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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 ta

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.

wmagato 11y ago
"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".
- bphogan 11y ago
  You're right. 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.
  - SilasX 11y ago
    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".
- rhino369 11y ago
  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.
  - kaitai 11y ago
    Most grad students get health care though!
ianbicking 11y ago
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.
- dalke 11y ago
  "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".
dalke 11y ago
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.
- kauffj 11y ago
  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.
bachmeier 11y ago
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.
HarryHirsch 11y ago
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.
- munin 11y ago
  > 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."
  - dalke 11y ago
    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.
    - 11y ago
nwjtkjn 11y ago
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."
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- silasdunbar 11y ago
  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%20Sheet%202011-12%20v8b%20NS.pdf 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.
nitrogen 11y ago
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.
wfo 11y ago
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.
- kedean 11y ago
  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.
- rhino369 11y ago
  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.
kaitai 11y ago
Who is going to teach 18-year-olds sentence structure or remedial algebra at 11 in the morning for a fun side-gig? The independently wealthy? Adjuncting in law and business schools is a very different gig than the folks teaching English, history, math, physics, sociology, art, etc.

wmagato 11y ago

"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".

bphogan 11y ago
You're right. 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.
- SilasX 11y ago
  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".
rhino369 11y ago
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.
- kaitai 11y ago
  Most grad students get health care though!

ianbicking 11y ago

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.

dalke 11y ago
"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".

dalke 11y ago

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.

kauffj 11y ago
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.

bachmeier 11y ago

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.

HarryHirsch 11y ago

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.

munin 11y ago
> 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."
- dalke 11y ago
  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.
  - 11y ago

nwjtkjn 11y ago

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."

deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
silasdunbar 11y ago
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%20Sheet%202011-12%20v8b%20NS.pdf 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.

nitrogen 11y ago

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.

wfo 11y ago

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.

kedean 11y ago
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.
rhino369 11y ago
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.

kaitai 11y ago

Who is going to teach 18-year-olds sentence structure or remedial algebra at 11 in the morning for a fun side-gig? The independently wealthy? Adjuncting in law and business schools is a very different gig than the folks teaching English, history, math, physics, sociology, art, etc.