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| Jack is a talented artist, but he is from steerage... |
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| ...and he will freeze to death in the icy water. |
If academia were an early 20th century ocean liner, adjuncts would be the immigrants in steerage, full-time instructors and tenure-track faculty would be middle class folk (too uninteresting to make it into movie plots), and administrators would be strolling the upper decks with John Jacob Astor and the unsinkable Molly Brown. It took the Titanic going down with over 3,000 souls behind locked gates trapping them in the lower decks before society cared about that particular system. The news stories about academic adjuncts drowning in impossible lives are only just beginning to surface.
There are adjuncts who find their way to tenure track. It does happen. There are also a lot more working actors and musicians making a living than you might imagine, but that doesn't make entertainment an industry I'd point to as an example of job security. The adjuncts who make it to tenure track are the ones who, when they apply for a listed tenure track job, will have all the qualifications (current research and conference presentation, etc.), PLUS the teaching experience from being an adjunct. And they're able to move anywhere in the country for the job. This typically needs to happen within the first several years after finishing the PhD, while the person still has some energy to stay on top of research and writing. Nearly every instance I know of in which an adjunct is stuck being an adjunct is someone who, in those first years after the PhD, was bound in some way to a particular geographic area and couldn't move to wherever the jobs were. They get mired down in the teaching and stop publishing. Then they stop going to conferences. And then the only jobs they can qualify for are ad hoc courses as adjuncts. 1 at this school, 2 at a school on the other side of town, 1 at the community college nearby, 1 at a school an hour away. The joke among adjuncts is that you know you're an adjunct when you're eating your dinner in your car in a college parking lot in between classes.
This is not an industry that, as a whole, goes out of its way to reward loyalty. If you're teaching as an adjunct at a research institution and all you're doing is teaching then you have no chance - NO CHANCE - of ever getting a tenure track job at that school. It is not going to happen. No one at an R1 is ever going to just convert you to tenure track because you're awesome. Even if every single one of them knows you are awesome. Even if every one of your students tells the administration that you're awesome. And when the school does finally list a tenure track job in your field (if that ever happens), they will do a national search for it. The expectations for a tenure track job applicant haven't lost anything since you first finished your degree. In fact, they require even more now. More research, more service, more teaching experience. Which of those does the overworked adjunct have? Exactly. Teaching: the one they always care the least about at an R1. Not going to happen for you there. You are going to have to go somewhere else to find the tenure track job.
If you want to avoid the adjunct machine, your best bet is a smaller school. Yes, small schools have adjuncts, but they are seldom used like slave labor the way they can be at other places. At my college, we mostly hire adjuncts to pick up those rare, spare sections of Gen Ed that had to be opened up over summer to accommodate a class enrollment that was greater than expected when the schedule was first set. It's unusual for a smaller school to pull the nasty trick that larger schools will: 8 new sections of Composition have to get covered, so they hire 8 adjuncts to teach 1 section each at $3k per section (for a total cost to the school of $24k), instead of hiring 2 of those people to teach for that semester as full-time instructors (for a cost to the school of $24k each, plus the cost of benefits).
Some of you may say that the school has to save money however they can, because tuition is so expensive and so forth. I will remind you that the rising costs of higher education do not come from the cost of instruction, but the cost of administrators, as has been clearly demonstrated (1), despite the best efforts of some to depict faculty as greedy money-grubbers impoverishing students for their own monetary gain. The schools that cut costs by exploiting adjunct labor are the same ones that routinely pay their presidents over $600k per year, their vice presidents nearly that, and often pay their coaches more than $1m per year. Anyone in academia who cites as a good business model hiring adjuncts as slave labor while administrators are paid ever-skyrocketing salaries needs to drop by the Business department for an intro course.
If you're living in a mansion and driving a luxury car but your income isn't enough to cover your lifestyle, you don't save money by giving up your daily Starbucks or switching to a cheaper gasoline, you downsize the big stuff. Any financial advisor will tell you that. You can't improve a school by impoverishing the people who do the teaching. Yet that is exactly the tactic taken by administrators at more and more schools. In some states, the problem is endemic, and entire school systems have adjusted their budgeting over the years so that they are now reliant on adjunct labor just to keep the current budget model going, and the adjuncts are so destabilized that they are not in a position to advocate for their own best working conditions. Protests of this model fall on deaf ears, and are becoming increasingly drastic as a result. (2)
If, btw, anyone reading this is ginning up an argument that schools need those huge salaries so they can "attract the best talent" in administrators, I would say get out of my face before I slap yours. If you think you can run a school with the best talent in administrators but NOT the best talent in teachers, I would ask you to tell me the name of the most inspiring administrator who changed your life in college. No? It was teachers who made an impact on your life? Think about how many times a day at your job you use what you learned from your college administrators. You probably never met them. If you did find your college president inspiring, chances are you were at a smaller college where you could actually meet him or her and have a conversation, where the president actually interacts regularly with the students. At smaller schools like that, the pay disparity between the president and the faculty is nothing like what it is at a school like Duquesne, where an adjunct who died last year in humiliating poverty made $10k that year, while the president made over $700k. The average tenured associate professor there makes $82.3k, but they range from $56.2k to $131.2k (according to chronicle.com/article/faculty-salaries-data-2012/131431#id=212106,) And the Duquesne president turns out to be on the low end of the presidential sweet life. A new Chronicle of Higher Education table pulls together the top presidential salaries at public colleges and universities (paid by taxes, mind you) and the salaries are staggering. Ohio State University paid its president over 6 million dollars in 2013.(3)
The pay disparity is absurd between administrators and adjuncts. It's bad, too, between the upper and middle decks. Although not quite as shocking as what is happening in academic steerage, the stagnant salaries among tenure-track and non-tenure track full time faculty is not even keeping up with inflation. Don't be fooled by the averages. Many estimates of academic pay are based on medical school faculty and law school faculty, rather than, say, liberal arts school faculty. There are other considerations as well. Men make more than women. Like, blatantly. And some departments pay way more than others. Look at the Chronicle of Higher Ed's Table of Faculty salaries (chronicle.com/article/2013-aaup-survey-table/138291) and you'll see averages for a school, but look more closely for details and it starts to get interesting. The average for my rank at my school shows way more than I'll ever make, because the top salary at my rank is a man in Business or the sciences, and I'm a woman in the humanities. (4) That average salary you see listed is the number in the middle of his salary and mine. I will not discuss here or anywhere what my salary is, but I'll tell you that, according to some estimates I've seen, I make roughly the same as subway operator or a telecom technician. I would add that the entry level requirements for my job begin with a degree that takes 7 years of graduate school and includes job experience and publications. Getting tenure and promotion takes even more. And I have it way, way better than adjuncts. Money is tight and my student loan payments suck, but I have a house and a car and a decent health savings account.
Adjuncts also often have student loans from both undergrad and graduate school. If they default on those loans, their alma maters will freeze their transcripts. (5) Since all academic jobs require official transcripts at some point in the application process, this means that adjuncts who have defaulted on their loans are unable to find the work that would give them the money to pay the loans. Yet another trap awaiting the adjunct trying to hold it together out there. The water is rising and the stairs to the upper decks end in locked iron grates.
Adjuncts work their asses off. They are stretched so thin it's hard to believe they can have anything left to actually care about their students, but they do. They care. And they inspire their students. Personally, I'd like it if they could all just walk off the job and see which institutions sink. The schools left standing would be the schools with a genuinely healthy business model, schools that have smart, long-term, sustainable programs. Systems built on the misery of the many might be able to cover up their inequities for a while, but look at history and tell me what happens to top-heavy systems. The system we have cannot continue. The people in academic steerage are drowning, and the public is starting to take notice.
coda: If you are not an academic and you're horrified by what is happening but don't know what you can do about it, don't despair. You can help by asking questions. Know a college administrator? Ask him or her what adjuncts make at that institution. Taking your kid to look at college campuses? Ask the tour guide, the admissions counselor, and anyone else you meet about the use of adjuncts at that school - in particular, ask what percentage of general education courses are taught by tenure-track faculty. And hold your state elected officials accountable for the way faculty are treated at state-funded schools. Know any adjuncts? Hug them, feed them, and tell them that they deserve better than they're getting.
(1) Bloomberg News, "Bureaucrats Paid $250,000 Feed Outcry Over College Costs," Nov 24, 2012: www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-11-14/bureaucrats-paid-250-000-feed-outcry-over-college-costs.html
Inside Higher Ed, "It's Not Faculty Salaries," Feb
5, 2014: www.insidehighered.com/news/2014/02/05/college-work-forces-grew-not-fast-enrollment#sthash.vzaCjDSj.dpbs
The Chronicle of Higher Education, "Administrator
Hiring Drove 28% Boom In Higher Ed Work Force - Report Says," Feb 5, 2014:
chronicle.com/article/Administrator-Hiring-Drove-28-/144519/
The Street, "Higher College Tuition? Look At
Administrative Bloat," Feb 25, 2014: www.thestreet.com/story/12442038/1/higher-college-tuition-look-at-administrative-bloat.html
US News and World Report, "The Surprising Causes of
Those College Tuition Hikes," Jan 15, 2009: www.usnews.com/education/articles/2009/01/15/the-surprising-causes-of-those-college-tuition-hikes
Wall Street Journal, "Deans List: Hiring Spree Fattens
College Bureaucracy - And Tuition," Dec. 28 2012: online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424127887323316804578161490716042814
Washington Monthly, "Administrators Ate My
Tuition," Sept/Oct 2011: www.washingtonmonthly.com/magazine/septemberoctober_2011/features/administrators_ate_my_tuition031641.php?page=all
(2) Inside HigherEd, "Adjunct Continues Hunger Strike After Hospital Visit," 15 May, 2014:
http://www.insidehighered.com/quicktakes/2014/05/15/adjunct-continues-hunger-strike-after-hospital-visit#sthash.3AC57hfp.dpbs
(3) Executive Compensation at Public Colleges, 2013 fiscal year: http://chronicle.com/article/Executive-Compensation-at/146519/#id=table
(4) In fact, I make less than the average salary the Chronicle has listed for the rank below mine, which means that despite the massive effort of tenure and promotion I'm still making less faculty with less experience, fewer publications, and less service to the school. The system sucks.
(5) This, by the way, is a COMPLETE outrage. The rationale is that the schools own the academic records and can refuse to share them if they aren't paid. But the loans already paid the school. The School Has Been Paid. It's the loan company that isn't getting the payment. The school is just helping the loan company punish the graduate who can't pay. It is wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong and the people responsible for this should remember that God is watching.
