What's it like to be higher ed adjunct faculty? Tell your story

[yurbud]

For decades, higher education has been aping the personnel practices of corporate America and relying more and more on part time, temporary, and non-tenure track faculty, especially to teach the course required for graduation.

While this is great for administrators to free up money in their budget for other things, it can wreck havoc on the lives of those who didn't expect to get rich teaching but did expect to be able to pay their rent and student loan payments every month and know that they'd continue to have a job if they were doing it relatively well.



Various groups have been working on changing this at the state level, and adjuncts and contingent faculty are finally starting to come together at a national level in groups like the New Majority Faculty, which I am a part of.

To help us figure out which things to focus on changing, WE NEED YOUR STORIES.

You can post them as text in the comments of this article http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YbAXuOqbJx4">or if you are feeling more multimedia, as a video reply to this youtube thread.

Tell us what has happened to you as an adjunct, non-tenure track, part time, temporary (usually all of the above) faculty member in higher education, both on the job and in your personal life as a consequence of having a job.

For example, http://equalpayforequalwork.blogspot.com/2007/09/letter-to-legislators-grandparents-paid.html">I told my own story here, and the story of http://equalpayforequalwork.blogspot.com/2007/10/death-of-trash-digging-professor.html">an instructor who resorted to going through the trash for pop cans to make ends meet. I have known instructors who still lived with their parents into their fifties and others who have had marriages unravel because their income didn't live up to their spouse's expectations for someone with their education level.



On the professional front, a friend of mine set up a PACE program for his college, then when the time came to give someone a full-time tenure track job to run it, they hired someone from outside the school (who promptly asked my friend how to do his job since he had padded his resume). Just recently, this instructor was fired from his community college after eighteen years of service, most likely because he was vice president of the part time faculty union.

Your stories will not only help us figure out what to fight for but give us powerful evidence to present to legislators and groups that work on higher education issues that using Walmart labor practices does real harm to real people.

If you wish to remain anonymous, that's fine, though the more specific the details, the more useful your story will be, for example, say what state you are in, whether you are at a two-year or four-year college or research university, public or private, what discipline you teach in, your qualifications to teach, and how long you've been doing it. Any information you don't want to include is okay though.

https://www.blogger.com/comment.g?blogID=25327285&postID=4109125436885696772">Post written stories

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YbAXuOqbJx4">Post video stories

NOTE: You can post your stories here too. Eventually, I'll figure out how to consolidate all of them with those posted elsewhere.

[Jackpine Radical]

1. OK, I played. Here's what I wrote:

I spent several years on the part-time, adjunct academic staff trail after finishing my psych PhD just in time for the Carter debacle followed by the Reagan Depression. I thought I was well on my way to a nice tenure-track position when I left grad school with a half-dozen articles accepted by peer-reviewed journals, but that was not to be. Between academic stints I lived on soft money doing program evaluation work and the like, until I retreaded myself as a clinical psychologist and abandoned all hope of the academic career I originally sought, and which I still mourn--although my income is no doubt better than it would have been in Academe.

[villager]

2. I'm an "online college instructor" (among other things!)... and have just been furloughed

...until the new fiscal year starts. Since, I think, the dreaded "benefits" would have to be paid, if I worked straight through and amassed more hours...

[yurbud]

3. that sounds familiar

[Liberal_in_LA]

4. Competition for tenure track postions is fierce. Folks figured out what a cushy gig professors have

yeah, I said it.

Ratio of apps to open position is about 300 to 1 around here.

[yurbud]

5. a couple of things would change that:

If more classes were taught by full time tenure track faculty instead of adjuncts, that app ratio would go way down.

Also, since adjuncts are paid less than tenure track, they often teach MORE than the equivalent of a full time load.

In addition, to offset the cost of benefits and pay for tenure track faculty, administrators pressure them to teach overload classes above a full load. Here in California, this is done exactly the opposite of overtime pay in any other industry at the community college level: tenure track faculty get paid at the adjunct rate for their overload.

If most were teaching exactly full time gigs, there wouldn't be as big a difference between supply and demand.

The way it is currently set up on helps the bean counters, administrators, and trustees who are looking for ways to free up money to throw to their cronies in contracts for software and building improvements.

[Liberal_in_LA]

6. The changes you suggest make sense. Tenure track would fight to the death to

block those changes.

[yurbud]

8. which is partly why the tenure & non-tenure tracks were created:

Divide and conquer is one of the simplest and most effective union-busting tactics. Once in place, the employer doesn't even have to do that much, just throw out some scrap of money and watch us fight over it like ravenous pit bulls.

[smoogatz]

10. You guys are both missing the nut here, in varying degrees.

The crux of the problem is declining public support for public universities, combined with rising enrollment. Administrators have to do more with less, and everybody gets screwed.

[yurbud]

11. that is part of the problem. the other part is that administrators get way ahead of that cutting

curve and figure out ways to line cronies pockets with the difference.

[smoogatz]

12. I've been around academia my whole life, pretty much

and in my experience what high-level administrators do is create jobs for each other, generate a lot of ridiculous committee busy work for the faculty, Chairs and Deans in order to burnish their resumés, and then move on to other schools that offer more lucrative compensation packages. It's a racket, but it's not quite the racket you think it is, mostly. All the building stuff is ridiculous, but there's actually a logical rationale for it if you start to think, as administrators do, of the degree and the "college experience" as commodities the universities are selling to students, aka customers. Generally the building contracts are handed out to cronies of state legislators, not cronies of administrators--although I'm sure the latter is occasionally the case, too.

[yurbud]

17. state legislators for universities, trustees cronies for community college districts

[smoogatz]

18. Trustees!

Almost forgot about them. yeah, that's a racket, too, but not one over which the admins have much (if any) control. The trustees are their bosses.

[yurbud]

35. funny thing, my local got a trustee elected. After he'd been in office for a couple of months...

I asked him why he hadn't stopped the administrators from doing something since he was their boss and he said, "Not exactly..."

The administrators had convinced him he didn't have much power over them. I don't think that's typical. More often, the people attracted to the trustee positions are like any other politician--they are in it to work the angles and line their pockets. Administrators who figure that out and go along with it probably get farther and those who don't probably don't get far.

[yurbud]

19. I would also differ on the ''college experience.'' they are trying to create the appearance

not the reality of it.

They remind me of how a friend described her alcoholic father. They had a house that looked nice and well-kept on the outside, but inside there was no furniture and the cupboards were bare.

It's kind of the neutron bomb model of higher ed--kill the people and keep the buildings.

[smoogatz]

20. Yep.

You got that right. The faculty have become the least important and most expendable element in the whole undertaking. It'll be interesting to see how/if that changes here when we get collective bargaining--I have a feeling that in five years or so the landscape will be very different.

[rucky]

13. Tuition increases don't cover it?

There has been enough of them over the past 20 years - way above inflation.

[smoogatz]

14. Nope.

In order to generate sufficient revenue from tuition to make up the difference, most schools have had to raise tuition AND grow enrollment, which means they have to offer more sections of required classes, and figure out how to house and feed all those extra students, and how to recruit and retain them, which is another big problem. Most states put limits on the amount that schools can increase tuition, too, which is obviously problematic. Here in Wisconsin, we're once again in the throes of a system-wide hiring freeze; our department lost two lines for which we'd already done searches--one of them permanently. The cuts in state support have been dramatic, to say the least. Faculty at UW-Madison actually floated a proposal for secession from the UW-system a few years ago; state support had fallen below about 17% of their budget, but of course the legislature et al still wanted to tell them what to do. If you get a chance, it's worth watching "Declining By Degrees," a fine film about the rolling crisis that is American higher education.

[smoogatz]

9. Tell me about my cushy job.

90+ student load, 4 courses/preps a semester, 60-70-hour weeks, under $50k with no raises the last three years and furloughs likely in 2010. We make less at our regional U than the public school teachers here in town--but of course they have union representation. We're forbidden to unionize by state law, although that's apparently changing, thank God.

The reason there are so many applications is that there are so few jobs and so many graduate schools cranking out PhDs. If schools used fewer adjuncts and created more tenure-track lines, the job market would be better, obviously. They're forced to use adjuncts mostly because state support for public universities has declined dramatically over the last thirty years: we get less than 20% of our total budget from the state, compared to around 45% thirty years ago--and that's true of public universities all over the country.

[alcibiades_mystery]

23. I work 75-80 hour weeks

And spent most of my twenties in near poverty.

Real "cushy."

:thumbsup:

[smoogatz]

25. Bingo.

People don't get it. They have this idea that college professors all teach 2/2 and make $100k/yr. If you're not Ivy League, second-tier private, or at a big R1, things look a little different.

[alcibiades_mystery]

26. Well

I teach 2/2, but I don't make that much...:-)

Still, I haven't met any serious faculty positions that don't require 60+ hours a week of actual work. The difference is that you can pick *which* 60; it's this freedom that some mistake for "cushiness."

[Liberal_in_LA]

31. real different for tenure professors at CA public universities

[alcibiades_mystery]

32. I know plenty

I don't agree. Some work hard and some lay off after they get their letter. But between research, service, and teaching, there's a lot of work that's unseen by the general public.

[aikoaiko]

7. Unless you have a different full time job, choosing to be an adjunct prof is one of the worst career

choices possible. Now if college teaching is a passion and you not good enough to get a tenure track position, then it might be worth the suffering, but probably not.

Wal-mart would be a better career choice than an adjunct professorship for many people.

[smoogatz]

16. A lot of adjuncts go into it to earn money and work on their teaching chops

while they finish their dissertations, etc. Lots of ABDs doing adjunct work. I was an adjunct for years, off and on, before finally being hired to a tenure-line job. I did it partly because I love teaching and partly because it was good CV--it was never a career choice as such. I don't think anybody says "I want to be an adjunct professor when I grow up."

[aikoaiko]

28. And that's fine. A lot of people have to do more to get that tenure track position

Some people need post-docs, other take adjunct positions. But some people continue down this path and lament their situation.

[lolly]

22. Love that "not good enough to get tenure"

You do realize that at many colleges, especially state and community colleges, tenure track profs were hired years ago when competition was much lower. Many of the tenure track folks (not all, of course) are there because of luck--right place at right time--and they are surrounded by adjuncts with higher degrees, more experience, even better publishing records. Enrollments go up, but instead of adding more tenure track jobs, they add 2-3 more adjuncts.

To add insult to injury, when they DO have an open tenure track position, they may exclude adjuncts from applying. They're damaged goods.

[smoogatz]

24. True dat.

In my last couple of years as an adjunct here I had more/better pubs than any of the tenured/tenure-line people in my specialty, and better teaching evals than most. It's not necessarily about who's better: higher ed has been in a hiring depression for twenty years. For a lot of folks who end up as adjuncts, too, the stumbling block is finishing the dissertation. It takes time and money to write a book; an understanding and supportive spouse helps, too.

[aikoaiko]

27. this is true of many jobs. its a competitive market and some didn't compete well enough

Every discipline still has tenure track positions open.

[janx]

15. Thank God you posted this!

I have 40 papers to grade today and can't spend much time online, but I'm bookmarking this thread. You have no idea how timely this is.

[L. Coyote]

21. Contact the Adjunct group at Maricopa Community College

the largest employer of adjuncts in the world, I suspect.
MCC employ about 90% adjuncts, no insurance or health care, no benefits at all, just contract work.

[izzybeans]

29. As a former adjunct faculty I just want to say that its not entirely true that they "ape the

practices of corporate America" because I have never worked for a company that treated me as poorly as the two academic institutions where I used to work. The second institution actually led me to quit work on my dissertation because I had discovered that the myth of academia as a shining beacon on a hill was bankrupting my family.

They are doing more than aping corporate America; with adjuncts they are rewriting forms of labor exploitation.

Thanks for this link. I will add mine.

[yurbud]

34. I'd amend to "ape poorly"

[a la izquierda]

30. Ah, gee thanks. I'm now going to have nightmares.

Should have PhD in hand by May 2010.

[eridani]

33. To avoid having stories like this is why I went to work in industrial research n/t