Adjuncts

Quicksearch

Blog Administration

RSS Readers

Sunday, October 1. 2017

Most of those seeking teaching careers end up as adjuncts, making peanuts and struggling to survive. One wonders why they do not simply apply for high school jobs where they could get steady, well-paid useful work with benefits and can never be fired.

Today, getting tenure as a full professor is like making it to the NBA.

One also wonders why our lefty universities treat these devoted slaves so poorly while hiring diversity administrators for $350,000/year.

Posted by The Barrister in Education at 12:44 | Comments (16) | Trackbacks (0)

Trackbacks

Trackback specific URI for this entry

No Trackbacks

Comments

Display comments as (Linear | Threaded)

I too have been awe struck by these "diversity administrators". My particular peeve is that they are usually "staffed" with other secondarily useless people. I have become somewhat used to affirmative action hires and usually just shake it off as I do the exorbitant fingernails that I invariably find at each visit to my local Dept of Transportation. However, I am severely pissed at the salaries I find for these "Diversity Admins". It makes no sense whatsoever. I wonder what they actually do for eight hours a day. And further what does their staff do?

#1 Marc Anderson (Link) on 2017-10-01 13:11 (Reply)

If everyone is selected to the elite, it's not an elite any longer.

#2 LAG on 2017-10-01 13:40 (Reply)

I did some adjunct teaching while not employed in my Engineering profession. Pretty thin gruel.

And even FT isn't great; a friend talked about the school where I taught and a "non-tenure track" Lecturer position being considered. Here's the kicker: Needed a PhD and would be paid what I made in industry over 15 years ago.

#3 David Hunt PE on 2017-10-01 13:41 (Reply)

The K-12 edumedication cartel have got it so that a Ph.D. isn't qualified to teach in K-12 unless they have an education degree. It is true that Ph.Ds aren't actually trained or qualified to teach anything, except as supposedly subject matter "experts". They receive no whiff of training to teach. On the other hand, the edu school graduate has lots of indoctrination, but also little training in actual teaching. Not unlike how law school offers the bare minimum training in how to practice law.

Engineering is different as the professors know that one day they may drive over a bridge or use a vehicle that has design work or calculations done by one of their students.

#4 JK Brown on 2017-10-01 15:00 (Reply)

Sorta true. In STEM some locales do make exceptions for people as they work toward the teaching credentials.

Anyway, I've had some good friends who did exactly what the Barrister asks: taught HS instead of adjunct or JUCO. Didn't work out too badly.

#4.1 DrTorch on 2017-10-02 12:38 (Reply)

QUOTE:

Pg 81
In the same year first appeared the celebrated Act for the punishment of beggars and vagabonds and forbidding beggary, and requiring them to labor or be whipped. Herbert Spencer states in his "Descriptive Sociology" that it punishes with loss of an ear the third conviction for joining a trades-union, which, if true, would justify much of the bitterness of modem labor unions against the common law. The provision evidently referred to (22 Henry VIII, chapter 12, section 4) applies, however, not to guilds, but to "Scolers of the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge that go about begging not being authorized under the seal of the said Universities" as well as to other beggars or vagabonds playing "subtile, crafty and unlawful games
such as physnomye or palmestrye."

--Popular Law-making: A Study of the Origin, History, and Present Tendencies of Law-making by Statute, Frederic Jesup Stimson (1910)

I've often wondered if the "Scolers" in that passage refer to students at the universities or the medieval equivalent of adjuncts.

But as parents often tried to impose on their kid who wanted to be a musician or actor, those who enter the Liberal Arts should also learn a trade for when it doesn't work out.

#5 JK Brown on 2017-10-01 15:03 (Reply)

My understanding is that it referred to the students. Their manner of dress was not dissimilar to the tattered robes of mendicant friars, And since there was some overlap between the groups, it was easy for someone unfamiliar with the two groups to confuse one for the other.

#5.1 another guy named Dan on 2017-10-02 15:09 (Reply)

It was apparent by the mid-70s that the hiring boom for university faculty positions, a boom that lasted over 2 decades, was over. I was working as an aide in a hospital when a fellow aide informed me that her grad student husband was researching non-traditional jobs for English Ph.Ds. He was making this knowledge available to his fellow Ph.D. candidates.

Ironically, he ended up getting a tenure-track faculty position, and died a quarter century later in his university administrator job. The initiative he showed in researching non-traditional jobs probably helped him in obtaining a faculty position.

While I sympathize with the plight of the adjuncts, I also question their judgement in pursing a career path where for over 40 years it has been glaringly obvious that there is an oversupply of job candidates for the appropriate tenure-track positions. Their tenured professors also share some blame, as most of them have been less than candid in informing their Ph.D. students about their job prospects. "Yes, there's a good chance..."

Our universities could function with half the administrators they currently have- at least they did 40 years ago. The IT revolution should have made a lot of administrator positions redundant, but instead we have more administrators. Even the HuffPo admits New Analysis Shows Problematic Boom In Higher Ed Administrators

QUOTE:

The number of non-academic administrative and professional employees at U.S. colleges and universities has more than doubled in the last 25 years, vastly outpacing the growth in the number of students or faculty, according to an analysis of federal figures...
Universities have added these administrators and professional employees even as they’ve substantially shifted classroom teaching duties from full-time faculty to less-expensive part-time adjunct faculty and teaching assistants, the figures show....
Part-time faculty and teaching assistants now account for half of instructional staffs at colleges and universities, up from one-third in 1987, the figures show.

During the same period, the number of administrators and professional staff has more than doubled. That’s a rate of increase more than twice as fast as the growth in the number of students....
Rather than improving productivity as measured by the ratio of employees to students, private universities have seen their productivity decline, adding 12 employees per 1,000 full-time students since 1987, the federal figures show. ..
The ratio of nonacademic employees to faculty has also doubled. There are now two nonacademic employees at public and two and a half at private universities and colleges for every one full-time, tenure-track member of the faculty.

Universities need to fire half their administrators.

#6 Gringo on 2017-10-01 15:25 (Reply)

You are too kind, by about 1000%. Half, indeed.

#6.1 Sam L. on 2017-10-01 18:29 (Reply)

ap·pa·rat·chik
ˌäpəˈräCHik/
nounhistorical

-- a member of a communist party apparat.
-- an official in a large political organization.

Correction: They need to fire all of their administrative apparatchiki, and begin with a clean slate and clear rules.

You don't cut out half of a tumor and call your cancer cured.

#6.2 Krusty on 2017-10-02 07:45 (Reply)

The money goes to non-educators for the same reason cities with budget troubles always cut streetlights and other essential services while never firing a single useless parasite: When you're performing your actual function adequately, you can't plead for more funding.

When you're a monopoly, giving the customer his money's worth is crazy. There's nothing in that for you.

When times are good, blow out your head count with brainless biomass that presents no risk of producing any valuable work output.

When times are bad, turn out the street lights and hold the public for ransom.

Same reason the CDC always has plenty of funding to study obesity in lesbians, but pleads destitution when Ebola breaks out.

Oh, you want us to actually study the control of disease? I guess we might think about it, but that'll cost you extra.

#7 Wilbur Hassenfus on 2017-10-01 15:27 (Reply)

I have been full time faculty at my small two year college for over 20 years. I am now in the position to hire PT teachers and get to run the committee when we (very rarely) hire a full timer. In general, when a FT professor retires I can't replace them with another FTer. Instead, I am expected to hire multiple PTers to teach our classes.

At the same time, our administration has become bloated beyond recognition. We have more VPs than you can shake a stick at and we hire lawyers far too often. If those legal eagles were really handling all of our litigation in-house AND lobbying the state legislature to get us measurably more money, I would grudgingly agree they were earning their keep. But instead, our administration pays through the nose for consultants to lobby rather than having the inhouse lawyers do their jobs properly. Now we are offering to hire ANOTHER lawyer at roughly the salary we could use to hire three FT teachers.

I am glad I got my FT job when I did. I wouldn't be able to get the job today, since the field has changed for the worst.

God have mercy on those PT faculty who know that the door has been slammed in their faces.

And so you would think that since you can get two to three times as many classes for the same money with part timers as you can with full timers, college fees and tuition costs would be nosediving, right?

Wrong. That is where the bloated administration has come to soak up the money that used to go to faculty.

I explained it the other day to a friend who never went to college: if we had a factory making widgets and business was booming, we would be smart enough not to start firing workers from the assembly lines but hiring more upper management who never touched a widget. If we did, we would soon be out of business. But not in academia. God save us all.

#8 Dangerous Dean on 2017-10-01 20:56 (Reply)

Wrong. That is where the bloated administration has come to soak up the money that used to go to faculty.

I explained it the other day to a friend who never went to college: if we had a factory making widgets and business was booming, we would be smart enough not to start firing workers from the assembly lines but hiring more upper management who never touched a widget. If we did, we would soon be out of business. But not in academia. God save us all.

Well said.

#9 Gringo on 2017-10-01 20:59 (Reply)

Tenured=aloof,>sabbaticals,,lazy,fat,privileged,,,overpaid ect.
IMO that def would cover around 50% of those campus'elite' freeloaders.
I know all tenured are not but see many who are.

#10 RL on 2017-10-02 00:07 (Reply)

Quite simple really, the modern university system needs graduate students as teaching and research "assistants" more than it needs young professors. They work cheap and are eminently more controllable, since they do not have tenure and generally do not control their funding, even in many circumstances being a net contributor to the revenue of the university via their student loans.

I find it ironic that it is the university system, which claims to be the cutting edge of learning, that perpetuates the medieval guild system of apprenticeship in thin disguise, the principle difference being that a master was obligated to provide maintenance for his apprentices, rather than charging them for the privilege as today.

#11 another guy named Dan on 2017-10-02 08:40 (Reply)

I doubt they are allowed to eat peanuts, did you forget peanuts are racist?

#12 JTW on 2017-10-03 20:59 (Reply)

Add Comment

Name
Email	(Your e-mail will not show in your comment)
Homepage
In reply to
Comment	By commenting on this site you agree to the site rules listed here. Email addresses will not be displayed and will only be used for email notifications. Quick reference guide: [i] italics [/i], [b] bold [/b], [u] underline [/u], [url] (web address) [/url]. More tips here. Enclosing asterisks marks text as bold (word), underscore are made via _word_. E-Mail addresses will not be displayed and will only be used for E-Mail notifications. To prevent automated Bots from commentspamming, please enter the string you see in the image below in the appropriate input box. Your comment will only be submitted if the strings match. Please ensure that your browser supports and accepts cookies, or your comment cannot be verified correctly. Enter the string from the spam-prevention image above: BBCode format allowed
	Remember Information? Subscribe to this entry

Maggie's Farm

Our Recent Essays Behind the Front Page

Categories

Quicksearch

Links

Blog Administration

RSS Readers

Sunday, October 1. 2017

Adjuncts