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Comment by rhino369 | Hacker News Reader

Paying them more would increase tuition. Maybe colleges should shift the funds from elsewhere but that not as simple as just paying them more.

What is never talked about in these articles about the plight of the adjunct is that adjunct professor is supposed to be a fun side gig. Almost charity work. You are supposed to do it for the experience. I'd had many adjuncts at northwestern when I was getting my law degree. They were partners at major law firms. They mad millions a year. They would have done this job for free. Maybe they did.

My wife considered adjuncting at her old college for the same reason.

It seems a huge part of this problem is some are treating these jobs as real, life supporting careers. They aren't meant that way. Maybe colleges are taking advantage. But these adjuncts are also taking advantage of themselves willingly.

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Could you might address some of the points raised in the article? They seem to be at odds with what you wrote.

For example, you wrote "adjunct professor is supposed to be a fun side gig", while the article suggests that these position were originally for '“the housewives of higher education” (eg, the wife of a man that the university wanted to recruit), or for female instructors where the university did not allow female professors. These were low status positions, quite different from the "fun side gig" you says it was meant for.

You point to Northwestern's law school as if it were the appropriate model for how adjunct teaching should be, and comment that many if not most made millions per year. However, the article says "31 percent of part-time faculty are living near or below the federal poverty line". What percentage of the 250+ adjunct professors in Northwestern's law school department live at or near the federal poverty line? Why you think your experience at a graduate program Northwestern can be generalized to undergraduate teaching and is applicable to most other schools in the US?

You write 'But these adjuncts are also taking advantage of themselves willingly.' The article also addresses that point rather extensively, starting with "But apart from feeling sorry for the underpaid faculty, why should we care that college professors have the same job conditions as day laborers, fast-food workers, cashiers, taxi drivers, or home-care aides? They did, after all, choose to pursue a career in higher ed." and ending some eight paragraphs later.

Moreover, they are not all "willingly" doing so. Many are trying to unionize, but 'While some schools like Georgetown have accepted unions without too much fuss, others have adopted the tactics long used by anti-labor businesses: falsely accusing labor officials of earning exorbitant salaries, hiring law firms that specialize in union busting, and firing those involved in the campaign.' Instead, they are "willing" to stay for the short term, because in the long term they help themselves, others like them, the students they teach, and the humanist values that a college is suppose to embrace. (All points that the article touches on.)

These differences between your comment and the article suggest that your understanding of the adjunct teaching issue is not well aligned with what most people mean when they talk about this topic.

I re-read the part you reference at your suggestion and I don't see how it debunks that adjuncts take these positions willingly. It talks about how schools spend a lot of money on administrators and that adjuncts provide similar or better performance than tenured positions.

"Willing" has different meanings. http://www.merriam-webster.com/thesaurus/willing lists three of them.

People will use the term "willing" to mean #3: "done, made, or given with one's own free will".

I'm willing to work a part-time job flipping burgers to make ends meet. I'm willing to come home smelling like grease in order to have a home.

On the other hand, I might not be willing to do so because it's beneath me, and would rather live in car and live off my small winnings from playing poker. Another way to cast this is that I'm willing to live in my car in order to preserve my dignity.

No matter what happens, there's a Panglossian way to construct it such that I'm "willing" to do whatever I ended up doing. Which makes that definition meaningless in this context.

I instead interpret "willing" to mean something more like #2: "having or showing the ability to respond without delay or hesitation."

In this context, I use it more like "willing to work in the job as-is, without significant complaint or protest". Compare "I'm looking for a volunteer" vs. "I'm looking for a willing volunteer", or "lend a hand" vs. "lend a willing hand." A volunteer may lend a reluctant hand, but still be a volunteer.

People of their own free will (definition 3) are working at job where they've had to stop (definition 2), think about if they want to do it, and work on ways to make it more worthwhile.

The article suggest that some of these non-tenure track jobs are make work for spouses. I don't think that is a major use of them now. In fact, if it is then what is the problem? They should have the tenure track salary in the same household.

My point is that the people taking these jobs are being foolish. They are taking clear part-time low paying jobs and then wondering why they part-time low pay income.

The reason they are taking these jobs is because they can't find tenure track gigs. Okay, so they didn't succeed. That is no excuse for taking a shitty consolidation job and then bitching about the pay.

>Why you think your experience at a graduate program Northwestern can be generalized to undergraduate teaching and is applicable to most other schools in the US?

I'm not saying we shouldn't care because these jobs go to millionaires. But we shouldn't care because these jobs aren't meant to actually support a person. Judging by the fact that they are part time and low pay, I think it's clear it's not just Northwestern that views them as non real career jobs.

In fact, several universities actually only let someone adjunct one class a year because it's not supposed to be a career.

>Moreover, they are not all "willingly" doing so. Many are trying to unionize

That sounds willingly to me. Of course they would rather get paid more. But their is a lot of supply for people who can teach these courses. Especially since the commitment isn't very high.

These jobs are essentially volunteer gigs that you get paid a token amount for. But some people want to be a part of academia so bad they are willing to live in poverty to do it. That's fine, but that is their choice.

EDIT:

I should also note that schools are exploiting the glut of potential adjuncts. But I don't really have a problem with that. As you note, we exploit lowerclass workers. Why should I care if the PhD is getting the same treatment as a janitor. In fact, we should probably care less since these adjuncts would more easily find a better white collar job.

I think the article went into the history to establish how adjunct track positions have historically been a low prestige position. It wasn't trying to argue that these are currently make-work position for spouses, just like it wasn't trying to argue that only men currently get full professor status. It then went from there to show that it's still a low prestige position.

If it is instead meant as a 'fun side gig', etc., for people with high paying jobs elsewhere, then when was the transition from being a low-prestige job to one that millionaires will do as a sort of charity work?

The thing is, there are multiple types of adjunct positions. For example, Stephen Wolfram is an adjunct professor at the University of Illinois math department. However, he is not teaching college algebra every semester. Instead, it's an affiliation where both sides get some prestige from it. I believe that your example of teaching a graduate level law class at Northwestern falls into this prestige category.

But most adjuncts are not in this prestige category.

> They are taking clear part-time low paying jobs and then wondering why they part-time low pay income.

Like I said, many of them are not wondering. They know why. And they are trying to do things like unionize in hopes that it will get better.

To which I'll add that part of changing things is to let others know what's going on. If no one talked about it, and there were no news articles, then it would continue to get worse.

> Okay, so they didn't succeed. ... then bitching about the pay.

Yes, this is exactly why union start. You shouldn't be surprised about their actions when history shows it's a core part of union nature. Just like I'm not surprised about people who responds as you have done, or I am doing.

> these jobs aren't meant to actually support a person.

While I think that every job should be able to support a person, at least when scaled up to full-time hours. (Actually, I think every job should be able to support a person and a child. And I think we need single-payer health care, liberal parental leave policy, and free day care starting at age 2. But then, I live in Sweden.)

How should I decide which jobs are meant to support a person? Does the person offering the job get to make the decision? Is there government oversight? Is that organization funded enough to ensure compliance? Is there a cap on lawsuits? Can a university require arbitration to settle problems? When do adjuncts learn enough about the law recognize illegal anti-union actions by the university? How do they fund lawsuits if there is a problem?

> only let someone adjunct one class a year because it's not supposed to be a career

The article started with examples of where a driver for Uber was "supposed to" be an independent contractor, but California labor regulators ruled he was an employee. And of a FedEx settlement of a similar issue in California, and FedEx loss in Kansas. And of two trucking firms who lost the same issue.

I can also point to the Microsoft's settlement some 15 years of a court case by people who were "supposed to" be temporary employees.

So this "supposed to" isn't always the way thing are.

You can say that those people "willingly" got those jobs. But the successful lawsuits show that "willingly" and "supposed to" are not that relevant to how the legal system works or how labor responds. As you must surely know, having studied law.

> While I think that every job should be able to support a person, at least when scaled up to full-time hours

I think it's widely accepted that any full-time job should be able to support a person. At the same time we want it to be possible for an employer to offer e.g. a 5hr/week position (which can be valuable to all kinds of underprivileged folk - those with health problems that make full-time work impossible, the elderly, teenagers - or as a second job for people in temporarily strained financial circumstances) without having to take on all the responsibilities of employing someone full-time. We've tried to implement policies that reflect that, but per the article we see e.g. universities limiting the number of hours that adjuncts work so that they aren't obliged to pay for healthcare.

The gap here is people have ended up putting together multiple part-time jobs so they're effectively working full-time. This is partly an unintended consequence of legislation, but it's not obvious to me how to fix it - if someone's working for six different employers, what responsibilities do each have? How do we make sure someone fired from five of their six jobs receives unemployment, without giving it to someone in full-time employment who gets fired from their minor side gig? (Much as I support basic income, that's not a politically realistic answer yet - so what are the practical policy steps we can do today to move in the right direction for these folks?)

> it's not obvious to me how to fix it - if someone's working for six different employers, what responsibilities do each have?

Single payer health care would handle the biggest issue, because it would make the employer not also be in charge of paying for your health care.

Get rid of 401(k) and push it back into Social Security, to disassociate the company from retirement savings.

Then someone with 5 jobs @ 8 hours/week will have roughly the same benefits as someone with 1 job @ 40 hours/week. The major exception will be vacation time and sick leave. I have no good sense of the problems there, much less solutions.

> How do we make sure someone fired from five of their six jobs receives unemployment, without giving it to someone in full-time employment who gets fired from their minor side gig?

Is that really an issue? How does that happen now?

I presume the government tracks the employment tax payments, which are paid monthly or semi-weekly. These are linked to your SSN, which you used to file for unemployment. So it shouldn't be that hard to identify frauds.

> Is that really an issue? How does that happen now?

Well currently you don't get unemployment benefit if you're in any kind of employment, AIUI, so my hypothetical "person with six jobs who's fired from five of them" would not be eligible (or would have to quit their remaining job if they couldn't find others quickly enough).

I see. I misunderstood. I thought you meant someone would come to the unemployment office with a notice of being laid off, and declare being unemployed, despite having other jobs.

I have no experience with filing for unemployment. I reviewed the New York "Unemployment Insurance A Claimant Handbook" at http://www.labor.state.ny.us/formsdocs/ui/TC318.3e.pdf . It confirms your understanding; even working for a fraction of an hour counts as "work", so someone with a job teaching 3 hours a week is employed and cannot file for unemployment benefits.

Adjuncts are supposed to fill in the gaps when there are more classes than can be taught by the full time faculty. The real problem is that as admissions increase, rather than creating more tenure track jobs, they create an adjunct position for 1/3 the pay, and use the other 2/3 to create an administrative position. From the article:

"Even while keeping funding for instruction relatively flat, universities increased the number of administrator positions by 60 percent between 1993 and 2009, 10 times the rate at which they added tenured positions. In the old days, different professors would take their turn as dean for this or that and then happily escape back to scholarship and teaching. Now the administration exists as an end in itself and a career path disconnected from the faculty and pursuit of knowledge. Writing a few years ago for this publication, the Johns Hopkins professor Benjamin Ginsberg described colleges and universities as now being “filled with armies of functionaries—vice presidents, associate vice presidents, assistant vice presidents, provosts, associate provosts, vice provosts, deans, deanlets, and deanlings, all of whom command staffers and assistants—who, more and more, direct the operations of every school.” So while college tuition surged from 2003 to 2013 by 94 percent at public institutions and 74 percent at private, nonprofit schools, and student debt has climbed to over $1.2 trillion, much of that money has been going to ensure higher pay for a burgeoning legion of bureaucrats."

There is some truth to what Ginsberg asserts (i.e., administration could most certainly be leaner at a lot of places), but the notion that administrators are disconnected from "the pursuit of knowledge" is a bit weak in my view. A lot of the reason for the growth of Ginsberg's "administrative class" can be attributed to the growth of research programs at universities. Administrators are primarily there to worry about real-world issues that most faculty can't be bothered with in the cut-throat world of publish or perish. These include checking regulatory issues (i.e., establishing policies for IRBs and medical research), aiding in grant preparation, outreach efforts, and balancing academic freedom with legal issues. These are all things that faculty do not have expertise in, as PhD programs do not train them for these kinds of responsibilities. Frankly they shouldn't worry about these things- they're there to do research or teach, not draft a policy. You could argue that administrators might be overcompensated perhaps (especially at the upper-level), or that there might be too many of them, but their necessity as a distinct organ of the university is indisputable in my opinion. The halcyon pre-70s days when faculty could regulate a university on their own are gone (and it's questionable whether or not they ever did a particularly good job at this to begin with).

It’s possible that Ginsberg doesn’t really see this as much because he lives in the world of political science, which doesn’t require nearly as much support infrastructure since it is so theory-centric.

You also might want to take what Ginsberg says with a grain of salt for the very reason that he’s a tenured professor with a salary of around $157k a year (http://web.jhu.edu/administration/provost/docs/JHU%20Fact%20...) while most administrative positions (perfectly fireable at the first sign of economic trouble!) at JHU are in the $40k-$50k range (based on Glassdoor). He’s not quite the victim of brutal administrative oppression that he claims to be.

I don't think the Assistant Vice Provost of Academic Student Affairs Outreach has any role so pragmatic as aiding in grant preparation. I think they spend most of their time responding to emails and attending meetings about recruitment strategies and whether the college is sufficiently committed to diversity.

I would also say the fact that Ginsberg is not a victim only bolsters his point. He really has nothing to gain by making these statements.

I think that you're missing my point a bit with respect to Ginsberg's not being a victim. As I attempted to express earlier, he is perhaps correct about the value of upper-level management in universities (just as some management in modern corporations have dubious merit). When it comes to issues such as the adjunctification of academia or the tuition spiral, however, university professors share in the culpability by commanding 6 digit salaries and lifelong employment. It's not really fair to throw many extremely useful and necessary administrators under the bus when they make a 1/3rd of what a professor makes without any of the job security or power.

"It seems a huge part of this problem is some are treating these jobs as real, life supporting careers. They aren't meant that way."

The problem is that the universities do not advertise it that way. They don't take thousands of dollars from parents and tell them "thanks, hopefully we will find a volunteer to teach your kid by the time class starts next week".

You're right.

They say "professor with experience in her field."

Which is what an adjunct provides when done right.

Unfortunately enrollment is a big deal at schools, and sometimes more classes are offered than there are people to teach them.

And some adjuncts are simply just not qualified to teach anything because they have no experience that's relevant. Seen it too often in my time in public higher ed.

Yeah, I think it would look different to prospective students and their parents if they were explicitly told, "you will be taught by a barely-scraping-by post doc who won't be devoting her full attention to the class because she's panicking about whether her food stamp application will go through".

It's an open secret that professors don't teach a huge portion of these programs. Usually it's grad students who get paid even less than adjuncts (sometimes they actually pay for the privilege.

Though I do wonder if schools are lying to the adjuncts. Maybe suggesting this could help them get hired full tenture track. If so, that is abusive.

Most grad students get health care though!

Think about it like this: when the Senior Research Fellow from DuPont (back from when the fabled Experimental Station was still a thing) who is teaching one really good graduate level course at Penn as adjunct, when this guy walks up to the Chair, saying that his office space shouldn't be cut or he won't be back, the Chair will listen. When the adjunct at Tumbleweed State College who is teaching 3 courses of Gen. Chem. says the same, the chair will laugh.

The ones who get cheated is of course the students. They will get a credential instead of an education because no adjunct is going to get into an argument about teaching, and you can't force anyone to take the credential serious.

> when the Senior Research Fellow from DuPont (back from when the fabled Experimental Station was still a thing) who is teaching one really good graduate level course at Penn as adjunct, when this guy walks up to the Chair, saying that his office space shouldn't be cut or he won't be back, the Chair will listen

No, the chair won't. This "Senior Research Fellow" is teaching a grad class. The grad class doesn't make the university any money. It doesn't even pay for the classroom it's taught in. If this "guy" is teaching 2 300 person sections, or writes and wins multi million dollar grants, or has the connections with DuPont that give the department money directly, then, yes, they are making the university money.

That's all the department cares about. That's all your management ever cares about, "what have you done for me lately."

The department also cares about its accreditation. The professors want grad students who can handle advanced chemistry. Someone has to teach them.

> The grad class doesn't make the university any money.

Odd, I could have sworn that my grad school listed a cost for credit hours. While there was a tuition waiver, that money came from somewhere, and I'm pretty sure that includes grant overhead.

I'm sure too the funding agencies might wonder about all the overhead needed for a grad school with no one teaching graduate-level courses.

> I'm sure too the funding agencies might wonder about all the overhead needed for a grad school with no one teaching graduate-level courses.

Maybe. Maybe not. Probably not.

Either way, which would bill more: one 18 person class, or 2 300 person classes?

Like I said, it doesn't matter which one bills more.

The school almost certainly won't get grad students if it doesn't offer any graduate level courses.

A graduate program with poorly trained students is not going to get the bigger grant funding, if only because the research is likely to be less advanced.

It's even more profitable to have a class without a teacher, where people simply get a degree in exchange for money and bypass all the intermediate work. These are called diploma mills.

This sounds a lot like the argument that minimum wage isn't supposed to be a living wage. Well, whether it is or it isn't, the current system (minimum wage or adjuncts) isn't working for a lot of people, so something has to change.

No, it wouldn't. Universities have plenty of money to pay living wages and not abuse their workers. It is a national disgrace that they so often choose to do so anyway. They just spend their resources on hiring more administrators to assist other administrators in administrating, expensive fancy unnecessary buildings that nobody wants, etc. As it mentions in the article we are discussing. There is more than enough money to go around, it's just going where the people with power decide it should go, as in any hypercapitalist system.

Additionally, my old university has built 4 new buildings in the last 4 or 5 years that I can think of. Brand new buildings, even while none of the existing buildings are ever actually full. Couldn't this, for example, go to actually teaching? Or maybe some of those donors giving millions to the sports departments could be convinced to give to a teaching fund instead? Perhaps the university doesn't need to spend boatloads switching student management software for the third time in a decade?

As the article mentions, the number of students to teachers hasn't changed, it's just that most of those teachers are being paid less. When the universities are making significantly more than they were, the income of the teachers should at least be proportional.

My (poorly made) point was that they'd just keep spending and then spend more. If you could make them stop hiring pointless admin and pay adjuncts more, I'd agree.

Who is going to teach 18-year-olds sentence structure or remedial algebra at 11 in the morning for a fun side-gig? The independently wealthy?

Adjuncting in law and business schools is a very different gig than the folks teaching English, history, math, physics, sociology, art, etc.

Paying people more doesn't necessarily make cost go up, if productivity makes up for the cost. But I'm at a loss to see how that would work here: is there any such thing as a more productive adjunct professor? Researching professors can bring in grant money, for instance. Teach larger classes? Other parts of the university system may resist that. There's something about a university system that only seems capable of ratcheting up costs.

Maybe one reason is that universities never go bankrupt (and colleges only infrequently go bankrupt). There's no way to dissect the components of the system and reconstruct them in a better or more minimal manner.

"is there any such thing as a more productive adjunct professor"

The text starting with the example of "Mary Grabar, who worked as an adjunct for many years" gives several examples of how an adjunct professor can be more productive: 1) having a lockable desk rather than having to lug a cart each time to a hot-desking bullpen, 2) remove the need to work additional jobs outside of teaching, which can lead to 'stress and exhaustion', and keep the teacher from mentoring students, writing letters of recommendation, or answering students who simply had questions, and 3) reduce isolation between teachers, because it:

> allows us to improve ourselves academically as well as our working environment,” she says, and it “facilitates better teaching to have others who are in the same circumstances to talk through problems, share experiences, and strategize how to solve them.”

The essay also suggests that a reason for the "ratcheting up costs" is that administration has been taking over most universities and the money has been going to "ensure higher pay for a burgeoning legion of bureaucrats." The article mentions Benjamin Ginsberg, who goes into more depth on this topic in "Fall of the Faculty: The Rise of the All-Administrative University and Why It Matters".

Another thing that is never discussed is that many of the schools relying heavily on adjuncts, including a lot of community colleges, face increasingly tight budgets. This literature (there are enough such articles that it is a literature) tries to give the impression that wealthy schools like Harvard are taking advantage of individuals that have fallen on hard times.

In reality, a lot of adjuncts are, as you point out, professionals that do this on the side. Still others are not looking for full-time work, but want to maintain a connection to the academic world.

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