Adjunct Faculty—An Unsustainable Disgrace
By Joseph A. Domino
There is perhaps no topic in America where we talk out of two sides of our mouths more that Education. Education is in crisis at all levels, but at the college and university level it cries out and no one seems to be listening. Education is important but our standards continue to drop and we fall behind other countries. Faculty, the hearts and souls of universities, are being relegated to “operating costs” which are forever scrutinized for reduction. The adjunct system, around a long time, provides that cost control, and it has slowly been eroding opportunities for full-time professors and the salaries and benefits that accompany that status. When adjunct faculty handle a full-time course load plus work other part-time jobs to make ends meet it compromises the quality of their instruction which affects students. No matter how many courses adjuncts teach, they are still considered part-timers. It’s drudgery and adjuncts carry about the same status as a Wal-mart greeter or grocery bagger, and the pay is about the same. Let’s break it down.
Salary
It is simply not a livable wage. When I divide my net pay by hours per week, it comes out to something like $11-12 per hour. The only way I can afford to do this is with supplementary income from investments. Other adjuncts are not so fortunate. Some are on food stamps (“The Ph.D. Now Comes With Food Stamps,” by Stacey Patton, The Chronicle of Higher Education (May 6, 2012).
Matthew Benjamin in Bloomberg News (April 6, 2009) reported, “The number of Americans who want full-time jobs but are working part time has increased 83 percent in a year to 9 million, according to Labor Department data.” He went on to say, “They are part of a broader group that includes those who want a job but have stopped looking for work and those who want full-time positions but have to settle for part-time employment. A measure of underemployment that counts those people has almost doubled in the past two years, to 15.6 percent, providing a more complete gauge of the labor market’s deterioration.”
In the case of the adjunct, it is often a full-time work week at part-time pay.
My local County School District (K-12) has a base starting salary for first-year teachers of approximately $39K with post-graduate degrees. A regular faculty assistant professor position at my college has a salary range of $41-69K. Although I am in the system, I have applied several times for such a position at various campuses and was not even contacted.
Benefits
Of course there are none. Of primary interest is of course health insurance. Not even something basic like doctor visits and prescriptions. However the college does offer a benefit which full-time employees (faculty and non-faculty) can purchase: pet insurance. Locally, at any rate, this would be a public relations disaster except no one seems to know or care. I contacted a local newspaper reporter who covers higher education in the area. The reporter was not interested in a story.
There is a 403b retirement plan, which is mandatory. I need every dollar and the deduction doesn’t help me. When I questioned Human Resources, I was told schools do this to avoid contributing to employees’ social security, in other words, save the college money.
Working Conditions
On the plus side, adjuncts work mostly unsupervised but, while the Administration says we have its full backing, there has been a growing culture of viewing students as consumers and professors as “facilitators”. The widespread deficiency in basic skills and cultural literacy is shocking. The Administration also talks a lot about “student retention.” In four English Comp. II classes, no one had ever heard of Thoreau’s Walden Pond, let alone having read it. Once in a discussion of psychology and Macbeth, I mentioned Freud’s theory of the subconscious. Blank stares. I asked how many had taken “Psych. 101”. A few hands went up. I said you covered Freud, right? No, they had not.
Many adjuncts struggle who have no other sources of income. I know one who teaches as many as nine courses across three campuses.
We do not have private offices, but instead a large shared room with computers, workspace, other equipment, lockers (this last gives it all the charm of a bus station). A new building opened a few years back with classrooms and offices. Many of the regular faculty moved their offices to the new building, leaving many vacant in the old one. A good number of them were quickly filled by instructors/consultants running a “Small Business Development” program.
An office, even closet-sized with no windows, is a small perk, but in the world of academic untouchables, no request is too small. The point is an office lends a sense of professionalism to students and a sense of ownership and belonging to the instructor.
The college has a formal commitment to “Sustainability” which appears proudly on their website. Areas of sustainability include the environment, economic growth, and social [my emphasis] responsibility.
This is embarrassing, when one considers the passive abuse inflicted on adjuncts. In fact, it is the height of social irresponsibility. I have heard of faculty being chastised for drinking from plastic water bottles. I suppose the only thing we should throw away is people. To my mind, it’s not far removed from Orwell’s 1984 where any statement must be accepted as true because the State says it is. At the very least there is a latent hypocrisy at work here.
The Lone Star College Model. An article entitled, “Adjunct Inspiration” (Katherine Mangan), March 27, 2009,” in The Chronicle reported that “officials say they are trying to improve conditions for both faculty members and students by offering a limited number of “full-time adjunct” positions. These are adjuncts, typically hired for an academic year, who work a full-time teaching load — usually five classes per semester. They receive full benefits, and their pay is 70 percent of what a comparably qualified full-time faculty member would earn. That’s because full-time pay is based 70 percent on teaching and 30 percent on service and professional development. Adjuncts do not have the latter two requirements.”
Not great, but a better deal than we have presently. It might provide a good model or basis for working toward reform. It should not be characterized as a compromise, but as a step in the right direction.
The Larger Implications
Tenured faculty seem to act like they have no stake in this. They do. They are systematically being phased out. This should be their fight, too.
The two-thirds model (adjunct staffing percentage) can be described as analogous to the Feudal system, where the peasants and serfs constituted the majority and wealth and power were concentrated in the minority ruling class.
For the future, we would have to ask who would be inclined to become an educator in the current environment?
Conclusion
In an interview, Michael Moore responded to a question about whether every American was entitled to health care. His reply, applicable here, was, “We have to decide what kind of people we are.” He was referring to our national character. Do we extend a hand to the deprived, or simply say, every man for himself. Politically, health care, education, and livable wages are “social” problems. As soon as the “S” word appears, many reactionaries equate this with “social engineering,” a stone’s throw from the dreaded iron fist of socialism.
Institutions of higher learning should not follow the Walmart business model (e.g., 39-hr. a week employees, classifying them as part-timers, who then do not qualify for benefits).
We are slowly but inexorably abandoning our national commitment to academics, and thus losing our vision. In doing so we cannot sustain our democratic way of life. One of our founding fathers put it this way:
“If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be.”
–Thomas Jefferson, 1816
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Well, Josh, you nailed that down. Can’t wait for you to speak at CEA!
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Joseph,
What you say is basically true, but where are your remedies? I had been one of those ‘crying adjuncts’for decades, but in the past few years I have changed my attention towards solutions, not just complaints. I usually teach 9 courses on 3 or 4 campuses, plus online classes (that I do more work on than face to face sections). At the community college that is my base school we unionized in 2004 and our conditions have gotten considerably better. Not so much due to the National union but due to the leadership we developed on our campus and actions we took (like during Campus Equity Week activities, membership luncheons, organizing the adjuncts, having a strong negotiations team, and mostly by taking part in Campus life). We have become an important part of the College community by funding student scholarships and by participating in the College Foundation events. This has allowed us to more than double our per credit pay in 8 years, get an 8 desk adjunct office with computers, our own copier, a coffeemaker, a frig and microwave, etc. We have gotten voting rights in the Faculty Senate and seats on 10 College committees. I have recently gotten a seat on the Faculty Executive Committee which has given us a stronger voice in governance. My union co-president and I have monthly meeting with the administration and bring up issues concerning adjuncts, not all of which have been rectified but we have made many inroads.
We need to have a strong presence on our campuses and try to make the changes that will give us more equity. It is not as easy as complaining. It takes time and hard work. It is done in baby steps and with patience. It has taken a lot out of me but the outcomes have made it worthwhile. We must strive to change the ‘college culture’. We can not settle on being the ‘new normal’ but make out own path toward better pay and working conditions. 10 years ago at this school the President of the College stopped me in the hall one day and said he was tired of hearing adjuncts whine and cry. That is the day I decided to change things in that College and it is finally paying off. Are were treated equal with the full timers? No. Are we in a better position than we were 10 years ago? Definitely yes! And 5 years from now we will be in an even better place as long as we continue to offer the solutions.
The major reason I became involved in New Faculty Majority was to share my accomplishments and failures and to benefit from the same from other members. The ideas that have come from NFM have helped me get down that path faster. Keep stressing the solutions at your school and maybe someone will eventually listen, or at least get tired of hearing them and make some changes.
We adjuncts need to be the fuel that ignites the changes and brings forth the solutions that will give us the respect we deserve.
Joseph, I do apologize. I misread the situation and thought Josh wrote this fine article. I hope your school’s faculty will be able to read what you’ve said here and take heed. Bill’s response does give strategies he’s followed to make that hope become a reality. Thanks to both.
Hello Bill, I would like the opportunity to chat further with you about the inroads you’ve achieved. Would you please send me a quick email so I can chat further with you?
Regards,
Matthew Lit
Colorado Mountain College
Vice President of Adjunct Affairs
Lost power for 9 days due to Hurricane Sandy. Just getting back to normal and we have a snowstorm coming! Please send me your emailn address and I will send my cell number. I would love to talk about this with you.
Bill
I am still waiting to hear from you!
Bill
My state university system is trying to apply a version of the Lone Star Model here and has just proposed it (about 2 weeks ago) in contract negotiations that have been stalled for 15 months. Our full-time adjunct faculty already do better than that, so it would represent a substantial pay cut.
Our negotiations team told them to go smoke that idea.
This from a bargaining unit that’s about 80% tt/tenured and 20% adjunct. Take heart, y’all. We’re learning.
This transformation of higher education has been underway for more than 3 decades. Qualified, full-time faculty is the most expensive budget line-item in every school from K-20 so full-time faculty become adjunct faculty; thereby reducing the human cost of education. In other words, adjunct faculty become contract labor, hired and fired at will according to enrollment, thereby transforming their entire lives because they will not earn as much as they might for the purpose of retirement and Social Security; they may not enjoy health care protection either. That is a disservice to them, their families and their security. Equally important and problematic, in my opinion, is that the college/university charges full tuition and advertises a degree that may be cobbled together with a part-time department while allowing the public to believe that published professors engaged in research are at the helm. The very quality of the degree, if faculty are hired and acquired semester by semester or even year by year, must be called into question. If it has only a skeleton crew or an ever-changing crew, then collegiality, collaboration, and continuity may not exist, and those three C’s are essential.
The remedy is to form separate unions or bargaining units within existing unions. Without collective action, nothing will be done. Individuals do not have the power to negotiate their working conditions (except at very senior levels of management) and existing unions that represent both full time and part-time workers are nearly always willing to sacrifice the well-being of the part-timers for the welfare of the full-timers.
All of the national organizations that represent faculty, AFT, NEA, and AAUP have had statements on their websites for years supporting pay equity for adjunct faculty. Except on some campuses where there was no representation for adjuncts whatsoever, they have done little or nothing about implementing this standard.
On our campus, where there are more adjuncts than full time faculty and professional staff combined, the union simply ignores the interests of the majority. That is because many adjuncts are afraid to take the two minutes to fill in the membership form that would make them full members and let the rest of the membership know that they want their interests represented. It is hard to overcome this fear when both the administration and the union show little respect for adjunct faculty.
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Hi Joseph,
First, thanks for posting “Adjunct Faculty—An Unstainable Disgrace,” which I found to be beautifully articulate and compelling and a pleasure to read. The movement needs strong writers, and I hope you’ll be writing more. I also hope that, if you aren’t already, you’ll subscribe to the Adj-L, the Contingent Academics Mailing List, which has long served as the vehicle for discussions about the issue–-I learned about your piece from Joe Berry’s excellent digest, “COCAL Updates” that he posts on the Adj-L.
As an adjunct in my 21st year, I can identify with much of what you say, including the poverty-level income, which is a function of both the per-class rate of pay and the workload limitations that adjuncts commonly face (e.g., no more than 67 percent of full-time in the California Community College system). In Washington state, thanks to the courage of Keith Hoeller, who was behind two class action lawsuits settled in 2002 and 2003, adjuncts who teach at 50 percent of full-time for two consecutive terms now regularly receive retirement and health care. I am taken by your identification of the “passive abuse inflicted on adjuncts” and how it is “not far removed” from an Orwellian 1984 assertion that it must be true because “the State says it is.”
My response would be similar to Bill Lipkin, who I know from the New Faculty Majority; I am a former NFM board member. Bill asks about solutions. You mention the “Lone Star College Model,” which, I certainly agree, constitutes no solution, though it may be better than no nothing, just as removing the cap that limits adjunct workload would be positive, as the cap now helps to keep poor people poor. Bill talks about what Joe Berry has identified as the “Inside-Outside” strategy of working both within the associations like faculty unions, where they are available, along with non-union outside groups, like COCAL, NFM, the California Part-time Faculty Association for those in California, etc.
My recommendation as a solution would be to look at the colleges of British Columbia as a model that to be emulated as it offers true equality. At Vancouver Community College, the largest, for example, the key difference between faculty is not tenured vs. non-tenured nor even full-time vs. part-time. It’s regularized (which is the functional equivalent of tenured) and non-regular status. Term faculty who teach at 50 percent of full-time for two years, without an unsatisfactory evaluations, are automatically converted to regular status, whereby they have job security (right of first refusal, right of accrual) and can presume their job will continue indefinitely, quite possibly until retirement. Of course one can be laid off, but it must be for cause. It would be like all faculty being tenured or on the tenure track, which so contrasts with our U.S. standard for adjuncts when one can teach for decades with little prospect of being hired full-time. Also, VCC has a great system of faculty seniority, and seniority, not full-time or part-time status, is the key variable in workload assignment. Non-regular faculty accrue seniority on a pro-rated basis, while regular faculty accrue seniority at the full-time rate, whether they are teaching full-time or part-time. This is so that once faculty members becomes regularized, if they should wish to remain part-time, their seniority ranking will not be overtaken by someone who happens to teach more.
I also liked the question you restated about what kind of people do we wish to be. Do we believe in a system that treats people equally or do we believe in elitism and stratification?
Frank Cosco from Vancouver Community College and I developed the “Program for Change,” which is a roadmap for activists to convert the U.S. bifurcated two-tiered system into an egalitarian one, with VCC’s system as a model. It’s posted at http://vccfa.ca/newsite/wp-content/uploads/2012/05/ProgramForChange_09-28-2010_001.pdf as well as at the New Faculty Majority website.
Jack Longmate (jacklongmate@comcast.net)
Adjunct English Instructor
Olympic College, Bremerton, WA
Good suggestions in the comments. I would add though that where you matters when it comes to options. Florida state code is not labor friendly may not allow you to exercise some of the recommended options. Talk to Texas, Mississippi, Louisiana and Texas adjuncts about that. I bet a number of Bill’s suggestions could be adapted.
Perhaps readers more familiar with the Florida adjunctiverse could chime in here.
FYI: url for the Bloomberg article by Matthew Bergman, “Americans Feel 15.6% Unemployment as Underemployment Surges”
“Adjunct Inspiration” (2009), about the Lone Star model is, alas, behind a paywall. Apparently, it includes “adjunct-certification” (“excellence without money”)
I’m not so sure where matters as much as one might think. While some states effectively preclude the formation of unions, there is nothing that would stops adjuncts in a right to work state from lobbying to establish a seniority system or to pull for, first, a system to hire adjuncts according to a established procedure per the hiring administrative union (division/department/teaching area) to be a step in, second, an single institution-wide hiring procedure with common criteria according to which all faculty, full- and part-time, would be hired. Both of those ideas involve little cost and both are among the over 30 discrete goals of the Program for Change (http://vccfa.ca/newsite/wp-content/uploads/2012/05/ProgramForChange_09-28-2010_001.pdf).
In fact, since adjuncts in states that allow faculty unions and who are represented by unions often do not have measurable improved working conditions, it’s unclear how important unions are in determining those working conditions.
What can be influential in any context is unanimity to show agreement behind a given idea–if most faculty members in a given discipline, department, or institution stand behind a given idea, it will be difficult for the administration to ignore it, particularly if it entails a nominal amount of funding to implement.
Jack Longmate
Adjunct English Instructor
Olympic College, Bremerton, WA
I wish you were right, but my own personal experience and that of colleagues inform me otherwise.
As for, “nothing that would stops adjuncts in a right to work state from…” what about being fired mid-semester, not rehired, blackballed? When any of those are likely consequences for actions so mild as trying to start an AAUP advocacy chapter (not a bargaining unit) or correcting an administrator on a point of labor law, few will feel they can risk even that much, let alone the more you suggest.
It’s puzzling that the false analogies and factual errors here have not registered with readers.
Not that I disagree with you that pay and working conditions for adjuncts are atrocious. But, for example, it’s unlikely that Walmart classifies a 39-hour-a-week employee as part-time, when as we all know, 40 hours is full-time in anyone’s book. And the “two-thirds model” does not apply, on average, across the country — in two-year colleges and in certain disciplines in four-year colleges, it’s much worse than that. You were misled by whomever you spoke to in HR: FICA is paid on gross pay, not on after-tax pay, and so having everyone contribute to a 403(b) would do nothing to change the employer’s share of the FICA (Social Security) tax.
Serfs were attached to the land. They had no choice of where they would work: they had to live and work where they were born. Thus to compare serfdom to adjunct teaching is a false analogy.
No one is forced to work as an adjunct. One could earn more operating a cash register at Walmart, and at Costco the same job would earn significantly more. Employed at, say, Costco, a person bright enough to earn a master’s or doctoral degree would quickly rise to a managerial position, which is paid many thousands of dollars more than the entry-level salary cited in this post, which does not require one to take work home, and which decidedly does not entail hours and hours of unpaid labor.
When you observe that you supplement your pay with investment income, you inadvertently put your finger on the problem: so many people work adjunct as a kind of hobby that colleges can easily keep pay low, and that makes it impossible to demand fair rates of pay. Pay rates and working conditions will never improve until people refuse to work for low pay with absurd working conditions.
The only solution is for all of us to quit working adjunct and take jobs that pay decently, even if some of us think such work is beneath our dignity.
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