9 ms·

The Tall Task of Unifying Part-Time Professors

9 points by Futurebot 12y ago

philwelch 12y ago
It's amazing how many people don't understand as simple a concept as supply and demand. There are lots and lots of people not only qualified to be academics, but actively trying to break into the field. There is relatively little demand for academic work. While tenure track professors can earn a decently reliable income, the fact that it's possible (however unlikely) for a given Ph.D to get that level of job security fills thousands of grad students and Ph.D's with false hope. So, just like people trying to break into Hollywood, they race to the bottom to accept shittier and shittier adjunct jobs. This is the world's way of telling them that maybe they should go find something else to do for a living. The only sustainable solutions will address the supply and demand issue: 1. Create more demand for academic work. For the sciences, this is actually a decent idea. I'm sure we could triple public spending on basic sciences and get enough socially useful return on it to justify the expenditure. A little harder to justify for the humanities. 2. Reduce the supply of academics. Produce fewer Ph.D's. Then the remaining Ph.D's will have the leverage to dictate better compensation, because they will be harder to replace.
- dalke 12y ago
  The article was clear that it isn't so simple. "“Ballooning administrative and capital costs, seldom related to the core mission of higher ed, far outpace instructional costs,” ... "High-profile spending has turned into a higher-education arms race, with universities pouring money into buildings, technology, academic star power, and administrative costs. Trevithick stressed that he believes this is the most relevant point of all—that universities aren’t paying fair wages to adjuncts because they don’t want to, not because they can’t." Suppose we do #1. The easy university response for increased demand is to continue to hire adjuncts below the 30 hours per week limit for Obamacare => no improvement in the adjunct situation. How do you even go about doing #2? Put a law in place capping the maximum number of PhDs per school? Push for an increase in technical colleges, career colleges, and other colleges without the liberal arts degree or graduate courses? Does that mean a retired person interested in learning for the sake of learning, who wants access to the research culture and resources, might be denied entry to a PhD program for fear of taking an adjunct position in the future? So why not #3: unionize, with union contracts which require a working wage and health care coverage? Collective bargaining is a perfectly reasonable free market mechanism. If 75% of the teachers are adjuncts, and in the middle of a term 95% of them strike over demonstrably poor treatment, then it will be hard for the university to get the scab workers to finish off the term. Or #4: place a limit on how much can be spent on administrative overhead. http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/magazine/septemberoctober_2011/features/administrators_ate_my_tuition031641.php?page=all http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/magazine/septemberoctober_2... (and others) point out that administrative costs have grown while academic costs have decreased, as a percentage of the budget. As a simplistic solution, require that there cannot be more administrative staff than teaching staff. This is all too easily gamed to be a realistic solution.
  - philwelch 12y ago
    "Trevithick stressed that he believes this is the most relevant point of all—that universities aren’t paying fair wages to adjuncts because they don’t want to, not because they can’t." They could pay adjuncts more money if they had to, but why would they if they didn't have to? That's not how supply and demand works! > Suppose we do #1. The easy university response for increased demand is to continue to hire adjuncts below the 30 hours per week limit for Obamacare => no improvement in the adjunct situation. #1 is unsustainable outside of the hard sciences. > How do you even go about doing #2? Reduce or eliminate federal student loans for graduate degrees in non-essential subjects. #2 already does itself, in a sense; I made the perfectly reasonable life decision to become a software engineer instead of a philosopher because philosophy isn't a very promising career. I know another philosopher who even went to grad school before ending up making the same decision. You might ask, well why don't all the adjuncts just learn to do something useful for a living instead of being adjuncts? The reason is, if you major in a purely academic major (I'm going to pick on philosophy because that was my major but there are many others), you can easily get into a bubble where the only people in your field are academics, and you start to think that your only option is to become an academic yourself. Professors will actually encourage you to go to grad school. You will go to grad school, get your Ph.D., and still have this mistaken impression that becoming a philosopher is a reasonable career decision because you've spent your entire adult life working towards that goal. But the only work you can get in that career is as an adjunct. You spend more and more years with the mistaken impression that you can get a tenure track position, somehow, somewhere, until you're in your 30's or 40's and have no useful professional skills. If you don't figure out in undergrad that the world isn't especially willing to pay for more philosophers, you get stuck in a career trap of trying to become a philosopher. You end up being the academic equivalent of a minor league baseball player or an aspiring actor who's scraping by with nothing or waiting tables in Los Angeles--someone who thought they could make it big but it never happened. The difference being, if you're a major league baseball player or a Hollywood actor, you make millions of dollars. If you're a tenured professor in philosophy, you make a middle-class income in whatever town happens to have the state university that happened to hire you. > So why not #3: unionize, with union contracts which require a working wage and health care coverage? Unionization only works when the union has monopoly power over the source of labor. Adjuncts are easily replaceable--that's why they already get paid shit. Unions only work when there's a barrier to entry. If one doesn't naturally exist, what happens is that the union itself becomes the barrier to entry. If you're going to erect barriers to entry then the best option is to just limit the use of adjunct faculty in the first place and open more tenure-track positions to replace them. > Or #4: place a limit on how much can be spent on administrative overhead. It's not like the money is just going to magically go to the faculty, and if it did, it would go to the tenured faculty, not the adjuncts.
fsk 12y ago
That's one reason I dropped out of a PhD program in Math. I realized that, if I was lucky and did well, I would get a tenure-track job at the #250 ranked school. If I was unlucky, I would be perma-adjunct with no other marketable skills at age 40. On the other hand, in software, I'm also feeling washed up at age 40, but at least I earned a decent salary in the meantime, and probably will always be able to find some sort of software-related job.

9 points by Futurebot 12y ago

It's amazing how many people don't understand as simple a concept as supply and demand. There are lots and lots of people not only qualified to be academics, but actively trying to break into the field. There is relatively little demand for academic work. While tenure track professors can earn a decently reliable income, the fact that it's possible (however unlikely) for a given Ph.D to get that level of job security fills thousands of grad students and Ph.D's with false hope. So, just like people trying to break into Hollywood, they race to the bottom to accept shittier and shittier adjunct jobs. This is the world's way of telling them that maybe they should go find something else to do for a living. The only sustainable solutions will address the supply and demand issue: 1. Create more demand for academic work. For the sciences, this is actually a decent idea. I'm sure we could triple public spending on basic sciences and get enough socially useful return on it to justify the expenditure. A little harder to justify for the humanities. 2. Reduce the supply of academics. Produce fewer Ph.D's. Then the remaining Ph.D's will have the leverage to dictate better compensation, because they will be harder to replace.

dalke 12y ago
The article was clear that it isn't so simple. "“Ballooning administrative and capital costs, seldom related to the core mission of higher ed, far outpace instructional costs,” ... "High-profile spending has turned into a higher-education arms race, with universities pouring money into buildings, technology, academic star power, and administrative costs. Trevithick stressed that he believes this is the most relevant point of all—that universities aren’t paying fair wages to adjuncts because they don’t want to, not because they can’t." Suppose we do #1. The easy university response for increased demand is to continue to hire adjuncts below the 30 hours per week limit for Obamacare => no improvement in the adjunct situation. How do you even go about doing #2? Put a law in place capping the maximum number of PhDs per school? Push for an increase in technical colleges, career colleges, and other colleges without the liberal arts degree or graduate courses? Does that mean a retired person interested in learning for the sake of learning, who wants access to the research culture and resources, might be denied entry to a PhD program for fear of taking an adjunct position in the future? So why not #3: unionize, with union contracts which require a working wage and health care coverage? Collective bargaining is a perfectly reasonable free market mechanism. If 75% of the teachers are adjuncts, and in the middle of a term 95% of them strike over demonstrably poor treatment, then it will be hard for the university to get the scab workers to finish off the term. Or #4: place a limit on how much can be spent on administrative overhead. http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/magazine/septemberoctober_2011/features/administrators_ate_my_tuition031641.php?page=all http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/magazine/septemberoctober_2... (and others) point out that administrative costs have grown while academic costs have decreased, as a percentage of the budget. As a simplistic solution, require that there cannot be more administrative staff than teaching staff. This is all too easily gamed to be a realistic solution.
- philwelch 12y ago
  "Trevithick stressed that he believes this is the most relevant point of all—that universities aren’t paying fair wages to adjuncts because they don’t want to, not because they can’t." They could pay adjuncts more money if they had to, but why would they if they didn't have to? That's not how supply and demand works! > Suppose we do #1. The easy university response for increased demand is to continue to hire adjuncts below the 30 hours per week limit for Obamacare => no improvement in the adjunct situation. #1 is unsustainable outside of the hard sciences. > How do you even go about doing #2? Reduce or eliminate federal student loans for graduate degrees in non-essential subjects. #2 already does itself, in a sense; I made the perfectly reasonable life decision to become a software engineer instead of a philosopher because philosophy isn't a very promising career. I know another philosopher who even went to grad school before ending up making the same decision. You might ask, well why don't all the adjuncts just learn to do something useful for a living instead of being adjuncts? The reason is, if you major in a purely academic major (I'm going to pick on philosophy because that was my major but there are many others), you can easily get into a bubble where the only people in your field are academics, and you start to think that your only option is to become an academic yourself. Professors will actually encourage you to go to grad school. You will go to grad school, get your Ph.D., and still have this mistaken impression that becoming a philosopher is a reasonable career decision because you've spent your entire adult life working towards that goal. But the only work you can get in that career is as an adjunct. You spend more and more years with the mistaken impression that you can get a tenure track position, somehow, somewhere, until you're in your 30's or 40's and have no useful professional skills. If you don't figure out in undergrad that the world isn't especially willing to pay for more philosophers, you get stuck in a career trap of trying to become a philosopher. You end up being the academic equivalent of a minor league baseball player or an aspiring actor who's scraping by with nothing or waiting tables in Los Angeles--someone who thought they could make it big but it never happened. The difference being, if you're a major league baseball player or a Hollywood actor, you make millions of dollars. If you're a tenured professor in philosophy, you make a middle-class income in whatever town happens to have the state university that happened to hire you. > So why not #3: unionize, with union contracts which require a working wage and health care coverage? Unionization only works when the union has monopoly power over the source of labor. Adjuncts are easily replaceable--that's why they already get paid shit. Unions only work when there's a barrier to entry. If one doesn't naturally exist, what happens is that the union itself becomes the barrier to entry. If you're going to erect barriers to entry then the best option is to just limit the use of adjunct faculty in the first place and open more tenure-track positions to replace them. > Or #4: place a limit on how much can be spent on administrative overhead. It's not like the money is just going to magically go to the faculty, and if it did, it would go to the tenured faculty, not the adjuncts.

fsk 12y ago

That's one reason I dropped out of a PhD program in Math. I realized that, if I was lucky and did well, I would get a tenure-track job at the #250 ranked school. If I was unlucky, I would be perma-adjunct with no other marketable skills at age 40. On the other hand, in software, I'm also feeling washed up at age 40, but at least I earned a decent salary in the meantime, and probably will always be able to find some sort of software-related job.