American colleges and universities commonly promote social justice through their departments, curricula, policies, hiring decisions, and campus events. A scroll through campus news, events, course offerings, and scholarly publications will show support for dismantling racism, abolishing prisons, and using government policy to create a living wage.
However, it is equally common for institutions of higher education to pay the majority of their professors poverty-level wages without benefits and to deny them access to career advancement. If universities want to promote social justice, they should start by paying their adjunct professors a living wage with benefits.
Over the past 60 years, a two-tier system between tenured professors and adjunct professors has come to dominate in American colleges and universities. In 1960, three out of four professors were tenured or on the tenure track. Today, this ratio is reversed. Half of all professors in America are adjuncts, and three out of four are not on the tenure track. Nearly all professors have a terminal degree in their field. Many have pedagogical education, and tenured and adjunct professors alike may teach the same courses. Whether they are adjunct or tenured, all professors are professors in the eyes of their students.
But while tenured professors can make up to six figures, one in three adjunct professors lives below the federal poverty line. On average, an adjunct professor is paid only $2,700 to teach a 3-credit class. That’s not per month, that’s for the entire semester. The pay is slightly better at prestigious institutions, but not by much. At American University last year, I was paid $4,300 for each three-credit class that I taught.
Tenured professors receive a consistent, middle-class paycheck year-round. Adjunct professors aren’t paid over the holiday break between the fall and spring semesters. My union representatives advise us to go on unemployment over the summer. Tenured professors have healthcare benefits. Adjunct professors do not. Tenured professors have their own offices within their departments. Adjunct professors share offices, which are on different floors, and often in a different building, from the rest of our department. My office at American University, a shared cubicle in the basement, didn’t have a working light for an entire academic year.
Like many adjuncts, I worked at two or three schools at a time. I made $19,000 last year. One of my colleagues, who has both an M.F.A. and a Ph.D., made $25,000. Another adjunct, not at American University, was caught sleeping in his office and showering in the dorms because he couldn’t afford a place to live.
It’s not like colleges don’t have the money to pay adjunct professors a living wage. They just prefer to spend it on other things. You can easily find publicly available budget and expenditure reports for most higher education institutions. For example, in 2018, American University’s total revenue was $683.6 million, with $555.8 million of that revenue from tuition alone. The school spent $207 million on faculty and staff salaries and $8.7 million on adjunct faculty wages. In other words, of every tuition dollar that American University received in 2018, less than 2 cents went to an adjunct professor. Paying adjunct professors pennies on the dollar is, essentially, standard practice at universities and colleges across the country. It seems that higher education institutions want social justice — they just don’t want to have to pay for it.
With this year’s killing of George Floyd, and the ensuing national conversation around social justice and systemic racism, a number of universities, including the University of South Florida, American University, Otterbein University, and Brown University, have released statements on social justice. The University of Vermont asserts that social justice is “a public health issue” and states its commitment to “dismantling systems of oppression.”
I would contend that sleeping in an adjunct cubicle and never seeing a doctor, even while working as a university professor, is a public health issue. In 2019, the University of Vermont paid a base rate of $6,300 to a “part-time” (adjunct) professor, $22,500 to one associate professor, and up to $200,949 to a full professor. What is this exploitation of nontenured professors if not a system of oppression? Shouldn’t it be dismantled?
I challenge any university promoting social justice to lead by example. Dismantle the two-tier faculty system and give all professors equal pay for equal work. Academia, it is your responsibility, not the government’s, to pay for your professors’ healthcare, to pay your professors a salary commensurate with their standing as professionals and scholars, and to make sure that being a professor is a career, not a side gig.
Academia, if you want social justice, you should back up your words with actions.
Alexandra Syrah (M.F.A.) is an adjunct professor of writing at American University.
