If you cannot see the comic at the top of this paragraph (for instance, if you are on Facebook), click the link to the original blog post, or my commentary below will not make sense. I am an Adjunct Professor. Well, that is a bit of a stretch. I used to teach more often, but now I teach about once a year. I am officially an Adjunct Professor, but the reality is that I really am a very part-time professor. I enjoy it. There was a period of my life when I taught almost every semester.
But, that really only meant that I taught one course per semester. I was never allowed to teach more than one course per semester. If the university for which I work had allowed me to teach too many courses, they may actually have had to give me some benefits. So, as the comic above shows, the working pool for adjunct professors is competitive, and somewhat akin to the labor groups that stand on the street hoping that someone will come by to hire them.
Many of you thought that professors are well paid academic types in tweed jackets, smoking a pipe, and teaching three to four courses a semester while earning a high wage. That may have been true once upon a time, but it is no longer true. The same university campus that may support some of the most radical of liberal political views nowadays actually works on the most Darwinian of capitalist approaches, approaches that would make the most conservative of Republicans become a university groupie. When one speaks one way and behaves another way, that is normally called hypocrisy, but that is the level at which universities deal with their adjunct professors. (Note that there are exceptions.)
Adjunct professors are a great way to save money. You set up a team of rotating professors so that no professor gets to teach more than one course a semester. If you are fortunate, no professor even teaches once a semester. Rather, the stable is rotated through in such a way that you are never in danger of incurring benefits. This approach is used in many university fields. I have even taught a laboratory course in which I had to put in many off-course hours, but was only paid for one course with no hope of ever becoming full-time. In fact, in that particular major, there was only one full-time professor. Everyone else in the department was an adjunct, so the department was run on a very low employee overhead while being able to charge standard university prices.
Meantime, university fees have gone up significantly faster than any cost of living increases. Regardless of how one measures it, it is obvious that something is significantly wrong with the way in which university fees are calculated. Worse, I know more than one adjunct professor who has never worked full-time, and must put together a stable of teaching several courses at several universities in order to be able to make ends meet. Low wages, no benefits, no retirement, no health benefits, this is the legacy of an American university system that is seriously broken. We wonder why other countries are pulling ahead of us while we treat adjunct professors as little more than glorified field hands.
Worse, as an adjunct professor, my information on one of the fields that I teach becomes older and older. I have no time to do research, as I work a full-time job (remember, teaching is an avocation for me). I have not time to keep up with the writings in my field. I have no time to do those things which professors are supposed to do in order to ensure that their students are aware of the latest developments in their field. Yet, the university charges students the same as though they were being taught by resident professors who have time to do all that I have said. Again, we wonder why other countries are pulling ahead of us.
We have lost some significant educational integrity. We wonder why we have problems. Frankly, I, too, wonder with many how educational costs can be climbing as fast as they do when the educational system is employing more and more adjuncts while reducing the number of “true” professors. I do not mean to insult my fellow adjuncts, but neither they nor I are true professors in the sense of people devoted to research and the development of new theories and new directions. And, if creativity has been so reduced in the university, is it any wonder that our students are not able to be creative and the rest of the world is passing them?
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