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This is literally the least interesting response one can make to this issue. Both parties are offering/accepting what the market will bear? Obviously! That's what makes it the market. You're stating a tautology.

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.

Supply and demand is always political.

Prof Robinson has to 'accept' the university's offer because the alternative is starvation and homelessness.

The university believes - wrongly, as it happens - that people like Prof Robinson are easy to replace. So it sees no need to treat him any better.

If he tries to argue for a fair rate, he's arguing as someone from an inferior position of power and status with 'rational actors' who don't understand the consequences of their actions.

In this case the consequences are poor teaching, and - in the medium term - the replacement of an overly greedy university system with something that offers better value for students.

I'm sure the admins are patting themselves on the back for putting Prof Robinson in his place.

They won't be so happy when everyone - including the student body - has moved elsewhere.

>Are bright young people being indoctrinated with a sense of personal sacrifice for the cause of 'higher learning', not unlike a cult?

No, bright people are being indoctrinated in business and econ classes with the idea that you should make a fast buck however you can. Social transactions can only be valued financially. Nothing else matters.

Those are the real cult victims. As is Prof Robinson, who is one of many talented individual dealing with the consequences of that particular brand of kookiness.

This is not rhetoric. These toxic attitudes exist because they've been heavily promoted. They didn't just happen.

> The university believes - wrongly, as it happens - that people like Prof Robinson are easy to replace. So it sees no need to treat him any better.

Are you using "wrongly" in the sense of "what they're doing is wrong" or "their belief is incorrect"? Because the latter is absolutely not true. There is a near endless supply of freshly-minted PhDs willing the take the author's place.

I think the point is that, though there are plenty of other PhDs to take his place at low cost, it may be hard to find one who is able to create as much value (for students, and by extention the university) a Prof Robinson.

Considering how more interconnected the world is getting your going to see the salaries of jobs which can be done remotely decrease and teaching will be one.

However in your argument, with plenty of PhDs available the chances of finding another Prof Robinson should not be impossible. We can always find traits of teachers we like and dismiss others for similarly arbitrary reasons, the issue being how do you make this work for hiring decisions. One person's dream candidate may not even rate for another

  > Supply and demand is always political.

"Economics is politics by other means."

Academics are not "desperate." There are a wide variety of jobs open to them that they could purse, they have a lot of options and are intelligent.

Read some of the Chronicle of Higher Ed forums and then come back to reaffirm that statement. For fun, start here: http://chronicle.com/forums/index.php/topic,168931.0.html You can also go down the rabbithole of leaving-academia stories starting with http://leavingacademia.blogspot.com/2014/03/what-you-can-do-... . Maybe academics leaving academia are objectively in a good position to transition to other jobs, but they are in general so psychologically wound up in academia that instead they are desperate and disturbed.

They're in an incredibly good position. My former boss's boss's boss has a PhD in chemistry. His boss's boss has a PhD in economics. "Tired of bossing around stupid undergrads? Get paid 5 times as much to boss around adults!" I don't even have any reports, and I'm making 5 times what I was making as an adjunct and barely scraping by, and I don't have to deal with undergrads who would rather squeak by than actually learn the material they're being certified in. I have my MBA, but I'm quite pleased to work with people who have their bachelors in philosophy. Disturbed is a good word. Certifiably insane might be a better phrase to use. The real world can actually pay the bills. If you're not being appreciated financially by academia, go where you are. If you still want to deal with undergrads after putting in an honest day's work, there's plenty of demand for adjuncts to teach night classes.

He's getting paid hourly and has already put in 55 free hours to teach the course properly. How many more free hours do you expect from him? I think the email he sent the students is spot on. Perhaps if they're distressed enough, they will put pressure on the university to pay their teachers what they're worth.

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.

Indeed. My ex-wife is a high school teacher, and it's incredible to me how many hours she has to put in outside of class, at an already low-on-paper rate. And then she cobbles together more teaching at area colleges.

It's shameful. But I'm sure we'll get the educated populace that that rate will deserve.

My wife is also a teacher. That she puts in hours outside of class seems like a pretty good deal considering the almost 15 weeks of holidays she gets a year. Like every other teacher I know, she could be earning a lot more (with much less holiday) in any number of white collar professions.

How many weeks of the year does she work as a high school teacher?

The high school year. Then she increases her college contract work during the summer.

Even more than that, the class was a contract job and it's over. How much free work is it reasonable to do for a client after the job is finished and you're no longer being paid?

> the reason he's being offered a pittance is because he and the people like him will accept it. >

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?).

To add insult to injury, in the US, non-tenure-track faculty positions are almost invariably without any kind of benefits--including health insurance.

> there's only so many teaching slots available, and there's a fuckton of Phd graduates desperate to obtain one regardless of the salary or employment terms

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.

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.

In my field, no competent grad student paid tuition, and it wasn't a meaningful measure of value or cost. Nobody would have accepted an offer from a grad program that didn't provide a full ride. So tuition was basically funny money, like a "list price" that is always discounted.

My research work brought in enough grant money to pay for my stipend plus equipment and other expenses. If anybody was taking a loss, it was the National Science Foundation.

Grants are easier to come by in certain fields than in others. Natural sciences, for the most part, have it much easier than social sciences and humanities.

Tuition begins to matter when students lose funding. Then it's no longer "funny money." According to the Ph.D. completion project, between 50–60% of students that enter a Ph.D. program finish it by the 10 year mark: http://www.phdcompletion.org/quantitative/book1_quant.asp

Most programs guarantee funding only through the first 4–6 years. Some programs make students compete against one another for quasi-guaranteed funding after a certain point.

A substantial minority of graduate students are either going to quit the program with only a masters degree to show for it or are going to end up paying tuition. Usually they can reduce the amount of tuition paid by enrolling as a "non-resident student" or something similar. But the tuition rate (and how long they will cover tuition) isn't something that can be brushed aside, either by students managing their finances, or by departments assessing their budgets.

Assuming some amount of my taxes goes towards funding these grants, I'd much rather that money goes towards funding advances in battery or materials technology than to in-depth analyses of Shakespeare. There are advancements and improvements to be made in fields like social work and law but I don't think they'll be made by writing dissertations.

Also, are you saying some PhD's take 10 years to complete, not including undergrad/masters? My understanding was a PhD on its own was typically a 3-6 year endeavour. I know it's a difficult project to manage but 10 years seems long.

That's probably averaged over all disciplines. The better-funded disciplines (CS, engineering, natural sciences, etc) have better outcomes in the sense of shorter time-to-completion. There's a lot more attrition in arts and social sciences, as I understand it.

These are some good points. I took 7 years from entering grad school, without doing a Masters along the way. I take full responsibility for how long it took -- my first thesis project was over my head. I would not have forged ahead without funding, so my Plan B was to take the Masters (i.e., pay the diploma fee after passing qualifiers) and then pick up a quick Masters in electrical engineering.

PhD in math here.

When I was applying for grad school I got a letter offering admission from some school that basically said: "we'll pay you $20k in stipend, plus tuition is $40k, so really this offer is worth $60k".

I think they may have added another couple thousand for health insurance as well.

How nice of the university to pass $40k/year from its left hand to its right hand!

(said a fellow grad-student)

Oh yes. It's quite wonderful, really. For the cost of a stipend and waiving tuition, they get someone who'll work almost for free, grading papers, teaching seminars, and maybe even bringing in grant money. Then as soon as they graduate, they're back, desperately applying for adjunct positions.

If you were very cynical, you could try and consider the RoI on a stipend from the point of view of the administration. It's one of the most abusive and exploitive things you'll find outside of a North Korean prison camp.

You could also look at it from the perspective of students, who have been told for nearly two decades that they should be college bound, and that they should get "the best education they can," and then finally that they should "do what they love." When you finally exit the pipeline, you realize that the best education isn't worth much outside of the school you got it from, and doing what you love doesn't pay very well.

The problem is that you learn this about 6 years too late, and transitioning to a job where you're actually valued will set you back even further.

As a grad student in the 2000's I was told by a professor that the department would take into consideration the expected attrition rate (typically ~50%) when admitting grad students. The idea being that they would have enough TA's for intro classes. Attrition would make the number of advanced students more inline with the money available to fund PhD students till they graduated. In other words, they purposefully over-admitted to get TA's, most of whom would leave with an MS as best.

This was in science departments. In departments that had few or no "general ed" courses, such as engineering, and thus little need for TA's, the graduation rate was much higher.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pyramid_scheme

> 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.

Well, largely because the PhD students don't just do the teaching work, they do the research, too! Professors are often stuck as something more like a manager these days, which means that even the "winners" of the academic rat-race don't really get what they actually wanted: to do research full-time with a secure salary.

And this is why I, a sort-of confirmed desperate academic (ok, I know how to code so not really!) finally stepped off the hamster wheel of looking for a tenure-track job: my friends who got the golden ring still had sucky jobs that involved 60 hours minimum work per week, and so much of it was NOT RESEARCH! Move across the country four times, move the family, leave my support systems, all to do a job that in the end isn't even what you thought it would be?

No.

Apparently you can pay less than $30k a year to get a hard-working instructor with a Phd to teach your students. So, that's what they do

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.

>I'm also not thrilled by the email he sent the student. I feel like communicating with students outside of class time is absolutely part of the job of instructor; his email reads to me like someone saying "I'm not paid enough to do the entire job I was hired for". That wouldn't fly in any other context. If he decided to just not show up to some lectures he was hired to teach, what would the university say if he told them he wasn't being paid enough to attend every class? He may be dealing with a shitty deal from the administratio, but passing it along to those even weaker than him is hardly admirable.

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".

You seem to be arguing that it's his fault for accepting low pay for a 225 hour job, but then that he should be screwed for another 75 hours, because "that comes with the territory".

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.

> But he's the one who signed up to do a crap job for little pay, and keeps signing up to do it again every year. And that makes him part of the problem.

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.

Well look, I appreciate the point that there are limited jobs and a lot of qualified people and that the market forces the wages down.

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.

Yeah, like the London of Dickens: they got the job they wanted, did they not?

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

>Now, despite my tone above, I am sympathetic. He's doing a crap job for little pay. I have empathy for him! But he's the one who signed up to do a crap job for little pay, and keeps signing up to do it again every year. And that makes him part of the problem.

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.

In a company he'd get paied for working outside his job schedules. And if the market could find the right price for something, capitalism wouldn't be such a fail.

But I can't resist pointing out here that we're talking about a University. It's universities that have been hotbeds of criticizing capitalism for decades. It's probably university-educated, university-created, and university-supported ideas that prompted your comment in your first place. It's universities doing everything they can to foster hatred of "capitalism" and telling you how horrible it is in every way they can.

And when you're not looking or listening, they turn right around and pay people exactly what the market will bear and pocket the difference. (At least, to your way of thinking. That's not really the best way to think of it, but for rhetorical purposes I'll accept your way for the sake of argument here.)

I feel genuinely bad for this person, who sounds very good at what is actually a very hard job that even a "mere" Physics PhD is not adequate qualification for (evidence: many of them still suck at teaching physics).

But I still can't help but read the complaints about the coldness of capitalism here with a bit of a raised eyebrow. This is a University. No excuses! If there's any entity anywhere that ought to be paying what the professor "the right price" without reference to "cold" market facts right now, with no prompting, no public campaign, just doing it, it's a University. Stop talking and show me how much better your way is than capitalism... but, oh, wait, it's apparently just raw capitalism with a wafer-thin moralistic sheen drawn over it.

And no, there's nothing even remotely exceptional about this one case. We've had a stream of articles on HN that establish how this is absolutely the norm across the board, so no escape out that hatch.

Perhaps those of you who have gotten your ideas about capitalism that ultimately source from the University system ought to reconsider whether your source is that reliable, if they can't put their own ideas into action.

This is one of the reasons I would love to see the adjunct teachers unionize and strike. The ivory-tower professors love telling how great unions are for every other industry; why should they be left out of the awesomeness?

Right. This was the case many years ago (at least in the US) but now universities are essentially for profit corporations run by MBAs who care nothing for the mission of the institution, overloaded with administrative parasites who latch on to any profitable industry and spit platitudes about 'education' and then turn around and stab it in the back. There has been a massive shift in governance of universities; if you go to any university you will see the faculty (read: the people who actually do the work of the university and are public intellectuals) have almost zero power, a token appointment or two in the puppet university governing body, not the board which makes the real decisions. This is happening for a number of reasons, partially because the short-term corporate profit agenda has infiltrated every industry no matter how noble (see: health care. Accountants decide what treatment you get, not a doctor. Businesspeople decide which doctors and nurses are doing a good job based on profits and cost-cutting, not a standard of care), which is really a result of a cut in funding. It's essentially a result of a shift in culture; towards a culture indoctrinated into the religion of economics, valuing things only for their potential profit, using economic measures even when (especially when) they are inappropriate. Defunding art, education, health care, infrastructure, safety nets, anything with intangible or even long-term tangible value in favor of things which show up in short-term metrics. It's especially prevalent among youth. Ask a college kid what's important to him; he'll say making money, period point blank. Everything else is secondary, if it even exists. Our world is a lot more cutt-throat than it was even 50 years ago, when intellectuals and professionals were respected, and there was a healthy middle class, not a quickly disappearing one, full of people trying to tread water in it or claw their way out by tooth and nail before being "middle class" means no more than barely eking out an existence for the short years you're healthy to work at maximum productivity, but only with the permission of a high ranking member of the owning class (i.e. a 'job').