{"id":1257,"date":"2015-02-26T22:42:46","date_gmt":"2015-02-27T04:42:46","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/admin.patheos.com\/blogs\/janetheactuary\/?p=1257"},"modified":"2015-03-01T09:51:54","modified_gmt":"2015-03-01T15:51:54","slug":"yesterday-was-national-adjunct-walkout-day-did-you-notice","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/janetheactuary\/2015\/02\/yesterday-was-national-adjunct-walkout-day-did-you-notice.html","title":{"rendered":"Yesterday was National Adjunct Walkout Day. Did you notice?"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>

\"LibrePlanet 2014 27\" by Lionel Allorge - Own work. Licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons - http:\/\/commons.wikimedia.org\/wiki\/File:LibrePlanet_2014_27.jpg#mediaviewer\/File:LibrePlanet_2014_27.jpg<\/a>
\u201cLibrePlanet 2014 27\u201d by Lionel Allorge \u2013 Own work. Licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons \u2013 http:\/\/commons.wikimedia.org\/wiki\/File:LibrePlanet_2014_27.jpg#mediaviewer\/File:LibrePlanet_2014_27.jpg<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/p>

A Facebook friend posted about this yesterday; at various colleges & community colleges across the United States, adjunct professors \u201cwalked out\u201d (or protested in other ways, including using class time complaining about the situation) of their classes to protest the lot in life of adjunct professors.<\/p>\n

Details here, at the Chronicle of Higher Education<\/a>, or here at Inside Higher Ed<\/a>, or see the graphic at the blog \u201cHow Did We Get into this Mess?<\/a>\u201d<\/p>\n

The basic story, for those unfamiliar with the situation, is this: \u00a0once upon a time, universities hired adjunct faculty (that is, paid by the course, for variable and uncertain numbers of classes per semester) to smooth out fluctuations in demand for particular courses, and to benefit from the skills of professionals in the community, so that experts out in the working world, or early retirees, would teach part-time and at night. \u00a0At the same time \u2014 this is hard to fathom any longer \u2014 when I was entering grad school (and I AM NOT THAT OLD), it was genuinely believed that the cohort of professors who were hired when the baby boomers entered college in large numbers, would be retiring, and fresh Ph.D.s would be needed to replace them. \u00a0 (Really! \u00a0When I was making the decision to go to grad school, it seemed like a lot more of a well-defined career path than the vagueness of \u201cwhat do you do with a public policy degree after graduation?\u201d)<\/p>\n

Of course, that didn\u2019t work as planned. \u00a0Large numbers of university graduates did indeed flock to grad school, but at the same time, universities discovered that they could easily hire adjuncts, at low pay rates per course, not just to smooth out demand, but to replace retiring tenure track professors, or to fill out instructional needs as their programs grew, or to allow tenure track professors to teach reduced course loads. \u00a0And the would-be professors, graduates with perfectly-respectable doctoral degrees, accepted their new lot in life, supporting themselves (or being supported by a spouse) by driving from one university to the next, wherever they could pick up a class to teach, hoping against hope that someday soon, that hoped-for tenure track, or at least long-term, full-time instructor job would materialize.<\/p>\n

(For those new to the blog, I myself was an adjunct professor<\/a>, for a semester, before I figured out that I\u2019d better find a different career path, so I think I speak with some authority here.)<\/p>\n

But several things strike me:<\/p>\n

First of all, for any individual trapped in the life of a so-called \u201cRoads Scholar\u201d it seems obvious that the best decision, on a personal basis, is to find a different career, stat. \u00a0There are, of course, all kinds of reasons why they don\u2019t, besides just holding out hope that that full-time job\u2019ll come soon. \u00a0There\u2019s a certain feeling, once you\u2019re a part of the academic world, that it\u2019s a noble\u00a0calling, far removed from the crass world of business, so that it\u2019s inconceivable to leave. \u00a0There aren\u2019t the sort of resources to find a new career, that, say, a liberal arts undergraduate would have available to them, from career counseling to on-campus interviewing; instead, you\u2019re very much on your own. \u00a0And it can be difficult to convince a prospective employer that you\u2019d be a good fit for the job they have on offer, as they\u2019re both skeptical of your ability to fit in to the business world, and suspicious that you\u2019ll leave for academia should a better job be on offer.<\/p>\n

But, beyond that, Megan McArdle had a great pre-Valentine\u2019s Day post <\/a>on sunk costs. \u00a0True, she was writing with respect to relationships, and her experience sticking with a boyfriend who was, in the end, not marriage material, because of the investment, in time if not in money, that she\u2019d already made in the relationship. \u00a0Why do adjuncts stick around? \u00a0Because of their own sunk costs.<\/p>\n

Second thought:<\/p>\n

The situation with adjunct professors is repeated in multiple other occupations: \u00a0consider manufacturing jobs, such as at the auto companies and other large manufacturers such as\u00a0Caterpillar (see this article at Crain\u2019s for context<\/a>, or google \u201ctwo tier payscales\u201d or \u201ctwo tier wages\u201d) , where the workforce is split into two tiers. \u00a0The established \u00a0workforce has generous hourly wages and benefits, solely due to their union contract. \u00a0But in order to accommodate the employer\u2019s demands, they\u2019ve accepted a two-tier model, in which new hires have significantly lower hourly pay and benefits. \u00a0It has happened in another way in such countries as Italy and Japan, where protections for workers hired with full-time, permanent contracts are so generous that most new hiring now is done for contingent\/contract\/temporary workers, even if it\u2019s to fill roles which themselves are long-term needs of the company. \u00a0 It happens anytime in which the established workforce has locked-in (whether by tenure, employment contracts, union contracts, or law) pay and benefits, agreed to during times of prosperity, now significantly\u00a0above market, considering basic supply-and-demand in the labor force for the market\/country, and unsustainable considering what the\u00a0company\u00a0can reasonably price its product for.<\/p>\n

The protesters, and the commenters in the above-linked articles, generally are of the opinion that the way forward is unionization: \u00a0by forming a union, and protesting and striking and following in the tradition of union organizers before them, they\u2019ll get the universities to accede to their demands, and receive contracts for full-time employment at pay levels that they \u201cdeserve\u201d owing to their doctoral degrees. \u00a0And the \u201cdeserved\u201d pay levels aren\u2019t merely typical pay at community colleges for full-time instructors now, based on 5 courses per semester, but a workload equivalent to tenure-track hires, say, two courses per semester to allow time for personal research projects.* \u00a0(Never mind that in this idealized world in which adjuncts are replaced by full-timers, there will be winners and losers among the now-adjuncts, as some perpetual part-timers become full-timers and others, unemployed.) \u00a0But, of course, if it were this easy, then unions, in general, would still be going strong, and, everyone, having been unionized, would be receiving generous pay and benefits and spending four weeks each summer at their cottages Up North. \u00a0Instead, some years ago, even in union-stronghold metro Detroit, Hudson\u2019s employees (back before it became Marshall Fields and then Macy\u2019s) rejected unionization, believing that the union wouldn\u2019t be able to increase pay significantly enough to compensate for the cost of union dues. \u00a0It just doesn\u2019t work \u2014 companies\/universities\u00a0still have budgets to meet. \u00a0It\u2019s simply not possible to make the extra cash materialize, all the more so with tight budgets and funding cuts.<\/p>\n

But \u2014 but, they say, the university just needs to trim the endlessly-growing administration. \u00a0We see claims that the number of employees in university administration is growing exponentially, outpacing faculty hiring. \u00a0But if this is the low-hanging fruit, why hasn\u2019t it been plucked already?<\/p>\n

* Here\u2019s a comment from the Chronicle article linked to above, in response to my pushing back at the notion that Ph.D.s have an inherent right to a given salary level and teaching load:<\/p>\n

Because all academics work \u201cpart time\u201d by the definitions of those outside academia. And by that, I mean, they teach a reasonable amount (2-3 courses a semester), then engage in service and research, publish, attend national and international conferences, and deal with admin matters as well as student advising (which may include thesis supervision and the like). Because a PhD goes trough a number of hoops and training to get the degree. Because an actual scholar does research and is active in their field. And most importantly, because this is exactly what TT faculty do, and they aren\u2019t a different human subspecies but simply people holding a position gradually turning extinct.<\/p>\n

You pay more for more qualified instructors just as you pay more for lawyers or doctors, who also got a higher degree and also sweat through exams and qualifications, than you do for their assistants who did not, and going back to my barista example. If you believe people with higher degrees shouldn\u2019t be paid more, don\u2019t send your kids to college, let alone gradschool.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Which \u2014 well,\u00a0wow, to think that a credential, by itself, should grant automatically you these privileges, and its an injustice if it doesn\u2019t! \u00a0I\u2019m at a loss here.<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A Facebook friend posted about this yesterday; at various colleges & community colleges across the United States, adjunct professors \u201cwalked out\u201d (or protested in other ways, including using class time complaining about the situation) of their classes to protest the lot in life of adjunct professors. Details here, at the Chronicle of Higher Education, or […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2209,"featured_media":1381,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[100],"class_list":["post-1257","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-universities"],"yoast_head":"\nYesterday was National Adjunct Walkout Day. 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