If adjunct professors want a future where they don’t live condemned to poverty, they need to leave academia instead of demanding better jobs from universities.
“Higher education is an industry with a two-tier employment system: the full time and tenured professors and the administrators with well-compensated, stable jobs, and the adjunct professors who have no guarantee of job stability and pay near poverty levels,” Hamilton Nolan wrote for Gawker.
To highlight the plight of the adjunct, Gawker requested, and received, almost 200 responses from adjuncts about their working experience. Nolan summarized the academic struggle:
Many adjuncts must hustle madly just to make a living
The Ph.D. system is unsustainable
So where is all the money in higher education going? To middle management administrators, not teachers
A reasonable response to a low-paying, unfair employment system would be to leave it for a better one if another job can be found. The economic situation points that way, too: a glut of graduates want to become professors, and the high competition means colleges can fill faculty openings for cheap.
The personal anecdotes are bleak, but they aren’t new. Colleges and universities have moved away from a tenured faculty to a “cost-effective” faculty for decades. It’s unlikely to change soon, either.
Part-time faculty have increased from 24 percent of instructors in 1975 to 41 percent in 2014. Full-time tenured faculty dipped from 29 percent to 21 percent in the same time period, and full-time tenure-track faculty fell from 16 percent to 8 percent, according to the American Association of University Professors.
“Reliance on part-time faculty is not a viable long-term solution for higher education if the United States is to remain a global leader in education and research,” the AAUP declared.
Colleges have reaped big savings from this change. Low pay and without benefits, adjunct positions are a rare instance in higher education where administrators adhere to supply and demand. If unionization catches on, or colleges lessen their reliance on part-time and non-tenure track faculty, those costs will jump. Then, colleges will cut adjunct positions or raise tuition.
If bad pay and a dim academic future bothers academics, they need to recognize a harsh truth: the dream of becoming a career academic is one they need to drop.
“If you graduated in the class of 2011, your chances of living the academic dream appear to have been pretty slim,” Jordan Weismann wrote in The Atlantic when he found that only 19 percent of Ph.D.-earners had an academic job by graduation.
Too many people want to become professors relative to the number of available jobs. The oversupply of candidates let colleges hire for cheap. Agitating for an adjunct union or better pay won’t change that economic fact. As with actors and musicians, a few will hit it big and get the dream job, but the rest will eke out a meager living until they jump to a more lucrative, if less desired, career.
Full-time professors and college presidents have seen rising pay. Blaming university administrators is a popular argument, but administrators do much of the work that faculty don’t want to do anymore, and universities won’t save much by cutting administrative positions unless they cut faculty positions, too.
Adjuncts suffer, but that comes with the job title. The escape from adjunct penury is to escape academia.
