-grad-school” justification, this argument has universal appeal. Pitch it, Laura!
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I’m curious, because Laura says that adjunct teaching is not particularly common at elite private colleges (which, to be honest, is the sum of my experience), but some of the commenters suggest otherwise. What are the numbers? What are the percentages of courses taught by adjuncts at various types of college: elite university, lower-tier private university, flagship state U, directional state U, LAC, etc.?
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On reflection, there is a version of this at the Ivy League, I believe.
What I’ve heard (and please correct me if I’m wrong or if this is out of date) is that at the very highest levels of the Ivy League, it is almost impossible for a junior faculty person to get tenure, as tenure is largely reserved for stars hired as senior faculty. Hence, under that system, a junior faculty person (who is theoretically eligible for tenure but in practice won’t get it) is somewhat like an adjunct, just a highly paid one.
(Why tolerate that treatment? Apparently, departments outside the Ivy League understand the score, and it’s possible to get a reasonable non-Ivy job once you leave.)
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It’s not always easy to get a “reasonable non-Ivy job,” though: one of my cohort got a plum Ivy job (which I was quite jealous of at the time) and six years later is back on the job market. And what’s worse, he’s not getting interviews for jobs at schools that are interviewing grad students he supervises. Ouch. My directional state university is looking much better now.
Since we are in an isolated rural area, we are somewhat better at dealing with contingent faculty, who have their own union, usually teach a full courseload (4/3, in contrast to 3/3 for the t/tt people, and for a lot less pay – but still enough to get by here, in the $30-35K range), and eventually get something that’s a little like tenure. One of my friends just got converted to tenure-track after maybe 5-6 years here working like crazy and being wonderful at everything. It’s not ideal, but it’s better than other places.
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“It’s not always easy to get a “reasonable non-Ivy job,” though: one of my cohort got a plum Ivy job (which I was quite jealous of at the time) and six years later is back on the job market. And what’s worse, he’s not getting interviews for jobs at schools that are interviewing grad students he supervises. Ouch. My directional state university is looking much better now.”
Hmmm.
So are Ivy League junior faculty essentially just long-term adjuncts?
It must be very difficult to run colleges with two tiers of professors: junior faculty that are going to be gone within 5-6 years and senior faculty that are such 800-pound gorillas that nobody can get them to do anything they don’t want to do.
Maybe you could patch that up with sufficient administrative talent and money, but it sounds to me like a recipe for disaster.
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We are actually going to hire this year (yay! We’ve had 4 retirements in the last 3 years and hadn’t been allowed to replace until now), and some of our adjuncts are being seriously considered, according to the grapevine.
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It varies by Ivy. That is true of some of them but not others. I have friends who’ve gotten tenure at some Ivies, and friends making plans for once they don’t get tenure at other Ivies. There’s no stigma to not getting tenure at the schools known for not granting tenure, so people tend to look at it as a 6 year postdoc, publish their book, and then move to a TT position at a different elite university (e.g. Stan/ford). It is a bummer for grad students and undergrads, who have to deal with a constant rotating door of junior and mid-level faculty, many of whom are much more involved with their students and doing much more interesting work than the tenured faculty. On the flip side, one Ivy with cash to burn hired away a hotshot couple from our dept who were about 6 months away from emeritus. They offered them 3x the salary with no teaching, research, or publishing requirements. The couple used their slush fund to provide fellowships for their current grad students at my school, as they’re not required to take on students at their new university. AFAIK, Their current university is paying over a million dollars a year to have their names on the faculty webpage, and that’s the extent of the benefit. From grad student friends in this department, this thing happens all the time and they’re pretty pissed. I’m in the rare field where with one exception the Ivies are not top 10 in the discipline (and the only top 10 Ivy doesn’t engage in these practices), so I don’t know if this is the case with other departments.
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AmyP: What you say is certainly true of Yale when I was there. It was understood that almost no assistant professors got tenure. They moved on after a few years (it certainly doesn’t hurt your resume to have taught at Yale) and the tenured professors were mostly recruited from other institutions (most academics find HYP irresistible). I think HYP still operate that way. I would hardly consider the lot of an assistant professor there to be similar to that of an adjunct at a directional state U, however.
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My sense is that most (all?) of the more elite schools have 2 tiers of faculty: the tenure-track, with lower teaching loads (2:2, with releases for a variety of reasons lowering the loads) and high research expectations and the contract/lecturer/instructor track with much heavier teaching loads (4:4 load, significant service) and theoretically little to no research expectations but unwritten expectations of research (especially if they ever want to move on). There’s typically significant pay differences as well, with contract folks making about 60% of the tenured folks’ salary. Classifying nontenure track faculty as contract/lecturer/instructor allows the uni to not count them as adjuncts, even if they work on perpetual one year contracts that only get renewed after the spring semester ends.
This system, while based on inequalities, is much better than the situation of a true adjunct, potentially teaching at multiple institutions, and not knowing their teaching load until the semester starts.
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It seems like there’s really a spectrum, with a whole middle class which includes VAPs, lecturers, “true” adjuncts who think they’re getting a good deal (like my wife), etc. If you want to include assistant professors at places where they don’t expect to receive tenure, count them too. Most of the “lecturers” that I knew of when I was in college taught lower-level language courses (there were also adjuncts in this role), and many people would consider teaching Russian or Swedish or whatever to bright young people at 60% of a professor’s salary–still more than a local high school teacher gets–to be a very good job. So just dividing the faculty world into tenured and “contingent” personnel doesn’t really capture the situation.
BTW, the idea of not having a job guaranteed to last more than a year is kind of typical. Everyone I know, except for one or two tenured professors, is in that situation. I don’t think you can get the parents too upset about that.
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That idea of having a job guaranteed to last more than a year is atypical, but that’s not to say an adjunct on a series of short term contracts is in the same situation as a typical employee. Most people employed in a career think of their jobs as “permanent” even if they aren’t guaranteed. The company may go under or the position be closed or they might get fired to cause, but otherwise, they expect to have that job and to accumulate seniority and vacation and the like. They aren’t so easily replaced..
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If I wasn’t clear, I was talking about lecturers at top-tier schools. I don’t think they have much cause for complaint. I agree that the “professional adjunct” life is very undesirable.
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We’re not exactly top-tier here.
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Or at least not in the humanities and such.
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Anyway, broadly speaking (i.e. if you include research), I’m part of that middle class. My job is certainly not guaranteed, but I don’t think of somebody in a time-limited position as being in the same boat as me. The parts of my compensation that make for the middle-classness nearly all depend on being a permanent (though not tenured*) employee. Somebody making my same salary without the benefits is being paid something like a third less than I am.
* Tenure is close to meaningless in our department anyway.
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BTW, the idea of not having a job guaranteed to last more than a year is kind of typical. Everyone I know, except for one or two tenured professors, is in that situation. I don’t think you can get the parents too upset about that.
Speaking from the perspective of a parent who does not have a bachelor’s degree, an ever-rotating precariat of teaching staff screams “worthless diploma mill” to me—the academic equivalent of Amway or one of those other ponzi schemes. I’d find it hard to believe that the pay and job stability of faculty isn’t heavily correlated to graduation rate and employment prospects of graduates, let alone the quality of education.
Folks like me aren’t planning to send their (our) kids to college because it’s “the thing to do”; we’re doing it so our kids don’t end up like us, skating on economic thin ice. It is one of the things I’m looking at in terms of where she’ll end up studying. College at any cost higher than community college is already as a practical matter unaffordable to me; if I’m going to make the sacrifices and serious risk necessary to get her there, it’s going to be for results, and I don’t believe those results can be obtained from a college that doesn’t value their faculty. Look, I’m in the building trades, and I guarantee you in my world you get what you pay for—and the contractors that don’t value their workforce enough to pay them decent wages and benefits produce shoddy workmanship. It’s visible, even to people who don’t work in the trades. A college that doesn’t value their faculty isn’t going to do much investing in their students either. That’s not what I’m willing to pay for.
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This is a great statement, and I’m going to steal these ideas and pass them on to my school and our faculty unions. It’s exactly right.
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As usual you are the voice of reason when we can get a bit in our heads about all of this.
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Yeah, I’m a hundred percent behind you, lubiddo. I’m sending my kids (or one of them) to college to get an education. I expect them come back after four years smarter about a bunch of stuff. I think that they’ll get a better education, if the person in the front of the room is properly compensated for their time.
The problem is that other parents and students don’t care about the learning part of college. What they care about is getting a degree and having a lot of fun for four years. If those are your priorities, then the classroom stuff is boring and a waste of time. They want colleges to go throught the show of education, but they don’t care about it all that much. That’s why we end up with fancy football stadiums and ramen-noodle professors.
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If undergraduate education is your priority, I can think of a hundred problems bigger than excessive deployment of adjuncts. The American university makes undergraduate education a low priority from top to bottom.
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Tenure itself isn’t the primary difference between an adjunct and a tenure or tenure-track professor. I mean, tenure is great and all, but that’s not the main difference.
Tenured professors have a living wage. Now, it isn’t great compared to other professions. A whole lot of assistant professors make around $50-60K per year. Compared to a first year law school graduate, that’s pretty sucky considering the English PhD spends at least double time in grad school as a law student.
Tenured professors know where they will be working in six months. Adjunct professors have no idea. College do their hiring a month before a semester begins. It’s very possible that an adjunct could teach four classes one semester and bring in about 10K, but then not be able to find any work the following semester.
Tenured professors have health insurance and 401K plans. Adjuncts do not.
Tenured professors are paid to write recommendations and answer e-mails, because they are on salary. Ajuncts do not.
Sure, some adjuncts are satisfied with this arrangement, because they have other sources of income. My electrician teachs a class at the local technical school and loves it. He also has no prep work and no essay grading. But most aren’t. They are trying to live on less than $20K per year. That’s just depressing.
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Could you use the phrase “salaried” instead of “tenured” or “tenure-track”? Being salaried is something non-academics understand and are sympathetic to, while they read “tenured” as “unfireable”.
What’s the opposite of “salaried”? “Hourly”? “Seasonal”? “Perma-temp?” I’m not sure “salaried-vs-seasonal” is quite equivalent to “tenured-or-tenure-track-vs-adjunct”, but it might help.
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I wouldn’t use the word “salaried”; in my (hourly) work world, that gets more side-eye than “tenured”. “Salary” means paid-even-if-not-working, and for most hourly workers has more negative connotations than tenure. When I’ve heard people talking negatively about tenure, I’ve always countered with the necessity of job protection for teachers to have academic freedom for unpopular or challenging ideas, or the ability to avoid the enmeshment that comes from a school board or community that expects teachers to belong to a particular political party or religion. That the problem isn’t that teachers have tenure; the problem is the rest of us don’t.
“Aaah! yeah! I’ve never thought of it that way…” is the response. Because it isn’t often spoken aloud, but people are aware that teachers receive a hell of a lot more public scrutiny than most other workers. Tenure is a form of compensation for all the nibby-noses all up in one’s life, both in and out of the classroom.
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To people who are actually salaried, it means “Paid the same even if I’m working overtime.”
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MH, I know that’s true in most cases, and my condolences. But those aren’t the cases that people in my world flash on. We think of the lazy, shiftless in-law that can’t pour piss out of a boot unless the instructions are on the heel, but who fortunately plays a good game of golf, and thus was able to secure a go-hide-in-the-corner job on his schmoozing ability. In my line, the charitable way of referring to the dynamic is “kicked upstairs”—the foreman is the guy who gets the least done when working with the tools, so….no loss to “kick him upstairs”. *smile*
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I more or less come by my salaried status honestly. I don’t need condolences for it. I’m substantially self-directed or whatever the law says.
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I do think that this gets to Christiana’s point above. I haven’t been salaried for the last three years, part of which has been on spent on an hourly contract to a former (salaried) employer, so I see the difference in the kinds of work that gets done in superficially-similar situations.
On the one hand, I’m far happier to work overtime than I was on salary. But on the other, there is a qualitative difference in the kind of work I do. In addition to eschewing semi-recreational team-building stuff like the choir at Christmas or the volunteer days, I’m not shadowing employees in other parts of the business, doing career development with the organization’s technology, participating in strategy or team goal meetings, nor anything else that doesn’t fit within the somewhat-narrow scope of ‘what they’re paying me to do ‘. I can imagine that if I were being paid to teach, I’d have to do similar triage in ways that might not be in the best interests of the typical student.
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Tenured and tenure-track are pretty much in the same boat. One has tenure, one is on the road to getting tenure. They’ve got that tenure thing, plus normal salary/benefits that other white collar employees enjoy.
There are full-time, non-tenure track faculty. Sometimes called lecturers. They don’t get tenure, but they have semi-permanent positions. They are hired on a contract basis. They make less money the tenured faculty, but it is still respectable. (I did this for three years and no complaints w/the salary or benefits.)
The third category are the adjunct professor. It is confusing, because they are called professors, too. They are the migrant laborers of academia. They are the ramen noodle professors. They are paid minimal rates. It’s not really hourly, because if you figured in all the time for test prep and paper grading, the salary would be below minimum wage and, thus, be illegal. They are paid a lump sum for their services.
I have to keep the words tenure and adjunct, because that’s their names. I can do a better job of explaining it all, so this is helpful.
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Again, speaking as a blue-collar, working class parent whose daughter will be in that “at risk” category of not graduating from college (over my dead body, but that’s another conversation. *smile*. don’t get me wrong; she wants to go, has a dream, and this will happen one way or another, even though I’m too old to consider sex work as a side gig to pay for it)….a high number of adjunct faculty has a negative impact on students like my daughter. No, adjuncts don’t “go that extra mile”, and oftentimes can’t, because they themselves don’t have the support of their institutions.
Not to be cynical (*smmrrff!*), but students like my daughter are seen as ATMs by too damn many colleges that aren’t interested in competing with other institutions on the academic level. They aren’t expected to finish, and no one gives a good goddamn if they don’t because the college gets paid anyway. Colleges are being run like factories just prior to offshoring—bleed ’em dry and dump. No investing for the long term. But since this is my daughter we’re talking about, I’m not down for that. I’m not sacrificing her future or mine (what, cash is going to fall out of the sky for this?) so some administrator gets the perk of a car allowance for his/her BMW while some ramen-eating ‘professor’ can’t pay the heat bill without second-and-third gigs, and thus is not able to provide the type of education or resources she is going to need to move the hell up out of Dodge, which is her goal.
(also worth a mention: young women don’t get any “breaks” in the work world unless they have formal education to back it up. The more, the better. Employers just aren’t willing to see young women as ambitious, innovative, hard workers, or good learners unless they prove it first with education. It is what it is, and I’m preparing my daughter for the actual world she’ll be living and working in, rather than the ideal, egalitarian world we haven’t yet achieved. Boys can get away with slacking in a way that girls cannot.)
Keep in mind, for people in my social class, college is the ticket out. What we are paying for is escape velocity. And when we see people with college degrees getting just as screwed? Yeah, that doesn’t go over well. Maybe you won’t convince the college-as-long-party crowd, but I’m not convinced that’s the majority of parents or students.
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My state university has worked hard over the last few years to build in supports for first-generation or otherwise at-risk-of-dropping-out students – lots of extra programming for freshmen, including a required “intro to college” 1-credit course. I was very skeptical about the value of this (it seemed like a money-making venture for the company that produces the required reading packets, which don’t seem very substantial to me) but it seems to have helped. Of course we are not just doing this out of the goodness of our hearts, but to ensure that our retention rate stays up, which both looks good and ensures that those students’ tuition dollars continue to come our way. But I think it can be both good for the students and good for us.
Anyway, these freshmen support systems, both within coursework and in the dorms, are very popular now, so these may be good things to look for as you consider colleges for your daughter. In addition to asking about the stability and compensation of the faculty, any efforts they’ve made at improving retention can be a good sign.
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I don’t know about the work world, but boys certainly get a pass on slacking getting in to college. My #1 guy (mediocre to decent academic record, middling SATs) just got admitted to a rather nicer school than his record would have gotten him had he had bumps in front. They are all trying hard to find reasons to say ‘yes’ to boys, because the schools are trending towards 60/40 women/men, and at some point not far past that, the girls won’t come.
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While I agree with Lubiddo that blue-collar families typically get the short end of the stick when it comes to education, when it comes to higher ed, this problem affects everyone.
Any kid who is not in a top tier, small liberal arts college will have adjunct instructors teaching their kids. My oldest will probably attend a good public college. He’ll have lots of adjuncts. My youngest will probably go to a community college for a technical program. He’ll have even more low-paid adjunct professors.
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Do they have an honors program or honors college? At least here and where I was an undergrad, that got you different sets of options for most (not all) classes. For example, I took Calc with a full professor and maybe 25 to 30 of us in the class. My friends took the regular Calc in an auditorium.
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What Laura says is not quite true: if your kid is at a top tier large university, she will not have adjuncts teaching her. Rather, if she is a math major, she will have grad students who don’t speak English (and who probably can’t teach in any language). When she and her classmates complain to the head of the department, she will be told, basically, that the need to have grad students check the “teaching experience” box outweighs the minor desideratum of teaching mathematics to the undergraduates.
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Yet another good reason to do the first two years in community college.
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Ohio State had a mandatory language proficiency test for any non-American TA. I don’t know if it helped or not, but it was really wonderful at pissing off British graduate students.
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Except for the English department (comp teachers) we have very few true adjuncts (people teaching just a class here or there) and also very few “visiting” assistant profs (who teach a full load but are not tenure track). I don’t think there are any grad students who teach, except for comp. This is what happens when you are a state university in the middle of nowhere – at least here in the midwest, but maybe other places too. You can’t get people to come here without a tenure track job.
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