7 ms·

The Sad Death Of An Adjunct Professor Sparks A Labor Debate

55 points by lvs 13y ago

rorrr2 13y ago
Why didn't she get a full time job? I can't see how the school is responsible for her horrible career and long term financial planning. If you're making $10,000/year is the US, while having an education, it's your own damn fault.
- bartwe 13y ago
  What if they don't employ fulltime ? Also what is so special about parttime employment that it shouldn't also give (partial) pensions and health insurance.
  - jacalata 13y ago
    Decent countries decouple jobs and pensions/healthcare. Parttime employment should have nothing to do with your access to either.
  - rorrr2 13y ago
    Is that the only place in the country that employs? At her age she shouldn't even be working. What has she been doing for over 60 years? Where is her social security, 401k/IRA, savings?
- johnchristopher 13y ago
  > If you're making $10,000/year is the US, while having an education, it's your own damn fault. That is a bold and broad generalisation.
  - frozenport 13y ago
    She actually refused aid on numerous occasions, I believe there was something of the Vie Bohème in her. Also according to the math she began teaching at 58, which asks what happened before.
    - Xylakant 13y ago
      > Also according to the math she began teaching at 58, which asks what happened before. Probably married with a husband earning the wage, the default mode of living in a marriage for the generation born in 1930.
      - jacalata 13y ago
        I not sure about that, her obit didn't mention a husband and also if she were a widow she should have been receiving survivors benefit from social security.
    - angdis 13y ago
      Does it really matter what happened before? She deserved some compassion. By any reasonable point of view this was well-liked competent teacher who gave 25 years of service to her employer. She happened to fall through the social safety net. Sadly, the way things are going, such miserable endings are going to become far more common when our generation becomes elderly.
  - rorrr2 13y ago
    $10K/year is equivalent to $5/hour full time. Even a complete moron with no education can make more money doing cleaning, washing dishes, delivery, etc. And that lady was not a complete moron, she was teaching.
    - Xylakant 13y ago
      So the take-away is that american schools value their teachers less than restaurants their dish-washers. That's a great lesson about the state of academia.
      - rorrr2 13y ago
        That's not true. The lady worked part time. Most dish washers work full or longer time work shifts. The academia pays alright, you just have to do the hours. She didn't.
        Xylakant 13y ago
        The lady worked part time, granted. However, I would expect a high-skilled job such as teaching to pay enough for a living even on part time - 3,500 USD for a whole course seems a bit on the cheap side for me. Then, there's a couple of other factors that come into play: The university only hands out part time contracts, so they're in a position to keep the wages low: Demand too much, no problem, we'll take another teacher for your course next year. I dispute your notion that academia in general pays enough. The given university pays an average of 20 - 25k to 75% of it's teachers. That's about half of the average wage in the USA. Even if they're working part-time that's still way too low for a job that requires university grade education. That's the people you entrust your childrens education to, not your dishwasher. I assume that most of those 75% would love to have a full time job at the faculty, but the faculty obviously doesn't let them. So they either have a second/third job or live on scraps. Neither of those options is even remotely beneficial to the students education.
        trevelyan 13y ago
        Read the article. Leaving aside the absurdity of expecting 83 year old people to work, this woman wanted to work and was let go.
- AmVess 13y ago
  Probably not a huge job market for someone in her 80's. There's not a large job market for someone 20 years her junior.
  - rorrr2 13y ago
    I would do private tutoring. I bet it pays much better too. Considering she worked very relaxing hours, she could spend 10 hours a week searching for new clients.
- barking 13y ago
  That's one way of looking at it. If she was living in Western Europe she'd probably be retired 23 years already, have a pension and free healthcare.
  - rorrr2 13y ago
    And in Sudan she would be a child soldier or a rape toy. What does this have to do with what actually happened? Living in the US without health insurance is a ticking financial and health bomb. Even I, as an immigrant, knew that. That's why I paid through my nose to have insurance for me and my family when I was an independent contractor. She lived day-to-day, didn't bother to plan even short term future, it's completely her fault.
    - jacalata 13y ago
      At 83 she almost definitely qualified for Medicaid, so she did have health insurance. However many health insurance plans have limits and high deductibles or disqualified expenses that can send a low income person bankrupt anyway. Quick quiz, which treatments for ovarian cancer would your plan cover and what are the deductibles? How does that compare to a plan you could buy on the individual market as an 83 year old woman?
      - rorrr2 13y ago
        Oh, I absolutely agree that the US healthcare system is absolute shit, but there are ways around it. She should have planned for it long before 83. I started planning my finances for retirement at 25. She should've been eligible for Medicare, but I guess she didn't pay medicare taxes. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medicare_(United_States)#Eligibility http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medicare_(United_States)#Eligib...
        jacalata 13y ago
        If she wasn't paying payroll taxes, that would be the fault of the employer who is supposed to deduct them, and where she had worked for 25 years, no? There is no minimum income you have to pay it on as far as I am aware.
- wisty 13y ago
  She was 80. For a woman born around 1930, getting a job as a French teacher was more than she'd be expected to do. Her circumstances have more to do with the US social safety net than her planning a poor career. But it does highlight the fact that working in academia can be a worse career than working in retail.
  - rorrr2 13y ago
    US has social safety nets, she just didn't bother to use them. She didn't bother to pay for health insurance. She didn't bother to finance her IRA/401k. She didn't bother to find a full time job with health insurance. > But it does highlight the fact that working in academia can be a worse career than working in retail. Working part time in either without paying for private health insurance will end up the same. And yes, being a teacher doesn't pay much, but she didn't bother to advance her career over what, 60 years? She basically did the same thing she liked day after day, and expected the society/country to take care of her needs. I agree that it would be nice to have a single payer healthcare system in the US, but that's not how it is.
  - jimhefferon 13y ago
    > the fact that working in academia can be a worse career than working in retail I agree; it is exploitative. But why do people keep showing up to do it? For every person who quits finally there are another dozen lined up to take the job. Perhaps that may be a little exaggeration, and no doubt it varies by region and subject matter, but people doing adjunct work must be getting compensation that is not salary or else why are they doing it? (Maybe I should say that I work in higher ed; I've often been puzzled by people's motivations about this.)
    - brazzy 13y ago
      > But why do people keep showing up to do it? Social status. Nobody gets looked down upon when they say that they're an adjunct professor at a university. And of course it's rewarding and stimulating work.
michaelt 13y ago
Duquesne officials say there are no immediate plans to allow adjunct professors to unionize, despite professors' vote to do so. I was under the impression unionisation usually happened against the wishes of employers? It's hardly realistic to expect employers to act with their employees' best interests at heart.
- mathattack 13y ago
  It's hardly realistic to expect employers to act with their employees' best interests at heart. This is a little harsh. Many companies do put their employees first, so that they can keep the best ones. They just have to be in a position to capture some of the value from the added talent. Universities aren't always in a position to do that. Unions can come with other problems such as reduced flexibility of the work force, which in today's high-change environment for schools could be crippling. One should ask the deeper question - why are there so many underpaid adjuncts? The oversimplified answer is that we're subsidizing the production of too many Phds with non-transferable skills.
  - michaelt 13y ago
    This is a little harsh. Many companies do put their employees first, so that they can keep the best ones. I agree that employers often act in employees' best interests when there is no more profitable alternative.
    - mathattack 13y ago
      In knowledge industries, it's frequently a case of long term versus short term interests. Take training... It rarely pays off in the short term (when you have the cost) but it frequently does in the long term. Another example is severance. It doesn't pay in the short term, but abusing folks on the way out doesn't pay in the long term either.
DanielBMarkham 13y ago
I always find it amusing when media outlets try to gin up controversy by pointing at other people arguing and saying something like "Hey, there's a big debate over here!" Never mind that they have this huge megaphone, that they choose which stories to run or not, and that it's in their best interests to have as many people as possible arguing about it in public as possible while linking to their article -- the faux storyline is that some other people think some issue is important. I think education in the U.S. is in bad enough shape already. The last thing it needs is more vested interests with political agendas involved.
amerika_blog 13y ago
It's worth reading the school's response before you let the Crowdist media whip you into a hive-mind: http://www.post-gazette.com/stories/news/education/duquesne-disputes-claims-over-death-of-adjunct-professor-704143/ http://www.post-gazette.com/stories/news/education/duquesne-...
- chrisro 13y ago
  So they knew she was in a bad place financially and still terminated her contract? There's not much to their response that changes this story. They didn't dispute her lack of benefits or the amount of her wages and they confirmed that she was in financial distress (so much so that the priests invited her to live in campus housing but still later the university stopped employing her).
  - wmeredith 13y ago
    Is the University not allowed to terminate contracts of staff "in a bad place financially"? That makes no sense. The college clearly reached out and tried to help her. The pay their adjuncts better than most and why would a part time professor teaching a class or two per semester have benefits? She was also 83 and died of cancer. This was not a 30 year old professor working full time, who couldn't afford treatment for a cold and died. It's a sad story, but the outrage seemed misplaced.
eykanal 13y ago
The sad thing is that the article is correct; that is HIGH for an adjunct salary. When I finished my postdoc I applied to a few adjunct positions. The salary would have been $2100/class, which, after factoring in the time needed for preparing for the class, traveling, lecturing, being available for office hours, grading, etc, would have come out to well below minumum wage. No thank you very much.
rayiner 13y ago
Here's my beef with the story. I feel bad for the lady and all. But why didn't she use any of the safety nets available to her? Medicare, social security, etc? Did she have kids she could turn to? At bottom, she was a lady who decided she should be able to live independently, turning away help apparently, teaching a few French classes a year. Why is that the employer's fault? Just because she was old? I'm all for having a social safety net, but I think it should be a last ditch remedy. People should save up for retirement, have kids who can support them, and only if all that fails should the safety net kick in. I think the government should have done something for her here, but it's not the employer's fault. Finally, I find the implication that we should care more because she was educated. I'm much more concerned about the uneducated person who works as a day laborer and doesn't have the opportunity to pursue a career that might result in a secure retirement.
- 6d0debc071 13y ago
  > People should save up for retirement, have kids who can support them, and only if all that fails should the safety net kick in. Saving up for retirement's not really practical when you're on such a limited wage. I can't agree with the kids thing either. People should have kids because they want to show them the world - as children they reasonably expect to love and cherish - not as some cynical insurance scheme. > Why is that the employer's fault? Just because she was old? It would be the employers fault whether or not she was old, exploiting people in that manner is pretty disgraceful. It's just that as she aged the probability of negative consequences increased.
  - rayiner 13y ago
    At the end of the day, love doesn't support 80 year olds who didn't save for retirement. Working adults do, either those people's kids or other people's kids. With respect to the latter, traditional families can support older people much more efficiently than the model of paying enough state pension for them to live independently.
    - 6d0debc071 13y ago
finin 13y ago
It's ironic that the full name of the university is "Duquesne University of the Holy Spirit".
aestra 13y ago
75% of college instructors are adjunct professors? REALLY? That's the most surprising statistic I've read in a long time. We only had a couple in my school, and they were pretty temporary positions.

55 points by lvs 13y ago

Why didn't she get a full time job? I can't see how the school is responsible for her horrible career and long term financial planning. If you're making $10,000/year is the US, while having an education, it's your own damn fault.

bartwe 13y ago
What if they don't employ fulltime ? Also what is so special about parttime employment that it shouldn't also give (partial) pensions and health insurance.
- jacalata 13y ago
  Decent countries decouple jobs and pensions/healthcare. Parttime employment should have nothing to do with your access to either.
- rorrr2 13y ago
  Is that the only place in the country that employs? At her age she shouldn't even be working. What has she been doing for over 60 years? Where is her social security, 401k/IRA, savings?
johnchristopher 13y ago
> If you're making $10,000/year is the US, while having an education, it's your own damn fault. That is a bold and broad generalisation.
- frozenport 13y ago
  She actually refused aid on numerous occasions, I believe there was something of the Vie Bohème in her. Also according to the math she began teaching at 58, which asks what happened before.
  - Xylakant 13y ago
    > Also according to the math she began teaching at 58, which asks what happened before. Probably married with a husband earning the wage, the default mode of living in a marriage for the generation born in 1930.
    - jacalata 13y ago
      I not sure about that, her obit didn't mention a husband and also if she were a widow she should have been receiving survivors benefit from social security.
  - angdis 13y ago
    Does it really matter what happened before? She deserved some compassion. By any reasonable point of view this was well-liked competent teacher who gave 25 years of service to her employer. She happened to fall through the social safety net. Sadly, the way things are going, such miserable endings are going to become far more common when our generation becomes elderly.
- rorrr2 13y ago
  $10K/year is equivalent to $5/hour full time. Even a complete moron with no education can make more money doing cleaning, washing dishes, delivery, etc. And that lady was not a complete moron, she was teaching.
  - Xylakant 13y ago
    So the take-away is that american schools value their teachers less than restaurants their dish-washers. That's a great lesson about the state of academia.
    - rorrr2 13y ago
      That's not true. The lady worked part time. Most dish washers work full or longer time work shifts. The academia pays alright, you just have to do the hours. She didn't.
      - Xylakant 13y ago
        The lady worked part time, granted. However, I would expect a high-skilled job such as teaching to pay enough for a living even on part time - 3,500 USD for a whole course seems a bit on the cheap side for me. Then, there's a couple of other factors that come into play: The university only hands out part time contracts, so they're in a position to keep the wages low: Demand too much, no problem, we'll take another teacher for your course next year. I dispute your notion that academia in general pays enough. The given university pays an average of 20 - 25k to 75% of it's teachers. That's about half of the average wage in the USA. Even if they're working part-time that's still way too low for a job that requires university grade education. That's the people you entrust your childrens education to, not your dishwasher. I assume that most of those 75% would love to have a full time job at the faculty, but the faculty obviously doesn't let them. So they either have a second/third job or live on scraps. Neither of those options is even remotely beneficial to the students education.
      - trevelyan 13y ago
        Read the article. Leaving aside the absurdity of expecting 83 year old people to work, this woman wanted to work and was let go.
AmVess 13y ago
Probably not a huge job market for someone in her 80's. There's not a large job market for someone 20 years her junior.
- rorrr2 13y ago
  I would do private tutoring. I bet it pays much better too. Considering she worked very relaxing hours, she could spend 10 hours a week searching for new clients.
barking 13y ago
That's one way of looking at it. If she was living in Western Europe she'd probably be retired 23 years already, have a pension and free healthcare.
- rorrr2 13y ago
  And in Sudan she would be a child soldier or a rape toy. What does this have to do with what actually happened? Living in the US without health insurance is a ticking financial and health bomb. Even I, as an immigrant, knew that. That's why I paid through my nose to have insurance for me and my family when I was an independent contractor. She lived day-to-day, didn't bother to plan even short term future, it's completely her fault.
  - jacalata 13y ago
    At 83 she almost definitely qualified for Medicaid, so she did have health insurance. However many health insurance plans have limits and high deductibles or disqualified expenses that can send a low income person bankrupt anyway. Quick quiz, which treatments for ovarian cancer would your plan cover and what are the deductibles? How does that compare to a plan you could buy on the individual market as an 83 year old woman?
    - rorrr2 13y ago
      Oh, I absolutely agree that the US healthcare system is absolute shit, but there are ways around it. She should have planned for it long before 83. I started planning my finances for retirement at 25. She should've been eligible for Medicare, but I guess she didn't pay medicare taxes. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medicare_(United_States)#Eligibility http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medicare_(United_States)#Eligib...
      - jacalata 13y ago
        If she wasn't paying payroll taxes, that would be the fault of the employer who is supposed to deduct them, and where she had worked for 25 years, no? There is no minimum income you have to pay it on as far as I am aware.
wisty 13y ago
She was 80. For a woman born around 1930, getting a job as a French teacher was more than she'd be expected to do. Her circumstances have more to do with the US social safety net than her planning a poor career. But it does highlight the fact that working in academia can be a worse career than working in retail.
- rorrr2 13y ago
  US has social safety nets, she just didn't bother to use them. She didn't bother to pay for health insurance. She didn't bother to finance her IRA/401k. She didn't bother to find a full time job with health insurance. > But it does highlight the fact that working in academia can be a worse career than working in retail. Working part time in either without paying for private health insurance will end up the same. And yes, being a teacher doesn't pay much, but she didn't bother to advance her career over what, 60 years? She basically did the same thing she liked day after day, and expected the society/country to take care of her needs. I agree that it would be nice to have a single payer healthcare system in the US, but that's not how it is.
- jimhefferon 13y ago
  > the fact that working in academia can be a worse career than working in retail I agree; it is exploitative. But why do people keep showing up to do it? For every person who quits finally there are another dozen lined up to take the job. Perhaps that may be a little exaggeration, and no doubt it varies by region and subject matter, but people doing adjunct work must be getting compensation that is not salary or else why are they doing it? (Maybe I should say that I work in higher ed; I've often been puzzled by people's motivations about this.)
  - brazzy 13y ago
    > But why do people keep showing up to do it? Social status. Nobody gets looked down upon when they say that they're an adjunct professor at a university. And of course it's rewarding and stimulating work.

michaelt 13y ago

Duquesne officials say there are no immediate plans to allow adjunct professors to unionize, despite professors' vote to do so. I was under the impression unionisation usually happened against the wishes of employers? It's hardly realistic to expect employers to act with their employees' best interests at heart.

mathattack 13y ago
It's hardly realistic to expect employers to act with their employees' best interests at heart. This is a little harsh. Many companies do put their employees first, so that they can keep the best ones. They just have to be in a position to capture some of the value from the added talent. Universities aren't always in a position to do that. Unions can come with other problems such as reduced flexibility of the work force, which in today's high-change environment for schools could be crippling. One should ask the deeper question - why are there so many underpaid adjuncts? The oversimplified answer is that we're subsidizing the production of too many Phds with non-transferable skills.
- michaelt 13y ago
  This is a little harsh. Many companies do put their employees first, so that they can keep the best ones. I agree that employers often act in employees' best interests when there is no more profitable alternative.
  - mathattack 13y ago
    In knowledge industries, it's frequently a case of long term versus short term interests. Take training... It rarely pays off in the short term (when you have the cost) but it frequently does in the long term. Another example is severance. It doesn't pay in the short term, but abusing folks on the way out doesn't pay in the long term either.

DanielBMarkham 13y ago

I always find it amusing when media outlets try to gin up controversy by pointing at other people arguing and saying something like "Hey, there's a big debate over here!" Never mind that they have this huge megaphone, that they choose which stories to run or not, and that it's in their best interests to have as many people as possible arguing about it in public as possible while linking to their article -- the faux storyline is that some other people think some issue is important. I think education in the U.S. is in bad enough shape already. The last thing it needs is more vested interests with political agendas involved.

amerika_blog 13y ago

It's worth reading the school's response before you let the Crowdist media whip you into a hive-mind: http://www.post-gazette.com/stories/news/education/duquesne-disputes-claims-over-death-of-adjunct-professor-704143/ http://www.post-gazette.com/stories/news/education/duquesne-...

chrisro 13y ago
So they knew she was in a bad place financially and still terminated her contract? There's not much to their response that changes this story. They didn't dispute her lack of benefits or the amount of her wages and they confirmed that she was in financial distress (so much so that the priests invited her to live in campus housing but still later the university stopped employing her).
- wmeredith 13y ago
  Is the University not allowed to terminate contracts of staff "in a bad place financially"? That makes no sense. The college clearly reached out and tried to help her. The pay their adjuncts better than most and why would a part time professor teaching a class or two per semester have benefits? She was also 83 and died of cancer. This was not a 30 year old professor working full time, who couldn't afford treatment for a cold and died. It's a sad story, but the outrage seemed misplaced.

eykanal 13y ago

The sad thing is that the article is correct; that is HIGH for an adjunct salary. When I finished my postdoc I applied to a few adjunct positions. The salary would have been $2100/class, which, after factoring in the time needed for preparing for the class, traveling, lecturing, being available for office hours, grading, etc, would have come out to well below minumum wage. No thank you very much.

rayiner 13y ago

Here's my beef with the story. I feel bad for the lady and all. But why didn't she use any of the safety nets available to her? Medicare, social security, etc? Did she have kids she could turn to? At bottom, she was a lady who decided she should be able to live independently, turning away help apparently, teaching a few French classes a year. Why is that the employer's fault? Just because she was old? I'm all for having a social safety net, but I think it should be a last ditch remedy. People should save up for retirement, have kids who can support them, and only if all that fails should the safety net kick in. I think the government should have done something for her here, but it's not the employer's fault. Finally, I find the implication that we should care more because she was educated. I'm much more concerned about the uneducated person who works as a day laborer and doesn't have the opportunity to pursue a career that might result in a secure retirement.

6d0debc071 13y ago
> People should save up for retirement, have kids who can support them, and only if all that fails should the safety net kick in. Saving up for retirement's not really practical when you're on such a limited wage. I can't agree with the kids thing either. People should have kids because they want to show them the world - as children they reasonably expect to love and cherish - not as some cynical insurance scheme. > Why is that the employer's fault? Just because she was old? It would be the employers fault whether or not she was old, exploiting people in that manner is pretty disgraceful. It's just that as she aged the probability of negative consequences increased.
- rayiner 13y ago
  At the end of the day, love doesn't support 80 year olds who didn't save for retirement. Working adults do, either those people's kids or other people's kids. With respect to the latter, traditional families can support older people much more efficiently than the model of paying enough state pension for them to live independently.
  - 6d0debc071 13y ago

finin 13y ago

It's ironic that the full name of the university is "Duquesne University of the Holy Spirit".

aestra 13y ago

75% of college instructors are adjunct professors? REALLY? That's the most surprising statistic I've read in a long time. We only had a couple in my school, and they were pretty temporary positions.