Comments on: The Adjunct pay issue, solved

By: Matt Weiner

Matt Weiner — Wed, 28 Apr 2004 19:06:59 +0000

I should say (or maybe it would be wiser not to) that what I describe is how I intend to grade. No guarantees that it actually has any effect on what I do when I’m reading through a big stack of papers, and I’d have to run some sort of complicated regression to determine whether people’s work actually does improve. Shai—If I actually tried to give C’s for standard performance I’d be lynched, and quite right too I think. As Harry says, I think this applies mostly to the final grade. asg—it sounds like those adjuncts are what adjuncts ought to be—people who are making lots of money by practicing what they do and are teaching courses to keep their hand in, pick up a few extra dollars, for love of the process, whatever. That tends not to happen in the humanities, my guess is, because it’s hard to find a philosopher or historian who’s in private practice.

By: Bill Carone

Bill Carone — Wed, 28 Apr 2004 18:58:20 +0000

Harry, “Wow. Am I naive or what? … I have tenure, so I feel no pressure to change my behaviour.” It might be naive if you didn’t have tenure or were an adjunct; do you disagree? I’ve found that I can easily get high evaluations by doing particular things the students want, as others have said above. For example, making sure that every homework problem is exactly the same as a class example with the numbers changed, and that every exam question is exactly the same as a homework question with the numbers changed. This is how I started teaching (as a TA), and many students think this is the only right way to teach a class. I no longer think this is a good way to teach. I think homework and exams should, in part, force students to think from familiar situations to unfamiliar situations, using the philosophy, methods, and concepts of the course. Most students don’t like this as much, even though I can show that they have learned more and better. As a result I receive poorer evaluations as I become a better teacher.

By: pw

pw — Wed, 28 Apr 2004 17:02:05 +0000

Given the typical lag between graduation and substantial donations, compared to the typical tenure (ahem) of adjunct faculty, this solution doesn’t really constitute a usable market mechanism. But by transforming adjuncts in general into a profit rather than a cost center, it might change the way universities look at them. On the other hand, for the past 20 years or more universities have been running a similar profit-center aproach with respect to adjuncts whose job is not primarily teaching, aka research associates, aka “soft-money scum”. (Research associates have to bring in at least enough grant money to fund their own salaries, although some institutions offer a year or two of grace if funds fall short.) The results have been mixed. One possibly interesting effect is that soft-money scum occasionally go crazy and kill a bunch of their colleagues, thereby increasing turnover on both tenure and non-tenure-track positions in a way that could not be achieved otherwise.

By: Rv. Agnos

Rv. Agnos — Wed, 28 Apr 2004 15:34:29 +0000

Why is the problem not solved completely by cutting pay until the surplus of adjuncts leave? Or contrariwise, if the problem is solved by identifying the best adjuncts, will this result in more tenured professors? I would assume not. So whom are these adjuncts replacing when they get tenure?

By: harry

harry — Wed, 28 Apr 2004 13:48:15 +0000

I think Matt’s and my practices are both consistent with the Utah requirements, anyway. Those refer to the final grade, not the intermediate grades, which can be used for pedagogical purposes (as Matt and I do), since they are only shared between teacher and student, and have no signalling function to anyone else. (Note, in Matt’s practice the subsequent good graes are the result of having the earlier tough grades, which had the pedagogical function of making the buggers work harder).

By: Ian

Ian — Wed, 28 Apr 2004 10:47:27 +0000

I’m not and never have been an academic and the issue of tenure has always confused me. Is it in practice any different from the difference between fixed term contracts and permanent employment for civilians?

By: multitimbral

multitimbral — Wed, 28 Apr 2004 05:47:38 +0000

Matt W., that Atrios quote just bumped my opinion of him up a notch. I’m not surprised you remembered it, and am glad you were able to find it.

By: Shai

Shai — Wed, 28 Apr 2004 05:29:57 +0000

"I tend to try to grade hard on the first assignments, in order to light a fire under the students, and then grade easier on the next ones" i think consistency is important. how does your scheme fit in with grading regulations, these (or yours) for example.

By: asg

asg — Wed, 28 Apr 2004 05:15:55 +0000

This is fascinating. At the University of Maryland at College Park, where I studied computer science, the first two years of the curriculum are taught by adjuncts (well, “lecturers”). They are all people who could be making three times their teaching salaries in the private sector (and in fact most of them do, during the summer). I dropped out of that program a little over two years ago, because it was so freaking hard (in one of the classes I took second semester, fully two-thirds of the students were taking it for the second time, having failed the first). But I learned a lot and I still keep in touch with a couple of the lecturers from my courses. They were great. Some of them weren’t real happy with the administration, but I think that was because they were being asked to teach larger and larger classes with no additional classroom or TA resources. I wonder if it’s generally true that adjuncts/lecturers in the sciences are somehow better off than the ones in the humanities.

By: Keith's Dumb Friend

Keith's Dumb Friend — Wed, 28 Apr 2004 03:35:25 +0000

Harry – I think you do it exactly right; tenure can be a useful vehicle for imbuing the process with rigor and content. Matt – (You too.) I think departments don’t like students withdrawing on a regular basis, since it tends to reduce the number of majors, and hence diminishes the resources the institution will expend on the department, and all that implies. Daniel – “A university exists in order to maximise the size of its endowment fund.” “If alumni or their parents have warm fuzzy feelings about the university which lead them to open the old chequebook, then it seems quite likely to me that the reason they are prepared to do this has something to do with the educational experience that they or their offspring had there, which in turn probably comes back to the work of an adjunct. All one needs to do is to make this connection between activity and revenue measurable.” Perhaps I’m simply missing the point, but some fairly respectable research (e.g., Cunningham and Ficano, JHR, 2001, (I might be wrong on the year)) shows that the best way to maximize the endowment is to attract high-quality students, where quality is measured by SAT scores. In fact, C&F suggest (and I’m shorthanding here)that endowment size is largely explained by SAT scores. I think the argument they make is that these (high SAT) people tend to be financially more successful down the road, and they tend to credit their institutions for some of that success. Regression analysis does not appear to contradict their hypothesis (to the contrary, the lagged SAT profile (about 20 years I believe) has a huge statistical impact on donative flows 20 years hence). I’m sure that I am not doing justice to their argument, but it goes something like that. My guess is that these (high-quality) schools do not hire many adjuncts; they pitch themselves as having elite faculty, and that’s why you pay the big dollars (or whatever) for them. It’s possible that adjuncts may simply be a signal of “low-quality” and/or financial distress.

By: Matt Weiner

Matt Weiner — Wed, 28 Apr 2004 01:02:48 +0000

I tend to try to grade hard on the first assignments, in order to light a fire under the students, and then grade easier on the next ones (hopefully they will actually have improved, too!). I’d hope that by the time evaluations roll around people feel all nice and toasty from the recent good grades—also, people who get a good grade followed by a bad grade will be really mad. Also, the way funding schemes work, shouldn’t the department be ecstatic if I get students to withdraw? They still have to pay for the course, I think—so the department gets its headcount—and then they have to take it again. As a visitor I don’t sit in on department meetings, so I may have this wrong.

By: harry

harry — Wed, 28 Apr 2004 00:46:52 +0000

Wow. Am I naive or what? I give low grades throughout the semester, on the grounds that on any given piece of work they could have done a much better job, then add a bit after the final (so I have a distribution somewhere close to the average) on the grounds that they shouldn’t be penalised for having taken a class with a mean grader like me. How stupid. I tell them to criticise the class on the evaluations because I want to know how I could teach the class better (though I also tell them that I ignore any comment that is accompanied by comment on my attire or accent, and that they won’t benefit directly from anything they say). Still, I have tenure, so I feel no pressure to change my behaviour. The candy and doughnut comments are damning.

By: Matt Weiner

Matt Weiner — Tue, 27 Apr 2004 23:51:56 +0000

I think Daniel's solution wouldn't actually help any individual adjuncts--by the time their students are rich enough to give big donations, the adjuncts will have either left academia, got jobs elsewhere, or collapsed and died of TB. Something or other is reminding me of this quote from Atrios: This Economist article discusses firms' pricing strategies. How stupid can The Economist be? Everyone knows that prices are set by the market. Invidual firms have no ability to impact prices. I can't think what.

By: bull

bull — Tue, 27 Apr 2004 22:56:09 +0000

I believe that xavier hit the nail on the head with respect to adjuncts’ pay levels. There appear to me to be great hordes of people eager to be adjuncts, and with good reason: looks good on a resume, makes you feel like an intellectual and not just any old money-grubbing joe, and the process of marshalling your thoughts to teach others is a great learning process. Given the supply, why should universities pay more than they need to pay? And if there aren’t enough good adjuncts, pay more. However, on the second point, it does not seem likely to me that (1) there would be a strong correlation between an adjunct’s talent and donations in the name of the adjunct or (2) even if there were a strong correlation that there would be sufficient donations earmarked for particular adjuncts to provide a reliable measurement.

By: Xavier

Xavier — Tue, 27 Apr 2004 22:18:07 +0000

Universities aren’t suffering from a lack of adjuncts so I don’t see how they can be considered underpaid. Your suggestion might still be a good one, but I disagree with the premise. It’s an excellent solution to the problem of universities not being able to discriminate between good and bad adjuncts.