Today’s Wall Street Journal has a long column by one of the Taste page editors, Naomi Shaefer Riley, on the issue of adjunct labor in today’s financial climate. It begins with another trend, the lowering of graduate admissions for the coming year. (My school, Emory U., is cited as reducing doctoral lines by 40 percent.)
Riley raises the standard explanation that graduate programs are darned expensive to maintain. Ohio U. economist Richard Vedder “estimates that schools send anywhere from five to 15 times as much on graduate students as on undergraduates.” They take small classes with senior profs, and they usually don’t pay tuition, instead receiving a stipend of $10k to $20k each year.
Then again, Riley notes, they also provide a financial service for universities. They teach lots and lots of freshman and sophomore courses without pay. “By providing cheap labor,” she says, “graduate students save college administrations millions of dollars each year in salary costs.”
If they do help the bottom line, though, why are schools cutting admissions? Riley believes that the reasons vary. Large state schools probably don’t have to make many cuts because they can get away with having nearly all their 100-level intro courses taught by grad students and adjuncts. Small private schools with high tuition, though, need to put a fair number of regular profs into freshman classes, so the rate of grad admissions reductions will go up.
Riley also cites the “compassion” argument, namely, that with the job market so bad in so many fields, it is unfair to send so many Ph.D.‘s into the world.
But she rejects that argument, noting that the job market has been terrible for years. She cites Gwen Bradley’s article “Contingent Faculty and the New Academic Labor System” (2004), which argues 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.’”
The logic doesn’t fly, and it has given rise to an increasingly restive adjunct population. She paraphrases our own Marc Bousquet, who “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.”
The problem, Riley concludes, is that universities have an easy and cynical answer: “So what?” As long as undergraduate applications stay high, as long as “customers” are happy, who cares what adjuncts and graduate students say? Indeed, “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.”
That’s a depressing finale, so let’s change the subject and take a look here at a symposium at National Review where a group of contributors, myself included, single out their favorite play (King Lear wins).
