I don't think it's fair to say he's being exploited. He's a highly educated white male in a prosperous nation. He has plenty of agency and has had many options

I don't think it's fair to say he's being exploited. He's a highly educated white male in a prosperous nation. He has plenty of agency and has had many options throughout his life. If you read his follow up, he admits that he's explicitly choosing this job for personal reasons (flexible hours allow for him to provide parental care). When there is a long queue of people who would love to take your job, I just don't see how you can call it exploitation. He's not being manipulated; he's just accepting the low pay as a tradeoff for flexible hours. I suppose you could maybe argue that there's a positive externality to his employment which the market doesn't capture (note: this would be separate from the positive externalities of education, which is already subsidized), but I'm skeptical. There's a long queue of people who would love even his marginal academic job. Obviously, I do feel sorry for the guy. I'd never want to be in his situation myself, but I also feel he should admit his own agency in getting himself into it (hopefully helping to tear down the glorification of academic jobs in the meantime). Moreover, most of my sympathy tends to go to people in genuinely exploitive and helpless conditions (ex. children born into poverty; women in tyranical underdeveloped countries, etc.).