The Rise of The Adjuncts
I was very upset after reading Stanley Fish’s recent blog entitled, The Last Professor. In it, Fish reviews (coincidently, of course) the most recent publication of one of his former students, Frank Donoghue, as a starting off point for a baseless rant about how adjunct instructors at America’s colleges are causing the downward spiral of our higher education system.
Fish states that, “Universities … do not hire the most experienced teachers, but rather the cheapest teachers.” After paying momentary lip service to the reality that no one specifically is to blame for the rise of adjunct instructors, Fish then spends the rest of the article blaming adjunct instructors, even going so far as to say that we adjuncts represent a lack of values for “higher learning.”
Yes, we are the cheapest teachers, in that we get paid dramatically less than our tenured colleagues. But I resent greatly that Fish compares adjuncts everywhere to shameful schools like the University of Phoenix, simply because he sees most colleges and universities are now basically “for profit” organizations. Invoking the University of Phoenix to win an argument about academia is as fucked a fallacy as invoking Nazis to win…well, just about any other argument.
I work as an adjunct English instructor at several community colleges. Like most other part-timers, I do this full-time, meaning I drive between 3-4 different districts in order to cobble together a living. The reason I have to do this is that in addition to getting paid about 30% less per hour for doing the exact same work as my tenured colleagues, I also am restricted from teaching more than 1-2 classes per semester in each district. So in order to get a full workload of classes, I need to be on the books at several different districts. This is no easy task, because most districts are not hiring, thanks to constant budget cuts by our state’s governor. Even when I do manage to get hired to teach one class in one district, I have no guarantee whatsoever that I will ever again be offered a class, and thus every four months or so (depending on whether the district I teach at is semester-based or quarter-based) I have to reapply for my own job. Needless to say, I get no benefits whatsoever: if I am sick, I have to pay out of my pocket for my healthcare, and if being sick caused me to miss work then I get docked pay. I haven’t been to a dentist in 2 years.
Yet what Fish fails to observe is that most adjuncts have the exact same qualifications as our full-time colleagues. None of us, tenured or adjunct, are in this “business” for the money. Despite a society, which sneers “those who can’t do, teach,” even in this economy we could all find better paying work somewhere.
So why do we do it? I’ve talked to a lot of professors, and believe it or not, even the most dispirited, tired, beaten down of them still expresses a desire to make a positive difference in the lives of their students. They don’t all feel that they succeed, but they all understand the value of education and that their role as teacher is critical, in fact, the most critical component, beyond even the students themselves.
So what is the difference between adjuncts and the tenured? It isn’t our degrees, and it isn’t our experience. It isn’t our training, and it isn’t our capabilities. Adjuncts are not instructors who have repeatedly applied for full-time work and been rejected due to lack of a higher degree, lack of experience, or lack of capability.
Adjuncts are adjuncts, and not tenured, because there are no tenured positions available. In all the districts that I teach, only about 30% of the instructors are full-time, leaving everyone else to be an adjunct. Before our recent budget crisis, most schools would hire one new full-time professor per year.
That position would receive literally hundreds of applications, all from highly qualified adjuncts, many of who have worked at the very school in question for years (if not decades). Who gets the position? It’s a crapshoot. To be picked as the one person for a full-time job out of five hundred applicants is just a matter of luck. Sometimes it goes to the part-timer with the most seniority, other times to a fresh, young thirty-nine year old teacher who has just received their doctorate. To imply that something was inferior about all those other applicants is both ignorant and disrespectful.
Now we have a budget crisis, funding to state colleges has been slashed again, and all schools in the state have a hiring freeze, meaning they have gone from having one open full-time position to having zero.
Fish concludes by saying he was born at just right time, and that were he born today then he’d not be able to receive the quality education that he got in the good old days (you know, when women weren’t allowed to be doctors, and the entire student body was nice and white and clean). According to his website, “Stanley Fish is the Davidson-Kahn Distinguished University Professor and a professor of law at Florida International University, in Miami, and dean emeritus of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences at the University of Illinois at Chicago. He has also taught at the University of California at Berkeley, Johns Hopkins and Duke University. He is the author of 10 books. His new book on higher education, “Save the World On Your Own Time,” has just been published.”
Congratulations, Dean Fish. It sounds like you were born at just the right time after all. No, not the right time to receive a proper higher education as you conclude in your New York Times op-ed, but at just the right time to still get hired as a full-time employee in academia. In the old days, universities were hiring, and my wife and I would have been able to get full-time work. After all, we’re both highly qualified, and committed teachers. Today, that fact is irrelevant.
Yes, Dean Fish, if you were born when I was, things would have been different. Oh, the quality of your education would have been the same, if not better, despite what you might think about all us adjuncts teaching most of the classes. The difference would have come after you got that great education, because you would have found yourself in a position just like mine. You see, there just aren’t any full-time positions available anymore, and so you would have been forced, despite your top education and desire to teach, to work as a part-time instructor, just like the rest of us.
How long do you think you could have handled it? Something tells me you would have quit within a week and enrolled at business school.
...such as chalk, dry-erase markers, a ream of paper, or a bottle of whiskey!
Send this to the NY Times for publication: it’s an excellent rebuttal to Fish. (They will not like the f word, so edit that).
FYI, California comm colleges are required by law to maintain a ratio of 60:40 FT to Adjunct (check that stat). They don’t, so are in contravention of that law, but no one does anything about it.
The rise of the adjuncts is directly correlated to the rise of monetarism and people with Macho Bullshit Acronyms (MBAs) who spend their days looking for ways to save money for institutions (ie, make them more profitable at the expense of basics like tenure, health, holidays and pay). That also correlates to the demise of unions (because unions like to promote tenure, healthcare, holidays and pay …).
Finally, the FT faculty including the heads of departments could give a fuck about the plight of the adjuncts. For the record, when I told one head of department I was going to quit and leave the country for work (I did, and now earn at least 10 times what I did as an adjunct), she frowned and told me about how tough it had been for her when she was starting out as adjunct. But that was 30 years ago when the money was better and, as you point out, there was a prospect of a full-time gig. She thus revealed that she was utterly clueless about the conditions of the people she employed.
Arthur King — February 1, 2009 @ 6:54 am
Fish is a well known bite in the ass. I don’t think I’ve ever read anything he’s written I agreed with. I was an adjunct for 15 years (masters graduation till year one after my PhD graduation – I was out of grad school for ten of these.) Well I remember being invisible to tenured and tenure track faculty.
At teaching colleges, I agree (I’ve always been at teaching colleges). There aren’t many differences between PhD level adjuncts and tenure line faculty. When I got my PhD, I knew that I had to market based on certain things to get a tenure track job. In my field they were crim, quantitative skills, and prior pubs (even for a teaching college job.)
It worked. I’m tenured at a regional state college. I’m very grateful. I actually talk to the adjuncts, too, but not everyone does.
I will say, we do use adjuncts where we should not. I don’t care if they have a PhD or masters, but I’m often not comfortable with lawyers teaching sociology courses, or political science masters people teaching sociological theory. But we do it because they can show up and teach.
I should talk. I mainly taught econ for my adjunct courses. I never even had a course in it. I learned it out of the textbooks.
TBD — February 1, 2009 @ 11:44 am
I just want to reply to:
“I will say, we do use adjuncts where we should not. I don’t care if they have a PhD or masters, but I’m often not comfortable with lawyers teaching sociology courses, or political science masters people teaching sociological theory. But we do it because they can show up and teach.”
I recently started at a new school, and they told me that they haven’t had a geography teacher teaching their geography classes since their full-timer retired several years ago. History teachers and anthropologists were teaching the geography classes. While the subjects are closely related (my BA is in Anthropology), geographers have a unique perspective, and use different techniques to look at the world.
The key to geography is spatial analysis. I don’t know that someone who hasn’t had special training in geography could provide that unique geographic perspective.
Geography Adjunct — February 1, 2009 @ 12:00 pm
Hmm, looks like the americans do things a bit different than Canada? Here, Ive only had 2 adjuncts for my undergrad. One because they couldn’t find enough profs for some first year civil engineering class, the other because they thought it would be good to get someone with “industry experience” to teach the course. One was an awesome teacher, other was ****, but got rehired anyway.
From what I hear from profs and PhD students here, the university hires based on mostly on research output (papers published) with some consideration for teaching.
Also, is U of Phoenix supposed to be terrible or ????. Never really heard of it.
Brea — February 2, 2009 @ 2:02 am
Hmm, most of the time i find the people with tenure don’t give a damn because they know they have to really really screw up to be in trouble, most of the instructors ive had that were not tenured ended up trying harder.
BFF Jill — February 2, 2009 @ 2:25 am
I have had few adjunct professors, and usually for the bs classes that pretty much everyone has to take. favorite so far was eco-101, take home multiple choice tests right out of the book.
Chainsaw Plankton — February 2, 2009 @ 5:37 am
>>>Also, is U of Phoenix supposed to be terrible or ????. Never really heard of it.< <<
TLDR version. UoP and others like it are in the business of taking your money and giving you little in return. They arn't a real university. Anyone can call their business a university without it actually being one.
UoP isn't a University. Its a for profit business that is traded on Wallstreet. Anyone can call their business a university without it actually being one. They arn't the only ones ether. DeVry, ITT Tech, Kaplan, Westwood, Everest, NIT, Bradford Career School also do this. They are in the business of selling you a degree for as cheap as possible while charging you 3 times what normal colleges cost. This means then tend to hire people who have no background in teaching, let alone actually know how to teach, and if a course becomes unprofitable or enough people drop it mid semester they cancel the classes all together and tell you that you're **** outta luck and they're keeping your money without you getting any credits.
They also claim to be accredited, but the problem is they're not accredited with anyone that matters. Its a hook to get your money. If you see any of their advertisements look closely at the fine print at the bottom of the screen where it says, "Credits not likely to transfer." This basically means that no real college will take any credits you get while attending any of these so called universities. They know the education quality is so poor and laughable that they need to reteach you these classes to get you caught up with real coursework.
They're also guilty of lying about their job placement statistics. They'll say things like they have a very high job hire percentage within so many months after graduation. What they arn't telling you is those jobs are not necessarily in the field those people graduated in. They count people who are forced to get a job at McDonald's or other fast food places to make ends meet as a successful placement. They lied about this and exaggerated so much that ITT Tech got sued and raided by the FBI back in 2005 or 2006 for this reason. Several of their campuses where shut down as well.
If this wasn't bad enough their recruiters are actually treated as car salesmen. If you don't get X number of students a semester you're looking for a new job. The recruiters are put under heavy pressure to make their quota. The financial aid department isn't any better ether. I'm not sure if this is straight up ineptitude on their part or if they do it on purpose but they'll take out student loans with high interest rates from places like Sallie Mae in lieu of utilizing the most from federal loans (MUCH lower interest) and grants.
Employers generally laugh at anyone with an ITT Tech, DeVry, or UoP degree.
Relevant links.
FBI related stuff - http://certcities.com/editorial/news/story.asp?EditorialsID=571&page=45
A former recruiter speaks out – http://ripoffreport.com/reports/0/154/RipOff0154604.htm
Kravick Drasari — February 2, 2009 @ 1:47 pm
UoP designs their classes in a group session. Also, they don’t like to hire PhDs and people who aren’t currently working in a given field. They show this as an advantage, but not be one in reality…
TBD — February 2, 2009 @ 8:16 pm