Workers, exploitation, and the "business model" of higher education
When I was at U of A, there was an adjunct there whom I liked a lot. He was one of my favorite teachers when I was an undergrad and then when I was a grad student I worked with him teaching summer classes. One day in the office after a summer class lecture, he told me that in addition to his teaching load at the uni, he also taught classes at the community college. He was working significantly more than full time just to scrape by enough to cover his basic living costs. All total he made around $19K a year. He received no benefits. At the time, I thought that this was an unusual situation, that it was just because he was ABD and as soon as he finished his dissertation, all would be well for him. It wasn't until much later that I learned that academia hasn't worked that way for a long time.
Confessions of a tenured professor.
Even though there are a few bits of the article that I find questionable, I've linked to it because US higher education is in bad shape and often people who aren't currently employed in US higher education don't realize how bad it is. Here are a few excerpts from the article, not under an LJ cut because this is one of my Causes:
"While instances of dumpster diving are rare, adjunct shopping is typically limited to thrift stores, and decades-old cars sometimes serve as improvised offices when these "roads scholars" are not driving from campus to campus, all in a frantic attempt to cobble together a livable income. Some adjuncts rely on food stamps or selling blood to supplement their poverty-level wages, which have been declining in real terms for decades. At SUNY New Paltz, for instance, adjuncts’ compensation when adjusted for inflation has plummeted 49 percent since 1970, while the president’s salary and those of other top administrators have increased by 35 percent."
Basically, what's happened in academia is the same as what's happened in the work force. The income gap between the top and the bottom has increased and the middle class (ie tenured profs) is shrinking. (These days around three-quarters of all uni instructors are non-tenure track--the migrant workers of academia.) In academia the bottom rung is still doing the same professional labor with the same advanced degrees...they're just not getting paid what their education and experience is worth. Another website describes adjuncts as "the highly educated working poor." The situation for adjuncts is made even worse because often that education came at the cost of thousands of dollars of student loans. So they've got the double whammy of low salary and massive debt.
***
"The exploitation is indeed filthy, but for me and my tenured colleagues, this scandal is neither little nor secret: the vast majority of those well-educated, skilled professionals who daily teach millions of students in our classrooms are actually being paid far less than the workers who nightly clean them. Ad-cons are treated as chattel or as servants who can be dismissed at the will and whim of any administrator from departmental chair to dean or provost. And woe to those ad-cons who elicit the wrath of their campus presidents! They can be non-renewed without any due process whatsoever, simply zapped, either individually or by the hundreds."
And, yes, there are stories of ad-cons getting fired if they try to challenge the status quo of exploitation.
***
"I confess that I must have been overly naïve, but I was utterly dumbfounded when an administrator repeatedly told me that he saw no value whatsoever to the institution in keeping any adjunct instructors more than a couple of years, after which they ought to simply move on and find something else to do. I’m sure my tenured colleagues would find it totally unacceptable if they could be told at the end of any semester that they should simply leave, that there was no value to their accumulated expertise, thank you, because the college wished to hire a fresh young face at a lower salary."
***
(Incidently, women are more likely to be adjuncts and men are more likely to be tenured profs. And almost all upper level university administrators (Presidents, Provosts, and the like) are men. This is not to say that it's purely a gender thing, and there are plenty of men adjuncts, too, but gender is tied up with it.)
Confessions of a tenured professor.
Even though there are a few bits of the article that I find questionable, I've linked to it because US higher education is in bad shape and often people who aren't currently employed in US higher education don't realize how bad it is. Here are a few excerpts from the article, not under an LJ cut because this is one of my Causes:
"While instances of dumpster diving are rare, adjunct shopping is typically limited to thrift stores, and decades-old cars sometimes serve as improvised offices when these "roads scholars" are not driving from campus to campus, all in a frantic attempt to cobble together a livable income. Some adjuncts rely on food stamps or selling blood to supplement their poverty-level wages, which have been declining in real terms for decades. At SUNY New Paltz, for instance, adjuncts’ compensation when adjusted for inflation has plummeted 49 percent since 1970, while the president’s salary and those of other top administrators have increased by 35 percent."
Basically, what's happened in academia is the same as what's happened in the work force. The income gap between the top and the bottom has increased and the middle class (ie tenured profs) is shrinking. (These days around three-quarters of all uni instructors are non-tenure track--the migrant workers of academia.) In academia the bottom rung is still doing the same professional labor with the same advanced degrees...they're just not getting paid what their education and experience is worth. Another website describes adjuncts as "the highly educated working poor." The situation for adjuncts is made even worse because often that education came at the cost of thousands of dollars of student loans. So they've got the double whammy of low salary and massive debt.
***
"The exploitation is indeed filthy, but for me and my tenured colleagues, this scandal is neither little nor secret: the vast majority of those well-educated, skilled professionals who daily teach millions of students in our classrooms are actually being paid far less than the workers who nightly clean them. Ad-cons are treated as chattel or as servants who can be dismissed at the will and whim of any administrator from departmental chair to dean or provost. And woe to those ad-cons who elicit the wrath of their campus presidents! They can be non-renewed without any due process whatsoever, simply zapped, either individually or by the hundreds."
And, yes, there are stories of ad-cons getting fired if they try to challenge the status quo of exploitation.
***
"I confess that I must have been overly naïve, but I was utterly dumbfounded when an administrator repeatedly told me that he saw no value whatsoever to the institution in keeping any adjunct instructors more than a couple of years, after which they ought to simply move on and find something else to do. I’m sure my tenured colleagues would find it totally unacceptable if they could be told at the end of any semester that they should simply leave, that there was no value to their accumulated expertise, thank you, because the college wished to hire a fresh young face at a lower salary."
***
(Incidently, women are more likely to be adjuncts and men are more likely to be tenured profs. And almost all upper level university administrators (Presidents, Provosts, and the like) are men. This is not to say that it's purely a gender thing, and there are plenty of men adjuncts, too, but gender is tied up with it.)