I'm an adjunct, and I've written about various aspects of being an adjunct (e.g. here: http://jakeseliger.com/2014/12/22/how-do-you-know-when-youre...). But I'll add that there is a very good "excuse" why universities treat adjuncts how they do: because they can. When people stop signing up for grad school and/or to be adjuncts, universities will have to offer better pay and/or conditions.
Until that happens, universities won't. Markets are clearing.
> I'll add that there is a very good "excuse" why universities treat adjuncts how they do: because they can.
That's very true, and current and potential adjuncts should wisen up. That being said, just because you can take advantage of someone doesn't mean you should.
Yep. When you flood two generations with easy college money and tell them they have to go or they're a failure, don't be surprised when a disproportionate number of people are exposed to post graduate options and they seem like their best choice.
Even so, stuff like this reminds me not to take too romantic a view of "non-profit" higher education.
> When you flood two generations with easy college money and
Would that be why they are drowning in higher education debt?
Such failures in logic occur when you try to express a systematic social problem (erosion of labour rights and lack of unionisation in higher education institutions among adjuncts and graduate students) to individualist argumentation ("it's their fault for being exploited").
Unionization can only enable workers to capture more of the producer surplus; it can't fundamentally reverse a case of extreme oversupply.
For rough numbers, an epically good adjunct union might secure a 50% pay raise. But sane PhD pay rates would have to be something like 2x what they are now for it to be a viable career path for high-IQ white collar professionals. And that requires the supply to (take an economic hint and) contract.
Yes, and just as my claim would predict of Hollywood:
- Actors (in the aggregate) get a bigger fraction of the returns than the typical worker in other industries.
- The overwhelming number of people who make some money from acting have to supplement it with something else since they can only get a few days per year.
- Full time acting is not a viable career option for most people who would like to do it and are qualified.
- Unionization did nothing for the above dynamic, though it did have other benefits, like improving pay somewhat for those who find part-time work at all.
IOW, yes, it has benefits, no it will not return us to the state where getting a PhD becomes a viable full-time career path.
It already is happening. So many graduates see the higher level of skill they have and the joke of a salary that adjuncts make and 'nope-ing' out into industry. Academia is going to starve itself of it's best performers by low pay and horrible standards for adjuncts and tenure track positions alike.
Yeah, that's the smart thing to do, especially when there's strong demand for their skills, like from silicon valley. Heck, that would make a great plot for the show of the same name:
PP is looking to academia to hire and they informally offer a candidate "100", by which they mean "$100k/year", but (they later find out) the heavily underpaid post-doc took to mean "$100/day", and they debate whether they should write up the offer letter with the lower amount.
This. The fix for the pay issues is for the over supply to go away. If we attempt to legislate or worse, unionize the field, we will just end up with many who want to work with no job as requirements will spell out exactly who gets employed and how, effectively locking out any who cannot get on board.
I still of the opinion that the university system needs a good hair cut. They are able to rake in billions of federal dollars for student loans and unlike the medical care field where federal money also goes no attempt is made to course rates. As in, if you want students on federal loans this is what you can charge per course hour for this course.
The problem with the market-based approach is that the oversupply won't go away anytime soon. Right now there is a surfeit of chemists on the East Coast from the Dow-Dupont merger that added to the surfeit from the pharma crisis that started fifteen years ago and hasn't really ended.
What exactly is wrong with the union-based approach (the AMA works rather nicely for physicians), and why can't the US have a proper science policy?
The AMA does work rather nicely for physicians, but it's less clear that it works nicely for patients. There's a strong argument to be made that the USA suffers from a chronic undersupply of physicians, and that certainly boosts doctor pay but it comes at the cost of patients having to pay higher prices for poorer quality service.
The AMA also has the advantage of being an incumbent. If we were to hypothesize a similar national organization for American academics that was attempting to follow a similar strategy, their first problem would be how to generate the artificial undersupply that allows members of its profession to enjoy such a favorable job market in the first place. I'm guessing anything that accomplishes that goal more quickly than waiting for a market correction would, would end up being a pretty painful experience for the large number of folks who find themselves forcibly shoved out of academia.
Yep, the general sentiment among doctors is that they've failed to advocate for themselves both in the public sphere and government. Comparisons are frequently drawn between themselves and nursing groups who have lobbied very successfully for both expanded scope of practice and better workplace conditions.
Unions are most valuable for laborers and society when labor is fungible. Assembly line work, for example, really really ought to be unionized for the benefits of the worker, society, and probably the employer comes out a bit ahead too (expectations are set, wage negotiation is simplified).
Academic research is very not fungible. If you think there's a 10x programmer, there's a 50x scientist, a handful more at 10x, and the median (yes,median) "nominal" scientist is probably -2x.
A unionized system will protect the -2x and the 50xs, being treated equally to these idiots, will drop out.
I'm all for free association, if scientists want to unionize, that's up to them, but the broader social consequences will not be pretty.
Unions are not for academic researchers. Unions are for adjuncts teaching composition, or calculus, or chem 101. If you don't think someone who is hired on a Tuesday to teach a semester-long class starting on a Wednesday is an interchangeable commodity... well, suffice it to say that people hired as adjuncts to teach composition/art history/algebra/precalc/calc/mechanics are viewed entirely as commodities in any city large enough to have cheap housing.
Students will definitely come out ahead if their teachers have time and space to 1) read the syllabus before showing up to class, 2) prepare for class, 3) hold office hours, and 4) store graded materials. Things a student can't reliably do if the teacher is a poorly-treated adjunct: a) get a letter of recommendation (no time!), b) dispute a grade the next semester (tests aren't stored on campus!), c) have comfortable office hours (meet in a hallway, sitting on a floor, because there is no office!).
Sorry the post immediately above mine referenced researchers, and I forgot about op. I think there's a very good case for unionizing non-research adjuncts.
Markets don't know how to judge the value of science. Its main product is a non-excludable good -- you can't know if a train of experimentation or thought will ultimately be important until long after you have shared the results, but sharing thought/results almost entirely removes your market leverage. Therefore, the market says the value of science is... nothing. Which we've collectively decided is pretty obviously not true, so we fund science through the government, but that still doesn't give us any way to judge the value we're getting in return. Are we funding it too little? Too much? There's no way to tell the bang we're getting for our buck, we're just guessing(footnote). That guess determines the demand for scientists. Market corrections in the academic labor market target that guess, not any underlying market truth, so it's hard to say whether they're good or not, no matter how much of a True Believer in markets you are.
Contrast to, say, video game programming, where the market forces pushing people away from those jobs do represent a fundamental truth that isn't obviously baloney: there are more people who want to program video games than society needs/wants to program video games.
* Given the set of things that market forces tell scientists they should be doing instead of science, I'm pretty sure we're dramatically underfunding them, but that's certainly debatable.
There is no market for academic basic science (like Philosophy, pure Maths, Astrophysics, heck even theoretical Economy) so... I do not think it has relation to a market.
I have a PhD in CS and seriously considered staying in academia. I really enjoy teaching, so I would have been okay with making less than I could with an industry job. But it's not the pay that pushed me to industry, but the shitty contracts you get. I don't want to change cities or even continents every two or three years. There are no permanent positions available at all and even five year contracts are very rare.
Paying them more would increase tuition. Maybe colleges should shift the funds from elsewhere but that not as simple as just paying them more.
What is never talked about in these articles about the plight of the adjunct is that adjunct professor is supposed to be a fun side gig. Almost charity work. You are supposed to do it for the experience. I'd had many adjuncts at northwestern when I was getting my law degree. They were partners at major law firms. They mad millions a year. They would have done this job for free. Maybe they did.
My wife considered adjuncting at her old college for the same reason.
It seems a huge part of this problem is some are treating these jobs as real, life supporting careers. They aren't meant that way. Maybe colleges are taking advantage. But these adjuncts are also taking advantage of themselves willingly.
"It seems a huge part of this problem is some are treating these jobs as real, life supporting careers. They aren't meant that way."
The problem is that the universities do not advertise it that way. They don't take thousands of dollars from parents and tell them "thanks, hopefully we will find a volunteer to teach your kid by the time class starts next week".
They say "professor with experience in her field."
Which is what an adjunct provides when done right.
Unfortunately enrollment is a big deal at schools, and sometimes more classes are offered than there are people to teach them.
And some adjuncts are simply just not qualified to teach anything because they have no experience that's relevant. Seen it too often in my time in public higher ed.
Yeah, I think it would look different to prospective students and their parents if they were explicitly told, "you will be taught by a barely-scraping-by post doc who won't be devoting her full attention to the class because she's panicking about whether her food stamp application will go through".
It's an open secret that professors don't teach a huge portion of these programs. Usually it's grad students who get paid even less than adjuncts (sometimes they actually pay for the privilege.
Though I do wonder if schools are lying to the adjuncts. Maybe suggesting this could help them get hired full tenture track. If so, that is abusive.
Paying people more doesn't necessarily make cost go up, if productivity makes up for the cost. But I'm at a loss to see how that would work here: is there any such thing as a more productive adjunct professor? Researching professors can bring in grant money, for instance. Teach larger classes? Other parts of the university system may resist that. There's something about a university system that only seems capable of ratcheting up costs.
Maybe one reason is that universities never go bankrupt (and colleges only infrequently go bankrupt). There's no way to dissect the components of the system and reconstruct them in a better or more minimal manner.
"is there any such thing as a more productive adjunct professor"
The text starting with the example of "Mary Grabar, who worked as an adjunct for many years" gives several examples of how an adjunct professor can be more productive: 1) having a lockable desk rather than having to lug a cart each time to a hot-desking bullpen, 2) remove the need to work additional jobs outside of teaching, which can lead to 'stress and exhaustion', and keep the teacher from mentoring students, writing letters of recommendation, or answering students who simply had questions, and 3) reduce isolation between teachers, because it:
> allows us to improve ourselves academically as well as our working environment,” she says, and it “facilitates better teaching to have others who are in the same circumstances to talk through problems, share experiences, and strategize how to solve them.”
The essay also suggests that a reason for the "ratcheting up costs" is that administration has been taking over most universities and the money has been going to "ensure higher pay for a burgeoning legion of bureaucrats." The article mentions Benjamin Ginsberg, who goes into more depth on this topic in "Fall of the Faculty: The Rise of the All-Administrative University and Why It Matters".
Could you might address some of the points raised in the article? They seem to be at odds with what you wrote.
For example, you wrote "adjunct professor is supposed to be a fun side gig", while the article suggests that these position were originally for '“the housewives of higher education” (eg, the wife of a man that the university wanted to recruit), or for female instructors where the university did not allow female professors. These were low status positions, quite different from the "fun side gig" you says it was meant for.
You point to Northwestern's law school as if it were the appropriate model for how adjunct teaching should be, and comment that many if not most made millions per year. However, the article says "31 percent of part-time faculty are living near or below the federal poverty line". What percentage of the 250+ adjunct professors in Northwestern's law school department live at or near the federal poverty line? Why you think your experience at a graduate program Northwestern can be generalized to undergraduate teaching and is applicable to most other schools in the US?
You write 'But these adjuncts are also taking advantage of themselves willingly.' The article also addresses that point rather extensively, starting with "But apart from feeling sorry for the underpaid faculty, why should we care that college professors have the same job conditions as day laborers, fast-food workers, cashiers, taxi drivers, or home-care aides? They did, after all, choose to pursue a career in higher ed." and ending some eight paragraphs later.
Moreover, they are not all "willingly" doing so. Many are trying to unionize, but 'While some schools like Georgetown have accepted unions without too much fuss, others have adopted the tactics long used by anti-labor businesses: falsely accusing labor officials of earning exorbitant salaries, hiring law firms that specialize in union busting, and firing those involved in the campaign.' Instead, they are "willing" to stay for the short term, because in the long term they help themselves, others like them, the students they teach, and the humanist values that a college is suppose to embrace. (All points that the article touches on.)
These differences between your comment and the article suggest that your understanding of the adjunct teaching issue is not well aligned with what most people mean when they talk about this topic.
I re-read the part you reference at your suggestion and I don't see how it debunks that adjuncts take these positions willingly. It talks about how schools spend a lot of money on administrators and that adjuncts provide similar or better performance than tenured positions.
People will use the term "willing" to mean #3: "done, made, or given with one's own free will".
I'm willing to work a part-time job flipping burgers to make ends meet. I'm willing to come home smelling like grease in order to have a home.
On the other hand, I might not be willing to do so because it's beneath me, and would rather live in car and live off my small winnings from playing poker. Another way to cast this is that I'm willing to live in my car in order to preserve my dignity.
No matter what happens, there's a Panglossian way to construct it such that I'm "willing" to do whatever I ended up doing. Which makes that definition meaningless in this context.
I instead interpret "willing" to mean something more like #2: "having or showing the ability to respond without delay or hesitation."
In this context, I use it more like "willing to work in the job as-is, without significant complaint or protest". Compare "I'm looking for a volunteer" vs. "I'm looking for a willing volunteer", or "lend a hand" vs. "lend a willing hand." A volunteer may lend a reluctant hand, but still be a volunteer.
People of their own free will (definition 3) are working at job where they've had to stop (definition 2), think about if they want to do it, and work on ways to make it more worthwhile.
The article suggest that some of these non-tenure track jobs are make work for spouses. I don't think that is a major use of them now. In fact, if it is then what is the problem? They should have the tenure track salary in the same household.
My point is that the people taking these jobs are being foolish. They are taking clear part-time low paying jobs and then wondering why they part-time low pay income.
The reason they are taking these jobs is because they can't find tenure track gigs. Okay, so they didn't succeed. That is no excuse for taking a shitty consolidation job and then bitching about the pay.
>Why you think your experience at a graduate program Northwestern can be generalized to undergraduate teaching and is applicable to most other schools in the US?
I'm not saying we shouldn't care because these jobs go to millionaires. But we shouldn't care because these jobs aren't meant to actually support a person. Judging by the fact that they are part time and low pay, I think it's clear it's not just Northwestern that views them as non real career jobs.
In fact, several universities actually only let someone adjunct one class a year because it's not supposed to be a career.
>Moreover, they are not all "willingly" doing so. Many are trying to unionize
That sounds willingly to me. Of course they would rather get paid more. But their is a lot of supply for people who can teach these courses. Especially since the commitment isn't very high.
These jobs are essentially volunteer gigs that you get paid a token amount for. But some people want to be a part of academia so bad they are willing to live in poverty to do it. That's fine, but that is their choice.
EDIT:
I should also note that schools are exploiting the glut of potential adjuncts. But I don't really have a problem with that. As you note, we exploit lowerclass workers. Why should I care if the PhD is getting the same treatment as a janitor. In fact, we should probably care less since these adjuncts would more easily find a better white collar job.
I think the article went into the history to establish how adjunct track positions have historically been a low prestige position. It wasn't trying to argue that these are currently make-work position for spouses, just like it wasn't trying to argue that only men currently get full professor status. It then went from there to show that it's still a low prestige position.
If it is instead meant as a 'fun side gig', etc., for people with high paying jobs elsewhere, then when was the transition from being a low-prestige job to one that millionaires will do as a sort of charity work?
The thing is, there are multiple types of adjunct positions. For example, Stephen Wolfram is an adjunct professor at the University of Illinois math department. However, he is not teaching college algebra every semester. Instead, it's an affiliation where both sides get some prestige from it. I believe that your example of teaching a graduate level law class at Northwestern falls into this prestige category.
But most adjuncts are not in this prestige category.
> They are taking clear part-time low paying jobs and then wondering why they part-time low pay income.
Like I said, many of them are not wondering. They know why. And they are trying to do things like unionize in hopes that it will get better.
To which I'll add that part of changing things is to let others know what's going on. If no one talked about it, and there were no news articles, then it would continue to get worse.
> Okay, so they didn't succeed. ... then bitching about the pay.
Yes, this is exactly why union start. You shouldn't be surprised about their actions when history shows it's a core part of union nature. Just like I'm not surprised about people who responds as you have done, or I am doing.
> these jobs aren't meant to actually support a person.
While I think that every job should be able to support a person, at least when scaled up to full-time hours. (Actually, I think every job should be able to support a person and a child. And I think we need single-payer health care, liberal parental leave policy, and free day care starting at age 2. But then, I live in Sweden.)
How should I decide which jobs are meant to support a person? Does the person offering the job get to make the decision? Is there government oversight? Is that organization funded enough to ensure compliance? Is there a cap on lawsuits? Can a university require arbitration to settle problems? When do adjuncts learn enough about the law recognize illegal anti-union actions by the university? How do they fund lawsuits if there is a problem?
> only let someone adjunct one class a year because it's not supposed to be a career
The article started with examples of where a driver for Uber was "supposed to" be an independent contractor, but California labor regulators ruled he was an employee. And of a FedEx settlement of a similar issue in California, and FedEx loss in Kansas. And of two trucking firms who lost the same issue.
I can also point to the Microsoft's settlement some 15 years of a court case by people who were "supposed to" be temporary employees.
So this "supposed to" isn't always the way thing are.
You can say that those people "willingly" got those jobs. But the successful lawsuits show that "willingly" and "supposed to" are not that relevant to how the legal system works or how labor responds. As you must surely know, having studied law.
> While I think that every job should be able to support a person, at least when scaled up to full-time hours
I think it's widely accepted that any full-time job should be able to support a person. At the same time we want it to be possible for an employer to offer e.g. a 5hr/week position (which can be valuable to all kinds of underprivileged folk - those with health problems that make full-time work impossible, the elderly, teenagers - or as a second job for people in temporarily strained financial circumstances) without having to take on all the responsibilities of employing someone full-time. We've tried to implement policies that reflect that, but per the article we see e.g. universities limiting the number of hours that adjuncts work so that they aren't obliged to pay for healthcare.
The gap here is people have ended up putting together multiple part-time jobs so they're effectively working full-time. This is partly an unintended consequence of legislation, but it's not obvious to me how to fix it - if someone's working for six different employers, what responsibilities do each have? How do we make sure someone fired from five of their six jobs receives unemployment, without giving it to someone in full-time employment who gets fired from their minor side gig? (Much as I support basic income, that's not a politically realistic answer yet - so what are the practical policy steps we can do today to move in the right direction for these folks?)
> it's not obvious to me how to fix it - if someone's working for six different employers, what responsibilities do each have?
Single payer health care would handle the biggest issue, because it would make the employer not also be in charge of paying for your health care.
Get rid of 401(k) and push it back into Social Security, to disassociate the company from retirement savings.
Then someone with 5 jobs @ 8 hours/week will have roughly the same benefits as someone with 1 job @ 40 hours/week. The major exception will be vacation time and sick leave. I have no good sense of the problems there, much less solutions.
> How do we make sure someone fired from five of their six jobs receives unemployment, without giving it to someone in full-time employment who gets fired from their minor side gig?
Is that really an issue? How does that happen now?
I presume the government tracks the employment tax payments, which are paid monthly or semi-weekly. These are linked to your SSN, which you used to file for unemployment. So it shouldn't be that hard to identify frauds.
> Is that really an issue? How does that happen now?
Well currently you don't get unemployment benefit if you're in any kind of employment, AIUI, so my hypothetical "person with six jobs who's fired from five of them" would not be eligible (or would have to quit their remaining job if they couldn't find others quickly enough).
I see. I misunderstood. I thought you meant someone would come to the unemployment office with a notice of being laid off, and declare being unemployed, despite having other jobs.
I have no experience with filing for unemployment. I reviewed the New York "Unemployment Insurance A Claimant Handbook" at http://www.labor.state.ny.us/formsdocs/ui/TC318.3e.pdf . It confirms your understanding; even working for a fraction of an hour counts as "work", so someone with a job teaching 3 hours a week is employed and cannot file for unemployment benefits.
Another thing that is never discussed is that many of the schools relying heavily on adjuncts, including a lot of community colleges, face increasingly tight budgets. This literature (there are enough such articles that it is a literature) tries to give the impression that wealthy schools like Harvard are taking advantage of individuals that have fallen on hard times.
In reality, a lot of adjuncts are, as you point out, professionals that do this on the side. Still others are not looking for full-time work, but want to maintain a connection to the academic world.
Think about it like this: when the Senior Research Fellow from DuPont (back from when the fabled Experimental Station was still a thing) who is teaching one really good graduate level course at Penn as adjunct, when this guy walks up to the Chair, saying that his office space shouldn't be cut or he won't be back, the Chair will listen. When the adjunct at Tumbleweed State College who is teaching 3 courses of Gen. Chem. says the same, the chair will laugh.
The ones who get cheated is of course the students. They will get a credential instead of an education because no adjunct is going to get into an argument about teaching, and you can't force anyone to take the credential serious.
> when the Senior Research Fellow from DuPont (back from when the fabled Experimental Station was still a thing) who is teaching one really good graduate level course at Penn as adjunct, when this guy walks up to the Chair, saying that his office space shouldn't be cut or he won't be back, the Chair will listen
No, the chair won't. This "Senior Research Fellow" is teaching a grad class. The grad class doesn't make the university any money. It doesn't even pay for the classroom it's taught in. If this "guy" is teaching 2 300 person sections, or writes and wins multi million dollar grants, or has the connections with DuPont that give the department money directly, then, yes, they are making the university money.
That's all the department cares about. That's all your management ever cares about, "what have you done for me lately."
The department also cares about its accreditation. The professors want grad students who can handle advanced chemistry. Someone has to teach them.
> The grad class doesn't make the university any money.
Odd, I could have sworn that my grad school listed a cost for credit hours. While there was a tuition waiver, that money came from somewhere, and I'm pretty sure that includes grant overhead.
I'm sure too the funding agencies might wonder about all the overhead needed for a grad school with no one teaching graduate-level courses.
Like I said, it doesn't matter which one bills more.
The school almost certainly won't get grad students if it doesn't offer any graduate level courses.
A graduate program with poorly trained students is not going to get the bigger grant funding, if only because the research is likely to be less advanced.
It's even more profitable to have a class without a teacher, where people simply get a degree in exchange for money and bypass all the intermediate work. These are called diploma mills.
Adjuncts are supposed to fill in the gaps when there are more classes than can be taught by the full time faculty. The real problem is that as admissions increase, rather than creating more tenure track jobs, they create an adjunct position for 1/3 the pay, and use the other 2/3 to create an administrative position. From the article:
"Even while keeping funding for instruction relatively flat, universities increased the number of administrator positions by 60 percent between 1993 and 2009, 10 times the rate at which they added tenured positions. In the old days, different professors would take their turn as dean for this or that and then happily escape back to scholarship and teaching. Now the administration exists as an end in itself and a career path disconnected from the faculty and pursuit of knowledge. Writing a few years ago for this publication, the Johns Hopkins professor Benjamin Ginsberg described colleges and universities as now being “filled with armies of functionaries—vice presidents, associate vice presidents, assistant vice presidents, provosts, associate provosts, vice provosts, deans, deanlets, and deanlings, all of whom command staffers and assistants—who, more and more, direct the operations of every school.” So while college tuition surged from 2003 to 2013 by 94 percent at public institutions and 74 percent at private, nonprofit schools, and student debt has climbed to over $1.2 trillion, much of that money has been going to ensure higher pay for a burgeoning legion of bureaucrats."
There is some truth to what Ginsberg asserts (i.e., administration could most certainly be leaner at a lot of places), but the notion that administrators are disconnected from "the pursuit of knowledge" is a bit weak in my view. A lot of the reason for the growth of Ginsberg's "administrative class" can be attributed to the growth of research programs at universities. Administrators are primarily there to worry about real-world issues that most faculty can't be bothered with in the cut-throat world of publish or perish. These include checking regulatory issues (i.e., establishing policies for IRBs and medical research), aiding in grant preparation, outreach efforts, and balancing academic freedom with legal issues. These are all things that faculty do not have expertise in, as PhD programs do not train them for these kinds of responsibilities. Frankly they shouldn't worry about these things- they're there to do research or teach, not draft a policy. You could argue that administrators might be overcompensated perhaps (especially at the upper-level), or that there might be too many of them, but their necessity as a distinct organ of the university is indisputable in my opinion. The halcyon pre-70s days when faculty could regulate a university on their own are gone (and it's questionable whether or not they ever did a particularly good job at this to begin with).
It’s possible that Ginsberg doesn’t really see this as much because he lives in the world of political science, which doesn’t require nearly as much support infrastructure since it is so theory-centric.
You also might want to take what Ginsberg says with a grain of salt for the very reason that he’s a tenured professor with a salary of around $157k a year (http://web.jhu.edu/administration/provost/docs/JHU%20Fact%20...) while most administrative positions (perfectly fireable at the first sign of economic trouble!) at JHU are in the $40k-$50k range (based on Glassdoor). He’s not quite the victim of brutal administrative oppression that he claims to be.
I don't think the Assistant Vice Provost of Academic Student Affairs Outreach has any role so pragmatic as aiding in grant preparation. I think they spend most of their time responding to emails and attending meetings about recruitment strategies and whether the college is sufficiently committed to diversity.
I would also say the fact that Ginsberg is not a victim only bolsters his point. He really has nothing to gain by making these statements.
I think that you're missing my point a bit with respect to Ginsberg's not being a victim. As I attempted to express earlier, he is perhaps correct about the value of upper-level management in universities (just as some management in modern corporations have dubious merit). When it comes to issues such as the adjunctification of academia or the tuition spiral, however, university professors share in the culpability by commanding 6 digit salaries and lifelong employment. It's not really fair to throw many extremely useful and necessary administrators under the bus when they make a 1/3rd of what a professor makes without any of the job security or power.
It seems a huge part of this problem is some are treating these jobs as real, life supporting careers. They aren't meant that way. Maybe colleges are taking advantage. But these adjuncts are also taking advantage of themselves willingly.
This sounds a lot like the argument that minimum wage isn't supposed to be a living wage. Well, whether it is or it isn't, the current system (minimum wage or adjuncts) isn't working for a lot of people, so something has to change.
No, it wouldn't. Universities have plenty of money to pay living wages and not abuse their workers. It is a national disgrace that they so often choose to do so anyway. They just spend their resources on hiring more administrators to assist other administrators in administrating, expensive fancy unnecessary buildings that nobody wants, etc. As it mentions in the article we are discussing. There is more than enough money to go around, it's just going where the people with power decide it should go, as in any hypercapitalist system.
Additionally, my old university has built 4 new buildings in the last 4 or 5 years that I can think of. Brand new buildings, even while none of the existing buildings are ever actually full. Couldn't this, for example, go to actually teaching? Or maybe some of those donors giving millions to the sports departments could be convinced to give to a teaching fund instead? Perhaps the university doesn't need to spend boatloads switching student management software for the third time in a decade?
As the article mentions, the number of students to teachers hasn't changed, it's just that most of those teachers are being paid less. When the universities are making significantly more than they were, the income of the teachers should at least be proportional.
My (poorly made) point was that they'd just keep spending and then spend more. If you could make them stop hiring pointless admin and pay adjuncts more, I'd agree.
It's funny how the most essential work in society is under constant pressure of debasement. Feeding people is considered an ignominious job. Teaching people too is constantly debased. Now it's affecting higher education. The neoliberal transformation of capitalism decouples the value of goods and services from their value to humanity and instead pegs them against markets. Markets no longer merely transmit information about value. They are the definition of value. This is the ideological difference between liberal free market capitalism and neoliberalism; at least the former paid lip service to the idea that truth and value are ours to define. Not so. Capital determines value.
Universities are capitalist entities. They are trying to compete and appreciate in value for their shareholders. The market has replaced whatever value systems justified universities in the past.
Erm... isn't the actual root cause of the problem raised in TFA the opposite of debasement? Namely excess supply of people who're willing to go into academia to "do the most essential work in society", whatever the terms, as a sister comment from an insider pointed out? If the perceived value of being in academia was low enough, the market would force the universities to treat adjuncts better.
Also, aren't most or at least a great many of the most famous universities non-profits, competing for donations instead of trying to maximize shareholder value? I hear that in for-profit education, the average student is treated better and so is the average lecturer (you want to please your students whose money feeds you and you want to attract lecturers whose primary motivation is financial and who're good enough to please your students, so the for-profit institution kinda has to treat both well to survive.) Somebody living off donations, on the other hand, only has to please people donating the money (and someone living off taxes only has to please government officials), while pleasing either students or the teaching staff is no longer essential.
(I don't have firm or specific opinions on how higher education should be run, in general, just commenting on your points.)
Debasement here refers to the educational experience. That doesn't happen at all institutions but it certainly appears common. Debasement at for profit institutions is obvious to anyone paying attention. Those schools are more frequently than not diploma mills using student aid to extract $$ from the federal gov't. That's evidenced by aggressive marketing, FTC actions, weak admissions policies, low rates of graduation and frequently poor job placement prospects.
Debasement at the non-profits and state institutions is running them to the benefit of the administrators, buildings, athletic departments, and even endowments (i.e. alumni development) at the expense of the educational experience. None of that is germane to education. Profit or non-profit doesn't matter.
Debasement at state institutions is also legislatures and governors slashing budgets so they can cut taxes to the detriment of the entire institution and students. The administrators and athletic depts can and do lobby effectively but generally faculty and students have little voice in state gov't.
All of these tend to make the experience of students and faculty members worse than it might be otherwise. So yes, the oversupply of prospective faculty plays a role but it's only one of the drivers. There are close analogs in the exploitation of post doc researchers and let's face it student athletes.
> Erm... isn't the actual root cause of the problem raised in TFA the opposite of debasement? Namely excess supply of people who're willing to go into academia to "do the most essential work in society", whatever the terms, as a sister comment from an insider pointed out? If the perceived value of being in academia was low enough, the market would force the universities to treat adjuncts better.
this eerily sounds similar to the kind of logic i was rejecting. this is an appeal to the logic of markets and the assumption that they are efficient to derive truth. this is exactly neoliberalism. at least in old school liberalism we could acknowledge markets' shortcomings via externalities and the idea of market failure! Otherwise i think the sibling comment is a good response.
Neither your comment nor the comment you cite replies directly to mine - meaning, neither of you addresses the question what happens if people refuse to work for universities at the current level of compensation (perhaps some do not have a better option right now, but those who studied STEM certainly do.) I claim that comp will have to go up, boom, problem solved. Where am I wrong? What other solution would you propose that cannot be circumvented by the employer as long as the employees are willing to help circumvent it, for the same reasons making them willing to accept a raw deal now?
Instead, your comment in particular rejects what I said because it's "neoliberalism." All I said was that employers will tend to give you shit as long as you take it, be it for-profits, non-profits, government or individuals. I don't think that's quite the same as denying externalities or market failure or generally arguing about neoliberalism and other abstract concepts at a great distance from the issue at hand.
In concrete terms, I believe the someone quitting a bad job or not taking it in the first place is better off than someone who does take it and then broods about the debasement brought about by neoliberalism or whatever the supposed root cause of their condition is. In other words, my angle is more productive than yours as a basis for action.
I think the most essential-seeming jobs are "underpaid" because such jobs are (by their very nature) fulfilling, and people value that. If someone with the same qualifications would rather teach for $x than administrate for $x+20k, then naturally we end up with administrators being paid $20k more than teachers.
It really isn't. Food service jobs don't require that you spend years and lots of money in order to qualify for them. Academia has really become a sort of pyramid scheme: lots of people going to grad school to support a few faculty who educate them to do faculty jobs that are increasingly scarce. A couple of decades ago, the deal was that you might have to adjunct for a year or two after grad school, but if you stuck it out, you'd have a decent chance of getting a proper job. Those days are gone, but somehow the folks going into grad school haven't gotten the message yet. The only way the situation will improve is if people insist on being paid what they're worth and otherwise withhold their labor.
Basically, don't go to grad school unless you have a plan to do something other than becoming college faculty with it. And don't take adjunct jobs unless you're doing it for fun as a side gig.
Also, this crazy idea comes from talking to all these fine young people who want my letter of recommendation for graduate school. In pure math, there is not much point in going to grad school unless you're at least considering being a tenure-track academic. No one aspires to be an adjunct, you can get a job making real money out of college, and so unless you just think math is so fun that you want to do 7 years of grad school and then get a job, you are thinking of being a prof.
Other fields are certainly different.... but why get a PhD in art history if you don't want to be an academic?
> Doesn't the financial sector employ pure maths PhDs and pay them extremely well?
There are a few big names who make a lot of money, but on average someone with a PhD and x years of experience will be paid less than someone with a masters and x+3 years of experience, AIUI.
> And you can apply an art history PhD in museums, galleries, national collections, etc etc.
Sure, there are a few options, but how many of those jobs are there per PhD?
Ultimately, you can do whatever the hell you want after a history of art PhD, just like anyone else can.
You could be an actor, a soldier, an astronaut, a school teacher, a barista, a politician... whatever you want.
Most jobs, including many ones that pay excellently such as banking, don't care what degree you have, and many will value the diversity that different degrees bring.
> Ultimately, you can do whatever the hell you want after a history of art PhD, just like anyone else can.
Sure - but as the article says, why would you go for a history of art PhD unless you were looking to become an art academic (or you just loved the subject enough to spend 3 years doing it for no other benefit)?
I'll hazard a guess that the complaints mainly come from people in graduate programs for which the most realistic "good job" that actually uses the course subject matter is a tenured teaching position.
I mean, the high competition for adjunct positions seems to be evidence that many post-graduate students want to teach the subject matter that they've learned.
For most grad programs, the whole point is to train you to be a professor. So, yes, there is at least an implicit promise you'll be able to become the thing they're training you for.
And yes you could view these jobs as the coal mining jobs of today. The solution is the same now as it was then, unionize, negotiate and withdraw labor, it's been the same for more than the last century.
I'm faculty at a regional university in the U.S. Our enrollment is dropping by 5% a year, and short term positions are becoming the norm. Tenure track positions are risky in that once you've got somebody with tenure, it's difficult to get rid of them (intentionally). Short term positions give universities flexibility. We are not a Harvard or Yale with billions of dollars in endowments. Tuition is 80% of revenue, and our existence in 20 years is in no way guaranteed.
I don't know how many universities are flush with cash and are just being stingy by using adjuncts, but where I work (small regional university), we have intense budget pressure. We'd have to raise tuition a lot to cover the cost of converting adjust to tenure-track positions.
I don't like how adjuncts are treated, but seeing the problem from our administration's point of view, I know why we have so many adjuncts.
They're dropping for various reasons, I'm sure. But first and foremost because a bachelor's degree isn't worth anything anymore. Both my sister and my father have Bachelor's degrees and my dad's a janitor and my sister's a nurse. Granted, a nurse isn't that bad, but cleaning up people's feces on top of everyone in the practice being against her going to school to become a doctor (so she doesn't have to "ask permission" or clean up after people anymore) is a disgrace. And for my dad -- he's working with the lowest of the low. It's just awful that someone can bury themselves in 100k of debt to barely make more than minimum wage and clean up shit.
They absolutely do in the US if the situation calls for it and more appropriate staff aren't immediately available. You can't leave someone sitting in their own feces for an hour just because the CNA's are currently busy with other patients and you're somehow too good to do the dirty work.
As a former adjunct I can understand how you feel. That said, I agree in many ways with the article, you're also not seeing the budgetary perspective with a structure of 1960's university and only the 1990+ structure which probably currently exists at your school. That is a pre ponderous amount of administrators that used to not exist are eating a significant amount of the total cost of operation. If employee pay is the biggest constraint, the first look should be towards the administrators and not the educators. The educators are and should be the focus.
My mother is an adjunct math professor at three universities in the Western NY area. She teaches 7 classes to support the family while she's also going for her PhD (she's got like a 3.98 GPA or something btw).
The thing that gets me is that we look around and the campuses have millions to put up for new buildings and infrastructure and sports, etc. But here they can't give my mother a full time job with benefits.
Education is nothing more than an industry. They don't care if I pass or succeed, as long as they've got a job at the end of the day. I'm convinced of that.
I agree with your main point, but mentioning new construction is something of a non-sequitur because that funding usually comes from donors.
We might be able to make the case that the donations don't cover the ongoing cost of operating the new buildings, but at least at my institution, the new buildings are usually energy-efficient replacements for old ones.
But yeah, the whole thing is nutty: a few years ago at a Chamber of Commerce function, one of our extremely wealthy doners (you probably know of them) told the audience members that they should be providing a certain minimal level of funding to athletics, even if it meant reducing their normal contribution to the academic side.
1. Enrollment
2. Retention
3. Graduation with a job.
Enrollment is priority one, so they need nice campuses to get you in the door, good facilities to entice you to come. They'll advertise small class sizes with individualized attention because the current generation loves to hear that. (Of course this means they need more faculty to be there in the room.)
Graduation with a job is second because they need to show that people come out of the school. This of course becomes marketing material for #1.
Retention is the one they leave up to the departments and faculty.
You're not entirely wrong, but due to funding models of state colleges, these priorities may be a bit different.
In Ohio, for quite some time, state funding was based on enrollment, so that's what state universities did: enroll as many students as they could.
Then, it was decided that enrollment was a terrible thing to incentivize because the incremental enrollees were far more likely to drop out. So the state switched to funding based on graduation numbers, so retention and graduation are far more important and universities have tightened their enrollment standards and started building stronger relationships with community colleges.
At least with enrollment incentives, the deleterious effects on education itself are only indirect. Incentives for graduation rate directly promote grade inflation.
I teach in a college math department in the US. A typical adjunct for us would have a Masters degree and teach one or two sections of Elementary Stats. So, no PhD.
An assistant professor is a full time position. An adjunct is like the contractor/part time version of an assistant professor. The result is that adjuncts typically teach at multiple institutions, for example an R1 research university, plus a couple of local community colleges because 1 or 2 classes at one school is not enough to pay a livable wage.
In regards to credentials, in the US they can either have a PhD, be pursuing a PhD or have completed their Masters, but it depends on the institution's requirements to teach (and the classes they are teaching). You wouldn't have a Masters grad teaching graduate classes or an ABD teaching PhDs. Most well respected higher education institutions require a PhD to be an assistant professor (full time) but only be pursuing a PhD to be an adjunct/part time assistant professor teaching undergraduates.
My wife works in primary-age education, and is fiendishly smart and academic, with a degree from arguably the best university in the world, again with a tilt towards maths.
She could have easily gone and become an actuary, an i-banker, or a management consultant, but she didn't, because she wanted to be a teacher. This decision costs us ~$100k a year as a household.
Schools are able to hire people like my wife at below her "market" value because you don't need to be anywhere near as smart as my wife to be a teacher, and because there are couples like us who can walk away from more money for the improved lifestyle.
> She could have easily gone and become an actuary, an i-banker, or a management consultant, but she didn't, because she wanted to be a teacher. This decision costs us ~$100k a year as a household.
Probably more like $400-450k per year. And if you're fiendishly good as an investment banker, a lot more than that.
>Education is nothing more than an industry. They don't care if I pass or succeed, as long as they've got a job at the end of the day. I'm convinced of that.
Oh definitely. Admittedly, if you're an undergrad right now, a certain percentage of you are expected to fail, each and every year, because (it's assumed) you're just stupid or lazy.
I used to be a tenured professor (senior lecturer) and while universities treat adjuncts badly they also don't treat tenured professors any better. While the job has a lot of good points respect from your employer is not one of them.
At least here in Australia tenure really doesn't exist anymore. If they want to get rid of you they just wait for the next departmental reshuffle (these seem to occur every couple of years) and eliminate your position.
If you intern as a CS major, you will probably be paid somewhere between $10-$25/hr. If you intern in Hollywood, you will make a nominal amount.
Does anyone find this surprising? There is a practically unlimited amount of programming work to be done and not enough programmers to do it all. On the other hand, there is a finite demand for movies and a very large number of people who would like to do it.
Many people would like to be professors. Unsurprisingly, this depresses the wage. What else is to be expected?
Adjunct salaries will rise and/or more tenured professorships will be offered when either consumer demand rises or supply falls. Anything else is just wishful thinking.
>There is a practically unlimited amount of programming work to be done and not enough programmers to do it all.
I certainly find that statement surprising, considering that most of the programming work already done is economically useless. Unicorn-balloon inflation is not a real job.
There are many good points in this article, and I agree about the general gist that adjuncts are not well-served in this situation. That being said, I think that the article sets up an artificial binary between adjuncts and tenured faculty. There is a whole third leg of employment that is contingent full-time teaching. That is to say, one-year professorships, and lecturer/instructor/preceptor positions that employ people full-time, but without assurance of continued employment in the year to come (indeed, often with an explicitly NON-renewable contract). There is a large chunk of academic teaching from faculty who make an okay (not great) income for a year, but have no security for years to come, and are forced to go through an extremely grueling application process year after year (see this article from Slate.com on more about that process: http://www.slate.com/articles/life/education/2014/09/how_do_...).
The "visiting assistant professor" treadmill is definitely in the same badness league as adjuncting. Another trap is the "tenure track positions" where no one actually gets tenure, and they end up being re-advertised every three years.
So if someone is willing to teach a class for $2000 per semester, they shouldn't be allowed to?
I've tried to get into adjunct teaching, but there are so many applicants that it's almost impossible. Supply and demand. Adjuncts are paid what the market dictates, and that's ok.
Problem is a two-way street. Making only $2000 a semester may deter an adjunct from 'going the extra mile'. Not that a full-time professor would do so because they're full time. However, a low wage doesn't necessarily encourage the adjunct to do more than the minimum.
Also, if you figure that the department head will just fire and hire until they find someone what will put in that extra time you're kidding yourself. They work on semester contracts, firing and hiring over and over again will be throwing too many new/untrusted people into the classroom only to start-over in another few months, not to mention the lag-time between hires. What ends up happening is the department heads will maybe bring in a new candidate the next year if there's a lot of complaints against an adjunct, but otherwise they just keep the same scheduling.
...actually when you think about it - if the market forces argument was all there was to it administrators would be getting paid very little to, there's an abundance of administrators
I am glad that employers that mislabel employees as independent contractors are paying for their mistakes, but I am always a little disappointed when these articles appear.
I am an adjunct professor, but I also have a full-time job as a programmer that has spanned almost 30 years. Wikipedia says "adjunct professors are often nominated in recognition of active involvement with the appointing institution, while they are employed by government, industry, a profession or another institution" and that definition fits me perfectly.
Sad articles about the "plight of adjuncts" come out frequently, but I hope people understand that there is another side to the equation. The opportunity to work with motivated and passionate students that really care about the material is absolutely amazing, and it is a great way to give back to the community. I have stayed in touch with a lot of students over the years, and it is incredibly gratifying to hear how their careers have developed.
Many articles regarding the mistreatment of part-time academics have been making their way onto hacker news, and I feel that this isn't really going to change any time soon.
More and more, universities are there to create a "brand image", not provide decent education. This is why there is such an emphasis on administrators, because decent academics just want to learn more and teach, not try to sell you on a whole host of rubbish.
This is why things won't improve. If you have institutions that aim to provide more luxury to their students, so that they have "great college memories", then how do you expect colleges to pay more for better teachers.
It's completely clear to me that universities using adjuncts as consultants are violating federal laws and likely many state laws as well. Like most other such problems, the only solution is a major class action lawsuit like the one against Uber. I have no doubt whatsoever that given a fair trial, any competent judge or jury would see abuse here, if for no other reason than they are forced to work at specific times in a specific place. There is just absolutely no way you can justify this as consulting work when they cannot decide either the time or location of the work being done. There are other obvious violations but these are so egregious, it's revolting. Of course, you have to see the lawsuit to its conclusion because the Labor department doesn't give a shit about labor laws being broken and will tell you as much when you try to bring that up.
Until that happens, universities won't. Markets are clearing.
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