8 ms·

Death of an adjunct professor

139 points by denzil_correa 13y ago

shortcj 13y ago
My sincere condolences to the family of Margaret Mary Vojtko. Regarding the subtext of adjunct professor / student tuition abuse and exploitation for the keepers of the 'trademark and databases.' We are almost facing the event horizon of a black-hole; sub-star level lecturers are facing obsolescence. Mega-corp is trying to establish a stranglehold on what may be the 'database.' The database will determine your personal 'trademark' status in society and its integrity is something worth fighting for.
ffrryuu 13y ago
Yup, heard stories like this a thousand times.
mathattack 13y ago
It would seem like there would be some kind of middle ground where adjuncts should be paid a little more and get health care, and students pay less in tuition. $3,500 to teach 50 students? Where does all the tuition go? That's enormous overhead for buildings and administration, especially in a low cost area. Even you turn the $3,500 to $10,000 with a raise and health care baked in, it's only $200 per student. (I'm making assumptions on class size)
- tjr 13y ago
  I've worked as an adjunct professor at a community college. Class sizes appeared to average around 20 students there, rarely above 30 and sometimes around 5. In that environment, $3500/class seemed pretty reasonable.
  - bsullivan01 13y ago
    In that environment, $3500/class seemed pretty reasonable. OK, but how are the professors expected to live on that ? Independently rich or retired cannot account for any size-able number. CC are subsidized by the state and county, or at least should be.
    - brucehart 13y ago
      Many adjunct professors are people who have full-time jobs doing something else. A friend of mine did this one semester to make some extra money. He worked full-time as a structural engineer, but took a long lunch three days a week to teach Introduction to Statics at the university we both attended. He said it was fun to do for one semester, but he computed that he was only making about $10/hour when you included the time to prepare for lectures and grade papers.
      - oulipian 13y ago
        In my experience, teaching has a way of ballooning to fill whatever time you have. Teaching one class feels like just as much work as teaching three, partly because either way you have to be available to students outside of class - office hours, answering email, and so on. I can't imagine teaching a single university class "for fun" while holding down a full-time job. Certainly it's not something I've seen very often.
      - mathattack 13y ago
        Some people Adjunct to improve their resume too. NYU's school of continuing education has a lot of underpaid adjuncts who get residual benefits for the prestige of being NYU faculty. But nobody lives in Manhattan on NYU adjunct salary alone.
      - sliverstorm 13y ago
        Adjuncts are especially cool for this reason in fields with a significant professional application.
    - tjr 13y ago
      Oh no! I didn't mean to imply a good living, just that those numbers make sense. But as has been pointed out, the school she was at was likely charging a lot more than $200/student.
  - dalai 13y ago
    A tenured professor though can get $20k per class or more, assuming that he/she is only teaching and not involved in any research (most start with 3 courses per year). Of course many tenured professors also bring money to the university through grants and whatnot, but that is not always the case. I know of some that get more than $250k a year just to provide prestige to the department and maybe teach a course now and then. In any case, it doesn't matter if the class size is 10 or 50. You still need to prepare the same material, you still need to be there for the same amount of time. $3500/class sounds like a bargain to me. A TA earns more.
  - mathattack 13y ago
    I buy the argument for community colleges. $3500/20 = $175 per student per class. The courses are cheap, so it's a wash. I disagree with this for private colleges where the cost per course can be $3,000 per student.
- leoc 13y ago
  IIRC colleges also often milk the fee income from talk-and-chalk courses to support science, engineering and medical courses with expensive lab requirements. As well as collegiate athletics, climbing walls, landmark building projects and so on, of course.
- bradleyjg 13y ago
  Deanlet and deanlings making six figures to oversee "student life" and "strategic planning". Tenured professors who have 2/1 teaching schedules and haven't published since the 80s, but can't be forced to retire and keep on picking up inflated COLAs. Ever multiplying new unnecessary buildings (usually paid for by donors, but maintenance comes out of the budget). Special signing bonuses, research stipends, forgivable loans, and extraordinary salaries for "star professors" who are considered stars not because of their teaching prowess -- which is never, ever considered by hiring committees -- but because of their fame in a particular field. Lacrosse, volleyball, and crew coaches and facilities (only football and basketball pay their own way). And so on and so forth. The people that actually do the bulk of the teaching in many schools -- adjuncts and grad students -- get paid very very poorly. Even in schools that claim to have a high ratio of tenured faculty teaching classes, if you dig into it you will often find teaching assistants doing a lot of the direct student interaction and almost all of the feedback.
  - mathattack 13y ago
    I am actually ok with high pay for star professors. If you're a Nobel and bring international esteem to the school, you deserve to get paid. If your lectures are beamed around the world in MOOCs, you deserve to get paid. I think many tenured professors don't deserve it, and schools have very bloated administrations. They also have mispriced priorities. (Subsidizing luxury dorms, athletic facilities, etc)
    - bradleyjg 13y ago
      I agree that top researchers should be paid well by someone, I just don't think we've got the right someones. No man, or organization, can serve two masters. Either these schools are about undergraduate education or they aren't. The counterargument about presige isn't completly wrong. Prestige of the school is valuable to a degree holder. But all the universities chasing after the same limited pool of prestige is socially wasteful, and these heavily tax subsidized institutions are supposed to be advancing the social interest. We should have separate institutions that do research and perhaps train grad students.
pmorici 13y ago
Where does Social Security Medicare and Medicaid fit into this? She was 83 and well below the poverty line shouldn't she have been getting help from a t least one if not all three of those program?
- bsullivan01 13y ago
  Probably not below the poverty line, if she was single. Medicaid etc have a trick where you may lose your house and savings to ask for help.
  - deleted 13y ago
    [deleted]
- protomyth 13y ago
  She should have been drawing SS since she was 70. It would be Medicare not Medicaid and I am not sure how it would have helped since she was already being treated for cancer. Contracting positions are hell on earth if you don't put money into savings. Even if you work 25 years you need to put money away. We really don't have a national pension system[1]. I would be curious how the whole Microsoft contracting lawsuit would apply in this case. It seems it would have some relevance. 1) and looking at how underfunded the state one are, I don't see any hope in that direction
  - dragonwriter 13y ago
    > It would be Medicare not Medicaid The two are, most assuredly, not mutually exclusive.
  - x0x0 13y ago
    I believe SS benefits are indexed to earnings; if she had spent 2.5 decades earning $25k per annum her ss benefits may have been quite low it's worth noting that $25k pretax (and note $25k seems to have been a high), even at a modest tax rate, could easily fall (post income, fica, etc) to $18k post tax. Or $1500/mo. medicare should start shortly after the 65th birthday, but people still have to buy Part B and either part C or D. afaik part B requires a typical 20% contribution; this can be quite painful if you're living / attempting to maintain a house on $1500/month old age is no picnic, particularly in the usa, and that goes double for people who don't have significant savings
gngeal 13y ago
Duquesne has claimed that the unionization of adjuncts like Margaret Mary would somehow interfere with its mission to inculcate Catholic values among its students. I see. So treating old people in this way and leaving them in trouble after you squeeze them out is a part of those "Catholic values"?
- winestock 13y ago
  Read the next sentence: This would be news to Georgetown University -- one of only two Catholic universities to make U.S. News & World Report's list of top 25 universities -- which just recognized its adjunct professors' union, citing the Catholic Church's social justice teachings, which favor labor unions.
  - gngeal 13y ago
    Well, their Catholics are apparently less hypocritical than Duquesne's Catholics. I'm not sure, doesn't this simply reinforce what I was trying to say?
    - msg 13y ago
      The "Catholic values" you criticize and approve of are not "catholic". Forgive the pun. Edit: I see a way to read your statement as saying that Duquesne has a twisted view of Catholic values. Which I could agree with. However there is another reading, not difficult to stumble into, where you are trying to make a general statement about Catholic values, which I could not agree with.
      - guard-of-terra 13y ago
        This just proves that every Catholic is also a man (or woman) perfectly capable of sin and malice, and so we would be pretty happy if every single one of them would stop moralizing forever. Stop thinking that they are more right and more good just because; and behaving after that. Where can one unsubscribe from ever hearing of how religion tells us how to do good and from ever facing any religion-based opinion? Because I feel I still live in the medieval times when I do.
3am 13y ago
Disgusting. Disgusting and disgraceful.
davis_m 13y ago
I feel for Ms. Vojtko's family, but I don't feel like complaining about adjunct professor salaries is being fair. These positions are short term contract (6 months-1 year) and are not meant as long term employment. These positions are meant for people from industry to come in a teach a class on a specific topic they are experienced in. These positions are not research positions, or anything of the sort. Many of the people in adjunct positions have a completely separate full-time jobs, or perhaps are retired. Offering them health-care seems silly, because a large number of them already receive health care. So parading one lady who treated the position as some kind of career path as proof that professors at college's need to get paid more is silly. I understand that my professors are going to be higher paid than most (Software/Computer Engineering) but earning upwards of $200k with a great deal of perks is fairly common.
- johndavidback 13y ago
  I think reading between the lines a little bit should indicate that because 50%+ of professors are adjuncts means that universities are proactively attempting to keep professors with that status. It means they can pay them less both in salary and in benefits. Hence why Duequesne would want to avoid unionization of it's adjuncts. I don't know the statistics of adjuncts who have full time jobs as well, so take that with a grain of salt.
  - davis_m 13y ago
    That statistic of 50% professors being adjunct is not cited, and from searching online appears to come from the SEIU, which is a group who's goal is to unionize adjunct faculty. The report it self is not available, and it has been quoted in articles as "part-time faculty held 50 percent of teaching jobs at colleges" [1] and "adjuncts held 50 percent of teaching jobs at colleges" [2] Neither of those statements are the same as "Adjuncts now make up well over 50 percent of the faculty at colleges and universities." as stated in the article. [1]http://www.boston.com/yourcampus/news/bentley/2013/06/as_bentley_adjuncts_push_to_unionize_school_approves_wage_increase.html http://www.boston.com/yourcampus/news/bentley/2013/06/as_ben... [2] http://www.boston.com/yourcampus/news/tufts/2013/07/adjunct_faculty_at_tufts_vote_on_whether_to_unionize.html http://www.boston.com/yourcampus/news/tufts/2013/07/adjunct_...
Glyptodon 13y ago
Anyone told the Pope yet?
danso 13y ago
Ugh, I was hoping that the "death" was just a metaphor, and that this was just an essay about the end of adjunct teaching as a viable job...which, I guess it is. I'm starting as an adjunct instructor next week, and I'll be getting $1,000 for about 13 hours of actual teaching time and who knows how many hours between classes doing grading/planning. But I have a regular job, this is just a night class. I can't imagine someone actually depending on adjunct work for the pay
acuozzo 13y ago
Everyone here should demand an explanation from Rev. Walsh. You can e-mail him at: walshd@duq.edu
cafard 13y ago
Distressing, but it leaves me wondering what Ms. Vojtko did until she was 58. Had she retired from some other job, gone back into the workforce after the death of a spouse?

139 points by denzil_correa 13y ago

My sincere condolences to the family of Margaret Mary Vojtko. Regarding the subtext of adjunct professor / student tuition abuse and exploitation for the keepers of the 'trademark and databases.' We are almost facing the event horizon of a black-hole; sub-star level lecturers are facing obsolescence. Mega-corp is trying to establish a stranglehold on what may be the 'database.' The database will determine your personal 'trademark' status in society and its integrity is something worth fighting for.

ffrryuu 13y ago

Yup, heard stories like this a thousand times.

mathattack 13y ago

It would seem like there would be some kind of middle ground where adjuncts should be paid a little more and get health care, and students pay less in tuition. $3,500 to teach 50 students? Where does all the tuition go? That's enormous overhead for buildings and administration, especially in a low cost area. Even you turn the $3,500 to $10,000 with a raise and health care baked in, it's only $200 per student. (I'm making assumptions on class size)

tjr 13y ago
I've worked as an adjunct professor at a community college. Class sizes appeared to average around 20 students there, rarely above 30 and sometimes around 5. In that environment, $3500/class seemed pretty reasonable.
- bsullivan01 13y ago
  In that environment, $3500/class seemed pretty reasonable. OK, but how are the professors expected to live on that ? Independently rich or retired cannot account for any size-able number. CC are subsidized by the state and county, or at least should be.
  - brucehart 13y ago
    Many adjunct professors are people who have full-time jobs doing something else. A friend of mine did this one semester to make some extra money. He worked full-time as a structural engineer, but took a long lunch three days a week to teach Introduction to Statics at the university we both attended. He said it was fun to do for one semester, but he computed that he was only making about $10/hour when you included the time to prepare for lectures and grade papers.
    - oulipian 13y ago
      In my experience, teaching has a way of ballooning to fill whatever time you have. Teaching one class feels like just as much work as teaching three, partly because either way you have to be available to students outside of class - office hours, answering email, and so on. I can't imagine teaching a single university class "for fun" while holding down a full-time job. Certainly it's not something I've seen very often.
    - mathattack 13y ago
      Some people Adjunct to improve their resume too. NYU's school of continuing education has a lot of underpaid adjuncts who get residual benefits for the prestige of being NYU faculty. But nobody lives in Manhattan on NYU adjunct salary alone.
    - sliverstorm 13y ago
      Adjuncts are especially cool for this reason in fields with a significant professional application.
  - tjr 13y ago
    Oh no! I didn't mean to imply a good living, just that those numbers make sense. But as has been pointed out, the school she was at was likely charging a lot more than $200/student.
- dalai 13y ago
  A tenured professor though can get $20k per class or more, assuming that he/she is only teaching and not involved in any research (most start with 3 courses per year). Of course many tenured professors also bring money to the university through grants and whatnot, but that is not always the case. I know of some that get more than $250k a year just to provide prestige to the department and maybe teach a course now and then. In any case, it doesn't matter if the class size is 10 or 50. You still need to prepare the same material, you still need to be there for the same amount of time. $3500/class sounds like a bargain to me. A TA earns more.
- mathattack 13y ago
  I buy the argument for community colleges. $3500/20 = $175 per student per class. The courses are cheap, so it's a wash. I disagree with this for private colleges where the cost per course can be $3,000 per student.
leoc 13y ago
IIRC colleges also often milk the fee income from talk-and-chalk courses to support science, engineering and medical courses with expensive lab requirements. As well as collegiate athletics, climbing walls, landmark building projects and so on, of course.
bradleyjg 13y ago
Deanlet and deanlings making six figures to oversee "student life" and "strategic planning". Tenured professors who have 2/1 teaching schedules and haven't published since the 80s, but can't be forced to retire and keep on picking up inflated COLAs. Ever multiplying new unnecessary buildings (usually paid for by donors, but maintenance comes out of the budget). Special signing bonuses, research stipends, forgivable loans, and extraordinary salaries for "star professors" who are considered stars not because of their teaching prowess -- which is never, ever considered by hiring committees -- but because of their fame in a particular field. Lacrosse, volleyball, and crew coaches and facilities (only football and basketball pay their own way). And so on and so forth. The people that actually do the bulk of the teaching in many schools -- adjuncts and grad students -- get paid very very poorly. Even in schools that claim to have a high ratio of tenured faculty teaching classes, if you dig into it you will often find teaching assistants doing a lot of the direct student interaction and almost all of the feedback.
- mathattack 13y ago
  I am actually ok with high pay for star professors. If you're a Nobel and bring international esteem to the school, you deserve to get paid. If your lectures are beamed around the world in MOOCs, you deserve to get paid. I think many tenured professors don't deserve it, and schools have very bloated administrations. They also have mispriced priorities. (Subsidizing luxury dorms, athletic facilities, etc)
  - bradleyjg 13y ago
    I agree that top researchers should be paid well by someone, I just don't think we've got the right someones. No man, or organization, can serve two masters. Either these schools are about undergraduate education or they aren't. The counterargument about presige isn't completly wrong. Prestige of the school is valuable to a degree holder. But all the universities chasing after the same limited pool of prestige is socially wasteful, and these heavily tax subsidized institutions are supposed to be advancing the social interest. We should have separate institutions that do research and perhaps train grad students.

pmorici 13y ago

Where does Social Security Medicare and Medicaid fit into this? She was 83 and well below the poverty line shouldn't she have been getting help from a t least one if not all three of those program?

bsullivan01 13y ago
Probably not below the poverty line, if she was single. Medicaid etc have a trick where you may lose your house and savings to ask for help.
- deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
protomyth 13y ago
She should have been drawing SS since she was 70. It would be Medicare not Medicaid and I am not sure how it would have helped since she was already being treated for cancer. Contracting positions are hell on earth if you don't put money into savings. Even if you work 25 years you need to put money away. We really don't have a national pension system[1]. I would be curious how the whole Microsoft contracting lawsuit would apply in this case. It seems it would have some relevance. 1) and looking at how underfunded the state one are, I don't see any hope in that direction
- dragonwriter 13y ago
  > It would be Medicare not Medicaid The two are, most assuredly, not mutually exclusive.
- x0x0 13y ago
  I believe SS benefits are indexed to earnings; if she had spent 2.5 decades earning $25k per annum her ss benefits may have been quite low it's worth noting that $25k pretax (and note $25k seems to have been a high), even at a modest tax rate, could easily fall (post income, fica, etc) to $18k post tax. Or $1500/mo. medicare should start shortly after the 65th birthday, but people still have to buy Part B and either part C or D. afaik part B requires a typical 20% contribution; this can be quite painful if you're living / attempting to maintain a house on $1500/month old age is no picnic, particularly in the usa, and that goes double for people who don't have significant savings

gngeal 13y ago

Duquesne has claimed that the unionization of adjuncts like Margaret Mary would somehow interfere with its mission to inculcate Catholic values among its students. I see. So treating old people in this way and leaving them in trouble after you squeeze them out is a part of those "Catholic values"?

winestock 13y ago
Read the next sentence: This would be news to Georgetown University -- one of only two Catholic universities to make U.S. News & World Report's list of top 25 universities -- which just recognized its adjunct professors' union, citing the Catholic Church's social justice teachings, which favor labor unions.
- gngeal 13y ago
  Well, their Catholics are apparently less hypocritical than Duquesne's Catholics. I'm not sure, doesn't this simply reinforce what I was trying to say?
  - msg 13y ago
    The "Catholic values" you criticize and approve of are not "catholic". Forgive the pun. Edit: I see a way to read your statement as saying that Duquesne has a twisted view of Catholic values. Which I could agree with. However there is another reading, not difficult to stumble into, where you are trying to make a general statement about Catholic values, which I could not agree with.
    - guard-of-terra 13y ago
      This just proves that every Catholic is also a man (or woman) perfectly capable of sin and malice, and so we would be pretty happy if every single one of them would stop moralizing forever. Stop thinking that they are more right and more good just because; and behaving after that. Where can one unsubscribe from ever hearing of how religion tells us how to do good and from ever facing any religion-based opinion? Because I feel I still live in the medieval times when I do.

3am 13y ago

Disgusting. Disgusting and disgraceful.

davis_m 13y ago

I feel for Ms. Vojtko's family, but I don't feel like complaining about adjunct professor salaries is being fair. These positions are short term contract (6 months-1 year) and are not meant as long term employment. These positions are meant for people from industry to come in a teach a class on a specific topic they are experienced in. These positions are not research positions, or anything of the sort. Many of the people in adjunct positions have a completely separate full-time jobs, or perhaps are retired. Offering them health-care seems silly, because a large number of them already receive health care. So parading one lady who treated the position as some kind of career path as proof that professors at college's need to get paid more is silly. I understand that my professors are going to be higher paid than most (Software/Computer Engineering) but earning upwards of $200k with a great deal of perks is fairly common.

johndavidback 13y ago
I think reading between the lines a little bit should indicate that because 50%+ of professors are adjuncts means that universities are proactively attempting to keep professors with that status. It means they can pay them less both in salary and in benefits. Hence why Duequesne would want to avoid unionization of it's adjuncts. I don't know the statistics of adjuncts who have full time jobs as well, so take that with a grain of salt.
- davis_m 13y ago
  That statistic of 50% professors being adjunct is not cited, and from searching online appears to come from the SEIU, which is a group who's goal is to unionize adjunct faculty. The report it self is not available, and it has been quoted in articles as "part-time faculty held 50 percent of teaching jobs at colleges" [1] and "adjuncts held 50 percent of teaching jobs at colleges" [2] Neither of those statements are the same as "Adjuncts now make up well over 50 percent of the faculty at colleges and universities." as stated in the article. [1]http://www.boston.com/yourcampus/news/bentley/2013/06/as_bentley_adjuncts_push_to_unionize_school_approves_wage_increase.html http://www.boston.com/yourcampus/news/bentley/2013/06/as_ben... [2] http://www.boston.com/yourcampus/news/tufts/2013/07/adjunct_faculty_at_tufts_vote_on_whether_to_unionize.html http://www.boston.com/yourcampus/news/tufts/2013/07/adjunct_...

Glyptodon 13y ago

Anyone told the Pope yet?

danso 13y ago

Ugh, I was hoping that the "death" was just a metaphor, and that this was just an essay about the end of adjunct teaching as a viable job...which, I guess it is. I'm starting as an adjunct instructor next week, and I'll be getting $1,000 for about 13 hours of actual teaching time and who knows how many hours between classes doing grading/planning. But I have a regular job, this is just a night class. I can't imagine someone actually depending on adjunct work for the pay

acuozzo 13y ago

Everyone here should demand an explanation from Rev. Walsh. You can e-mail him at: walshd@duq.edu

cafard 13y ago

Distressing, but it leaves me wondering what Ms. Vojtko did until she was 58. Had she retired from some other job, gone back into the workforce after the death of a spouse?