“Are adjunct professors the fast-food workers of the academic world?”
James Hoff writes at The Guardian about working as an adjunct professor.
Sounds like the problem here is supply and demand.
Are adjunct professors the fast-food workers of the academic world?
I am what’s called an adjunct. I teach four courses per semester at two different colleges, and I am paid just $24,000 a year and receive no health or pension benefits. Recently, I was profiled in the New York Times as the face of adjunct exploitation, and though I was initially happy to share my story because I care about the issue, the profile has its limits. Rather than use my situation to explain the systemic problem of academic labor, the article personalized – even romanticized – my situation as little more than the deferred dream of a struggling PhD with a penchant for poetry.
But the adjunct problem is not about PhDs struggling to find jobs or people being forced to give up their dreams. The adjunct problem is about the continued exploitation of a large, growing and diverse group of highly educated and dedicated college teachers who have been asked to settle for less pay (sometimes as little as $21,000 a year for full-time work) because the institutions they work for have callously calculated that they can get away with it. The adjunct problem is institutional, not personal, and its affects reach deep into our culture and society.
Though there are tens of thousands of personal stories like mine of economic hardship and lives ruined or put on hold, it is not to these stories that we should turn when we consider the exploitation of adjuncts in academia, but to our universal sense of justice. For the continued exploitation of adjuncts is, to put it bluntly, nothing less than unjust.
Are adjunct professors the fast-food workers of the academic world? (The Guardian)
Comments
I work as an adjunct professor. For me, it is a part-time position I hold in addition to my full time job (although when I began teaching I had no other work).
No one forces me to work as an adjunct. If James Hoff isn’t happy with his compensation, he can look for employment elsewhere. No one is compelling him to work as an adjunct, and no one is stopping him from seeking work in another field.
As Aleister wrote, it is about supply and demand. Of course the universities are going to pay as little as possible, just like every other employer. James Hoff may think his work is important enough to merit more pay, but obviously the universities that employ adjuncts do not. (I surmise that most of these universities value research and publication over teaching.)
There is no grand injustice here. Just because you are “highly educated” doesn’t mean you are entitled.