As the college admissions season winds down, I have some hard choices to make, but my dilemma is not about choosing where to enroll. It’s about how many adjunct instructors I will hire to teach required courses next fall.
As a department chair at Columbia University, I am compelled to hire many people on a part-time basis, although they want and deserve full-time jobs. These adjuncts are among the finest, longest-serving instructors in many universities, and it’s well known that their lasting contributions can transform the lives of their students.
It’s also no secret that they are getting a raw deal. Overworked and underpaid, they often struggle to get by and, when taken to an extreme, the consequences can be tragic.
With each passing year, it becomes clearer that cheap labor has become the hidden foundation of American higher education. According to the American Association of University Professors, more than 50 percent of all faculty hold part-time appointments. A vast workforce of mostly non-unionized adjunct instructors—the so-called “contingent faculty”—now comprises the core of the teaching faculty. They often teach as many courses as full-time instructors, but because they are considered part-time, they have no voting power in departments or universities, no benefits, no job security and no office in which to meet with their students.
The short-term benefits to a university’s bottom line are obvious. It is fiscally advantageous for institutions to hire adjuncts instead of creating more full-time positions with benefits, and the seemingly unlimited availability of part-time instructors makes it relatively easy to offer a large number of courses. And, as noted in the 2010 report of the Coalition on the Academic Workforce, while adjunct instructors are long-time (albeit part-time) faculty and shoulder a substantial portion of the curriculum, institutional policies often treat them as if they are short-term workers with minimum involvement in academic life. More than once, adjuncts have been called “the fast-food workers of the academic world.”
To be sure, for some with other sources of income, the flexibility is an advantage. But for most struggling to make a living, the conditions are exploitative. Teaching numerous classes at multiple campuses to make ends meet, without access to the amenities and opportunities for advancement that come with full-time teaching gig, adjuncts are largely invisible and powerless. Above all, they are underpaid. The median pay for a three-credit course—one quarter of the average student’s classes in a given semester—is about $3,000 before taxes, and even adjuncts teaching a heavy load may be eligible for food stamps, while tuition costs are steadily rising.
How did this happen? When I was a student in the 1980s and 1990s, many graduate students supported their studies by teaching; universities needed them to meet the instructional needs of the growing population of undergraduates. Doctoral students stayed in school for many years, sometimes for decades, with little in the way of financial aid, so the flow of supply and demand remained relatively stable. In the last decade, however, many graduate schools have shrunk, graduating smaller and more select classes of PhDs. Meanwhile, the number of full-time faculty has not increased at the nearly same rate as the undergraduate population, hence the exploding need for adjuncts.
Even wealthy institutions that arguably have a vested interest in keeping adjuncts happy (if only to combat a growing trend toward adjunct unionization) are doing little or nothing to that end. At Columbia, the base rate of $5,000 per class for an adjunct has not increased in decades. Meanwhile, between 2006 and 2013, the Campaign for Columbia raised more than $6 billion, the highest amount ever raised by an Ivy League university. So where has the money gone? In the same seven-year period, the costly expansion to the new Manhattanville campus has proceeded apace, faculty salaries have remained flat and the ranks of professional administrators have swelled, as they have throughout American higher education.
With a May 1 college decision deadline looming, future members of the class of ‘19 should ask universities some hard questions, such as how many adjuncts they employ instead of full-time faculty, and at what salary. Perhaps the only way to effect change will be through two time-honored American traditions: the customer is always right, and you get what you pay for. The consumers of higher education deserve value for their money. They—and we —must demand dignified working conditions and decent pay for the adjunct instructors in the classrooms of American colleges and universities.
Susan Boynton, PhD, is Professor of Historical Musicology and Chair of the Department of Music at Columbia University and an OpEd Project Public Voices Fellow.
As the cost of a college education continues to rise, the public often perceives that professors with astronomical salaries are the ones “breaking the bank.” This article accurately dispels that explanation. The employment picture is not that positive for tenured faculty members either. Age discrimination is common - with universities dramatically increasing teaching loads, adding unrelated responsibilities, removing funding for academic projects, etc. in order to get tenured teachers to leave or retire. The exploitation of adjuncts is only one of a list of questionable policies in academia today.
No mention of having grad students teach classes. While I was a grad student, I taught 3 different undergrad courses. This was back in the 80’s and early 90’s, and was paid about $750 a month. They also paid my tuition, which was nice, but didn’t really cost them anything.
I believe Boynton has it exactly right, and I agree about two of the main causes of the situation – devoting funds to buildings and amenities rather than full-time faculty, and an absurd proliferation of administrators. I think the ranks of administrators in higher ed could be thinned by 50% without anyone even noticing.
I agree with Boynton that adjuncts are hard-working and often effective and inspiring teachers. But it is a disservice to students who are paying tens of thousands of dollars of tuition yearly to assign them instructors who are overworked (Many work two or three adjunct jobs to make ends meet) and often lack basics such as office space in which to meet with students.
Transparency about the practice may help end it, as would unionization. But the bottom line is that as long as there are highly trained people lining up to work for subsistence wages, it will be very tempting to hire them. Just say no and use your skills to get non-academic jobs, adjuncts!
The article implies that as graduate programs have scaled back, there are fewer grad students to use for teaching. Also, at many institutions, graduate students are teaching assistants who grade and handle discussion sections, but would not teach their own classes, which an adjunct with a Ph.D could do. I think graduate departments in most humanities disciplines are still too big and produce more Ph.Ds than the job market can handle, but of course if they scale back too much their tenured senior faculty might find themselves without classes to teach, so they keep churning out those unemployable Ph.Ds. That situation has held since the 1980s.
Possibly, if they thinned that herd of administrators, it would curb the manic pursuit of pouring ever more money into new facilities rather than, say, taking care of the faculty and staff and, oh, I don’t know, maybe doing some minimal g.d. maintenance on the existing facilities.
I still revere UNC (with the appropriate degree of irony, of course), but the school’s mania for replacing the already insanely scant parking with bright, shiny new buildings the school won’t be able to afford to maintain and can’t staff without a sufficiently impoverished adjunct faculty, even while sidewalks crumble and existing facilities become dated and dingy drove me, and still drives me, nuts. Part of it’s political–it’s a lot easier to get a state legislator to fund a big shiny new facility that some corporation or foundation or rich person has already agreed to help pay for than maintain existing infrastructure and staffing. Indeed, the latter two are like mental health care: the first thing that gets cut when times are tight and, once funding for them is cut, that funding level becomes the “new normal” from which the next round of cuts are made.