 2010 by Andrew Hacker and Claudia Dreifus. All rights reserved.)
CONTINGENT EDUCATION? Excerpted from the book HIGHER EDUCATION?: How Colleges Are Wasting Our Money and Failing Our Kids--And What We Can Do About It by Andrew Hacker and Claudia Dreifus, published in August by Times Books, an imprint of Henry Holt and Company, LLC. Copyright (c) 2010 by Andrew Hacker and Claudia Dreifus. All rights reserved.
Image: Henry Holt and Co.
Some years ago, at a college where Claudia was teaching a nonfiction writing course, she found herself working without an assigned office space. All college teachers require a dedicated corner where they can confer with their students. And Claudia's specialty—journalism training—is particularly dependent on professor-student interactions. Claudia’s students bring her their tentative first attempts at reporting. She must show them where they’ve gone right or wrong and gently steer them onto a successful path. Given the vulnerability of young writers, all of this is best done delicately, and in private. “I have no office space for meeting my students—what can we do about this?” Claudia inquired of the administrator who ran her department.
“There’s no space left this term,” the administrator declared dismissively, annoyed. “The regular faculty have taken everything.”
“I understand,” Claudia persisted, “but what are my students to do? This is part of their training.”
“Couldn’t you meet them in the cafeteria? Or the hallway? There are a couple of lounge chairs by the ladies’ room.”
That stunned her. Was this person actually suggesting that Claudia confer with her students south of a toilet?
This administrator, an individual who herself enjoyed a large, airy office far from the scent of the lavatory, grew increasingly irritated with Claudia’s insistence that her students deserved better. After ten minutes of back and forth, came this: “Listen here, Ms. Dreifus, you’re an adjunct! Do you get that? We’ve got a hundred adjuncts here. I’m busy.”
Ah, the pecking order of the university! Claudia—who’d previously spent much of her life as a professional journalist—didn’t yet understand her lowly place in this new environment.
Adjuncts belong to a diverse group of teachers called contingents, who are hired to take on chores regular faculty members don’t want to do. Their numbers and ratios increase with the size of a university, but since most students now attend larger schools, this raises their chances of getting a contingent education.
As we noted earlier, contingent faculty fall in several tiers.
Instructors and Lecturers. These positions have some security, but are low on status. They receive modest salaries and benefits, and many have multiyear contracts. It is generally understood that they will not move to the tenure track. By and large, they do jobs the higher tiers don’t want, like compositions sections or freshman mathematics. Many are faculty spouses.
Visiting Faculty. Here we are not referring to academic or kindred celebrities, who come to grace a campus for outlandish salaries. Rather, they are more likely to be young doctorate holders who cannot find a regular appointment. They fill in for professors on sabbatical or maternity leave. Many have had a succession of such appointments, but they are never asked to stay. They receive health and other benefits, but only for the period they are in residence.
Adjuncts. There are so many it’s impossible to get a reliable count. The range runs from respected professionals like lawyers and film producers who teach one evening course (largely because they enjoy it) to gypsy scholars who commute among as many as four campuses in a single week. As we’ve noted, pay rates are shamefully low. The American Federation of Teachers found the average is about $3,000 per course, which means many get less.
Teaching Assistants. In colleges that have master’s and doctoral programs, graduate students are regularly used as cheap teaching labor. Most typically, they run discussion sections in large lecture classes, freeing the professors from personal contact with undergraduates and chores they feel are beneath them. An American Association of University Professors survey of 280 research universities found that together they employed 181,481 teaching assistants, ranging from 5,376 at Berkeley to 202 at the University of Chicago. It’s difficult to track down information on what all graduate assistants are paid. Still, we can report that the stipend at Yale, as a school with more resources than most, is about $20,000 for the nine teaching months, plus another $3,500 to survive over the summer. Even for a single person, this is essentially a poverty wage.
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14 Comments
Add CommentThis article doesn't really much address the question of what has gone wrong in our colleges and how to get it back on track. It's more a litany of complaints of the treatment of contingent teaching staff, many of whom (according to the article and in my own experience) are very fine educators.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisHere's a couple of things that could help:
1) Eliminate tenure. Force highly paid professors to produce or be pruned.
2) Re-connect students to the cost of their education so that they and their parents will be more demanding consumers. For most, the cost is pretty much covered by government, giving them less skin in the game.
@Soccerdad...Very well put. Tenure is a joke. I know many who simply quit trying once they get tenure.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisExactly correct - no one should be guaranteed a job for life. They need some real world as well! But article did not address the real issues of colleges wasting money (read your kid's tuition). Times they are a-changing and we need to look carefully at what constitutes a college education.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThis article is good evidence of why contingent faculty are paid what they get. It is an anecdotal essay that makes for interesting reading but is lean on evidence or good science.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThe authors have worked as adjuncts in a field that has an enormous supply of potential faculty matched by an almost non-existent demand. In an economic marketplace this equates to a low price for product. Most graduate students haven't the interest, education, or skill to teach yet in fields like English there are more of them seeking employment than courses demanding their services.
The authors also demonstrate some poor arithmetic. An adjunct who is paid $4,000 to teach one course works approximately 117 hours over the semester. At the suggested 2 hours of preparation for each hour in the classroom an adjunct spends 6 hours per week in preparation time plus 3 hours in the classroom teaching for a total of 9 hours. Assuming the typical semester is about 13 weeks long this equals 117 hours per course. Divide $4,000 by 117 and my calculator comes out with about $34.00 per hour (not $8.65.) Assuming a typical year of 52 weeks less 4 weeks for vacation that would be 2,000 hours worked per year (assuming full-time employment) of roughly $68,000 per year full-time equivalent salary. This is for a person who is incapable of performing the equivalent of a professor's job. They are not vetted as having the education or research skills of a trained Ph.D. In today's market $68,000 for a newly trained Ph.D. in English is not too shabby.
If we truly want to "fix" higher education we need to stop admitting students who are at the bottom or below any reasonable measure of capability. Public universities are often required to accept transfers from junior colleges who are not required to take SAT exams. All they need is a GPA of 2.0 or better and an AA degree. We need to reduce the number of students gaining admissions to universities and colleges so the trained full-time faculty can educate them in a proper fashion. Some universities need to re-focus on teaching. Much university level research for publication is a waste of resources. Faculty publish mostly for other faculty. Billions of dollars are spent on research the only purpose of which is to further faculty raises and promotions.
Tenure's purpose in higher education is to provide job security so that faculty may express themselves openly about topics that may be highly controversial. It can be replaced, but increasing job risk is unlikely to attract the best people without higher pay.
This is nothing new, it was my experience while a physics Ph.d student at a major midwestern public university in the 1970's. The department brought in 2X the number of first year graduate students that it could fund for full Ph.D dissertations, purely to have enough TA's to teach all the undergraduate sections. They would then flunk about 50% in the qualifying exams at the end of the first graduate year and bring in the next crop.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisOf course they would never admit to such methods, ( the best proof - decades later after contributing to the department alumni association, I received the department magazine,where the university had to publish a piece to deny they were still using this metho!)
This was simply not the case at Texas Tech University. A major university in Lubbock, TX. For a majority of my courses in Biology and other areas as well, I had mostly tenured or tenure track professors teaching. The only class that I can honestly remember not having a tenure track, but a contingent, was Organic Chem II, but that guy had just finished his Doctorate in O Chem and was AMAZING!
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThis is the nature of corporitization (maximizing profit at the cost of quality and/or sustainability - and ultimately the consumers that support the various "race to the bottom" efforts). It's rotting out medicine, education, music ...pretty much everything that relies on real merit to produce good results. Corporitization is like communism as seen through the prism of Sam Walton.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisEvery type of worker (regardless of education level) is subject to supply-and-demand in the labor market. A glut in workers (also regardless of how noble we consider a profession to be) lowers wages which encourages many to find another profession, and over time an equilibrium is reached.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisIt might raise tough choices but will not surprise those who have done their homework.
I'm a chemistry student and once considered an academic career, but the simple fact is that there are too few academic positions for the number of graduates. The result is typical of any field with an oversupply of workers. This information is available to those who does even an hour of investigation online, as I would hope all my fellow students would sacrifice in order to properly plan a fulfilling career. I, for one, chose to go into consulting and I absolutely love it.
As to the question about contingent education, I was in a top 10 science/engineering school and I sat through numerous lectures by TAs. My fellow students and I agreed that professors are normally awful teachers anyway, and the best students who want to pursue research often do (I certainly did), in close conjunction with the faculty. The system works for those who are smart about it. There will always be those that aren't, but then as with everything: let the buyer beware. The real world shouldn't have to (and doesn't) hold your hand forever, and I don't see why this should be any different.
I served over 40 years as a tenured faculty member in a private university. I also served as a university administrator (dean, department chair, ect.) during part of that period. After retiring I am now teaching as an adjunct professor at a state university and at a community college. I am convinced that the main problem with our university system is the constant attempt to gain prestige.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisPrestige is gained by having highly published tenured faculty and brand new costly facilities. In order to attract these highly paid faculty, they are offered positions with little teaching duties. It is typical for these individuals to teach small graduate seminars. They create their own journals in their sub-specialties with their peers at other universities. They get their graduate students and untenured faculty to submit papers for review so that they can have a high rejection rate -- the only measure of prestige.
On the facility side, university administrators need to solicit funds from wealthy donors. They are most successful it getting funds for shiny new buildings that are then named for the donor. These buildings are often very expensive to maintain and their upkeep must come from the general funds meant for instruction.
Both of these expenses are substantial and have been increasing rapidly and result in the cost of higher education rising at an even faster rate than medical care. One way to mitigate these costs is to exploit contingent faculty.
The solution is to greatly reduce the pressure to publish. Much of what is published is read by only the few in a given sub-specialty and adds nothing to the betterment of society. Reduce the number of graduate programs where the only option for the graduate is academia. Many programs are totally self serving and costly.
Finally if donors want to have their name affixed to a building require them to endow a fund for maintenance and endow funds for paying for the faculty that teach in it and or the students who will learn in it.
Since most universities are either non-profit or public, these policies could be implemented by legislators or accrediting agencies.
As one who has taught multiple adjunct writing courses, this article hit close to home. I have much to say about it and have written an article about it on my blog: www.knittedthoughts.com. Come take a look -- I'd love to hear your comments.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI'm employed by a major research university as a staff member and I find the notion that once a professor gains tenure that they somehow "slack off" to be bogus, at least in my personal experience. Every professor I've worked with or for and all of those I've observed over more than thirty years has been a hard worker, tenured or not.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisPerhaps the sciences, where I work, are different than the liberal arts or other departments but the productivity, as measured by advising graduate students, publications, and teaching, of virtually all the faculty are uniformly high. I'm sure there's a slacker here or there but they're rare.
Tenure often brings a lot of out-of-classroom duties, such as faculty committees, which eat up a lot of time, and most research professors tend to travel a lot, representing their research at meetings, government boards, et cetera.
If you see slackers, don't blame tenure.
As an adjunct lecturer at 3 colleges and universities I can confirm that this article is right on target. The reason I teach is because I LOVE IT. And it shows. Students follow me from one course to another and my goal is for them to learn about the world around them. I wish I could say the same for all my colleagues. Unfortunately many full-time, tenured professors don't want to teach. They want to do research and HAVE to teach - and it shows. The students are the ones who suffer. Teaching, in general, should be left to those who want to teach. Let the researchers research, the writers write, and the teachers teach.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI have to say it would be nice to be given classes because I am a good teacher (not because no one else wanted to teach them), be paid as much as my colleagues, and not have to wonder if next term I will be given enough classes to pay for food and rent. Thank you for writing this article and letting the truth be known.
I am a professor at a US land grant university. One thing that is missing from this article is that, at least in my part of the country, salaries are suffering from "salary compression." More salary dollars are going to new hires to get good candidates and to salary increases for assistant and associate professors to retain them and less to salary increases for tenured professors. Therefore, tenured professors loosing purchasing power. In my department, every class is taught by a tenure track professor. Graduate students are only used for class or lab preparation. I am aware that is not true everywhere, but the move to non-faculty instruction at my university has been largely due to the precipitous drop in state funding over, at least, the last 15 years.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisContingent faculty exploitation... Although many points are well made here, I strongly object to the overly sweeping claims and the disunity in attempting to pit professors against adjuncts. It's not... The issue is just one: university administrators trying to save money!
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisExamples of objectionable statements:
1. "The professors don't want to teach..."
BULL! At the satellite campus of the research university for which I am an associate professor of mathematics, even full professors don't get much choice. We have courses to cover and each does his 18 credits per year (except in the rare case of a special grant or sabbatical).
2. Maybe because I was an adjunct for six years during the 1970s while getting my Ph.D., I've never treated an adjunct as anything less than any other colleague, nor when I was thrice campus department chairman. More to the point, I don't recall ever witnessing disrespect to adjuncts within our department or, for that matter, anywhere else on campus.
3. Our campus is always working to involve adjuncts more, including involving them with the faculty senate (admittedly more a showcase than real governing, IMO), mentoring them, finding them office space and computers, and so on. In fact, in one way adjuncts actually get BETTER treatment, because we need them to teach courses for which we can't afford to hire a full-timer. Hence, adjuncts get to dictate class times based on when they are available. I've never been able to make such a demand, and indeed, regardless of rank or tenure, all our regular faculty are expected to be available 18 credits per year, 8AM to 6PM, five days per week, if necessary - or 24 credits if not on the "research track" (tenured or tenure-eligible, particularly). This is not a complaint -- it's just the reality of the marketplace.]
4. Commenter attacks on tenure? Are you freaking kidding? Does one have to rehash the benefits vs. costs of tenure every decade to remind of its utter necessity? Sheesh!
5. "Publications that nobody reads except those in the same sub-specialty." This is exaggeration, distortion, and nonsense, not to mention its awful philistine level. Even if some of it is true, every generation finds uses for earlier "theory" that finds practical uses and even profits all - think satellites, GPS, smartphones, and the whole electronics explosion. Without academics being free and trusted to explore, society as a whole loses, now and in the future.
6. Finally, full-timers don't hire... only administrators do. Please stop trying to pit us against adjuncts!