Blog XLII (42): A Dickensian Environment

Today's post is an article that I originally recommended to people in Blog IV on April 6, 2009. Anya Kamenetz's article "Wanted: Really Smart Suckers: Grad School Provides Exciting New Road to Poverty" originally appeared in The Village Voice on April 20, 2004. It raises many of the issues I have been trying to discuss in this blog. Here is the article:

Here's an exciting career opportunity you won't see in the classified ads. For the first six to 10 years, it pays less than $20,000 and demands superhuman levels of commitment in a Dickensian environment. Forget about marriage, a mortgage, or even Thanksgiving dinners, as the focus of your entire life narrows to the production, to exacting specifications, of a 300-page document less than a dozen people will read. Then it's time for advancement: Apply to 50 far-flung, undesirable locations, with a 30 to 40 percent chance of being offered any position at all. You may end up living 100 miles from your spouse and commuting to three different work locations a week. You may end up $50,000 in debt, with no health insurance, feeding your kids with food stamps. If you are the luckiest out of every five entrants, you may win the profession's ultimate prize: A comfortable middle-class job, for the rest of your life, with summers off.

Welcome to the world of the humanities Ph.D. student, 2004, where promises mean little and revolt is in the air. In the past week, Columbia's graduate teaching assistants went on strike and temporary, or adjunct, faculty at New York University narrowly avoided one. Columbia's Graduate Student Employees United seeks recognition, over the administration's appeals, of a two-year-old vote that would make it the second officially recognized union at a private university. NYU's adjuncts, who won their union in 2002, reached an eleventh-hour agreement for health care and office space, among other amenities.

Grad students have always resigned themselves to relative poverty in anticipation of a cushy, tenured payoff. But in the past decade, the rules of the game have changed. Budget pressures have spurred universities' increasing dependence on so-called "casual labor," which damages both the working conditions of graduate students and their job prospects. Over half of the classroom time at major universities is now logged by non-tenure-track teachers, both graduate teaching assistants—known as TAs—and adjuncts. At community colleges, part-timers make up 60 percent of the faculties.

Average teaching loads for grad students have increased, while benefits are often cut off after five years. Humanities TAs are paid stipends ranging from less than $10,000 at a public school like SUNY-Buffalo to $18,000 at unionized NYU. Adjuncts, more and more likely to be recent post-docs who couldn't find a better position, earn less than $3,000 a course—usually without benefits, and far less than the $60,000 yearly national average for full-time professors. Meanwhile, the debt burden has grown: The average holder of a graduate degree spends 13.5 percent of his or her income paying back loans (eight percent is considered manageable). Fifty-three percent of those holding master's degrees, 63 percent of those holding doctorates, and 69 percent of those holding professional degrees are over $30,000 in debt. If they end up as "marginal employees," the academic freedom and security of tenure is replaced by a constant anxiety and alienation.

But the Internet means no isolated community has to stay that way. A new group of tortured, funny, largely anonymous websites are providing an outlet for academics who feel like they're getting spanked by their alma mater. They have names like Invisible Adjunct, (a)musings of a grad student, Beyond Academe, and Barely Tenured, and they address the emotional just as much as the practical consequences of competing in, and losing, the academic job-market lottery.
Founded in February 2003, Invisible Adjunct quickly became one of the most popular such blogs. Dozens of regular posters followed discussion threads like "The Old Boy Network" and "Is Tenure a Cartel?" Invisible Adjunct's author—call her IA—is a New Yorker in her late thirties with a Ph.D. in British history, an adjunct for the past two years. "I've spent all these years and I've failed," says IA, who entered graduate school in 1993 and received her Ph.D. in 1999. "You agree to do this five-to-seven-year low-paid apprenticeship because you're joining this guild. And if you end up as an adjunct you think, wow, I'm really getting screwed over."

The also pseudonymous Thomas H. Benton was a frequent contributor to Invisible Adjunct's blog and has penned a series of cautionary columns for the Chronicle of Higher Education. He is even more blunt than IA. "The premise of graduate education in the humanities is a lie: Students are not apprentices preparing for a life of scholarship and teaching," he says. "They are a cheap source of labor and status for institutions and faculty and, after they earn their degrees, most join the reserve army of the academic underemployed." Benton, a professor at a small liberal arts college, warns his students about trying to follow in his footsteps. "My experience as a working-class kid who finally earned an Ivy League Ph.D. is that higher education is not about social mobility or personal enrichment; it is one trap among many for people who are uninitiated into the way power and influence operate in this culture."

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Grad school applications are up slightly over the last decade, as unemployed college grads seek a haven from the job market. Every winter, a new crop of bright, bookish, maybe slightly fuzzy-headed kids, the kind who cover the sidewalks of the Lower East Side and Williamsburg, decide they're sick enough of the 9-to-5 grind to borrow some money and go back to school.

Unlike trade schools, most graduate programs do not offer prospective students detailed data on job placement, which varies widely from program to program. Tri-State Semi Driver Training School in Middletown, Ohio, for example, guarantees a job before you even start driving, while the American Language Institute in San Diego promises lifetime placement assistance to its teachers of English as a foreign language. Your local Ivy League English department can't offer the same deal: Last year, the Modern Language Association expected some 965 Ph.D.'s to be granted, while only 422 assistant professorships were advertised, a drop of 20 percent from the year before. In the foreign languages, there were only 263 positions advertised (for the 620 Ph.D.'s projected), a drop of one-third from the previous year. The MLA estimates that students who entered English programs in 2003 had a 20 percent chance of coming out with a tenure-track position. The situation is better in history, where the number of new Ph.D.'s in 2003 almost equalled the number of new jobs, after a decade of "overproduction," with growth coming in trendy specializations like the Middle East.

But numbers like these do little to deter the best students. "Top undergraduates are arrogant; they lack perspective," says Benton. "They've been fawned over all their lives, and they think grad school is there to help them realize their potential, not to use them up and toss them out."

Dan Friedman completed a Ph.D. in comparative literature from Yale University this spring after 10 years. He now teaches at a private high school in New Jersey, making twice the $25,000 he was offered as a university part-timer. He says that as a TA back at Yale, he tried to warn his favorite students. "I've had a few bright students, majors, who are often interested in carrying on and I've said to all of them, 'Don't do it.' I really wanted them to stop and think. And without exception, they thought I was joking. Only one of them came back to me—she ended up at NYU—and said, 'Now I know what you were talking about.'" Friedman says, however, that he isn't sure he would have taken his own advice back then. "I didn't know what I was getting into. It would have been different if I had known. You're committed to your subject and you think, I want to study literature. You don't think of yourself as a 40-year-old trying to support a family."
As a scholar of contemporary theory, Friedman quotes a cultural critic's perspective on the economic impact of the love of learning. "As graduate students get more and more exploited, people believe in it more and do it despite the difficulty." He refers to the 2001 book The Invisible Heart by feminist economist Nancy Folbre, which describes how the work that is most important to a society tends to be the most undervalued. "Teachers, nurses, people who do things they really care about, get shafted."

Devotion to the academic world, however, is not necessarily healthy. "People develop this identity," says IA. "They say, 'This intellectual work is who I am.' And it's hard to give that up. Even though there are two jobs in your field this year and 300 candidates, it still feels like you've failed."

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Ironically, defining herself as essentially an academic cuts off the humanities Ph.D. student's best shot at making a decent living: a job outside the academy. Last year, Alexandra Lord and Julie Taddeo created the website Beyond Academe, whose purpose is to profile history Ph.D.'s, like themselves, who've found satisfactory employment while still practicing their discipline—with museums, nonprofit foundations, government agencies, or as researchers for companies."I've been stunned by what people have said at some of the blog sites," Lord says. "They seem o believe that working as an adjunct and earning $19,000 and having no health insurance is preferable to working outside the academy. I think this prejudice is even stronger with people in grad school now than it is among older faculty." For her own part, Lord has no regrets. "I was a single New York woman teaching in a small rural own in Montana. I could go days without speaking to my colleagues, and all my social contact was with 18- to 20-year-olds. I felt that I had sacrificed my personal life for a professional career and I didn't see a reward." Now a public historian in Washington, D.C., Lord has peers she can talk to and makes $37,000 more than she did as a enure-track professor.

The Invisible Adjunct is herself headed beyond academe. After making a final pass at the academic job market, she is leaving the academy, and her blog, behind this spring. "I'm finishing up my semester of teaching and then I'm just going to have to figure out what my next move should be."

Like Lord, Friedman has no regrets at leaving the ivy-covered walls. He currently teaches literature and an interdisciplinary seminar to high school freshmen four days a week and coaches soccer. "The best phrase I've heard for us is the intellectual lumpenproletariat," he says, using the Marxist term for the ground-down members of the underclass who lack the class consciousness for revolt. "If something happened to empower those people, there would be an incredible efflorescence of culture in this country, because there's more of them now than there ever has been. But they are too busy scuttling around getting shitty jobs."

Administrative Note 8

I want to let everyone visiting this blog know that I will be unable to make a post next week. I will be doing official travel and my access to the internet will be irregular and uncertain. Please return to the blog on February 23 for another essay.

Blog XLI (41): In the Name of Kant

An editorial entitled "Learning" that appeared in The Charleston Gazette of Charleston, West Virginia on January 25, 2009 notes with sorrow current trends in higher education. It raises important questions about the quality of the education that students receive. It argues that students suffer from the use of adjuncts just as much as the part time instructors. Here is the editorial:

There is profound satisfaction in knowledge, in learning just for the joy of understanding humanity and science to develop an intelligent worldview. "Dare to know, the philosopher Immanuel Kant wrote--strive to be a lifelong seeker of better information, deeper wisdom.

Higher education once focused strongly on this goal. But a gloomy new book, The Last Professors: The Corporate University and the Fate of the Humanities, claims that wisdom is being pushed aside by modern schools rushing to train young people while operating on skimpy budgets.

Only one-third of college faculties now are tenured professors or tenure-track teachers, the book says. Most classes are taught by part-time adjunct instructors paid much less than real scholars.

Cash-strapped universities don't "hire the most experienced teachers, but rather the cheapest teachers," author Frank Donoghue, in the English department at Ohio State University, writes. Today, new hires include three adjuncts for every full timer.

Humanities topics such as history, literature, philosophy and the like are crowded out by career-track courses--vocationalism," he calls it.

In a New York Times essay about the book, Stanley Fish says the saddest example is the new for profit university that serves only "to deliver the information and skills necessary to gain employment... The mode of delivery--a disc, a computer screen, a video hookup--doesn't matter so long as delivery occurs. He quotes the fonder of online Phoenix University: "Coming here is not a rite of passage. We are not trying to develop value systems or go in for 'expand their minds.'"

College-going has boomed enormously as America's plunges into the Information Age, which requires high-tech training. Processing millions of students is an industry that must be done with industrial efficiency. Author Donoghue says academia never can return to the era of full-time scholars carefully instilling generalized wisdom in small clusters of young thinkers. This is sad. But perhaps many of today's graduates will discover, later on, that it's deeply reward to study, purely on their own, pursuing the life of the mind.

Blog XL (40): Less Than A Third

Today's entry is Stacy Cowley's article, "Outlook Grim For Prospective Professors; Disappearing Job Postings Prompt Ph.D.'s to Mull a Career Change." This feature appeared in the January 21, 2009 issue of The Village Voice. Cowley's reporting raises important issues about employment possibilities for the newly minted Ph.D. and suggests that many--actually most--Ph.D.s should look for employment outside of academia. Here is the article:

The American Economic Association's job board recently sprouted a brand-new section: cancelled listings. Newly minted economics Ph.D.'s and postdocs looking for their next academic job will instead find pages and pages of frozen and suspended searches, more than 50 in all. It's the same story for classicists and archaeologists checking the American Philological Association's listings, which now start with a roster of misery-a rundown of all the positions that no longer exist. Job hopefuls in psychology, film studies, creative writing, and sociology have created wikis to swap news about spiked listings, a death register that includes opportunities at Dartmouth, Cornell, Harvard, Hofstra, Fordham, and nearly every open search in the SUNY and Cal State systems.

Never mind a hiring freeze. For those seeking jobs in academia, next year is looking more like a nuclear winter.

"Last year, about a quarter of the positions I applied for had their searches canceled, and last year's market didn't look as bad as this year's," says one aspirant, art historian Sandra Cheng. "I'm wondering how many of these positions I'm applying for are actually real."

Now a visiting assistant professor at Pratt, Cheng got her Ph.D. in May at the University of Delaware and has a résumé filled with fellowships and grants. She's seeking a traditional academic livelihood: research, travel, and teaching, at a university with tenure-track positions. But after a year of job-hunting and piecing together part-time positions, Cheng is wondering if the career she envisioned still exists.

"I do sense a permanent change," she says. "I wonder if this is the last leg for the tenure system."

At the American Historical Association's annual conference/job fair, held in New York earlier this month, researcher Sterling Fluharty presented a paper about the job market in his field with a blunt conclusion: "Job seekers in history need to think more about their employment prospects in non-academic fields." A grad student at the University of Oklahoma, Fluharty mined data and found that less than a third of those who earned a Ph.D. in history between 1966 and 1992 were tenured faculty as of 2003. Even before this year's market meltdown, the move away from offering full-time, tenured positions was accelerating. By Fluharty's calculations, within the next decade, 55 percent of all university history faculty members will be working in part-time positions.

As professionals in fields with weak demand head back to grad school to sit out the market for a bit, grad students are investigating their own options for staying out of the job fray. Katy Pearce, a third-year Ph.D. candidate in communications at the University of California Santa Barbara, had planned to wrap up her studies this year. But when she returned from a stretch of fieldwork in Armenia, she found that "everyone in my program that was expecting to go on the job market this year all bailed. They just weren't seeing anything being listed."

Pearce's program guarantees funding for up to four years, so she decided to delay graduation, focus on burnishing her publishing credentials, and hope hiring prospects in 2010 look brighter. But as schools cut back their undergraduate enrollments to bridge budget gaps, she's wondering if the demand will be there for new grad students and for professors to teach them.

"At the last conference I went to, I heard that one of the jobs that opened at Northwestern, 400 people applied for. Usually, 100 apply," she says. "So many assistant professors have gotten cut. For those of us just getting our Ph.D.'s, how can we compete against people who have already been an assistant for a year or two?"

Those odds have Cheng reconsidering her career path. She's thinking about detouring away from art history and going into academic administration-universities are businesses, and businesses always need managers to run them. But if she does stick with teaching, she'd like to land a school where she can concentrate on undergraduates. Cheng is queasy about the idea of encouraging future art historians along into a field unable to absorb them.

"For Ph.D.'s in the humanities market, it's almost like we really shouldn't make any more, because there's such a backlog of doctorates floating around out there and we don't have the jobs," she says. "The programs want more grad students to keep their departments floating, but is it really ethical, I wonder?"

Blog XXXIX (39): Getting Paid

An issue that often gets little notice in graduate school, but become very real afterwards is the amount of pay that one makes as an academic. Terry L. Allison, the dean of the College of Arts and Letters at California State University, Los Angeles discusses this issue in a guest editorial he wrote for the San Gabriel Valley Tribune, a newspaper that circulates in the eastern suburbs of Los Angeles. This essay appeared in the paper on September 29, 2009. Here is Allison's op-ed:

On the recent Labor Day weekend I was catching up with old friends and naturally the state of the California economy came up. One of my friends, a very well informed person, complained of all the highly paid university administrators in the two state systems, knowing that I might be one of them.

"One acting department chair at UCSD is getting $267,000," she said!
I told my friend that after years of diminishing numbers of tenure-track faculty we had done a number of recruitments in the past year resulting in 16 new hires in the College of Arts and Letters at Cal State Los Angeles. I explained that most faculty members had at least eight years of university education and several had 10 or 13 years. Then I asked my well-informed friend how much she thought they earned as new professors.

"$175,000 a year?" she asked.

"No, about $60,000," I replied. "That's all we can afford to pay."

Is Cal State LA particularly cheap among the CSUs? I regularly meet with my fellow arts, humanities and social sciences deans and we discuss what it cost to hire faculty. Cal State LA is about in the middle of the 23 campuses in salaries. Our exact figures? New faculty who have a master of fine arts degree got on average $60,400; those with doctoral degrees get $62,211 per year. But this new school year they will earn 9.23 percent less on CSU's furlough program. I mention these specific dollar amounts so you understand how little we value higher education in our state. Accountants, information scientists, chemical engineers, and many other new bachelor degree recipients earn on average $50,000 to $70,000 per year. Our newly minted professors, who often have spent years as low-paid teaching assistants accumulating student loans, finally grab their dream job only to find that it barely pays the rent.
One of my colleagues had to work at Hallmark Cards, others moonlight in community colleges, and still others take on consultant or other work just to make ends meet.

That doesn't mean that the faculty doesn't work hard. In fact, they typically work between 50-60 hours per week to prepare for class, teach, grade, hold office hours, do administrative work and creative work or research. For that work, we pay less than many prison guards or plumbers earn in California.

This year, I'm very excited about our new hires, some selected from among hundreds of applicants. I also worry how long they'll stay and whether they can afford to remain, especially if they plan to have children. The two main reasons we lose newer faculty are the cost of living versus salary and because some faculty who accept our job really prefer to work at a research university. The second reason is acceptable; people learn through working what they want to do most. But the first reason, to lose promising people who we know can succeed and contribute to California, is a tragedy we witness too often.

Building a quality faculty at a public university is a decades-long project frequently interrupted by California's roller coaster tax base. Without any more tricks or budgetary lock-ins, we Californians need to find a way to finance our future through more dependable spending on higher education.

We must continue to attract and retain the brightest new professors through decent salary, benefits, and workload. We can continue to skimp but ultimately we will pay -through less business creation, a lower tax base, higher unemployment, outflow of skilled jobs, higher social welfare, and yes, even higher prison costs. That's a future we simply can't afford.

Blog XXXVIII (38): The Plight of the Adjunct, an Alternate View

The use of adjuncts has generated a lot of interest among the readers of this blog. Many people are angry at what they see as the exploitive behavior of academic administrators. There is good reason for this anger, very good reason, but it is also time to look at the other side of the issue. The basic idea of using part time instructors is sound. If you are a journalism school and the news anchor of your NBC affiliate station is interested in teaching a class on broadcast journalism, bring him in and have him teach a class. This practice adds some zest to your programs of instruction and makes them more creditable. It also makes your anchor feel good, because he is sharing some of his insights and helping contribute to the development of his profession. Who does not like to do that?

The problem, though, is that administrators (provosts, deans, and department chairs) have been using adjuncts to make up the shortfalls between budgets and programmed requirements. This tendency is understandable. If you only so much money, you need to make sure that you go as far as possible with your limited resources. You can either hire a full time instructor, (pay his health benefits and retirement) and get four or five classes out of him/her, or for the same amount of money hire 10 part timers who will teach two classes each.

The heavy reliance on part-time instructors is not good for anyone. Since Ph.D. programs overproduced, there are plenty of scholars who will take this part-time work in order to keep a foot in the profession for which they were educated and trained. Doing this for a year or two while you are writing your dissertation or after you have finished and are looking for a job is okay, but trying to live on part time pay for five or six years is not; you do not end up in a good place economically or professionally. It is also bad for the full-time faculty. It makes it difficult for departments to hire more people and develop their programs. Deans can and often do say, it is easier to hire an adjunct than give you the money for a new permanent faculty member. You cannot build a graduate program with part-timers. It also hurts the permanent faculty when it comes to their salaries. If you want a pay raise, it is very easy for the administration to say no when there are honestly 50 people who would do the job for half of your wage. It is also shortchanges the students. They and their families are shelling out a lot of money for a quality education and they deserve instruction from people that are going to be devoted to that effort. Taking a journalism class from adjunct professor Walter Cronkite would be a real blast and a highlight of your undergraduate career, but what would it be like if you took ¾ of your course work in your major from part-time instructors who probably are new and, more importantly, cannot devote as much time to their profession because they are trying to do something else to bring in adequate money to take care of their own needs. Adjuncts are unhappy and for good reason.

So why does this system continue? Naomi Schaefer Riley addresses this question in a thoughtful editorial she wrote for The Wall Street Journal. "So You Want to be a Professor" appeared in the April 24, 2009 issue of that paper. Riley is the deputy taste editor of the Journal, and the author of God on the Quad: How Religious Colleges and the Missionary Generation Are Changing America (2005). She argues there are sound reasons why the main constituencies of universities have little concern about the use of adjuncts, which should give us all reason to pause. Here is her column:

Late last month, the Web site Inside Higher Ed reported that several universities were shrinking the number of students admitted to their Ph.D. programs this year. Emory University is cutting its doctoral students by 40% -- admitting 220 this fall, down from 360 a year before. Columbia is reducing its intake by 10%. New York University is planning a reduction, although a "very modest" one, according to school officials. And the University of South Carolina is considering a plan to have some departments admit doctoral students only every other year.

There are several reasons for this doctoral downsizing. For one thing, teaching graduate students costs universities money -- at least on first glance. Ohio University economist Richard Vedder estimates that schools spend anywhere from five to 15 times as much on graduate students as on undergraduates. Grad students are taught in small classes with senior professors. And students in doctoral programs (as opposed to those who leave after taking master's degree) are generally on some kind of fellowship. They pay no tuition and receive a school-year stipend between $10,000 and $20,000.

But graduates students also act as teaching assistants, doing a great deal of time-consuming classroom work (and grading) that professors themselves are thus not compelled to do. In all sorts of courses, especially in their freshman and sophomore years, undergraduates may find themselves being instructed more often by a 25-year-old doctoral candidate than by the university's full-time faculty members, who, of course, already have their doctorates (and one or two books to their credit, too). It is an odd, upside-down arrangement, but it has an economic logic: By providing cheap labor, graduate students save college administrations millions of dollars each year in salary costs.

So why the cuts? Well, the calculations work out differently for different schools. For instance, universities in lower tiers might not have to do as much because they can get away with having a higher percentage of classes taught by graduate students. But some of the schools making doctoral cuts this year gave compassion as their reason. Catherine R. Stimson, the dean of Graduate School of Arts and Science at New York University, was quoted in Inside Higher Ed: Given the state of the academic job market, she asked, referring to would-be doctoral candidates: "Is it fair to bring them in?"

It sounds like a logical question, but is it really? After all, the dire academic job market is nothing new. As Peter Berkowitz recalls from his time as a graduate student and professor at Harvard and Yale in the 1980s and '90s: "The departments knew that something like half the students they admitted to their programs wouldn't get Ph.D.s." And, says Mr. Berkowitz (who is now a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution), "something like half of those wouldn't get tenure-track jobs."

In an article called "Contingent Faculty and the New Academic Labor System" (2004), Gwen Bradley notes that an academic job shortage is rarely the result of some surprising lurch in supply-and-demand curves, since "the same institutions both manufacture and consume the Ph.D. product." In other words, universities know very well that they are producing far more Ph.D.s than they need. Compare this situation with the medical profession. Even if medical residents are made to work long hours under difficult conditions, the vast majority of them will get jobs as doctors. The vast majority of, say, Ph.D.s in English literature will not. Given that the typical doctoral degree takes six or seven years to complete (during prime job-training and family-forming years), there is a moral problem here. It is no great exaggeration to say, as Mr. Berkowitz does: "Many lives are ruined this way."

With more and more people going to college, one might reasonably wonder why there hasn't actually been a shortage of Ph.D.s in recent years. Two decades ago William Bowen, a former president of Princeton University, predicted as much, claiming that there would soon be far more university teaching jobs than academics to fill them. He co-authored a study foreseeing "a real shortfall" in the humanities and social sciences starting in the late 1990s.

The shortage never materialized. Even during boom times, there was not much of an uptick in job listings for university faculty. Any increase in job demand was met by an overwhelming increase in labor supply. Universities began hiring adjunct faculty members. They typically teach courses at more than one school. (In California, they're referred to as "freeway flyers.") They don't get benefits and, all told, probably earn less than minimum wage.

Not surprisingly, these adjunct faculty members are feeling exploited and getting angry. In recent years, their concerns have been taken more seriously by the American Association of University Professors, which now has committees engaged in rigorous hand-wringing over their ordeal. Marc Bousquet, the author of "How the University Works," sees a couple of key ironies in the academic job market: Getting a Ph.D. now often means the end of an academic career rather than the beginning of one; and the American university, which claims to be an egalitarian institution, relies on people who can only afford to take badly paid adjunct teaching positions because they have another source of income, either from a spouse's job or a second job of their own.

One response may be: So what? Is there any compelling reason that universities--as self-interested as any institution--should reconsider their employment policies? Why not staff classes with adjunct labor? Why not give customers the same product at a lower cost?

The last question points to a bigger problem, though: Is it the same product? Who knows? Higher education has gone so far off the rails in recent years that parents and students hardly know what they are supposed to have learned in a freshman composition course or in Sociology 101. And as long as there is a degree waiting at the other end, they hardly care.

Blog XXXVII (37): The Plight of the Adjunct, Part II

The following article appeared in The Atlanta Journal-Constitution on September 28, 2009 as a guest editorial on that paper's opinion section. The author is Eric Fox and the essay had the title: "Adjuncts Exploited on College Campuses." This essay raises some of the issues that I discussed on April 6, 2009 in Blog IV and that the Tim Norton editorial discussed in Blog XXXIV on November 30, 2009. Here is Fox's editorial:

For the past four years I was an adjunct instructor of English at a technical college in Georgia. I taught hundreds of classes, thousands of students, developed solid relationships with faculty and administrators, and received outstanding student evaluations and recommendations from colleagues.
And then, at the whim of administrators, my contract was canceled. The college was under no obligation to explain to me their reasons, nor did I have any legal recourse in finding out why I was let go. Being a temporary employee, I was "merely" expendable.
This is the life of the college adjunct, where job security, health benefits, administrative support and fair compensation are the rare exceptions in a field in which 68 percent of all new faculty appointments are now part-time or non-tenure-track positions.
Colleges and universities across America have been successfully exploiting this system for years because it saves them money--money they can spend on parking decks, buildings and football stadiums.
There's nothing wrong with maintaining infrastructure and keeping pace with expanding enrollments, but not when it's disproportionately placed on the backs of part-time faculty.
Then it becomes a social injustice. Temporary faculty rarely have the bargaining power or the collective representation of traditional unions, so their ability to negotiate a fair salary is thwarted. Administrators can safely offer lower salaries, knowing that enough teachers are willing to work for reduced wages.
Some adjuncts accept these conditions because they have a second job, or a working spouse, and the poor compensation is tolerated. Others, however, are not so fortunate.
To make ends meet many adjuncts commute long distances to two, sometimes three colleges a week. I know. I did it for years.
I'm now teaching four classes, a full load for a college professor, but my compensation barely covers my monthly expenses. And because my employment is temporary, I have little opportunity for advancement.
With little incentive to stay, many adjuncts leave, so turnover rates are high, depriving students and schools of the critical continuity needed for a healthy educational culture. Recently, I encountered a situation that powerfully emphasizes the inequity of part-time teaching.
My employer offers students and adjuncts a health clinic, where minor illnesses can be evaluated and treated. The clinic also provides counseling services. When I contacted the clinic to speak to a counselor, I was told that the clinic couldn't help me. They only help students.
If I have a cut, or a cold, or a nose bleed, then I am accorded respect and treated. But if I seek help for a common emotional condition, such as stress or anxiety, then I am shunned, and told to seek help elsewhere. Is not the emotional health of a teacher as important for the classroom environment as the effective treatment of a cold?
Further, my employer prides itself on its progressive institutions and humane attitudes in solving various problems of the human community. Am I not part of that human community?
This double standard is galling. It speaks to the absurdity of a system that wastes the talents of dedicated teachers, drives them from the classroom, and punishes the students who are promised an extraordinary education, but only at the price of an exploited faculty.
Without pressure on administrators to reform the system, contingent faculty will continue to face workplace discrimination on various levels, resulting in a further erosion of professionalism, collegiality and scholarship.
How is this good for America's students?