Non-tenure track teaching staff – commonly referred to as adjuncts – now make up approximately 70% (yes, you read it correctly) of all teaching staff in American higher education. This means that roughly three out of every four courses an American student takes are taught by someone without job security who is working on minimal pay.
Years ago tenure was attacked for a number of reasons: it was accused of encouraging laziness and indifference to the students; it was unfair (why should one class of employee be exempted from being sacked for incompetence); it meant that older teachers could stay on way beyond their sell-by date. Above all, it was expensive and universities couldn’t rid themselves of ga-ga professors.
So tenure was cut back (or is disappearing) and we can now see clearly how students are being short-changed as a result. The administrators (or, as they are known,”nobodies”) have acquired unacceptable power and income. In some cases speech has been curtailed because, if an adjunct professor complains, he or she may never be asked to teach again. The only people who have gained are the heads of the colleges and the penpushers .
The larger picture is one of exploitation and control. One fifth of adjuncts have no health insurance. Half of all adjuncts are seeking full-time employment and are unable to obtain it. They are at the mercy of students who can get them fired if they are tough on the grading of lazy youngsters. Many have to take second jobs, cannot query their contracts, and can have their classes canceled without notice. The average adjunct lecturer receives only $2700 per course taught. While that amount is sometimes portrayed as easy money, in addition to class time lecturers have to prepare course content, create exams and assignments, grade, advise students, and, of course, travel from campus to campus. When academics are employed on a casual basis, such activity is not compensated, meaning that the true rate of pay is often around the minimum wage. Meanwhile, people have started to believe that if you are an adjunct you are an academic failure. And yet the whole business plan of universities is based on cheap adjunct labour. Why bother to go to college, some are asking?
The fact is that colleges and universities are being run as ordinary businesses, ever expanding to take more students and rake in more revenue, with little benefit to students. Amy Gutmann, president of the University of Pennsylvania, for instance, takes home over $3 million a year – about 140 times what an adjunct, teaching eight courses, would earn. The average pay for public college presidents was $428 000 in 2014. Some college sports coaches are paid even better: the 10 most highly paid college coaches in 2015 each earned more than Gutmann, with some bringing home more than $7 million.
Academia as a whole is supposed to work as a force for scientific inquiry, challenging conventional wisdom and independently assessing the truth of various claims and studies. The Enlightenment idea was that universites were there to search for truth, and pass on to new generations the knowledge and wisdom that comes from free thought and debate over centuries. A friend who is involved in this academic world calls higher ecucation a “bubble about to burst”. Let it burst, but return to the old meaning of a “place of learning”.
To The Independent
The most troubling aspect of the proposals to rank universities on teaching excellence is the assumptions that underpin it. For two decades now, politicians have been saying the sole purpose of a university education is to improve the job prospects (and earning power) of the students universities teach. This ideology of philistine instrumentalism, where academies and students alike are required to prostrate themselves before the idols of the economy and the markets, undermines not only universities but also the values of Western civilisation.
Universities are not there to improve “the economy”, and no honest academic in a field of study such as mine (classical archaeology) can put his (or her) hand on his heart and vow that a degree in her/his field can “guarantee” a higher paying job for their students.
Universities are there to seek out the truth, in particular to distinguish hard truths from fashionable falsehoods. They are there to incubate values best summed up by the German term Bildung, and not simply to confirm the values of the age. Clearly many students, schooled in this instrumental ideology promoted by politicians (and supported by the managerial elites that now run universities), no longer understand this. They do not value free speech, or recognise a genuine intellectual who asks genuine questions, such as Germaine Greer, when they see her. Is there anyone in politics who will stand up to this creeping political philistinism?
James Whitley, professor in Mediterranean archaeology, Cardiff University
I totally agree with all of your comments, both in the article and the comments. Why don’t the Americans do what the British do, and use more PhD students to teach the undergraduates? It not only saves money, but gives the undergraduates a good education and the PhD students different perspectives on their research. The more I hear about American universities, both from you and my American friends at Exeter, the more I’m glad I’m British. These American universities are the richest in the world; the fact that they pay these adjuncts poverty wages is inhumane. The government ought to regulate the private universities far more thoroughly.