Enough's enough: Contract teaching at a Canadian University

Dean, department head and provostial positions are heavily weighted toward highly successful researchers who have effectively "retired" into administration and seem not to consider teaching to be one of the university's core functions.

It's easier to convince these people to hire another janitor @ $70k/year than to give a contract teacher a full-time job at the same salary since to them bringing non-researchers into the ranks of permanent faculty is equivalent to letting the barbarians into Rome.

And to all those people saying walk away - that's the easy thing to do. The right thing to do is stand up and say "This is wrong" - not just for me, but for lots of other University teachers.

The market will pay for jobs at their replacement cost. If a stream of aspiring professors are willing to work for near poverty wages, with the occasional complaint, that is what they'll get. Why would the administration pay more?

(If a gas station starts charging $10/gallon, you get your supplies from another. Even if gas provides tremendous value to you, and you internally value it at $100/gal. Only if fuel isn't available elsewhere do you pay the higher cost.)

Industry R&D also has its pitfalls. The primary metric in most industry R&D labs (Microsoft, Mitsubishi ERL, etc. are the known exceptions) is $s, and there are more stakeholders in getting $s (customers, managerial caprice, etc.) than in publishing a paper or 'winning' a grant (which are usually the metrics in academia).

Don't fight uphill on Maslow's hierarchy of needs. Imagine what a rich idealistic kid wants to do with his life. Stay away from those professions unless you are also financially independent.

This is another problem produced by academic exploitation. Ph.D. students are produced 10-to-1 relative to tenure track jobs. Why would universities eat $50-60,000 in tuition and pay $25–35,000 in stipends per year per graduate student if they know they are over-enrolling? It's not like Ph.D. students bring money into a department, regardless of their level of "desperation" to get a terminal degree. That's a big and unnecessary loss to take every single year.

The answer is that grad students, like adjuncts, free the professors from the most onerous aspect of teaching classes: doing all the grading. In exchange for tuition and stipend, grad students have to serve as TAs once or twice a year (in some departments they can also take positions as Research Assistants or as administrators for undergrad programs). Some grad students will get the opportunity to sole-teach their own seminars. Because professors do not want to teach, and want to focus entirely on their personal research program and publications, having an excess of grad students around to grade, guest lecture, and fill out the course offerings every semester is worth the $25-$35,000 annual stipend (about the same that the adjunct professor writing this article makes).

You're right that universities don't have to offer any more than $35,000 + shitty benefits + no job security, because the adjuncts and grad students will still take the opportunity believing that it might turn into an opportunity to move up into the professoriate if they just work hard enough or if their next publication is just a little more brilliant. Doesn't change the fact that it's still a cynical and hypocritical exploitation of the "intellectual reserve army of labor" (to paraphrase Marx). Universities are some of the most leftist institutions in North America, but the professoriate and deanery are perfectly fine with naked exploitation both on the supply side (grad students) and the demand side (adjuncts).

If departments need graders, they should hire masters students rather than admit Ph.D. students and then cynically consume 5–10 years of their life. If departments need teachers to supplement their researchers, they should create a position distinct from tenure-track professor/reader, perhaps "lecturer," but that is not "part-time"/contract work and is compensated appropriately.

Yes, he might be "part of the problem" but it's not like he can choose not to be without starving. Nor can other professors. Perhaps with union help, but they don't seem to help. I don't see how blame slinging helps here at all.

And the issue is well-known and has been for years. I wrote about it from the humanities side here: http://jakeseliger.com/2012/05/22/what-you-should-know-befor... , though to be fair I didn't entirely appreciate just how bad the situation is until I began looking at the MLA jobs list.

Perhaps not surprisingly I didn't pursue academia and am primarily a grant writing consultant.

But there is a bigger context here. One is that the market pays him for 225 hours, then expects him to work 280 hours to do the core of the job, and if he wants to do his job properly he'd need to push it up even further to 300. If you want employees to appreciate the cold facts that the market doesn't value them, you should appreciate that employers accept the cold fact that they can't expect an employee to put in 30% more hours completely unpaid. That's not reasonable.

Now you could argue about that for SMEs. Your local cornerstore can't afford to give a full contract to one of its employees because it struggles? Alright. But this is a university with a $200m endowment in an industry where revenues have far, far outpaced the CPI and where class sizes have increased, too. The notion that they can't pay a highly qualified individual with 10 years of experience and excellent ratings for the 300 hours to do his job is ridiculous.

Now you can argue that he accepts a crap job and that the market keeps the wages down. That's all fine. We don't award PhDs more money than street cleaners because we respect them more, but because they're harder to get and in demand and therefore more expensive. And if this is no longer the case, I appreciate you can make the case they don't deserve $100k salaries, sure.

But it's not his argument. His argument is that he gets no worker's rights because of loopholes. No pension or unemployment protection, because the way they define his job, even though it's no different from another job title that does get those benefits. His argument is not that $30 an hour for 225 hours in a course is too little money, it's that they hire him for a 300 hour job and pay him only 225 hours. That has nothing to do with 'it's fine because it's what the market says'. That's just screwing with your employees and being able to get away with it because the market allows it. Pay him for the 300 hours that it takes to do the job right and award him the same worker's rights we have all come to expect in a civilized society that is market driven, but enforces some basic principles when the market doesn't naturally award them, like building up a pension or getting protection for when you lose your job. If that means cuts in his hourly wage to what he effectively gets now ($17 USD), that sucks but it's transparent, it's a signal to the 200 students in his classroom that says 'you're paying a shit ton and this is what the current market offers'.

That having been said, I appreciate your point on market forces and it's exactly blog posts like these that can affect them. To limit the amount of supply of new PhDs looking to get into teaching $60k jobs when they don't exist, you need communication like this. If anything let's applaud that.

As for your point on passing along the issue to those weaker than him... he he has no employment protection, combine that with the fact that he his multiple requests have already been denied, I'd say it's quite brave that he goes public with this, for one. But secondly, it's the way in which he least affects his students. i.e. if he, as you asked, decided to simply not show up to class to push his issue, that'd affect his students MUCH more in a way for which they have no real recourse and in a way that can really mess up their entire curriculum due to cascading effects. (e.g. fail a fall course because of issues with a lecturer or personal issues and you can't start your next course in the spring, and you can't redo the fall course in the spring either because it's only given in fall. So you have to wait an entire year before you're on track again. Stuff like this happened to my peers all the time in uni.)

The fact he continues teaching, continues putting in 280 hours for 225 in pay, pay which itself isn't too awesome in the first place let alone discounted against the extra hours, but deny the extra 20 hours to handle extra support while trying to get a conversation going to resolve this after having tried multiple times already, while putting his job and short-term livelihood on the line (in a position where his family is already classified poor and on income assistance) is 'hardly admirable'? I'd say on the contrary, quite admirable.

A student doesn't sign up to a professor to learn, they sign up to a school. It's the schools responsibility to ensure that the student is properly educated, not the individual professor's - they are employed by the school to achieve the school's aims.

passing it along to those even weaker than him is hardly admirable.

I'm not sure we read the same article. The author talks about trying to resolve this himself several times. If the student feels short-changed, it's the school's problem, not the fixed-hours employee they hired. This is the whole problem he's trying to highlight, and he's making a stand and taking it public. The students aren't as weak as you suggest they are, not if they act together.

Doubling the salary... [won't change supply and demand]

It will, however, make the currently employed staff more willing to work extra hours to ensure their students get educated properly. The author also isn't looking for tenure, he's looking to be made an employee at something more appropriate in wage.

Considering this situation strictly as a labour market might be too simplistic, given the importance of teachers in students' life. (e.g. an inspirational teacher that makes you want to learn more about a subject)

At 30k/year, it's a little disrespectful. (Anecdote: I recently read about a high school student who asked "why should I respect my teachers if they only make 40k?"). If tenured profs make 70k, adjunct profs should make at least 50k. The way I see it, the market price for teachers is underpriced because teaching is far from a "crap job"---quite the contrary---it's one of the best jobs in the world. In fact, we could say the 20k difference in salary between what it should be and what it is, is partially caused from a "fun job" penalty. (Think of this as the opposite of "danger pay" where you get paid more because your job is less fun that normal.)

At 30k/year, colleges get a mix bag of teaching quality. Some teachers will care, some teachers will try to get by with as little effort as possible. If universities increase adjunct salaries to 50k, they'll attract more of the teachers who care. Where do you get the extra cash to give 67% raise to each adjunct prof? Fire some administrators.

I think increasing adjunct salaries is all win for the university: better teaching, less administrators (and therefore less forms to fill out!!!), happier students, and the continuing the relevance of the in-person lecture-based teaching model (for lecture with < 50 students it becomes practical to interrupt the teacher when there is something you don't understand, how cool is that?).

The interesting issues at hand are the cultural factors of academia that cause so many highly qualified people to work for such astoundingly little money. Are bright young people being indoctrinated with a sense of personal sacrifice for the cause of 'higher learning', not unlike a cult? Are those self-issued 'high qualifications' not actually as valuable as they are pretended to be? Those are the interesting questions rather than just going "hurr durr supply and demand".

Not like the supply-and-demand argument excuses anything, either. The entire history of labor protections is that previous practices that the market would bear were deemed socially unjust and no longer permitted, even if you could still find people desperate enough to agree to them. Saying "you took the job; don't complain" simply isn't valid.

I guess we learnt this was not a human reply in the XIX century.

Well no. The real fault lies with the idiots in government who were somehow (coughcough lobbying coughcough university-industrial-state complex coughcough) convinced to classify all academic faculty as overtime-exempt in the labor regulations, even the part-time ones who are paid for piece-work.

With the exception of a few pernicious fields like that, society has long-since considered piece-work pay sufficiently unethical to be made illegal, requiring either fixed salaries for variable professional workloads or hourly wages that account for all hours actually worked, including overtime beyond 40 hours.

That's the standard, and there's no reason academia should be exempt.

Quite the opposite. The problem is that there already too many assholes who make it their sole mission in life to maximize their monetary inflow. But the fact of the matter is that this world keeps running because millions are prepared to do their part for a very modest fee.

You are wrong, then. The fiction the university maintains is that he is only being paid for the hours he does in class, plus a certain number of marking hours, which have been exhausted. What you're describing is called a "salaried position".

Are you sure it's 50%? Back when i was in university in Canada the gov't paid 80% of the tuition.

"CEO wages" have also out-paced the CPI. I'm sure the administration isn't paying themselves a pittance (and that in a budget crisis their salaries are the last on the chopping block)...

And to tell you the truth, I've often flirted with a similar idea to the one you mentioned at the end. That, along with plain home-schooling. So it doesn't necessarily have to be a "startup" that disrupts the current teaching ecosystem. It can simply be a bunch of parents buckling-down and doing what they think is best for their children.

Hopefully they don't make home-schooling illegal, as I've noticed it occurring in a few places. That would make it impossibly to change the status-quo without breaking the law.

In countries that allow such things there are plenty of private college "startups" and they are almost universally awful. There is more money to be made churning out hordes of poorly trained students than there is in properly training them.

Apparently that's not the case at Carleton.

The academic world is carefully arranged as a linear sequence which you can progress along but which is halted if you leave. It's expected that very little you could do out in the commercial world could aid your academic career, without at least the involvement of a university. At best you can return to the same point along the trail but it may be much harder.

The reinforcement begins with undergraduate students. The teaching and particularly grading, hence status, reward those suited for research. (This was particularly evident to me as a mechanical engineering student - the field is broad and empirical, but the examination of my course rewarded nothing but mathematical ability. And of course if you DO fly through the exams, interested professors will be gauging your interest in doing a PhD with them before long and it all clicks into place).

As a postgraduate student you will sit underneath portraits of your idols and eat dinners with the academics you're encouraged to look up to, be fed anecdotes and inside knowledge. The lecturers and postdocs you meet will be judged by their research ability and are already self-selected for a good mental fit with the system. It's universally acknowledged that salaries are higher elsewhere, but leaving would involve abandoning the track of research progression they're already entrained with. (It brings to mind the joke about the elephant-deconstipator at the circus who could never contemplate leaving showbiz).

I don't write any of this with rancour or ill-feeling, nor do I wish to over-egg things and make it seem like indoctrination. More like academia is a successful meme that shares characteristics with other enduring systems. If one wishes to poach from this particular set of people who are highly capable but driven by intellectual status (as well as of course their legitimate intellectual research interest) then one needs to offer them a substitute status.

Concrete suggestions to achieve this:

- Professional certification. I'm sure a lot of people here hate the idea but progression towards say being a Chartered Software Engineer might motivate academic types.

- Maintain university links. Collaborate with universities, offer secondments, let employees collaborate along their research interests. This isn't novel, good research organisations already do this. But it's probably rarer for the Silicon Valley 'Twitter for Dogs' type startups being involved with this sort of thing.

- Invent some other kind of new status or proxy for status. My point is that offering enough money to compensate for dropping one's academic dreams presumably won't work, since such money is already on offer, and PhDs remain predominantly focused on the academic track rather than using their talents elsewhere.

It doesn't change the context that the instructor isn't being paid to do it - he says he's already spent more time on the course than contracted. From his point of view, it's not an unreasonable request that he should not spent more of his (insufficiently remunerated) time on even small issues.

> and would be understandably pissed off if I was given no opportunity to collect an exam I'd taken.

But does that make it reasonable to blame a guy who's not paid to help you for not helping you?

I do understand the nature of your point, but I don't think any of the original argument is actually affected by the size of the task he's refusing to do.

I think that sort of behaviour is abhorrent, and frankly anyone who defends that strikes me as a "fuck you, I've got mine" kind of person. I make far more than this person does, and I can make the trade-off to do contract work for higher pay. His trade off is "contract" work for lower pay than the full timers with more than full time work load, and he doesn't get to trade higher job security for lower pay like we do.

He's being exploited and has the worst of all worlds, and he's teaching the next generation of this world, and you're sitting here saying he gets what he deserves? You've got to be kidding me.

Sorry for being so Keynesian, but it's the damn truth.

The biggest source of inefficiency is the bloated administration. In his most recent article, Accountability in the Ontario Ivory Towers, he does some estimates on how much the teaching budget (which is a tiny few percent of the total budget) would change if lecturers got fair pay.

Why would you be upset that a public institution decided to behave humanely rather than exploitatively?

Since he doesn't, all I can assume is that he values the intangibles of teaching enough that it makes up for the incredibly low salary.

All of human progress up this point can be wiped out in a generation if it's not passed on to the new individuals in the world.

Seriously, how is this good advice? If anything we should be encouraging more people to teach their knowledge and to get people interested in learning. Instead of shutting everything down, how about we figure out how to make things better?

(Not slamming the grad students here -- I've been one. Started teaching on a Tuesday, started grad classes the next day, had 3 hours of instruction on teaching the previous week to prepare me.)

Also, I resent your insinuation that profs have to teach well! ;) Maybe in Canada...

If the candidates were told this, I'd be fine. (I can easily imagine a world where most teachers happily work for low wages, because they've already done their primary career and are now retired, but are staying active in the community and passing on their knowledge.)

But lots of these candidates were lied to and told things like "there are a lot of professors retiring soon, so new spots will open up, so you can teach for a few years and then be ready to grab those spots." Meanwhile the full professors are making six figures and stringing along the adjuncts with promises of tenure, some day.

Public education I think there is much more evidence of systematic undermining. But that could be more about misguided ideological libertarianism rather than an actual desire to undermine the country. That's the trouble with ideology - empirical evidence can't sway you until it's too late.

I also have had a much better experience with ex-military types than not, in terms of their management abilities, and a fairly representative mix of political ideology too (they're not all conservatives).

Or what if equipment required to perform the teaching is extremely expensive, like lab equipment, telescopes, etc.

While the DIY approach is nice if you're doing something that doesn't have many unique/expensive prerequisites (beyond internet access and a computer), there's a whole lot of stuff out there that needs real hands on instruction using expensive gear.

It's ridiculous how little educators in a UNIVERSITY get compensated. I'm glad I got out of that environment early.

It's kind of like the academia counterpart to EA exploiting people enjoying game development.

"Learn to code in order to generate side income" isn't as simple as it sounds. I wish people would stop perpetuating this myth.