4 ms·

I don't think that we _do_ value teaching a lot if 75% of all teacher at that given school are the low-paid kind of teachers that earn about 50% of the median s

• tptacek 13y ago
  We don't value adjunct professors, I agree. But anyone with the credentials to be an adjunct professor could, presumably, get a well-compensated job teaching somewhere else. The expectation as I understand it in academia is that you're supposed to move on from adjunct professorship when it becomes clear that you're not getting tenure.
  • patio11 13y ago
    So, not quite so much there. Adjunct professors are, by definition, not on the tenure track. You're thinking, perhaps, of associate professors, who receive wages which are roughly commensurate with e.g. high school teachers but are frequently fired after 7 years (denied tenure). Adjuncts are a permanent academic underclass, in just about every sense of the word. (The one glimmer of hope, for adjuncts who have an MA but not a PhD, is to finish their PhD and then get an associate professorship afterwards. If you're a PhD and an adjunct, your career as an academic is functionally over.)
  • Xylakant 13y ago
    This is the assumption. However, reality begs to differ. In a place where 75% of the teachers are adjuncts and more and more tenures are replaced by adjuncts, that assumption does not hold. Teaching as an activity is in general valued by society, but that doesn't seem to pay of in appropriate wages for a large part of the teaching workforce. I think that's a sad state.