The Emergent Academic Proletariat and its Shortchanged Students

[marmar]

from Dissent magazine:


The Emergent Academic Proletariat and its Shortchanged Students
By Claire Goldstene - August 14, 2013


The phrase “corporatization of the university” captures the reorientation of colleges away from a primarily educational mission and toward one that resembles the financial bottom line. The evidence of this shift is myriad: the growth of for-profit degree-granting institutions, rising tuition and student debt, the pursuit of elevated rankings, disproportionate resources spent on athletic programs and sports facilities, the identification of students as “customers,” assessment of accomplishment in the classroom as that which can be quantified, a small number of highly compensated academic “superstars,” and a swelling cadre of overpaid administrators. According to Stephen Trachtenberg, former president of George Washington University and an unapologetic pioneer of tuition inflation, success for colleges is measured by continuous new construction on campuses and substantial endowments. The achievement of this never-ending growth requires constantly greater revenue, which in turn, necessitates escalating tuition and fees. As Trachtenberg explained, “people equate price with the value of their education.”

Comparatively little of this money, however, is dedicated to supporting the educational mandate of colleges by, for example, reducing the teacher-to-student ratio or paying the majority of faculty a livable salary. Rather, the burden of these “business-like” endeavors has been borne on the backs of onerously indebted students and low-wage temporary faculty.

Most teachers in higher education across the country lack long-term job stability. Presently, close to 70 percent of all faculty appointments in degree-granting institutions are off the tenure-track, a number that includes over one million people. The label “contingent academic labor” encompasses an array of arrangements, among them adjuncts paid on a per-course basis, one- or multi-year contract faculty, visiting professors, and post-docs. In general, these positions are characterized by low pay, no-to-little job security, and, frequently, no health or retirement benefits. According to the Adjunct Project, the national average remuneration for adjuncts is $2,987 for a 15-week, three-credit course, usually with a high student enrollment, and some teachers are paid as little as $1,000 per class. Currently, nearly 34,000 Ph.D. recipients receive food stamps to supplement their earnings. In an effort to cobble together a living, many adjuncts teach at multiple institutions, taking on a course load of six or more classes per semester and spending significant time traveling among campuses. Most recently, numerous university systems have reduced the number of courses adjuncts can teach in a single year to avoid the thirty-hour per week threshold established by the 2010 Affordable Care Act that would trigger access to employer healthcare benefits.

Though convenient to mark the economic contraction of 2008 as the turning point in this story, the achievement of a majority contingent faculty represents the culmination of a forty year trend. In 1970, almost 78 percent of faculty were classified as permanent, full-time. While four decades ago most adjuncts derived their main source of income from other full-time employment and taught an occasional course in their field of expertise, today more and more non-permanent faculty grind to support themselves and their families through teaching. ..................(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.dissentmagazine.org/online_articles/the-emergent-academic-proletariat-and-its-shortchanged-students

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1. Du rec. Nt

[Igel]

2. We get what we choose. Even if we're not aware of the consequences of our choices.

If you want flexibility in programmatic decisions you wind up with adjuncts in many cases. You don't hire somebody to teach a course if you know that in 5 years nobody'll be interested in it. I had a friend, Jerry, who had 1-2 PhD students in 20 years and taught about as many graduate seminars in that time. Nuclear engineering. Tenured a couple of years before Three Mile Island.

If you want to train a lot of experts in a field that rejects "core competencies" in favor of wild diversity, you wind up with faculty that are unhireable. They can teach a trendy course, but they have little flexibility. Slavists understand this--you graduate with a PhD in dialectology, you damned well can teach undergrad lit classes. You graduate with a PhD in Symbolist theatre, you can teach core lit classes and probably undergrad language classes and even a linguistics class. Or you don't get hired.

If you want to make for a tight fiscal situation by reducing state spending you wind up with more adjuncts. It saves money. If you think having really good food and a wellness center makes for a better college, then you find colleges spending more money on those things to attract students. And less on faculty.

Liberal family leave policies produces some adjuncts. Somebody has to take up the slack for 6 months.

If you want to hire outsiders to teach business or art or architecture or public policy courses because they have real-world experience, you wind up with adjuncts (often with perks beyond just the pay).

If you have a dept. that has to offer a lot of service courses, you have adjuncts to spare your full-time faculty.

If you have a dept. full of generalists, like poli sci; or that requires a lot of core courses with stable enrollment, like engineering and sciences, then you get a low level of adjuncts. The Humanities used to be like that. So did most majors. And those departments had lower levels of adjunct faculty.

Choices, choices. And consequences, intended or not. We have the system we decided to have.

Then again, you expect 20% or more of courses to be taught by adjuncts, unless the dept. has what appears to be excess faculty. Every year 1/7 go on sabbatical. Every few years, a professor leaves or goes on leave. The alternative is to reduce the courses offered, and that happens, too.