This essay actually takes the form of a quasi-Socratic dialogue... with myself. I really believe adjunct faculty are, in many ways, becoming a new undercaste for the information society.
Well, as any full-time professor knows, you spend far more time on a class than the actual number of listed hours. Many adjuncts are also teaching more than one class per semester. I don't know - maybe the work's not as grueling as operating a jackhammer in the hot sun for 8 hours each day, which I admit - but I still feel as exploited as any day laborer. There simply is no reason for the extremely dichotmous pay inequity between full-time and part-time faculty. I would expect to make at least half of what they do - but it's more like one-quarter.
But to me it goes beyond low wages: other things that bother me about being an adjunct at FIU include:
I wish that were true, but it's not. I have met too many people who have been adjuncts for ten and twenty years. Some wanted to stay that way - which is fine. But I have met too many people stuck in the adjunct track, unable to get anywhere else, when they desperately want to move on. And that's a problem. Medical residents, once they finish a one to three-year medical residency, can often expect a full-time job which will make up for their suffering. But in academia, that light at the end of the tunnel often doesn't seem to be there.
I would like to, but most assistant professorships I'm applying for have as many as 300 to 800 applicants. I would like to think I'm a strong candidate, but those are some tough odds. In many cases, I'm going up against people with many more years of experience than me. Normally, those people would not be applying for the same "entry-level" jobs. But because of our "distorted market" I'm being forced to compete with them.
Yes. I don't really want to be a millionaire, to be honest, but a living wage would be nice. And it's not like I don't have skills - but for some reason, the corporate world often doesn't seem to give a fig about the skills I have. I *have* tried on several occasions to look for work outside the ivory tower, but somehow my skills just generate blank looks. I guess the ability to think critically and do research has become irrelevant in the Dilbert World.
Some say the explosion of post-docs and adjuncts doing teaching
and research is just the simple result of supply and demand: there's
not enough demand for full-time faculty. I say this is rank BS:
our overcrowded classes prove the student demand for more full-time
instructors is there -- but the
administration is not giving departments the resources they need
to hire them.
This is not a supply problem - I really do not believe we are granting "too many" PhD's in the social sciences, the Humanities, or other fields, since a look at the actual statistics hardly seems to support this. It's a demand problem - there are two few positions open for us. But there SHOULD be more. The student demand in higher education is there for more instructors. For some reason, universities have decided to go the way of the corporate world's model of "efficiency". Do more with less... at any cost. Which means, have underpaid adjuncts, TAs, post-docs, and part-timers do all the teaching.
Many adjuncts at many universities ARE forming unions, just like graduate assistants have begun to do at UF, Yale, and elsewhere. Likewise, many post-doctoral fellows are grumbling about their mistreatment, and are also beginning to organize.
I am all in favor of improving labor conditions for adjuncts, postdocs, and GAs and TAs, but what we need more than unions for these groups are more full-time university positions. Our priorities are skewed. In our so-called knowledge society, entertainers make millions, and educators make spare change. There should be more funding for education, if the rhetoric is going to match reality.
People point lots of fingers about this situation. I don't think too few older faculty are retiring. I don't think distance learning is really a cause for this problem. It's just that education is underfunded in this country, plain and simple. Departments should be expanding more quickly than they are. But we also need to reorganize the priorities within our institutions of higher education as well.
As was recently argued in the American Anthropological Association newsletter, I think the growing "adjunctivization" of education is part of a larger "corporatization" of education - like the corporate world, education is becoming more and more "contractual". Just as many corporations in this country are turning to "temp" workers without any permanent status or benefits in the name of so-called "competitiveness" - so now are universities. Other phenomena, like the disappearance of tenure, and university-corporate partnerships, are also part of this process.
To me, it's deeply disturbing.