Death of an adjunct professor | Hacker News Reader

Death of an adjunct professor

post-gazette.com

139 pointsdenzil_correa70 comments

It would seem like there would be some kind of middle ground where adjuncts should be paid a little more and get health care, and students pay less in tuition. $3,500 to teach 50 students? Where does all the tuition go? That's enormous overhead for buildings and administration, especially in a low cost area. Even you turn the $3,500 to $10,000 with a raise and health care baked in, it's only $200 per student. (I'm making assumptions on class size)

I've worked as an adjunct professor at a community college. Class sizes appeared to average around 20 students there, rarely above 30 and sometimes around 5. In that environment, $3500/class seemed pretty reasonable.

In that environment, $3500/class seemed pretty reasonable.

OK, but how are the professors expected to live on that ? Independently rich or retired cannot account for any size-able number. CC are subsidized by the state and county, or at least should be.

Many adjunct professors are people who have full-time jobs doing something else. A friend of mine did this one semester to make some extra money. He worked full-time as a structural engineer, but took a long lunch three days a week to teach Introduction to Statics at the university we both attended. He said it was fun to do for one semester, but he computed that he was only making about $10/hour when you included the time to prepare for lectures and grade papers.

In my experience, teaching has a way of ballooning to fill whatever time you have. Teaching one class feels like just as much work as teaching three, partly because either way you have to be available to students outside of class - office hours, answering email, and so on. I can't imagine teaching a single university class "for fun" while holding down a full-time job. Certainly it's not something I've seen very often.

Some people Adjunct to improve their resume too. NYU's school of continuing education has a lot of underpaid adjuncts who get residual benefits for the prestige of being NYU faculty. But nobody lives in Manhattan on NYU adjunct salary alone.

Adjuncts are especially cool for this reason in fields with a significant professional application.

Oh no! I didn't mean to imply a good living, just that those numbers make sense. But as has been pointed out, the school she was at was likely charging a lot more than $200/student.

A tenured professor though can get $20k per class or more, assuming that he/she is only teaching and not involved in any research (most start with 3 courses per year). Of course many tenured professors also bring money to the university through grants and whatnot, but that is not always the case. I know of some that get more than $250k a year just to provide prestige to the department and maybe teach a course now and then.

In any case, it doesn't matter if the class size is 10 or 50. You still need to prepare the same material, you still need to be there for the same amount of time. $3500/class sounds like a bargain to me. A TA earns more.

I buy the argument for community colleges. $3500/20 = $175 per student per class. The courses are cheap, so it's a wash. I disagree with this for private colleges where the cost per course can be $3,000 per student.

IIRC colleges also often milk the fee income from talk-and-chalk courses to support science, engineering and medical courses with expensive lab requirements. As well as collegiate athletics, climbing walls, landmark building projects and so on, of course.

Deanlet and deanlings making six figures to oversee "student life" and "strategic planning". Tenured professors who have 2/1 teaching schedules and haven't published since the 80s, but can't be forced to retire and keep on picking up inflated COLAs. Ever multiplying new unnecessary buildings (usually paid for by donors, but maintenance comes out of the budget). Special signing bonuses, research stipends, forgivable loans, and extraordinary salaries for "star professors" who are considered stars not because of their teaching prowess -- which is never, ever considered by hiring committees -- but because of their fame in a particular field. Lacrosse, volleyball, and crew coaches and facilities (only football and basketball pay their own way).

And so on and so forth. The people that actually do the bulk of the teaching in many schools -- adjuncts and grad students -- get paid very very poorly. Even in schools that claim to have a high ratio of tenured faculty teaching classes, if you dig into it you will often find teaching assistants doing a lot of the direct student interaction and almost all of the feedback.

I am actually ok with high pay for star professors. If you're a Nobel and bring international esteem to the school, you deserve to get paid. If your lectures are beamed around the world in MOOCs, you deserve to get paid.

I think many tenured professors don't deserve it, and schools have very bloated administrations. They also have mispriced priorities. (Subsidizing luxury dorms, athletic facilities, etc)

I agree that top researchers should be paid well by someone, I just don't think we've got the right someones.

No man, or organization, can serve two masters. Either these schools are about undergraduate education or they aren't. The counterargument about presige isn't completly wrong. Prestige of the school is valuable to a degree holder. But all the universities chasing after the same limited pool of prestige is socially wasteful, and these heavily tax subsidized institutions are supposed to be advancing the social interest.

We should have separate institutions that do research and perhaps train grad students.

Either these schools are about undergraduate education or they aren't.

They aren't. When has this ever been a question? That doesn't change the fact that starry-eyed undegrads want to bask in the light of famous members of their field.

Imagine Feynman was still teaching, but was terrible at it. Would that stop countless people scrambling to get into the university he teaches at, simply to get exposure to his prowess and dream of working in his lab?

Research universities are a natural place for undergraduates. It's a symbiotic relationship. The University has use for willing young minds and hands, and willing young minds flock to the places where the knowledge is.

P.S. Don't forget star professors are often stars because of how much funding they bring to the university. It's not like undergrads are bearing the brunt of funding their laboratories.

I hear you. In a sense you could argue the liberal arts and community colleges do focus on undergrads, and the research schools take undergrads and professional programs along for the ride to pay the bills. In that case undergrads who subsidize faculty who are only concerned about producing Phds are knowing participants. But even still, the liberal arts schools (say Amherst) shouldn't be 20x the cost of the community colleges.

Duquesne has claimed that the unionization of adjuncts like Margaret Mary would somehow interfere with its mission to inculcate Catholic values among its students.

I see. So treating old people in this way and leaving them in trouble after you squeeze them out is a part of those "Catholic values"?

Read the next sentence: This would be news to Georgetown University -- one of only two Catholic universities to make U.S. News & World Report's list of top 25 universities -- which just recognized its adjunct professors' union, citing the Catholic Church's social justice teachings, which favor labor unions.

Well, their Catholics are apparently less hypocritical than Duquesne's Catholics. I'm not sure, doesn't this simply reinforce what I was trying to say?

The "Catholic values" you criticize and approve of are not "catholic". Forgive the pun.

Edit: I see a way to read your statement as saying that Duquesne has a twisted view of Catholic values. Which I could agree with. However there is another reading, not difficult to stumble into, where you are trying to make a general statement about Catholic values, which I could not agree with.

This just proves that every Catholic is also a man (or woman) perfectly capable of sin and malice, and so we would be pretty happy if every single one of them would stop moralizing forever. Stop thinking that they are more right and more good just because; and behaving after that.

Where can one unsubscribe from ever hearing of how religion tells us how to do good and from ever facing any religion-based opinion?

Because I feel I still live in the medieval times when I do.

Hear my kind tone of voice encouraging you to engage.

If you feel that hypocrisy gives you a free pass to avoid engaging with a very deep belief system with a philosophical head start on you of no less than centuries, and your capsule summary of the Roman Catholic church is "medieval" and "moralizing"...

I would say you actually need more exposure to Catholicism, not less.

Hypocrisy is a universal... so it is actually a horrible signal if you are trying to figure out what to believe. And Christianity at least has a history of facing this issue head on.

"Woe to you, teachers of the law and Pharisees, you hypocrites! You are like whitewashed tombs, which look beautiful on the outside but on the inside are full of the bones of the dead and everything unclean. In the same way, on the outside you appear to people as righteous but on the inside you are full of hypocrisy and wickedness."

-- Jesus, in Matthew

I just don't see this head start preventing a single person from doing same mistakes. This belief system seems like brain busy work: it makes you occupied for some time but does not make you a better person any more that any reflection will do when you are ready.

Add mythology to the mix and the system becomes net harmful.

Regarding Jesus: I just don't see "common christian" variety sort of people care about Jesus. Yes they claim they "love" him, but they just aren't trying to understand who he was as a person and therefore gravitate to beliefs that would make him facepalm.

Also, it doesn't look like God got out and helped the poor lady, as it always doesn't do.

You better stay clear from everything claiming to have relations to God, if she aligned with some secular university she might not die in absolute poverty.

I now have something to stick into religious faces for the rest of my life, bookmarking.

> Adjuncts now make up well over 50 percent of the faculty at colleges and universities.

Unless you think that a fairly large percentage of colleges are religious and have a religious exemption from letting their faculty unionise, this may not be what you're looking for. ^^;

She would get a better deal. Still not good but better one.

I'm not following your logic there. How does working for a secular university give her a better deal?

I can see how working in a union might - but that's not necessarily the same thing.

Because a secular university would have one stupid reason less against unionizing its workers.

Where does Social Security Medicare and Medicaid fit into this? She was 83 and well below the poverty line shouldn't she have been getting help from a t least one if not all three of those program?

Probably not below the poverty line, if she was single. Medicaid etc have a trick where you may lose your house and savings to ask for help.

She should have been drawing SS since she was 70. It would be Medicare not Medicaid and I am not sure how it would have helped since she was already being treated for cancer.

Contracting positions are hell on earth if you don't put money into savings. Even if you work 25 years you need to put money away. We really don't have a national pension system[1].

I would be curious how the whole Microsoft contracting lawsuit would apply in this case. It seems it would have some relevance.

1) and looking at how underfunded the state one are, I don't see any hope in that direction

> It would be Medicare not Medicaid

The two are, most assuredly, not mutually exclusive.

I believe SS benefits are indexed to earnings; if she had spent 2.5 decades earning $25k per annum her ss benefits may have been quite low

it's worth noting that $25k pretax (and note $25k seems to have been a high), even at a modest tax rate, could easily fall (post income, fica, etc) to $18k post tax. Or $1500/mo.

medicare should start shortly after the 65th birthday, but people still have to buy Part B and either part C or D. afaik part B requires a typical 20% contribution; this can be quite painful if you're living / attempting to maintain a house on $1500/month

old age is no picnic, particularly in the usa, and that goes double for people who don't have significant savings

Benefits vary based on income, but they're heavily weighted toward the low end. So, a poorer person will get lower benefits, but their benefits will be a greater percentage of their income.

Doing a fast calculation, someone who earned $25k (this year, not every year with prior years taking into account how earnings change) would probably get about $14k/yr in social security. So, it isn't a huge amount of money, but it would bring it up.

btw, the official federal poverty line in the us for a household of 1 is $11,490. pretty fucking shocking. [1]

[1] http://www.familiesusa.org/resources/tools-for-advocates/gui...

When I see numbers like that, I really have to question how they are calculated, as that's less that $1k/month.

While it is possible to live on that, it is also possible to endure many things people in developed countries really should not have to endure...

I didn't know that but that seems reasonable. I calculated what my bare minimum living expenses would be once and came out to about 12k. Once you get down to that income level there are a lot of expenses that just go away like in my state your property taxes are reduced to effectively zero if you make less than a certain amount.

My sincere condolences to the family of Margaret Mary Vojtko.

Regarding the subtext of adjunct professor / student tuition abuse and exploitation for the keepers of the 'trademark and databases.'

We are almost facing the event horizon of a black-hole; sub-star level lecturers are facing obsolescence. Mega-corp is trying to establish a stranglehold on what may be the 'database.' The database will determine your personal 'trademark' status in society and its integrity is something worth fighting for.

Everyone here should demand an explanation from Rev. Walsh. You can e-mail him at: walshd@duq.edu

I feel for Ms. Vojtko's family, but I don't feel like complaining about adjunct professor salaries is being fair.

These positions are short term contract (6 months-1 year) and are not meant as long term employment. These positions are meant for people from industry to come in a teach a class on a specific topic they are experienced in. These positions are not research positions, or anything of the sort.

Many of the people in adjunct positions have a completely separate full-time jobs, or perhaps are retired. Offering them health-care seems silly, because a large number of them already receive health care.

So parading one lady who treated the position as some kind of career path as proof that professors at college's need to get paid more is silly. I understand that my professors are going to be higher paid than most (Software/Computer Engineering) but earning upwards of $200k with a great deal of perks is fairly common.

I think reading between the lines a little bit should indicate that because 50%+ of professors are adjuncts means that universities are proactively attempting to keep professors with that status. It means they can pay them less both in salary and in benefits. Hence why Duequesne would want to avoid unionization of it's adjuncts.

I don't know the statistics of adjuncts who have full time jobs as well, so take that with a grain of salt.

That statistic of 50% professors being adjunct is not cited, and from searching online appears to come from the SEIU, which is a group who's goal is to unionize adjunct faculty. The report it self is not available, and it has been quoted in articles as "part-time faculty held 50 percent of teaching jobs at colleges" [1] and "adjuncts held 50 percent of teaching jobs at colleges" [2]

Neither of those statements are the same as "Adjuncts now make up well over 50 percent of the faculty at colleges and universities." as stated in the article.

[1]http://www.boston.com/yourcampus/news/bentley/2013/06/as_ben...

[2] http://www.boston.com/yourcampus/news/tufts/2013/07/adjunct_...

Your reasoning is correct, if and only if adjunct professor positions are filled as intended. The article mentions that adjunct professors make up over 50 percent of faculty at various colleges and universities. If it is so -- I am not qualified to evaluate -- then your argument falls at the base.

If adjunct professors are over 50 percent of faculty, then the position is being used by universities to hire cheap. This leads to obvious problems for professors but, ironically, in time kills higher education. Higher education requires individuals who are free from the worry of making ends meet, so they can pursue knowledge. They need not be rich, but they can't be counting pennies. In time, a staff made up of strapped professors hurts the teaching quality, destroys the perception of quality at universities and scares students away.

Why do professors need to "pursue knowledge"? What is wrong with having a corp of workers who's sole goal is to transmit knowledge? To avoid status quo bias, do primary school teachers also need to "pursue knowledge"? Since most primary school teachers do no research, should we fire them and replace them with researchers?

That's a very simple thing to answer. If your sole goal is to transmit knowledge, then you don't know how to teach to create knowledge. And that would be the end of "innovation".

Every good teacher you had in your life knew much more than the level at which they taught you. You can't teach effectively if you don't master flawlessly the subject you teach. You achieve that level by going way beyond what students learn.

At the basic education levels, this is easy to achieve. At the University level, you can only guarantee this elastic push by heading into research.

By this logic, algebraists and combinatorialists also can't teach calculus, given that they probably only got as far in calculus (namely 1'st year of grad school) as all the non-tenured, non-research adjuncts.

Yep, they can probably not teach you much about any non-trivial problem in calculus, nor would probably engage you much in current advances being made in field. They would make fantastic teachers for teaching Algebra-I and II.

Some of my worst courses have been Field theorist teaching electromagnetism.

Whatever these positions were "meant for", the reality is that an ever larger share of classes are taught by people in these positions. Some of them are retired from other jobs; some are postdocs or working on the side; some are trying to cobble together a full time job. In many fields there is no "industry" from which to draw instructors.

No one is claiming these are research positions, but if universities are going to take teaching seriously, they have to address who is doing the bulk of the teaching.

Are you implying there are adjunct professors receiving $200k with perks? I imagine it's possible that you can find an example somewhere (probably earning $197,000 p.a. from another job and teaching a course as a hobby).

Whether adjuncts are poorly paid on a short-term basis is surely irrelevant. People should be able to live on their incomes and cope with illnesses without becoming destitute.

No, I am saying there are professors receiving $200k with perks. An adjunct position isn't supposed to be a full-time long term position, so why should it be paid as such?

> An adjunct position isn't supposed to be a full-time long term position

Except that the common practice for colleges and universities now is to use them as full-time, long-term, lower-paid, reduced-benefit positions, and this trend is growing as adjunct positions are growing at a faster rate than tenured and tenure-track positions.

This is the kind if thing that is so dismaying to see on HN. It must be her own stupid fault that she died penniless of cancer, nothing is wrong with the system here.

I guess you guys feel differently, but I see myself as much more likely to end up like this lady than the CompSci professors making bank that you're talking about.

What exactly is dismaying about the parent comment? You don't truly believe that the parent commenter believes it is "her own stupid fault that she died penniless of cancer," do you?

Please open your mind a little and please be more charitable in interpreting opposing points of view.

Archetypical comment: probably right, but supremely unhelpful.

Assume that the problem with the comment isn't that the commenter is amoral, but instead that their reasoning has gone wrong somewhere. Then, rebut the reasoning.

> These positions are short term contract (6 months-1 year) and are not meant as long term employment.

From the article:

"Margaret Mary Vojtko... had taught French at Duquesne University for 25 years... Adjuncts now make up well over 50 percent of the faculty at colleges and universities."

And further information, with sources, backing this up: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Professors_in_the_United_State...

Lots of colleges are hiring adjunct professors to teach undergraduate courses, rather than full tenure track professors. As they reduce their tenure track hiring and increase their hiring of adjunct professors, it stops being a short-term contract for a visiting professor, and becomes the only viable career path for many people in academia.

The problem is, when many people think of professors they think of the same tenure track professors that you're thinking of; fairly well paid, good benefits, great job security (once tenure has been achieved, that is; before that, the job security is pretty dicey), lots of academic freedom. What they don't realize is that more than half of actual professors are actually low-paid adjuncts with poor job security (and a good chunk of the rest are tenure track but don't yet have tenure).

On top of that, you have post-docs and grad students doing most of the actual research (and some of the teaching as well), and you realize that academia looks pretty grim. Low paid people with low to no job security perform most of the actual work, while people think of them as high-paid folks with strong job security.

This is made worse by the explosion in administrative staff at colleges and universities[1]. Universities in the US are more about running universities than they are about teaching students or doing research. Given administrators are sucking down huge gobs of money, the budget shortfall needs to be picked up somewhere, and that is where the rise of the adjunct professor comes in.

1. http://dailycaller.com/2013/03/28/study-school-administrativ...

I am unable to actually find an sort of source for the statistic that "Adjuncts now make up well over 50 percent of the faculty at colleges and universities."

It seems to go back to the SEIU, a group that is attempting to unionize adjunct positions. I have seen it quoted in a number of ways, including "50% of part time faculty at universities are adjunct." and "50% of teaching positions at universities are adjunct."

I would like to see some sort of actual report that shows the source of that. My (very limited, anecdotal) experience seems to indicate much fewer than 50% of professors are adjunct. It all depends on how you count these things.

Following the citation in the Wikipedia article to http://www.insidehighered.com/views/2007/11/13/hoeller which links to http://www.aaup.org/our-work/research which links to http://www.aaup.org/sites/default/files/files/AAUP_Report_In..., there's a chart on the first page with trends between 1975 and 2011.

In 1975, 45% of teaching staff was tenure or tenure-track, 34% non-tenure-track (full or part time), and 21% grad students. In 2011, it's 24% tenure or tenure track, 57% non-tenure-track, and 19% grad students.

Now, part-time employees may make up a smaller proportion of actual teaching time than full time, but remember also that tenure track professors and grad students spend time doing research as well, not all of their time is spent teaching.

How many of your professors did you know the status of? I know that that certainly wasn't something I kept close tabs on when I was in college; there were a few professors who I knew well enough to know their status as tenured, tenure track, or not tenure track, but for many I didn't pay attention. Many of the adjunct professors are likely teaching intro-level classes that everyone is required to take; your freshman English or writing or math requirements.

Also recall that the more prestigious the school, the less likelihood that they will rely heavily on adjunct professors. Smaller state schools, community colleges, and for-profit schools may use them more often. Edit to add: the AAUP has another report that breaks down the faculty by school, and you can clearly see that these kind of non-tenure track and part time professorships are much more common at community colleges, smaller less prestigious schools, and for-profit schools, with some of them having 100% contingent (non-tenure track) faculty: http://www.aaup.org/sites/default/files/files/AAUPContingent...

And further, they may be named different things, but be roughly equivalent in job security, prestige, and benefits. Lecturer, instructor, visiting professor, visiting lecturer, assistant or associate teaching professor, etc.

Nonetheless, the AAUP document seems to show that even at US public doctoral and research universities, in 2005 non-tenure-track employees made up about a quarter of the full-time faculty and about 40% of all faculty if you include the part-timers (p. 18). There's also the issue of graduate students who teach or do research work. The numbers apparently included teaching grad. students, but only those which had been self-reported by their institutions as "employees" rather than recipients of valuable teaching/research experience (p. 10): it's not hard to imagine some under-reporting there.

From an NYTimes article earlier this year [1]:

According to the report, [tenure and tenure-track] positions now make up only 24 percent of the academic work force, with the bulk of the teaching load shifted to adjuncts, part-timers, graduate students and full-time professors not on the tenure track.

The report was published by Center for the Future of Higher Education in 2012. Link: [2]

From the executive summary from this 2010 publication by the American Federation of Teachers [3]:

Altogether, part-time/adjunct faculty members account for 47 percent of all faculty, not including graduate employees. The percentage is even higher in community colleges, with part-time/adjunct faculty representing nearly 70 percent of the instructional workforce in those institutions.

[1] http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/08/education/gap-in-universit... [2] http://www.insidehighered.com/sites/default/server_files/fil... [3] http://www.aft.org/pdfs/highered/aa_partimefaculty0310.pdf

"Percentage of teaching hours" or "percentage of teaching budget" seem like more useful statistics than "percentage of names on payroll".

Take a look at this report, which breaks down categories of professors by school, and you'll find that there are many schools for which contingent professors (non-tenure track) and grad students make up 100% of the teaching positions: http://www.aaup.org/sites/default/files/files/AAUPContingent...

Now, sure, they're mostly small community colleges or for-profit universities, but that is a significant chunk of the higher education system in the US.

> These positions are short term contract (6 months-1 year) and are not meant as long term employment.

They are short term contract, but lots of colleges and universities are using them for a large portion of their faculty, so that they have the option year-to-year of renewing employment without dealing with tenure, and to never have to deal with "firing" faculty. Also, not having to deal with benefits.

> Many of the people in adjunct positions have a completely separate full-time jobs, or perhaps are retired.

The vast majority do not.

> Offering them health-care seems silly, because a large number of them already receive health care.

The whole employment-based model of health care that is dominant in the United States is silly, but given the way that many colleges and universities in fact use adjunct positions, having them be covered by employer-provided group insurance isn't silly within that employment-based model of health care.

where on earth do professors get paid $200k+ with a variety of perks? I call complete bullshit. Unless you're discussing eg harvard, stanford, or yale; or law schools, in which case you should say so.

btw, salaries at UW Madison (top 15 cs) used to be on the web. They are nowhere near $200k

most of the adjunct employees don't, actually, have health care and many of them don't have other jobs, unless you count eg starbucks.

hell, is there any part of your statements that are informed by data rather than being pulled out of your ass?

Ugh, I was hoping that the "death" was just a metaphor, and that this was just an essay about the end of adjunct teaching as a viable job...which, I guess it is. I'm starting as an adjunct instructor next week, and I'll be getting $1,000 for about 13 hours of actual teaching time and who knows how many hours between classes doing grading/planning. But I have a regular job, this is just a night class. I can't imagine someone actually depending on adjunct work for the pay

Distressing, but it leaves me wondering what Ms. Vojtko did until she was 58. Had she retired from some other job, gone back into the workforce after the death of a spouse?

Disgusting. Disgusting and disgraceful.

Yup, heard stories like this a thousand times.

Anyone told the Pope yet?

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