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Brainstorm: Lives of the Mind Mark Bauerlein

Most Higher-Ed Executives Are Underpaid

cross-posted from howtheuniversityworks.com

In connection with The Chronicle’s Executive Compensation supplement, Sandy Ungar of Goucher College and I just appeared on NPR — and we agreed on most things. Sandy, for instance, described faculty compensation as “appalling,” and concurred regarding our over-reliance on contingent appointments. I argued that we needed to rebuild our crumbling faculty infrastructure, and that presidents should be held responsible for staffing arrangements that lead to scandalously low graduation rates.

I’ll write more about this later, but for now you can listen to the interview and read our commentary.

Excerpted from my piece, Asking Whether Presidents are Overpaid is the Wrong Question:


Using one form or another of peer comparison, many administrators can easily show that they should earn 20 or 30 percent more than their current salary. But that relatively modest underpayment pales beside the perennial exploitation of adjunct faculty members. At least 70 percent of today’s faculty members serve contingently, and those who serve part-time at community colleges can teach eight or 10 courses a year for less than $20,000, without health or retirement benefits. Faculty members in such conditions can easily argue that they should earn 200 percent to 300 percent of their current salaries, suggesting an underpayment 10 times as extreme as that of most administrators….. Tying executives’ pay ceilings to workers’ salary floor is an internationally established principle of fairness. In private enterprise, recent events have renewed calls to limit the executive multiple to 25 (a figure that the late management guru Peter Drucker once proposed). Typically the multiples for nonprofit groups’ executives are much lower: Military and civil-service pay scales are long-established examples of fairness. The chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff earns only about five times what any college-educated commissioned officer earns. Most state governors are paid less than five times what their college-educated employees earn.

Posted at 01:42:35 PM on November 17, 2008 | All postings by Marc Bousquet

Comments

  1. ASU president Michael Crow earns nearly half a million dollars. He gets a car, $50,000 housing allowance and an annual pension contribution of $85,000. On the other hand, Arizona governor Janet Napolitano earns $95,000. She is part of the state employee pension system with no special perks. She pays her own rent. For safety reasons, an officer from public safey drives her around. As a taxpayer I am appalled that the Board of Regents continues to serve as Crow’s cheerleader when ASU has below average graduation rates. Crow is also a know bigot. He harbors a grudge against Latina women (see Chichilnisky vs Columbia). Yet the Board of Regents keeps showering money on him. Will someone save Arizona from Michael Crow by hiring him at your university?

    — Debra J. White · Nov 17, 03:36 PM · #

  2. I was an adjunct faculty member for seven years at a private university. In the end, I was teaching 16 courses per year, 4 courses each quarter, including summer. I was earning $32,000 per year with no benefits and no guarantee from quarter to quarter that I would be given classes to teach. I was teaching graduate students. Although I LOVE teaching more than any other occupation, I left because I live in one of the most expensive urban areas in the country and could not pay my bills, although I had several other adjunct positions as well.

    — k · Nov 17, 04:31 PM · #

  3. So, at $2,000 per course, how can an instructor provide value to students? And I wonder how much the students were paying.

    The $2000 per course “k” was making happens to be about what I was paid as an adjunct associate professor in a state university between 1978 and 1982. I left for a position outside academia at $42K in 1982. I never earned a BIG salary outside academia, but progressed to a little over $120 K by the time I retired in 2002 as VP of a research company.

    In my most recent (part-time) teaching experience, I was paid $6,000 per section for two sections of the same course. This was at a private college. Upon some examination I discovered that I was being paid the amount one student in my class paid for the course. Yes, I was getting 4% of the college’s income received from tuition for the course, and the other 96% went for “other” expenses. As much as I love to teach people who are interested in learning, that level of compensation was not adequate to sustain my interest.

    To be entirely truthful, though, had more students been interested in learning at that rather expensive private college, I probably would have been willing to continue teaching there, even for the embarrassingly small amount of compensation that was provided.

    I had taught a course at a decent state university a couple of years earlier that I really enjoyed teaching and where I felt all the students were serious about learning. Sadly, the compensation ( about $3000) was not enough to cover my travel and lodging expenses, so I could not continue there.

    In my humble opinion, universities should not be hiring people who are so financially desperate that they will accept compensation that is less than minimum wage. There is a sense in which it is our own fault if we accept very low rates of compensation.

    If colleges and universities wish to hire people who have careers outside academia to teach an occasional course, fine—and maybe the compensation can be a sort of honorarium, rather that a wage.

    I appreciate that administration is not easy, but it is obscene that many administrators earn as much as they do, when instructors earn so little.

    My advice to academics who can’t earn a decent wage in academia is “Get out of academia.” When I got out, I was never again unemployed or under employed until I retired.

    — Joe Erwin · Nov 17, 08:06 PM · #

  4. There is a reason why wages are set by markets and not by “arguing”. If this hypothetical adjunct is willing to teach 10 courses for $20,000 and noone else is offering him more money, than he is by definition not underpaid. He can argue all he wants that he should make $60,000 but why would any conscientious administrator pay him more than he is worth?

    — rightwingprofessor · Nov 17, 09:23 PM · #

  5. Furthermore, Mark is calculating how much adjuncts are underpaid in comparison to permanent faculty. The university presidents are calculating their worth by comparisons to professions outside of academia. If we calculate the underpayment of permanent faculty compared to people with comparable degrees outside of academia, and then calculate how much the adjuncts are underpaid… I’ll let Mark do the calculations.

    — Shar · Nov 17, 09:53 PM · #

  6. Yeah, I was one of those underpaid, mistreated adjuncts.

    I “got out.”

    I’m now unemployed, and I am now wondering if I am unemployable. Advanced degrees, academic research, and teaching experience are not valued any more.

    My education, degrees and awards are next to worthless. It’s no longer 1982.

    — Get out? · Nov 17, 11:58 PM · #

  7. I’m guessing Joe Erwin is a white male, married with kids, and his wife only had to work part time or not at all while raising the kids. The reality of many other people’s lives, like Get out?‘s example, is so far different it is near obscene. And hey, rightwing, just because some people are desperate to eat doesn’t mean administration should take advantage of them. Get real! What is this country coming to when we cannot agree on foundational issues like taking care of PEOPLE? It has nothing, or almost nothing, to do with salary ranges or percentages or ratios, it has to do with what is ethical and fair. I have yet to meet an administration that is even remotely fair, and funny, their ethics don’t always line up either…. Although I would like to know who was paying Erwin $6k per class as an adjunct!!!!! THAT is unheard of!!!!!

    — Annie · Nov 18, 12:40 AM · #

  8. It seems to me that we bicker and bicker about not getting fair wages as adjuncts, and yet nothing happens. I have been reading about this so much in the last year since I have been an adjunct for three years and am finally done with my PhD and am on the job market. Well, I obviously have no guarantee of getting a full-time job, but I told my husband that I will look for a private sector job if I don’t get an academic job this year. I can’t work my tail off for another year without being able to pay my tremendous student-loan debt. (And NOTHING else.) It will break my heart because I went to school for so long and tried so hard to get a job as a college professor, but at some point you have to be realistic.

    — MEH · Nov 18, 01:12 AM · #

  9. Hey, Annie, the response is not to whine about why people should be ‘ethical and fair’, it’s to deploy strength in numbers. Why should anyone be fair to you if all you do is bitch and whine, and never bother organising?

    — dave · Nov 18, 07:59 AM · #

  10. Annie, the government is not supposed to take care of people. People are supposed to take care of themselves. Apparently you lacked a parental unit to tell you that “life’s not fair”!

    — rt · Nov 18, 08:46 AM · #

  11. I hate to see someone say his/her advanced education had no value, because I believe there is (or at least should be) direct value to the individual, whether or not one has found a niche in academia. I do think there is a very serious problem, however, if people go through their program of higher education believing that the only option open to them is in academia. Your academic training should not disqualify you from doing something outside academia. A part of your training should enable you to do research and write, that’s true, and one of the avenues to work outside academia is to actually produce something tangible.

    Hi, Annie. Nice try at characterizing me and my situation, and it is partly right and partly not correct. My wife and I got married about a year before I finished my PhD. We were both divorced, and she had two children from her prior marriage. I had none. She worked full time. When I got my post doc at a good research university, she was hired as my 1/2 time research assistant, partly as a way of providing more compensation than the post-doc position paid, but that was cool! She went back to school, and the research work she did with me fit right in with what she was studying in school. As a mid-thirties undergrad she did some good projects and was first author on some published papers. We got alot done in the 3-yr post-doc interval, but my supervisor was not even able to get the university to pay me what had been promised, and the university refused efforts to get me reclassified to a position that paid a little more and had a future. So I left for what seemed to be a secure research and teaching position. My wife worked full time at a nearby university, but in a clerical position. The institution lost funding for half my salary, I left, and the college went out of business. After that I moved back to where I was originally from and taught for four years as an adjunct. My wife worked full time in the copy center at a local community college. During this time my first book (just an edited volume) was published. I had published a lot of research reports up to that time, and an opportunity came along for me to edit a new scientific journal and to develop a couple of book series. All that went along very well, and I continued to attend professional meetings, organize symposia, develop conferences, and all the regular academic stuff. For the most part, of course, there was no compensation—but the publisher supported my travel to meetings, which was very helpful, along with support of my wife to run the journal editorial office. Our office for the journal was a space in an old cafe that we used as an office for a community ecology nonprofit we had started. We lived in a one-room apartment in the back. The journal came out of an interdisciplinary scientific society I had incorporated while I was a post-doc. My wife started a small business during this interval as well. So, we were scratching and scraping, with two kids in high school, and our income simply was not sustaining. My wife came to me and said “This isn’t working, you have to get a real job.” I tried to find a job locally as a janitor or hospital attendant or social worker or pharmacy clerk—all jobs at which I had experience—but nothing materialized, so I tried going out into the larger world.

    Three opportunities soon emerged. (1) Return to the university where I did my post-doc to do a second PhD in a more employable field. I was accepted into the program with support at twice the salary I had as a post-doc, and with assurance that my wife could also be employed by the university. (2) A training program at CDC for which the stipend was the same as #1. (3) a job as a zoological curator at a major zoo, for which the salary was considerably higher than for either of the other options—but the job did not REQUIRE a PhD. I took the zoo job, where I reported directly to the zoo director, an internationally known zoologist with a PhD from University of Chicago. The job involved management, supervision, design, construction supervision, and an array of things one often does not prepare for in graduate school, but it turned out to be a wonderful opportunity, and very liberating. Your graduate degree can open doors for you, but once through the door, in academia or elsewhere, you must actually be able to do something. That job launched me. I continued to edit the journal and my wife ran the journal office in our home. The professional contacts from doing the journal were good and led to additional opportunities, next, as a full-time journal editor for a notable nonprofit in DC. My continuing professional involvement across disciplinary boundaries, and the publication of several more books, and development of a field project in Indonesia, led me into a position for an NIH research contractor. I worked there for 14 years until I retired. My wife went back to school again in the late 1980s and then got an editorial job for a nonprofit, where she continues to work full time.

    BTW, the $6K per course adjunct thing was not actually called an “adjunct,” but was the most they were able to pay me as a visiting professor sabbatical replacement, but the terms were much like that of an adjunct. I did have a nice private office, though. It was a nice little college. I just was amazed that anyone would pay that much tuition and not try to actually learn something. I recently had an offer to teach as an adjunct for a state college, and they offered me $1800 to teach a course. I had to decline, because that would not have even paid my transportation costs.

    The RWP has a point about market forces. There are always those who will take advantage of desperation. My point is that you don’t have to be desperate. Collective bargaining is one approach, but if you can teach effectively, I’m confident that is not all you can do. And even if that is what you do best, you can get paid more for training people outside academia. If there is something other than teaching you can do, do that. The only way the market for teaching will correct itself is when people refuse to be exploited. Figure out what you can do—and what you enjoy doing enough that you can put alot of energy into it—and do that. Your entire self-concept need not be tied up in being a professor.

    — Joe Erwin · Nov 18, 08:54 AM · #

  12. “There is a reason why wages are set by markets and not by ‘arguing’. If this hypothetical sweatshop worker is willing to work 10 hours a day and on Saturdays for $20,000 and no one else is offering him more money, than he is by definition not underpaid. He can argue all he wants that he should make $60,000 but why would any conscientious sweatshop owner pay him more than he is worth?”

    — Henry C. Frick · Nov 18, 10:06 AM · #

  13. I apologize to all for an excessively lengthy post (above).

    — Joe Erwin · Nov 18, 10:06 AM · #

  14. Something else must be addressed in this discussion on academic labor. Rightwing Professor is correct, whether you like it or not, that the market, glutted with PhDs (and MAs) and with very few (and fewer all the time) TT positions, absolutely favors those who hire and not those who labor. While I think his/her phrasing is slightly tactless, it is inarguable that if a person wants to be in academia and nowhere else, and many more people think similarly, there is no incentive for a department to pay more and offer benefits. You may wish that they would, but academia does not differ from any other employment market. It will buy a product someone is willing to sell (your teaching) at the lowest possible price.

    Given that reality, here’s what adjuncts need to admit: the problem exists not when they are hired, but when they were accepted into graduate school in the first place. We are letting more people in than the market can bear. The departments at which I’ve taught have been overloaded with many grad students of not-great academic backgrounds who then got themselves accepted into these not-stellar schools’ graduate programs (programs created out of vanity or for cheap TA labor). Apparently no one ever told them that the market sucks unless you come out of a top program, so they take on student-loan debt that they later must scramble for labor to start paying down. (I was told very aggressively before I applied to doctoral programs not to accept an offer that wasn’t tuition and stipend for 3-4 guaranteed years—because the market sucked, because it would show a lack of faith in me, and because it meant a program didn’t have strong financial mojo. In my own years as a prof, I have seen nothing to discredit, and much to confirm, the advice I received.) However, lots of students coming out of not-great undergrad schools who then went into not-great gradate schools, paying their way or taking on teaching gigs that kept them from writing a strong diss or publishing (because the school doesn’t make them competitive for fellowships), now wonder why there are a million others like them who are pushing the adjunct market to get bigger and to get stingier.

    Of course, many people get into academia — and will go into subpar programs that can’t show a strong record of placing students in a particular field — very simply because they like the culture. I have met many, many grad students in my okay schools who are deeply in love with the lifestyle—discussing books! getting out that laptop in coffee bars! working out at 3 pm on a Tuesday!—and have unfortunately persuaded themselves that a fourth-rate school, just because it has an underfunded PhD program, will make them competitive with the Harvard students battling for the 6-7 jobs per year. I like this lifestyle too, which is why I became an academic. But it is so seductive that it leads many people to go into academia who shouldn’t as the market now stands—who are not going to get one of the very few TT jobs, and who are consequently going to get swamped by the adjunct wave. If there were fewer people to offer themselves up as cheap labor, universities wouldn’t be able to pay such low wages.

    I ask perennial adjuncts this: if someone had told you before you entered your grad program that most likely you were never going to get a TT job, because the odds were against you already by the time you finished undergrad (the AHA has frightening stats on this), would you have gone ahead? Of course you would. In fact, I’m guessing that any call to lower numbers of students admitted into grad programs, or for grad programs to consider whether the programs are really needed, would be taken here as elitist and discriminatory. So here we stand in a whacked-out market. Universities are never going to raise tuition (especially in this financial climate) or cut the football coach’s salary when there are 50 of you lining up every semester to teach 1 section of comp. If you want to be angry at someone, be angry at that undergrad professor or grad-program professor who didn’t give you the real skinny on what academia is like.

    — Saucy · Nov 18, 10:31 AM · #

  15. Employment prospects for Social Science and Humanities graduates would be much better if Ph.D. programs were not controlled by a tenured professorate immune from market competition.

    Academic programs in these fields tend to run off into pseudo-scholarship of no real practical value precisely because the tenured Social Sciences and Humanities professoriate has so much authority over how merit is measured. They don’t need to give a hoot about real world intellectual or practical accomplishment.

    So its no wonder that graduates of these programs are not well-received in the job market.

    — Ken D. · Nov 18, 10:31 AM · #

  16. I’m an administrator and I barely make more on a 12-month basis than the people teaching in my area…I want that 25 multiplier! There’s no justice in the world! Revolution!

    — anony · Nov 18, 10:34 AM · #

  17. @14 and 15: the relevant “pseudo-scholarship” here is actually the work of labor economists on the “job market” in academic labor. Follow the link above to my home blog, then click on the introduction link (pdf), scan to the discussion of the “waste product of graduate education” and discussion of precisely why labor economist and Princeton president William G. Bowen’s analysis and others failed to describe the shift in higher ed employment. He meant well, as I think you do, but he failed to capture a fundamental shift in employment patterns—casualization—and the role of schooling in it.

    Happy to discuss further if you disagree with that analysis, but I won’t engage in an uninformed shouting match flowing from the assumption that humanities types are soft in the head, etc. Solidarity, M

    — Marc Bousquet · Nov 18, 10:48 AM · #

  18. Saucy (#14),

    I think you’re right on, but for the last assertion that unsuccessful academics should point fingers at professors and grad. programs who don’t let them know that realistically they don’t stand a chance on the market. What’s refreshing about your post is that you acknowledge, thankfully, unlike most people I come across, that people are drawn to academia in large part because of the lifestyle, and not simply because of their undying passion for their subject (blah). Given how downright depressing and detached corporate work can be, I think aiming for an academic job because of the culture and lifestyle it may afford should be (and is often) at the top of people’s lists. That said, as you note, lots of people are going to put themselves out in hopes of an academic position regardless of professors telling them flatly that they their chances are slim. People will still enroll in underfunded and noncompetitive programs knowing that they’re screwed compared to someone from a top program, but nonetheless hoping that they’ll be an exception. So even if we blame sugarcoating professors and exploitative grad. programs that don’t give their graduates a decent chance of decent employment, I have a hunch that people will still walk the academic plank.

    But does it ever occur to those involved in trying to solve issues of academic labor that perhaps the biggest problem we face, in terms of the overcrowding of academic labor, seems to come from outside of the academy? I would argue that the state of 9-5 employment in America, particularly in corporate settings, and regardless of up or down economies, is so loathsome for so many people that we pin all kinds of (false) hope on academia as ‘a different way.’ It may seem irrational at first to opt for low wages, exploitation, instability, etc. as an adjunct professor over better salaries, health benefits, etc. in private sector 9-5s; but sometimes, for some people, even the lousiest of academic lifestyles can be more rewarding than many of the alternatives.

    — Swift · Nov 18, 11:13 AM · #

  19. Who’s shouting? I am a humanities-type, so I’m not going to argue that we are “soft in the head.”

    Prof. Bousquet, it seems to me that if you want to host a blog, you should not be so quick to shut down dissenting views under the guise of loftily withdrawing from the rough-and-tumble (“I won’t engage in an uninformed shouting match”). And you should have told the CHE that you expected readers to peruse your scholarship fully before they deigned to comment on your blog posts. As you are, in rather prickly fashion, intimating that those who disagree with you are “uninformed,” all I’ll say is that my perspective is that of someone who has been learning, and then teaching, in graduate universities for twenty years. I take it you consider that makes me too “uninformed” to comment without, say, first reading your book—raising the bar pretty high for future commenters. Don’t worry, I won’t be one of them.

    Good God. Is this your model for the classroom? Get sniffy, insulting, and withdraw as soon as someone hazards disagreement?

    — Saucy · Nov 18, 11:36 AM · #

  20. re #17: Marc, I guess my use of the term “pseudo-scholarship” was unclear. I was thinking of my own experience for example in an Ed School where we focused on a lot of meaningless theory such as social constructionism with very little reference to the practical world. I haven’t read your work but judging from your blog I’m sure its great and I look forward to reading it.

    — Ken D. · Nov 18, 11:45 AM · #

  21. @20 Thanks for the clarification. @19—really, I didn’t mean any of the insults you seem to have taken, or to “shut down”—only to enable a better conversation.

    It’s true that I was a bit brisk. My goal, as I’ve said before on the blog, is to generate a series of “asked and answered” posts on topics that come up frequently in the comments—the “job market” as a magically explanatory heuristic is one of them. Pointing to the free download of the book’s introduction is a poor substitute for that. I just haven’t had time to follow through.

    All I mean is that for the thread you’ve started to progress, you may want to reconsider the explanatory force of “job market” in your remarks. The best way to get up to speed on current thinking about the failure of this kind of “labor market analysis lite” is to spend five minutes grasping the argument best phrased in the chapter.

    Here’s a precis: “job market analysis minus consideration of schooling in structural casualization=ideology, not description of reality.”

    Sorry for the misunderstanding. I didn’t mean to paint you as uninformed—I took you (and #15/20) as earnest enough to seek and share understanding. Or I wouldn’t have responded at all. So I may well have been a bit “sniffy,” but I really didn’t mean to be either insulting or to withdraw. Best regards, solidarity, M

    — Marc Bousquet · Nov 18, 11:58 AM · #

  22. Just a brief comment on “pseudo-scholarship.” It is my impression that scholarship and research, that is, the PRODUCTION of knowledge and ideas and more tangible products, is much more of what higher education is and should be about than just “teaching” a course. There are good adjuncts, of course, but if they are all about teaching and not at all about doing, the students are probably not learning what they could and should be learning in college. Students need to be learning how to learn, learning how to evaluate and create ideas and knowledge. They will not learn this from people who have never learned it themselves. Colleges that rely on people who are desperate to teach because they cannot do anything else get what they pay for. They pay little and their students get little. The sad part is that some brilliant and creative people get stuck in abject adjunct poverty and do not find a way out.

    “Saucy” (#14 above) got good advice. I was advised not to consider any program that did not offer me full support. All eight places I applied to did so. I realized part way through the PhD program that there were unlikely to be jobs in my field, and I thought maybe I should have accepted the community college teaching position I had been offered before entering the PhD program.

    At one point I became discouraged and dropped out, but when the depression subsided, I petitioned to reenter, mainly because, I realized, if I did not finish my PhD I would become one of those people who did not finish and knocked around, always wondering whether or not I could have finished. I’ve known too many people who have been tortured throughout their lives by self-doubt associated with failure to complete something.

    When I was about to finish I identified two jobs in the world for which I thought I was qualified. I applied for them and was offered both. The post-doc that I chose was the first offer and certainly the correct choice (the other offer was outside the US).

    Fotunately, the program I was in has turned out to be a near top-rung program—based on the actual accomplishments of the faculty and students, not the reputation of the football team or “ivy-league” status.

    Along the way I interviewed for a couple of tenure track jobs. In one place I was advised by several people, including the department chair and at least one student, that they had two kinds of students in their PhD program. One kind was highly qualified and fully supported. They others paid the high tuition and were not expected to finish the program or accomplish much. They were just admitted because they could and would pay—enough to support the merit students. Interesting. I later learned that the faculty vote was a tie, and after several ballots, the individual already temporarily in the position won out. Oh well….

    Something similar happened on the other interview. The person who was in the slot temporarily was hired. Unfortunately, the search chair told me during the interview that the other person was going to be hired. Strange business, this academia….

    I lurk around with a little envy. I’m sure that’s evident. But, I’ve had a good life, and it could not have been much richer had I been a “real” academic.

    — Joe Erwin · Nov 18, 12:05 PM · #

  23. This series of posts provides the clearest reason for why contingent faculty remain exploited. Some of you need to pull your heads from the sand and look around. Your experience is not the same as everyone else’s. Grad programs will lie just to get good students and then will lie just to keep them around long enough for them to provide cheap labor; then the students will be tossed aside, left to fend for themselves in Adjunct Hell while being derided by their mentors for “not finishing” or whatever other “crime” is used to justify the students’ inability to finish quickly while maintaining a labor-intensive yet poverty-level lifestyle.

    I don’t know which grad students Saucy knows, but few of my peers could get to the gym regularly because of their work schedules. If they went at 3 pm, it was only because they had a 2-hour gap between teaching sections during the day, their own course work at night, and office hours scattered hither and yon in between.

    And I think we all might be surprised by the number of grad students who go to grad school on a lark instead of as part of a calling and love of the discipline. Most of these sorts are also the most heavy users of adjunct assignments to supplement their familial capital. The ones I have known often gather as many sections as possible, but then provide the most cursory instruction possible. But we mustn’t speak of this small but significant portion of adjuncts because they embarrass us all.

    — Amanda Huggenkiss · Nov 18, 09:43 PM · #

  24. The real problem is that tenured faculty love to have graduate programs, and then they pump out a million grad students who will not get jobs. Most in good conscience should shut down their graduate programs, and others should scale back to turn out only two or three per year. Supply far exceeds demand, and I am surprised that none of the “right-wing” professors has pointed out such basic wisdom.

    If, in turn, graduate programs cut back on their overproduction of graduate students, universities would need to hire people to teach the courses currently taught by graduate students and dropouts (lots of contingent faculty are ABDs, not Ph.Ds). As the supply shrinks, good jobs will increase.

    There is no market incentive at this time to do anything for part-time faculty. And it is tenured faculty, with their desire to assure themselves they must be great and important since they have grad student sychophants, that has caused this problem, plain and simple.

    — Roger Thornhill · Nov 19, 06:22 AM · #

  25. Amanda, I could virtually hug ‘n kiss you! That isn’t you, is it, Amanda Sue? Anyway….

    We are in danger here of “blaming the victims,” but who ARE the victims?

    The exploited instructors who are not paid well enough, of course.

    The students and their parents or other benefactors who pay for something they are not getting.

    The regular faculty who get students who took the courses taught by the overworked, underpaid, and sometimes, not-so-well-qualified adjuncts.

    The reputation of the university suffers in many ways, ranging from students and parents who feel they are being cheated, to the alumni whose educational quality have been compromised—and whose productivity and earning power ultimately may suffer. Ratings, attractivity, and student retention may all be undermined.

    None of this is to say that some adjuncts are not well qualified. Some are. But the “adjunct lifestyle” takes a toll on teaching quality, in ways that reduce the effectiveness of even the most competent.

    [The Adjunct Lifestyle involves the following: teaching many classes, often with little advance notice, using a textbook selected by someone else; having to try to take on other jobs to make ends meet; conducting a continuing search for full-time employment anywhere in the world; battling depression and feelings of worthlessness and/or anger; and trying to help a spouse/partner understand why a PhD, 3-yr post-doc, and many publications that qualifies you to be invited to lecture in prestigious universities and research centers around the world does not translate into employability in a local community college or state college; etc.]

    We can go on and on about this, and we probably will, but the best solution I can see is for everyone to have a look at the best interests of themselves and their institutions, and change course. Many adjuncts would be far better served to go out and get a job elsewhere outside academia) or create a small business doing something about which they have passion.

    Now for the even more unpopular part. Universities should demand that regular faculty maintain scholarly productivity throughout their careers, and that such activities should be integrated with the education of students, and viewed as an essential function of the university (producing knowledge and producing people who will be productive of knowledge and ideas).

    If that means altering or abandoning tenure, so be it. Far too many tenured slots are filled with lazy burnt out people who do nothing but teach, sometimes, exceptionally useless courses, and who often fail miserably even at teaching, and who, in many cases, really never did much in the way of scholarship anyway. A few years ago most PhDs published only one paper in their entire careers! It seems to me that anyone in academia, tenured or not, should be producing publishable knowledge and ideas (or other tangible work) every year of his/her career. I’m pretty lenient about what can be considered productivity, but it amazes me that some tenured folk never publish or present papers or edit or write books or exhibit art, or whatever. There is no excuse for it.

    Professors who have graduate students who cannot find good jobs should stop having graduate students. And, of course, students should not select fields or professors where there supply exceeds demand. Some professional fields (e.g., veterinary medicine) deliberately avoid overproduction of graduates, and the demand and pay levels remain high. There are people who continuously produce good work and good students (who, in turn, are productive and employable), so not everyone needs to cut back.

    — Joe Erwin · Nov 19, 07:11 AM · #

  26. “there supply” should be “the supply” Sorry.

    — Joe Erwin · Nov 19, 07:53 AM · #

  27. Joe Erwin
    BRAVO – from a former adjunct, career outside academia, now one of the ‘evil administrators’

    BTW – I have several tenured faculty members who make more in 9 months than I do in 12 – and my pay is about 2.5 times the lowest paid full time asst prof – where are all these highly paid admin slots I keep hearing of – even at the top rungs where presidents earn 1/2 million – that’s about 10 times the lowest faculty pay – adjust the faculty pay for 12 months and it more like 8 times, adjust it for experience (the proper comparison should be the full professor rank) and it’s more like 3-4 times – and if you look at the hours required, fund raising required (i.e., generating much more than your salary), etc – presidents are pretty underpaid – figure a more typical presidential pay of 300K or so, figure a full 12 months and 6-7 day weeks, and 10-12 hour days – that’s not a lot of money for the work required (and presidents don’t have any of the job security profs have).

    — fox · Nov 19, 10:36 AM · #

  28. fox:

    “presidents don’t have any of the job security profs have”

    I’ve been at several universities where presidents have stepped down, voluntarily and otherwise. In each case, the president simply moved into a tenured faculty position at a salary that is much higher than anyone else in the department and certainly much more than they would get on the market as a faculty member. So the ‘security’ is greater for a president.

    300K for a college president is still pretty high up in the distribution. The job is stressful, 24/7, and for the most part requires giving up your life in order to be criticized. Let’s be honest, though. The compensation is pretty dang good.

    I have no desire to become an administrator, but let’s recognize that 150K or 180K to be a dean at a research university in a small town with a low cost of living will fund a good lifestyle.

    What I find irritating about these discussions is that it’s always, “I want more!”, “My paycheck is too small!”, “This isn’t fair because he gets paid more!”

    How about this: What is best for the students and the other stakeholders of the university? ‘Underpaid’ administrators are not likely to cause problems IMO. Adjuncts teaching five classes a semester at three different schools, with no office, and limited time for class preparation and meeting with students, that is scary from the perspective of a parent sending kids to school. I don’t much care about problems that adjuncts have. I do care about the quality of education that is purchased at these low salaries. Paying adjuncts $50,000 a year to teach six classes, and giving them an office, complete with everything needed to do the job, won’t cost that much, but it will definitely improve the educational environment for the poor, exploited students.

    — me · Nov 19, 10:57 AM · #

  29. To all those who perpetually wonder why anyone would take these positions, please remember the reality that the contingent academic workforce is predominantly female. The “lifestyle” of academia is one of the few that offers a certain degree of flexibility so that parents (usually mothers) can attempt to fulfill family responsibilities while doing the equivalent of two full-time jobs —teaching and caretaking. Some argue that this “flexibility” is a “benefit” that makes up for the appallingly low pay.

    Fortunately, the contemporary workplace is starting to realize the wisdom of investing in employees who are parents by paying them professional salaries while accommodating their family responsibilities. Talented women will soon be opting for an enlightened workplace, even a corporate one, rather than a perpetually sexist university environment, and the loss will be academia’s.

    — AdjunctMom · Nov 19, 11:16 AM · #

  30. “Talented women will soon be opting for an enlightened workplace, even a corporate one, rather than a perpetually sexist university environment, and the loss will be academia’s.”

    Which of course, is why we should let the market do its job. If university administrators are too stupid to realize when they are underpaying someone, then they have nobody to blame but themselves when those people leave academia for greener pastures.

    — James · Nov 19, 11:34 AM · #

  31. If a man or woman is not the primary bread winner for a family—that is, the spouse has a reliable income—it is not so terrible to do some teaching to get out of the house and keep your brain alive. The compensation need not be great if you do not really need it. It might as well be volunteer work. If it were, no one would be getting “exploited” and compensation would not be an issue. Qualifications would be important though. The institution would/should only invite (volunteer) Guest Professors who are highly qualified. If colleges and universities want to HIRE someone, they should pay a reasonable wage and insist on getting what they pay for.

    I’m concerned that we (some of we) seem to regard “market” forces as somehow magically correct and just. While there is an empirical matter of supply and demand operating, I do not think it operates in any sort of even-handed or “fair” way. It can just simply become an empirical fact that something is “worth” what someone is willing to pay. Personally, I think value is much more complex than that. It seems to me that “market forces” have taken on an almost religious or sacred significance to some people. We are likely to be disappointed if we rely excessively on “the market” to assign value, determine merit, evaluate ethics, or enforce morality.

    — Joe Erwin · Nov 19, 12:11 PM · #

  32. “I’m concerned that we (some of we) seem to regard “market” forces as somehow magically correct and just.”

    While I will not necessarily say that markets always and everywhere produce just outcomes, I am of the opinion that they are just most of the time. In addition, the burden of proof is on those who claim that markets are unjust. Then of course, we get into the whole issue of deciding what is just. And why do we only look at the buyer of labor as being unjust. Perhaps those potential finance professors who will abandon academe for more money on wall street are acting unjustly?

    — James · Nov 19, 12:44 PM · #

  33. Part of the “market” problem is the vagueness of the criteria for faculty performance, and the difficulty of measuring it. Administrators can get away with hiring adjuncts whose teaching is inferior (because they get paid so little, are so overworked and harried, and so dissed in the current college environment). Especially in the humanities, where the required preparation for subsequent courses is fuzzy at best, there’s no real penalty for a dean hiring the cheapest labor possible.

    James doesn’t seem to understand, or can’t understand (some missing compassion/empathy gene, perhaps) that with labor ($150 million contracts of major league pitchers notwithstanding), letting the “market” make all the decisions, is problematic:

    1. Somebody is always willing to do the job for less, either out of desperation or because of wealth-enabled not caring about pay.

    2. In an unregulated labor market, you can always get a 10-year-old to sew shirts for 50 cents an hour. (Hey, if the parents make a “market” decision that instant cash from the kid’s labor now outweighs his/her bigger salary later if he/she stays in school, what the hell, that’s capitalism.) And you can always get a desperate or dilettante adjunct to teach a 3-meetings-a-week class for $2000 a semester.

    3. To the retort that there’s no comparison between child labor and academic adjuncts, I’d reply that there was a big difference—at least in theory—between outright slavery and child labor. But we did away with the one, then the other, in increments as (forgive the PC phrasing) consciousnesses were raised.

    4. James teaches, of course, in a state university, which unfairly competes with his beloved private enterprise, by offering underpriced-by-taxpayer-subsidy classes in finance. Those cheap classes attract students, the FTE numbers enable the department chairman, the dean, and the president to lobby up the chain to get more taxpayer money from the legislature to pay faculty salaries. Sure, in the smaller “market,” James’s department has to compete with private-enterprise salaries to get faculty members, but that’s only after his state university doesn’t have to compete in a “market” to get its budget as a whole. The university’s budget, and James’s department’s budget, is got by politics, pure and simple.

    5. Just as you probably don’t want a society in which the disparities of wealth range from the a whole class of Sultans of Brunei down to walking skeletons scavenging in landfills (well, that might be OK with James, but…), you probably don’t want a university in which humanities professors get, say, a third of what finance professors get just because there’s not much of an extra-academe “market” for what they do. It really doesn’t make for a collegial environment. (No, you don’t want lock-step pay by rank and time-in-grade, regardless of field, either. But some raising of the bottom and flattening of the top is necessary. And the finance professors who do want to teach instead of sitting in a Wall Street cubicle staring at a computer screen all day, will probably be happy to be paid a little less than they would be in private enterprise. The academic life does have its perqs, you know.)

    Has James ever read any Dickens or Steinbeck or seen any Lewis Hine or Sebastio Salgado photographs?

    — LuckyJim · Nov 19, 01:42 PM · #

  34. LuckyJim,

    I do appreciate your comments, even though I usually don’t agree with them. Let me address your issues:

    1. Your comment that someone is always willing to work for less doesn’t apply everywhere in the labor market. Believe me, if you know finance phds willing to work for less than $100k, please let me know.

    2. While I agree that child labor is wrong I don’t think that we can compare adjuncts to child labor. If a potential adjunct cannot compare options and see where their interests lie, perhaps they shouldn’t be adjuncts.

    3. I still don’t see the relationship between adjuncts and child labor unless you are arguing that adjuncts are forced into their lots. How is the exploitation of humanities adjuncts different from the minor leagues of baseball? Both pay poorly, and people in both are hoping for a shot at the big leagues, but we don’t have people ranting about exploitation in minor league baseball, why not?

    4. Yes, our budget and salaries are set by a political process, that goes against the market. The union has leveled salaries to the extent that we find it hard to hire people.

    — James · Nov 19, 02:39 PM · #

  35. The market (and the world) is not a fair and equitable place. There are those who trust “The Market” in the same authoritarian way as some people place absolute trust in “The Bible.” The Gospel according to St. Econ has been uncritically accepted by many otherwise intelligent people. Smart economists like Ronald Reagan wouldn’t believe something unless it were true, would they?

    It is easier to just accept that something is universally true and assert that the burden of proof is on everyone else to falsify your universal truth than it is to critically examine complex systems. So, it is easy to believe that a dollar is a dollar is a dollar, and whoever has the most of them is de facto the smartest or best or most deserving of whatever he has been able to accummulate.

    But each dollar is more subjectively valuable to someone who has few of them than to someone who has many (especially, if the latter has many more than he needs to meet basic requirements), and subjective value has consequences. What is true for individuals often applies to corporate entities as well. Of course, all this matters in terms of fiscal management as well as economic development efforts.

    — Joe Erwin · Nov 19, 02:45 PM · #

  36. “So, it is easy to believe that a dollar is a dollar is a dollar, and whoever has the most of them is de facto the smartest or best or most deserving of whatever he has been able to accummulate.”

    I would never argue that people who have more money are necessarily smarter than anyone else. It is more likely that they are more skilled in the things that the market values. There is some scope for luck here as well.

    “But each dollar is more subjectively valuable to someone who has few of them than to someone who has many (especially, if the latter has many more than he needs to meet basic requirements), and subjective value has consequences.”

    This is not true in the least, since we all have different utility functions. One of the reasons that I am in academia is because I place less value on additional dollars than someone who has a Ph.d in finance and works on wall street. We tend to self select into areas that fit our preferences.

    — James · Nov 19, 03:02 PM · #

  37. Sometimes, when I read James, I sometimes think I’m reading HAL 9000.

    OK, let’s get it down to one question: Is there a point anywhere in a free, generally capitalist society, where morality/compassion/decency trump what the market’s “invisible hand” might otherwise decide?

    If your answer is “No,” then the discussion’s over and you can go back to your Objectivist Society meeting. If your answer is any kind of “Yes,” or even “Maybe,” then you’ll have to start modifying your economic Darwinism which assumes that all workers are complete free agents on a “level playing field.” It’ll be tough, but maybe there’s a droplet of the milk of human kindness (in regard to people you’ve never met) that can be squeezed out of you yet.

    — LuckyJim · Nov 19, 03:23 PM · #

  38. “OK, let’s get it down to one question: Is there a point anywhere in a free, generally capitalist society, where morality/compassion/decency trump what the market’s “invisible hand” might otherwise decide?”

    The answer is yes. Which is why even free market economists are often against things such as child labor. Now, the problem I have is how you seem to equate adjuncts with child labor. People who have advanced degrees are on the upward sloping part of the playing field. If there is a group of people whom we should expect to be able to act rationally and look out for their own self interests it is people with advanced degrees.

    So, LuckyJim, do you believe that minor league baseball players are exploited in the same way that adjuncts are?

    — James · Nov 19, 03:40 PM · #

  39. Those of us who have benefitted from education sometimes feel a need to try to give something back to higher education. For some of us, who believe there are more ways of getting things wrong than getting them right, we’d like to help young people “get it right;” that is, get the most out of their educational experience. Teaching is a way of doing that, even if it is as an adjunct. Of course, the motivation I’ve just described is not limited to adjuncts nor universal among them.

    I think James has a good point, though, that bright and highly educated people should be capable of advancing their own interests. That is why I have been suggesting, repeatedly, that people who cannot survive on the inadequate pay provided to adjuncts really should find another line of work. Teaching is not the only thing you can do.

    I would work harder to get a part-time teaching position now, even though I am retired, if the pay was at all decent. Instead, I do occasional consulting, mostly not in academic settings. I earn as much in a few hours each month as a consultant as I would earn teaching an entire course, and my time is much more flexible. A rigid teaching schedule would get in the way of consulting opportunities.

    It seems to me that our children would probably be better off if they labored a little more than they do. Of course, having a job and some responsibilities does not equate with forced labor for long hours under harsh or dangerous conditions. So, the real problem with some child labor is not that it involves children, but that it involves exploitation of people who have little power to resist. That should not be the situation for adjuncts. They should not feel or be so powerless, and in some sense, they are complicit in their misery by having excessively narrow ambitions and a low self concept.

    — Joe Erwin · Nov 19, 07:07 PM · #

  40. Of course, James, minor league players ought to be paid more. And, there are, indeed, advocates, such as Dave Zirin, who say so. The problem with minor leaguers may not, however, be so much in the ridiculously exploitive pay as in the horrific treatment to which they are subject. This begins in the Caribbean and Central American player factories, where the majority of desperately poor dreamers subsidize the tiny minority who are then called up to the US minors. It continues in the minors where the majority again subsidize the pay of the minority who are called up to the majors. In the majors, the majority subsidize the minority of stars. But, most importantly, they all subsidize the fat cat owners, who create a game in which players are forced to take steroids and other foreign substances and ruin their bodies at a young age, all while being deprived of a political voice. Then, there are the multimillion-dollar stadiums, replete with luxury boxes for our plutocrats, but paid for from the public coffers. There is much to love about baseball, but also much that needs reform.

    By the way, James, child labor is illegal because the public agrees that it is immoral. There is no reason the public cannot similarly agree that an income or wealth disparity is also immoral. This is particularly true since the inequality of wealth in this country has had such a clearly detrimental impact on our government, which is now in the hands of a plutocratic elite.

    Personally, I’d like to set a ratio, not just on income, but on wealth as well. Think about how wonderful it would be if all those fabulously smart people in the plutocratic class stopped spending all their time conniving to wring more status wealth out of their business ventures and channeled their surplus energy into other activities like increasing the public good.

    — Unemployed Academic · Nov 19, 07:10 PM · #

  41. Now, on to the larger point about adjunct/academic autonomy… I find it troubling that academics like James can shove all of the responsibility for creating a just society onto the weaker of the two entities involved in an economic exchange. Blaming adjuncts alone for their situation is like taking a howitzer and dispossessing a shotgun-wielding farmer of his or her farm. If the farmer stays to fight with you over the land that his or her family has nurtured over generations, you can blame the farmer for not having the sense to walk away, but this says nothing about the morality of your actions. Just because you and the farmer enjoy de jure equality does not mean that you are de facto equal. As the stronger entity, the university has a greater duty not to exploit the adjunct.

    And, I find it astonishing that people assume that creating an economic situation in which only the charitable or desperate want an academic job has not degraded the level of teaching and scholarship from what it might be with only a modicum of good sense. If you want to discover why so many youths seem apathetic and disengaged, you only have to look to their faculty, who spend all their time working, thereby normalizing a life chained to the whims of one’s bosses and undercutting many of the lessons taught in the classroom about the relative importance of different subjects.

    — Unemployed Academic · Nov 19, 07:51 PM · #

  42. I find the argument that “exploitation is ok as long as there continue to be people who let themselves be exploited” analogous to the argument that “if I can find someone vulnerable to robbery, then it isn’t immoral for me to go around robbing people.”

    — Shar · Nov 19, 11:07 PM · #

  43. Shar: Exploitation is not okay. I agree. Enabling exploitation is also not okay.

    — Joe Erwin · Nov 20, 06:38 AM · #

  44. Basically, James—that brave socialist-in-practice / capitalist-in-theory—says that since adjuncts are above the age of consent, they can be exploited to any degree that college administrators can get away with. Same as those Brazilian gold miners, American coal miners early last century, restaurant deliveryment on bicycles today, etc., etc. What the market will bear is, to James and others, is the be-all and end-all decision-maker in the labor market as long as it doesn’t involve ten-year-olds.

    And remember, “what the market will bear” also applies, in free-market labor theory, not just to wages, but to matters of health and safety, too. OSHA is as inquitous to free-marketers as the Federal minimum wage. If a worker has to work in dangerous or unhealthful conditions to make a living, well, the free-marketers say, then few of them will do it, so the pool of available workers will dwindle, those willing to do the dangerous or unhealthful will have to be paid a whole lot more, and factory owners will decide it’s cheaper to put in safety equipment and remove the health hazzards. Right: after all bodies of all the desperate people trying to feed their families (because, in a free-market world, there’s no Social Security, state unemployment benefits, etc.) have been buried in Potter’s field.

    What I can’t figure out is whether James regards flesh-and-blood human beings in the labor market like dots on a profit/loss graph (or like the way the brainwashed character played by Frank Sinatra in the original The Manchurian Candidate described his fellow soldiers in the induced, fantasy battle that gets him his bogus Medal of Honor) because a) he’s a repellently heartless person, or b) he’s one of those young business-department academics whose reality is confined to books, classes, his office and the faculty lounge, or c) he actually believes that untrammeled free-marketism with regard to human labor will actually lead to a better, more humane society for everybody in it. From the tenor of his comments and his obliviousness to insult (a nice quality, by the way), I’d go with (b) for the time being.

    Oh, minor league baseball players: I don’t know much about them (their contracts don’t hit the press much). But I gather that there aren’t a whole lot of complaints about exploitation because it’s a temporary occupation (i.e., one plays it for a few years and moves on to the the majors or something else—they’re not in it for life, like a lot of adjuncts are), and the salaries are OK for young, mostly single guys pursuing a longshot. Minor-league life is, I gather, more like graduate school than being an adjunct. And minor league baseball players are not—as are adjuncts in an English department—performing a needed social service. The country needs reasonably literate college students; it doesn’t necessarily need more knowledgeable baseball fans.

    — LuckyJim · Nov 20, 07:05 AM · #

  45. LuckyJim,

    I would give your argument credit if humanities adjuncts have so little value in the job market outside academia, that their choice is to teach as an adjunct for what you call exploitative wages or go begging. But if someone faces a tradeoff between working for $50,000+ in the nonacademic labor market, versus making $30,000 as an adjunct, it is hard to see where these people are being exploited. If they have the opportunity to make more, but choose not to, why is that the fault of anyone but the worker?

    — James · Nov 20, 07:13 AM · #

  46. When I stopped being an adjunct I immediately increased my income sevenfold. The point regarding income contrast between adjuncts and what they can earn elsewhere is valid. Being an exploited adjunct is like staying in an abusive relationship. Exactly.

    — Joe Erwin · Nov 20, 07:41 AM · #

  47. 1. One has to do an awful lot of “freeway flying” to earn $30k as a humanities adjunct.

    2. So, if academic exploitees—even just some of them—can work relatively unexploited outside of academe, then academic exploiters are off the ethical hook?

    3. Does James’s finance department have required ethics courses?

    — LuckyJim · Nov 20, 07:46 AM · #

  48. LuckyJim: No. Market forces are not likely to reliably address fairness issues. Many advocates for unbridled markets are really promoting anarchy and some sort of “social Darwinism.” Of course selection (natural or not) operates at every level of functional organization, but that does not equate with what is fair or fit.

    — Joe Erwin · Nov 20, 09:56 AM · #

  49. “1. One has to do an awful lot of “freeway flying” to earn $30k as a humanities adjunct.”

    While this may be true, the question still remains: Why would someone choose such a job if they can make more money for less work doing something else? If they freely choose the lower paying job, how can that possibly be exploitation?

    “2. So, if academic exploitees—even just some of them—can work relatively unexploited outside of academe, then academic exploiters are off the ethical hook?”

    I think the problem lies in determining what is ethical in the first place. Most people agree that when I took an extra job as an adjunct, I was not being exploited when I was paid $2700 for the class. So, if I wasn’t exploited, it must have had to do with my personal circumstances. Are colleges required to enquire as to personal circumstances of their job applicants to determine a fair salary?

    “3. Does James’s finance department have required ethics courses?”

    No, we dropped it when our marxist professor in the philosophy department got caught sleeping with a student.

    — James · Nov 20, 11:01 AM · #

  50. Very funny, James. Those liberals sure have loose morals, don’t they.

    I think your point is well taken. If a highly qualified regular faculty member is paid $15K to teach a course and an equally qualified non-faculty member will agree to teach the course for $3, it is logical to hire the adjunct. But is there no consideration at all for an “equal pay for equal work” ethic?

    And what about hiring LESS qualified people to teach what would otherwise be taught by regular faculty? In this case, students are being swindled. If they allow themselves to be swindled, are they complicit? Maybe, but maybe they should recognize that and go somewhere else.

    At the same time, surely highly qualified people can do better and need not accept such low pay. As long as they do so they will be exploited. It is not right and it is not fair, like lots of things. Victims must decline to be victimized to the extent that it is in their power to do so. Failure of a victim to resist does not take the exploiter off the hook—not at all—but yielding to exploitation encourages and rewards it.

    — Joe Erwin · Nov 20, 12:14 PM · #

  51. “Very funny, James. Those liberals sure have loose morals, don’t they.”

    Probably just as loose as those free market types.

    “But is there no consideration at all for an “equal pay for equal work” ethic?”

    Are you seriously arguing that everyone in the university should be paid exactly the same? I would hate to see what would happen if we actually measured the productivity of full professors versus assistant professors, perhaps the salary scale would change a bit.

    — James · Nov 20, 12:36 PM · #

  52. James, that’s not what “equal pay for equal work” means.

    — Unemployed Academic · Nov 20, 02:25 PM · #

  53. James, actually, quite the contrary. I’m only suggesting that equal pay for equal work could be an equitable solution—not that EVERYONE gets paid the same. It might be appropriate to pay a Lecturer A/ Adjunct Assistant Professor, someone with the same qualifications as an Assistant Professor, the same as an Asst Prof for for teaching the same course. Lecturer B/ Adj Assoc Prof, the same as an Associate Professor, etc., Visting Prof or Adj Prof same as Full Prof, etc., for teaching a course.

    Of course, it must be recognized by part-timers that full-time faculty have time-consuming obligations beyond teaching, so only part of the salary of TT folks is for teaching.

    Equally qualified people should be paid the same for the same work. That’s only fair. But, part-timers cannot expect full-time benefits, either.

    — Joe Erwin · Nov 20, 02:31 PM · #

  54. But of course, my point is, that if a college offers me $3,000 to teach a class and I think that it is fair for them to offer me that amount and I accept it, even though I may know that the full time person may get $6,000 in compensation for teaching the same class. then if I freely and willingly accept it, why is it unfair?

    — James · Nov 20, 02:43 PM · #

  55. “if I freely and willingly accept it, why is it unfair?” — James

    Because neither of the principal parties in these deals is completely autonomous. Their behavior is always conditioned by the third party in the deal, the larger society that sets the conditions within which the deal is made. Society sets the ground rules for the arena in which people negotiate. If the public chooses to mandate that employers provide benefits for full-time workers, then all employers compete on a level playing field with each other in regard to benefits. If the public mandates safe conditions for employees then that cost is removed from the competitive calculus. If the public mandates only ‘free-market’ rules, then it vests almost all power in those with capital, who can then bully their workers even when it doesn’t make sense economically. Currently, we are experienced a relatively anti-worker labor market. This means that it might be fiscally rational for an employer to cheat its workers of decent pay in order to compete, but that doesn’t mean it’s fair. (Given the terrible outcomes from the abuse of adjuncting, I doubt that the crappy pay for adjuncts has much to do with competition anyway. It seems to be much more about power to me.)

    — Unemployed Academic · Nov 20, 04:07 PM · #

  56. “This means that it might be fiscally rational for an employer to cheat its workers of decent pay in order to compete, but that doesn’t mean it’s fair.”

    The problem is, who decides what is “decent pay”? When I was an adjunct, I thought $2700 was decent pay. Not spectacular, but not a bad chunk of change for what I was asked to do.

    On the other hand, when I was offered $1200, that was not decent pay, so I turned it down. In both of these cases, I used my own subjective evaluation to determine what “decent pay” was. Are you suggesting I should use some other method to determine decent pay?

    — James · Nov 20, 04:44 PM · #

  57. James, if you are willing to volunteer your time, that is fine. If you are willing to work for less than you are worth, maybe that is fine too—FOR YOU. But are you then admitting that your efforts are worth only half as much as the “going rate” for a full-timer? And, while all things are negotiable, to some extent, are you establishing or reinforcing a precedent for the payment of others? In many places there is a regular payscale for TT faculty and there is a different compensation schedule for adjuncts. When one says, “that is not enough,” the answer comes back that the amount offered is the standard and is not negotiable—take it, or leave it. I no longer take it. If others would no longer take it, the scale would change. That is why it matters to me for you to accept less than you are worth.

    — Joe Erwin · Nov 20, 04:50 PM · #

  58. “The problem is, who decides what is ‘decent pay’?… Are you suggesting I should use some other method to determine decent pay?” — James

    No, I’m saying that you are not really all that powerful in determining what is decent pay. As with most non-elite advocates of the ‘free market’, you apparently fail to understand that removing the government as a strong advocate on your behalf (via such laws as the limit on compensation ratios) does not increase your power. Instead, it shifts power to the wealthy, who are structurally privileged in capitalist social arrangements. The choice between $2700 and $1200 is chimerical because neither allows one to work full time and make a decent living. And, make no mistake: the contemporary adjunct system is designed to exploit those for whom it is the chief source of income, not supply a few professionals from outside the faculty. Whether you choose $2700 or $1200, the employer has won, since neither of those sums even approaches what a full-time, tenure-track faculty member would cost. If you pass up such an opportunity, the university can simply hire a less-qualified worker or expand class sizes yet again. Since universities have been taking both of these actions for 30 years or so with no complaints from students or their parents, it is difficult to see universities ending the adjunct system. Really, when will universities hit such a shortage of qualified instructors that they will be forced to pay more? When class sizes balloon to over 1000 students, the size of some classes at present? When they are taught primarily by high school students (in some places, undergrads are now teaching their peers)? And, if a such a shortage does materialize, do you think the response will be to raise faculty pay or import more smart PhDs from India or, better yet, offer more online courses taught by PhDs in India?

    — Unemployed Academic · Nov 20, 10:50 PM · #

  59. “Really, when will universities hit such a shortage of qualified instructors that they will be forced to pay more?”

    It has already happened in finance. The starting salaries of new Ph.d’s in finance average over $100k per year. Why don’t universities have the power to lower that to a much more reasonable level such as $60k?

    — James · Nov 21, 05:59 AM · #

  60. Can anyone explain what “Ph.d” is? Is this the accepted
    abbreviation in finance, for which everyone else uses Ph.D. (or sometimes, PhD)?

    — Joe Erwin · Nov 21, 10:50 AM · #

  61. It’s nothing but sloppy typing on a blog. If you have to read so much things on a blog comment, then it is no wonder they pay you so little when you serve as an adjunct.

    — James · Nov 21, 10:54 AM · #

  62. Sorry to disappoint you, James. The fact is, “they don’t pay me so little…as an adjunct” anymore, because I am not willing to work for what is offered. And, as you would know, if you actually read the comments, I have been suggesting that people decline to accept insultingly low compensation.

    I’m aware that “blogspeak” is often not very careful, either in format or content, but you did the “Ph.d” so consistently that I began to wonder if that was what you meant. Clearly it wasn’t JUST a sloppy typo, since you did it the same way over-and-over. That is not an error that is usually made by someone who actually has a Ph.D., but maybe you are an exceptional case.

    My apologies for being so picky. I’m just an old guy who has done alot of editing over the past 45 years. Stuff like that just jumps out at me. I can’t help it. One of my non-academic jobs was as a full-time editor of a carefully reviewed multidisciplinary scientific journal.

    Sorry if I insulted you, James. That was not my intention.

    — Joe Erwin · Nov 21, 06:25 PM · #

  63. As an administrator who has worked for private and government industry on two continents prior to taking my current position, I would like to suggest that the problems being discussed are not limited to academic grape pickers (aka adjunct professors).

    In any society such as those in North America where capital is held at greater value than labour, injustices such as you noted will occur. Similarly, we have seen other societies where labour is over valued and capital is close to being non-existent (the USSR?) which create similar disparities.

    Until your society can achieve a balance between the values of labour and capital demonstrated by several European countries (e.g. Sweden, Norway, Denmark, etc.), by driving out failed neo-con capitalism and its god of profits, then you are condemned to remain dis-advantaged.

    For futher reading try ‘The Gods of the Copybook Headings, Rudyard Kipling, 1919’.

    Before any blogging name callers respond – I am a socialist bastard, not a communist.

    — Keir Hardie · Nov 24, 12:38 PM · #

  64. Trivial:

    Way back up on #21, Marc Bousquet meant, I think, to say “brusque.” Prof. Bousquet is informative, and one of the good guys in all of this, but he’s hardly “brisk,” as in Lipton iced tea.

    Not so trivial:

    Adjuncts in the humanities, who sweated and struggled to get Ph.D.‘s in the hopes of becoming college professors, don’t have the same options of leaving academe for “greener pastures” as do adjuncts in finance. This doesn’t mean, nor does the contention that they should have known the academic labor market and seen their situations coming, that they should be exploited as they are. College administrators are not supposed to be the equivalents of the corporate world’s “Chainsaw Al” or “The Cereal Killer,” ruthlessly driving costs down and profits up. They run non-profit institutions that get a lot of tax breaks from state and Federal governments, and that should behave in a somewhat more equitable and humane manner. A living wage for anybody who teaches six college courses a year is about $45,000, plus health insurance, variable to some degree according to locale. Colleges should be pay it, preferably voluntarily because of basic ethics and decency. Failing that, faculty should unionize and collectively bargain such a minimum into existence. Failing that, the government—preferably state, but Federal if it comes to that—should mandate it, under pain of severely revised tax policy.

    If “James” is the same free-market ingenue as on other and previous threads, then he failed to mention that his $2700 adjunct class was on top of his full-time salary from that non-free-market, socialist, state university at which he teaches. Is James disingenuous? Does the wild bear s**t in the woods?

    — LuckyJim · Nov 25, 11:08 AM · #

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