“Adjuncts don’t want tenure-track jobs! They’re just teaching a course or two here and there for fun!”
Ok, this one is a hold-over from when adjunctification first began. Because once upon a time, it was true. And in certain fields, it remains true, at least to some extent. I think this one persists because it perpetuates the romanticized version of teaching and “molding young minds” that distinguishes it from work. Teaching is just this fantasy, where everybody’s all inspired and bathed in sunlight. This fantasy is attractive for a) administrators who want to remember their past lives as teachers as filled with joy and candy, b) faculty who live in denial about how teaching fits into their own lives in order to get up in the morning, c) a general public that wants to believe “children are the future” and that teachers are selfless and nurturing and filled with good will even when they don’t have the resources to do their jobs properly.
“But we need adjuncts in order to have flexibility in scheduling! What about fluctuations in enrollments? Just what about them?”
Again, this is a throw-back argument. In olden times, when adjuncts first came on the scene, this was true. But nowadays, it’s a big fat lie. Because if you have, say, 200 sections of composition, and 100+ of those are taught by adjunct faculty, clearly this isn’t about fluctuations in enrollments. This is not about “serving students” through the use of contingent faculty. This is about serving a bottom line. And you know, it’s interesting to me: this problem is most hideous in those disciplines/courses that are supposedly central to each and every student’s success in college and in the world – speech, comp, math. It’s funny how that works. You’d think that if such things were a priority, we wouldn’t try to pay as little as possible for them, and to hire people with very little vetting to teach them. [Let me just note that I know there are many dedicated and excellent adjunct faculty. I am NOT claiming otherwise. All I’m saying is that the interview process for adjuncting, particularly close to the start of a semester, is not terribly rigorous, and it is a happy accident if we get dedicated and excellent faculty out of that process. Pretty much all the interview process does is to confirm a pulse and to confirm that the person has some teaching experience and the requisite credit hours in the field and doesn’t seem psychotic. The interview process for t-t folks is more involved.]
“The problem is people with tenure! With their 6-figure salaries and 6-hour work-weeks! If only they would give up tenure, then we wouldn’t exploit the adjuncts!”
I fail to understand how giving up academic freedom and job security assists people without academic freedom and job security. Perhaps I lack imagination. I also fail to see how giving up those things does anything for students, which as far as I’m concerned should be our number 1 concern. I’m such a silly and naive girl. Clearly my priorities are not in the right place. And I won’t even comment on the skewed perceptions of people about how I’m compensated and the amount of work that I do.
“Ok, so maybe getting rid of tenure isn’t the answer. But all those old fogey tenured folks totally need to retire ASAP so that we can give the youngsters a chance!”
A chance at what? Let’s say it’s to fill that t-t slot. But that doesn’t increase the number of t-t slots. We’ll still have, especially at institutions like mine and in fields like mine, an overwhelming need for adjunct labor. So I guess now we’ll just have retired fogeys doing the free-way flying – having given up academic freedom, the ability to teach courses in their specialization, and health insurance (well, except for medicare). I’m unclear about how this solves the casualization problem…. Oh! Right! That’s because it doesn’t.
I could probably come up with some more lies, but these are the ones that immediately sprung to mind. And I think all of these lies get in the way of us talking about the problem in a meaningful way. As I see it, the problem is twofold. Obviously, it’s a problem of money.
Truth: We rely on adjunct labor, particularly in disciplines in which we must teach a huge number of sections because of general education requirements, because we can do so cheaply. And with that being the truth, until we find a pot of gold someplace, that’s not changing anytime soon. As far as I see it, t-t faculty have power over this issue only in that they could (ostensibly) change curriculum in such a way that the need for adjuncts would be greatly reduced. EXCEPT accrediting agencies are unlikely to be into that, so it’s a balancing act. And what ends up happening in such a case as I’ve seen it is that the humanities pretty much gets gutted with the exception of comp. And comp is still taught primarily by adjuncts, but it’s possible to fudge the adjunct numbers in such a way that it doesn’t seem like we’re relying so heavily on adjuncts. It’s pretty nifty and creative. And doesn’t get at the larger problem.
Because beyond the money issues, we also have a deeper, philosophical problem:
Truth: We rely on adjuncts because we are unethical.
We are content to exploit a class of workers (a practice that is enabled in many respects by the lies above) because it’s cheap and easy to do so. We are content to hand over what are the most important courses in a university’s curriculum (for, if they are not so important, why must each and every student take those courses?) to faculty who have not been through as rigorous an interview process, who do not have access to the same resources, and who are not as familiar with the shape of the university’s curriculum as a whole and how these foundational courses fit into that overall curriculum. We are content to pretend that we can get something for nothing and that doing so is our entitlement, and we are content to stand by while practices that are detrimental both to teachers and students alike continue. And by “we” I mean institutions – boards of regents/trustees, administrators, faculty, and staff. But also, I mean students and the general public. This is an ethical dilemma on a broad social scale. And we are all participating in it – some of us to our benefit and some of us to our detriment.
So if these are two truths about this issue (and I’m not saying there aren’t other truths, just that these are the two primary ones for me), it strikes me that we’ve got to deal with the ethical dilemma before we can hope to deal with the economic one. First, what motivation do we have to deal with the economic one until we deal with the ethical one? Second, I don’t think that we can start coming up with creative solutions about the money until we all – and I do mean all – start taking responsibility for this as a crisis that develops out of widespread anti-intellectualism, lack of commitment to education, and lack of belief in education as transformative and essential to living a full life as an engaged citizen. This is not a problem that will be solved by getting rid of administrative bloat, or by getting rid of the football team. This is not a problem that will be solved by doing away with research leaves or travel money for faculty, nor is it a problem that will be solved by reducing copying and printing costs. This is not a problem that will be solved by blaming adjuncts for participating in the exploitation, or by adjuncts opting out of their contingent status to find new careers, or by adjuncts construing themselves as unwitting victims. This is not a problem that will be solved by politicians, nor will it be solved by just upping tuition. This is not a problem that will be solved by getting rid of tenure. This is a social problem, people. This is a philosophical problem. Only after we deal with that can we get to the money and can we get past the lies.
Reassigned Time 2.0 
“This is not a problem that will be solved by politicians…”
Actually, politicians are part of the problem/solution, since they’re the ones cutting funding for higher ed. But then the administrators are parceling out what’s left differently than they used to — in paying administrators, for example. The combination of reductions in state funding and growth in administrative positions, salaries, and spending is a big part of why we have the “because we can do so cheaply” reason for relying on adjuncts.
Um, I should have opened my comment with this: Excellent post, Crazy! Sorry for the rudeness.
To be clear, I’m not saying that politicians aren’t *part* of a solution – just as all the other things I listed could play a role in being *part* of a solution. The thing that strikes me about these conversations is that they often seem to leap to singular and simple answers – “if politicians just funded education more…” “If tenured folks retired…” “If adjuncts would just quit…” “If we got rid of tenure….” “If faculty took on higher teaching loads…”
It seems to me that we can’t get to those practical things – whether singly or in combination – until we deal with the underlying issue, which, to me, seems to be that we don’t actually believe that much in higher education, and we don’t actually believe it’s worth paying for – as a culture. That’s not the fault of politicians solely, at least to my mind.
Oh, no, don’t apologize. I sort of anticipated somebody would point that out after I posted, but I figured I would wait for the comment to clarify 🙂
I like this post very much.
I’m not sure what it means for adjuncts to paint themselves as unwitting victims. I might like to hear more about what you mean. I wouldn’t say I’m unwitting but I am continually surprised by how crass my employers are about exploiting me. And short of quitting, I’m not exactly sure what my role is, here.
A – first of all, I’m shocked by your employers, too! Just… wow.
Here’s what I think I mean. And I’m speaking particularly about English as a discipline here, though it may apply more broadly. The casualization of labor in English has been a widespread problem for at least 20-30 years. There is something about the narratives that I see not infrequently about “But I wasn’t told!” that rings really false to me. Because even if one’s individual professors didn’t tell you, the information has not been a secret.
This is not to say that I don’t understand reasons for people ending up on the adjunct track – they want to keep their CV relevant with teaching in the hope of securing t-t employment, they really love teaching, they need the money and they don’t have a skill set that translates easily to another job, etc. – and so they adjunct, and just quitting or opting out isn’t really an option. Fair enough. BUT I think it’s possible to be complicit in one’s exploitation, and I think it matters that people speak out about that. So, for example, I have a hard time with it when adjuncts tell students that they should consider pursuing graduate school in my field, or when they don’t reveal to students the realities of their working conditions. (To be fair, I have a problem with t-t people who do this, too.) I have a problem with people who blame t-t faculty for the plight of adjuncts – not because we don’t participate in an exploitative system – I mean, we surely do – but because t-t faculty don’t actually have the institutional power to change hiring practices. (Yes, we can argue about why t-t faculty don’t have that power, and maybe we can assign blame to previous generations of t-t faculty for allowing faculty power to erode to this point, but that ship has sailed and that is not, at least in my field, the responsibility of current t-t faculty people.)
I understand that adjuncts have to be very careful in order to keep their jobs. I understand that most adjuncts don’t just have the opportunity to opt out of the system. I still do, however, have a problem with the rhetoric of victimization that I often see. It’s possible to be victimized – and to challenge, question, and protest it – without also asserting that one is totally clueless and that everybody has maliciously plotted against one. Does that make sense?
Yes, that does make sense.
Great post! Especially in contrast to the other big post on adjunct labor out on the internets this morning…
Let me add an element to the general suckiness of the adjunct labor system.
A couple of for-the-record things: I am recently tenured in a four-year non-R1 large state school where adjunct labor (full- or part-time) has been a big “staffing solution.” I believe the average in the college is about 45% adjunct to 55% TT. or maybe it’s the other way around. Close to 50-50, in terms of FTEs (not actual bodies), with some departments (English, mostly) having a much higher proportion of contingent labor.
(At least, that’s how it was until the floor fell out from under our budgets.)
So, here’s what sucks: a lot of people forget that our non-TT colleagues are, for the most part, just as qualified as we are, if not more so in some cases. Some lecturers in our department have UP books (and some tenured faculty do not), which they have written while teaching many more courses than their TT colleagues. Sure, some of our lecturers are ABDs who never finished, or Ph.D.s who couldn’t publish (or couldn’t move). But it’s far from all, or even the majority.
So, my thesis statement: it’s bad enough that adjuncts don’t get the pay they deserve; let’s remember at least to treat them with respect.
(And let’s not forget that our course releases are bought with cheap adjunct labor — if the exploitation of adjuncts is going to change, what’s most likely to happen is not more TT lines, but more courses and students for existing TT faculty. It’s non-choices like this that widen the rift between we lucky few and the others who make our standard of living possible.)
Here’s something that I’m thinking about in relation to the comment thread over at CC Dean (I didn’t link to his post because it was only a general sort of inspiration for this and I wasn’t directly responding) but which I think relates to what you’ve commented, Notorious.
Here’s the thing: historically, adjuncts have been used to “fill in” for ladder faculty, whether for actually hiring them or for things like “reassigned time.” A lot of the time, that reassigned time is administrative. Here’s what I wonder: why do we pull those who are compensated adequately for teaching away from teaching? If we want a more flexible labor pool, wouldn’t it make sense to hire people capable of teaching in fields like, say, comp, into staff/administrative posts that can flexibly be assigned into courses? That would a) give the “flexibility” that contingent labor gives but b) it would keep faculty with academic freedom and job security in front of the classroom. I don’t think this would solve all budget woes, but I wonder whether it might solve some of them. At the very least it would send a message about the priority of teaching. Maybe. I don’t know. I need to think about this more fully. But it strikes me as weird that we replace teachers – who we pull away from teaching to do other stuff, which at an institution like mine is rarely research – with teachers that we don’t want to pay.
*Mulling.*
So, for example, what if a prerequisite of getting an advising job would be x teaching competency? At my institution, the way it works when a staff or admin person takes on a course, they get paid in addition to his/her salary for doing so. What if, instead of doing that, we had “reassigned time” in reverse – pulling people from staff/admin work for teaching. That way, they’d still have their pay and benefits but we’d also have the flexible scheduling? Does that make any sense? Or am I on crack?
Excellent post!
I think it comes down to this: We have made something so elusive as knowledge into a commodity, and in doing so have created an industrial model of higher education (student = paying customer, degrees = product to be bought). How we reform that, I don’t know. It is indeed a social problem, and no one thing will fix our ills. It didn’t happen overnight, so surely it won’t right ship overnight. We all do what we can, I suppose.
[…] by haphazardmusings — Leave a comment August 17, 2010 A great post from Dr. Crazy on the casualization of academic labor . For those of you not in academia, this has become a super-hot issue, and there don’t seem […]
This is a MOST excellent post.
I’m a bit confused about one or two of your comments. Are you suggesting that, say, counselors should also be qualified teachers? Or that deans should?
(Our deans often teach one course a year as part of their regular duties. Some shouldn’t, but…)
We should probably add into our discussion the use of grad students for cheap teaching at R1s (primarily). That contributes in all sorts of ways.
Bardiac – I’m not entirely sure what I mean by my suggestion… other than that it seems bizarre that faculty are asked to do more and more administrative work without compensation while administrative staff are routinely compensated on top of their regular salaries for teaching. Anyway, I haven’t thought it through fully, and so let’s just pretend I didn’t mention that 🙂
As for grad students – they ARE an important part of this discussion, esp. because so much of the adjunct force at CCs and non-R1s is constituted of grad student labor. (We joke at my institution that it’s true – we don’t have grad students from our institution teaching our classes – a supposed selling point. we just get them from the institution 10 miles away.)
Dr. C — thanks for taking up the subject.
I think we frequently talk (write?) past each other because we’re starting from different assumptions. You’re painting the problem as fundamentally an ethical one; if we just got our ethics right, the rest would follow. I see it as fundamentally a structural one; until we reform the structures of higher ed to make them sustainable under real-world conditions, we’ll continue to see institutions do what they think they have to do.
These perspectives aren’t incompatible at all, but they certainly accent different syllables. I’m not holding my breath for broad cultural change, though I agree with you that it would be welcome. In the meantime, I think there’s some serious work to be done on the structures of higher ed to make them sustainable.
DD, You know, I don’t think that if we just get our ethics right the rest will follow. I think that structural change is still tough going even if our hearts are in the right place. But I DO think that the ethics are a precondition of wide-sweeping structural change, in that what is the *impetus* for the wide-sweeping structural change if we *don’t have a fundamental belief that changing the structures is the right thing to do*?
Regardless of our differences, I think you do believe that wide-sweeping change (such as eliminating tenure) is the right thing to do. But the “why” is important. Because if what motivates us remains getting the most customers through the higher education checkout line, eliminating tenure will only result in every teacher losing academic freedom, every teacher becoming an adjunct. (I do not think that this is what you think – it’s just the danger in thinking about structure without thinking about how and why structures are used.) I think that you assume that education is a fundamental value – that we all (“society” in general) want to see students better educated and that we all value higher education. That this is a common good that is recognized as such by the vast majority of people. I don’t think that’s true.
I think that the vast majority of people see higher education as a necessary evil, a hoop through which to jump. That’s not the same thing as valuing it, though. If we don’t change the minds of that majority – a majority that includes politicians, taxpayers, various talking heads – then I don’t think structural change is going to get us to greater equality or is going to solve the casualization problem.
Oh yes, excellent post. I was listening to this discussion on NPR this morning, and hollering at the radio whilst driving down the street: “I don’t make 6 figures! I work more than 6 hours a week! I need the protection!” So thank you for putting this out there for us to chew on.
GREAT post.
DD: “until we reform the structures of higher ed to make them sustainable under real-world conditions”
What about turning this on its head? What about changing real world conditions or as Dr. C. says, majority attitudes?
Or, to go with your ordering of things: if people aren’t really interested in higher education but just technical training, what follows from this … ?
P.S. back to Dr. Virago — what about cutting administrative salaries? And positions? As we adjunctify, we get more administrators, some doing things professors used to do as part of service.
[…] why do I even bother writing these posts? I try to say something and then someone else says it so much better. Maybe if I had a humanities degree I’d be better at vocalizing my […]
In most medical schools, almost all of the basic science curriculum is taught on a “voluntary” basis by faculty whose salaries are not supported at all from “teaching” budgetary lines.
I’m usually a grad student lurker, but a few things caught my eye in the comment thread. First, thanks for an excellent post – there’s certainly a lot to think about. I wonder, though, if just focusing on adjunctification is enough, whether we do so structurally or ethically. I think there’s certainly a case for that, but the structure of stipends for grad students (a fair few of whom are adjuncts elsewhere) also needs to be taken into consideration.
My uni is unionized, and the TA salary I made was relatively generous. But then, there was no more funding for me after four years (and 3 of those years were required coursework). So in order to continue to pay for rent & carrots, I had to engage knowingly in my own exploitation as an adjunct. It affects the amount of time I can work on my dissertation, thus slowing my progress down, and I constantly wonder how I can possibly be a good teacher when I have no real time to work with the students I teach.
Does anyone else have thoughts on stipend structures and what happens when grad students lose their funding? It seemed to me that I was left with little choice but to engage in this casual market, even when I knew what the ramifications were.
Gwee – I think you’re right that graduate education and its attendant work/payment structures are an issue here, as Bardiac also noted in a comment above. I didn’t address that in this post because I was responding to various things out in the world (the NY Times discussion about profs who won’t retire, Dean Dad’s post, other things I’ve seen/heard in the past week or two) and none of those was focusing on graduate education/work.
To some extent, I am reluctant to talk about what I think about grad student stuff, as I don’t work at a research university and I’m not really equipped with the experience to weigh in, other than remembering back 10 years to my own limited experience or just imagining what I think seems right in a Crazy vacuum. I’m not sure how useful that would be. I’m comfortable talking about the adjunct side of the equation because I understand the administration of it and the funding of it.
I can tell you this. What I did when my funding ran out was to temp. I was able to make ~23K/yr doing that, with little stress and at a job where I was able to work on the diss when my “real” work was finished. Was it fulfilling? No. But it paid the bills. It allowed me to focus on getting the diss finished in the span of a year, as opposed to focusing on commuting between different schools and becoming overwhelmed by teaching (as teaching tends to be about 5x more time consuming than one ever thinks it will be). I’ll note that to make that much adjuncting I’d need to teach approx. a 5/5 load (assuming I could get that many courses and assuming that I was making over 2K per course, which isn’t necessarily a given), and between commuting between institutions (as I do think it would have been unlikely that I get 5 courses at one institution while a grad student) and the crappy schedule I’m sure I’d have, I likely would not have finished my dissertation in that year.
Now, this is not to say that I think grad students who turn to adjuncting are “stupid” or that they should be blamed for making that choice. (Similarly, I think it’s disgusting when professors blame the casual labor situation in higher ed on graduate students for deciding to go to graduate school.) I think, personally, that grad students are scared into participating into the casual market by the cut-throat nature of the tenure-track market. Grad students are led to believe that if they don’t have the MOST teaching experience and the MOST publications and the MOST everything that they will never succeed in finding their way to the tenure track. So if I can say one thing that any grad student readers might find useful, I can say this:
I am at a teaching institution. I have served on search committees, and I have participated in a limited way in searches where I didn’t have committee responsibilities. At a certain point, more teaching experience does absolutely nothing for your cv. Seriously. Yes, we want to see that you have experience teaching. Yes, we want that experience to be consistent over time. Yes, we appreciate it if you’ve taught a range of courses that we might like for you to teach. BUT. If you’ve taught comp throughout your time in your PhD program, 1 section a semester, 1 more section of comp is not going to make us think you’re more awesome – unless it’s at an institution that is similar to ours. 4 more sections of comp does NOTHING for you. So, seriously: turning to the adjunct track once funding runs out is not necessarily the best option – for you personally, or for your chances on the tenure track. I don’t think graduate students hear that very often from their mentors. I think instead all they hear is that they don’t want to “appear lacking in seriousness” or “appear not to be committed to the profession” – which is seriously disgusting advice to give to people, I think.
Oh, it’s worth noting that when I made the decision to temp, I also had made the decision to move back to my hometown. And I think that the professors from my grad school viewed both decisions negatively, even though it meant keeping myself out of tens of thousands of dollars of loan debt, and I think they still think that I’m lacking in seriousness. I mean, who cares that I have a t-t job! I don’t have a t-t job at a research university so I’m a loser!
Great post, but I beg to differ on one crucial thing. It’s not a philosophical problem, it’s an economic problem. The solution? Hang together or we’ll all hang separately, I always say.
Jonathan – this is where we’re going to have to agree to disagree. Because I don’t see how “hanging together” is possible or makes any difference if we don’t address those beliefs that *underwrite* the economic problem. In other words: yes, there is an economic problem, and yes, it needs to be addressed, but also there is a foundational and fundamental problem about how we regard education that exists on a large social scale. I don’t see how we can get the traction, the resources, or the will to address the economic problem without having a real conversation about what education means in this country, who it serves, why it’s valuable, and what it’s worth. Right now, education for most people means jumping through hoops required for middle-classness, it serves “customers”, it’s is valuable because it’s required for the job you want, and it’s worth as little as you can possibly pay for it (in terms of taxes and in terms of tuition at public institutions). We can “hang together” all we want, but if those are the prevailing views of the world around us, we’re just talking to ourselves.
Just a quick response to the idea of reassigning staff time to teaching, rather than faculty time away from teaching: I think in many, many institutions these days, staff are overworked and doing the jobs of multiple people, too.* So you’d have to then hire an adjunct to do the staff job, which I don’t think gets at the problem. I also don’t think it would feasibly replace the significant numbers of adjuncts found in most institutions.
*except, perhaps, at the very top levels – which isn’t to say that these folks don’t also work hard, they’re just usually better compensated! It just seems that having each dean and provost teach a class isn’t going to get rid of a lot of adjuncts, nor, in many cases, provide very good teaching (many administrators being in fields where teaching isn’t a prereq).
My problem is more with the amount of non-teaching, non-research stuff faculty get dragged into doing – at one of my former jobs I felt like the work of the admissions department, for instance, kept getting shifted over to the faculty (due to lack of money to hire professionals – just turn it into faculty “service”), and I kept wanting to say, “But I don’t know SQUAT about recruiting and retaining students!!”
Okay, returning to lurking now…
Excellent post, Dr. Crazy. It moves us away from the us vs. us ethos (get rid of the old fogeys! the tenured! whoever stands in the way of my perfect job that I will surely be hired for!) to the structural problems underlying the crisis.
First: excellent post!
“If we want a more flexible labor pool, wouldn’t it make sense to hire people capable of teaching in fields like, say, comp, into staff/administrative posts that can flexibly be assigned into courses? ”
I agree with the first point New Kid made. I have an applicable MA as uni staff (admin assistant, in addition to something that would too clearly identify me) and had taught our gen ed course for years before taking my position–I’m also not paid well for what I already juggle daily, much less throwing teaching on top of that. Administrators are a different argument, but I think in most cases staff are already trying to do more than one job due to slashed budgets and hiring freezes/cutbacks (and have been for years).
Which is not to say I wouldn’t welcome the opportunity to teach again, but I certainly would be no better (and that’s optimistic) compensated than an adjunct and it wouldn’t change the climate one whit.
How do you see the reliance of graduate student instruction for 100-level comp (and similar courses) in this system? They, too, are much easier on the departmental budget than t-t faculty and are assigned sections with less field and teaching experience than the adjuncts you mention getting through non-rigorous hiring procedures.
Thanks for this post, Dr. Crazy.
To your suggestion that flexible teaching labor can be had by hiring staff who are also qualified to teach, then juggling their teaching assignments: there’s been a lot of discussion about this idea under the rubric of “hybrid faculty-staff positions,” sometimes shortened on Twitter to #alt-ac. (Think of the humanities PhD who works in academic technology or gets an MLIS and becomes a subject-specialist librarian; the previous link is both a manifesto and an announcement of a soon-to-be-released essay collection.) Alt-acs work in universities & use their training to get job security as staff; then, in most cases, they have to go through their institution’s separate process for being certified as adjunct faculty.
This sounds like a nice idea in theory, but in practice there are substantial institutional barriers:
1) Academic hierarchies imagine that tenure-track faculty do the “real work” that makes the university go, and that other people are “support staff,” either the non-PhDed or those who couldn’t hack it on the tenure track. Hence, departments can be very reluctant to routinize the idea of split faculty-staff positions. (If the same person can be both a professional colleague and the staff member who fixes your email, how does any Ph.D. know where they fit in the academic pecking order? There but for the grace of the tenure track, you could be spending your July fixing someone’s computer instead of working on your promotion dossier or sitting in an air-conditioned archive.)
2) Established administrators in budget-strapped staff units understand that they’re lucky to get new hires, and they’re wary of hiring people who “really want to be faculty” and may either leave when they’re offered a tenure-track job, or will get adjunct-faculty status, teach on an overload, and take time away from the staff unit they were hired for. This is a perception problem, particularly in the areas of an institution where administrators commonly don’t hold Ph.D.s.
3) In most cases, being formally “staff” means that a Ph.D. can’t accept grants in their own name, can’t get release time for research, and otherwise has institutionalized second-class status, despite holding the highest degree in their field. Until those institutional barriers are fixed, many humanities Ph.D.s will hang on as adjuncts in hopes of someday ascending the ladder up to a tenure-track position.
Very thought-provoking post. I don’t completely buy that TT faculty have no power over the hiring situation. Granted, at my institution, it did take an enlightened administrator several years ago to get the initiative started, resulting in national searches for adjunct faculty (esp. in the English department), full-time status, 30K a year, and benefits. The department rose to the occasion, though, and we now have voting representatives in faculty meetings, a rep on the committee that advises the dept. head, and half of the committee that oversees and evaluates the adjuncts (who get one course of release time to do so).
Granted, none of this is getting to the heart of the problem that you identify here. But it does show that there are a number of things that TT faculty can do within a department to show respect to their NTT colleagues and make their working conditions more humane.
First, while I doubt you can hear it from wherever you are, I am clapping for such a wonderful post.
And I too am a grad student lurker, so I appreciate your points about the adjunct world I will no doubt end up in at some point. However, you make a point that seems so very basic, and yet that I feel I have never heard articulated in an academic environment: that “this problem is most hideous in those disciplines/courses that are supposedly central to each and every student’s success in college and in the world – speech, comp, math.” It seems so obvious I feel like smacking myself for not having consciously realized this before. Comp is treated like a red-headed stepchild in my department, and it’s taught not only by adjuncts but even more so by grad students (not me, though, because who can live on a 3k/ semester stipend? No thank you, student loan debt for a freaking MA.) And your point that comp should be a priority rather than something taught by neophytes or indentured servants is a revelation to me.
Which means, I suppose, that I have been properly indoctrinated into the system. So, thank you for the wake up call.
As a member of the general public from an academic family I think one thing that isn’t addressed in this whole discussion is that this is a general workplace trend.
So philosophically, it really does need to be addressed as a society and not only within the academy. While research and free thinking may put a particular spin on it, it the truth is that in many other fields the exact same issue exists – in IT and customer service it’s off-shoring; in media it’s keeping rates low so that it’s always the eager-for-the-byline cheap labour that provides the “content” and not experienced, expensive full-time old-school journalists, and so on.
I personally believe *some* of this comes from the decision that corporations are solely accountable to one principle: “Increase shareholder value.” I think that’s had a trickle-down effect into many areas, including how government spending is perceived.
It’s not just adjuncts for sure. I realize you are addressing it in your area, but since this was a pretty sweeping post I thought I would bring it up.
Just to elaborate: I see it as expressed a lot a leadership issue. I think most CEOs see their primary role as making the books come out right in the short term – certain companies are famous for laying off on a kind of quarterly-results basis – and not so much for long-term building, ensuring that employees are receiving fair wages and being retained, and so on.
Now obviously that pressure has always been there — duh, labour history — but I think we have lost ground since the recession of the early 90s.
I think this has translated into academic leadership as well, with academic administration taking long-term development of faculty and quality of instruction and the health of their institution on a global basis as a much lower priority than “how can we get through this budget.” After all, if you market it right you will have students, so why care? It may be that the trend towards more people attending higher education institutions is actually working against caring about those things – there’s lots of customers so your product can be mediocre, and so it doesn’t matter if your staff is burning out, etc. (Not that adjuncts lower quality individually.)
And you know, I don’t have a solution for them at all. But I think it is a cultural shift. I am hoping the touchy-feeling Gen Y has some ideas.
Dr. Crazy wrote “as little as you can possibly pay”
My governor and legislators, my university’s board and chancellor, my president and provost all embrace that tactic. It is tiresome. It is as loathsome as students trying the same thing with their schoolwork.
Thanks to those of you who’ve continued the discussion of this post. I’ve got a guest from out of town staying with me so I haven’t been able to keep up with the thread, but I really appreciate the conversation that has developed. I’ll respond when I’m no longer being the hostess with the mostess 🙂
Shandra makes great points.
I agree with this, too: “I think instead all they hear is that they don’t want to ‘appear lacking in seriousness’ or ‘appear not to be committed to the profession- which is seriously disgusting advice to give to people, I think.” That talk about “seriousness” did me a lot of harm post PhD, perhaps even more than in graduate school; it’s as though to appear loyal enough you’d practically have to commit hara-kiri in some form.
I had an argument with someone about this post, who thought it was undemocratic (I think) to note that adjuncts don’t have all the training, nor go through all the vetting, regular faculty do. I think that’s actually an important point and could go on about why.
Re grad students vs adjuncts (and don’t forget, there are also instructors/lecturers, who aren’t last minute part time hires like adjuncts) — who it’s better to staff with, it really depends on where you are. Where I went to graduate school the TAs were fantastic and YES it was good to have hip cool 20somethings not yet sick of 101 teaching freshmen. In other places, where all the factors align themselves differently, best practices can be different. But adjunct pay HAS to go up, somebody ought to make a law, the situation is so exploitative!
Beautiful post.
Most college courses in this country are taught by a low-caste army of limited contract, low-paid, no-benefit workers. Of course it’s to some extent an economic problem, but i this sense adcons are just the avant-garde. But in the end it really is as you say a philosophical problem: humans decide what the real, the important, the moral economic categories are.
mistyped website. sorry
I’m not DD, but I feel enough affinity with where he’s coming from that I can give answering a comment addressed to him a try:
“DD: “until we reform the structures of higher ed to make them sustainable under real-world conditions”
What about turning this on its head? What about changing real world conditions or as Dr. C. says, majority attitudes?”
I’ve been trying to change real-world conditions from my locale in the deep south, both through networking and through the hard one-on-one diplomacy efforts, for a very long time (15 years on my part), as have most of my colleagues (some for at least double that). I don’t see HOW you change the real-world conditions in some parts of the country. There are so many deep-seated anti-intellectual biases in so many places that I honestly don’t think the ethical approach to this problem (while I understand it COMPLETELY and understand why Dr. C would take it on) is even remotely viable.
If you can do the work to make people aware of what a ripoff adjunct and non-TT labor is, and I’m wrong, I will dance and celebrate and gladly emigrate to whatever part of the country gets it right – because it’s utterly hopeless down here. Somehow, though, I don’t think us red-state rednecks are all that different from the general population in most other places in the union. Most of them simply don’t think, at this time, higher ed is worth the money they’re being charged for it. Beyond a certain point, holding out hope that we will convince them moves into the “false hope” universe.
(Of course, from my vantage point, so much of the cost explosion can be tied directly to health care costs, and there is so much “socialist!” name-calling around the concept of single payer in order to control those costs that I’m personally on the brink of despair at this point. At the end of the day, there is a non-zero part of the population that simply doesn’t WANT this problem fixed – they WANT us to get starved for money and just go away. That’s a hard reality I’ve had to learn over the past few years.)
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