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Comment by davis_m | Hacker News Reader

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.

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> 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.

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?

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.

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".

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.

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_...

> 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.

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.

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.

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?

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