Survey of adjuncts and other contingent academic labor

I told the census that I have three bathrooms, but that was merely aspirational if you can’t count the bushes behind the patio. I did this survey honestly and now I feel better about myself.

Thanks for posting this. Even though I will no longer be part of the “contingent academic workforce” after Wednesday (I won’t adjunct again, even without a TT offer; two years is long enough), I fully support the goal of improving condition for adjuncts.

Oh, never mind. Reading comprehension fail.

Then the school administrators will demand a car allowance because their horses ran and hid.

Alas my answers would only skew the results as I’m in a weird position of being an associate professor who doesn’t actually teach. One of the quirks of my institution is that librarians are faculty, which has some benefits, though tenure isn’t currently one of them.

Nope, I am not going to fill this out because the last thing I want for this sector is to be unionized.

I am a grad student, I was paid a relatively small wage to teach some courses. I was willing to accept the lower wage because I had no teaching experience. I also come from a foreign country and the small wage here is a fairly big wage there. If this market had been unionized I am not sure I would have gotten the job (or been accepted into my program in the first place).

I am very wary of people who collect data on salaries because clearly the ultimate goal is to try some form of centralized bargaining. This is usually inefficient because the salaries should be allowed to adjust to the various circumstances without having regulations imposed from above.

Michael: did you mention that 30 November is THE LAST DAY to fill out the survey? So everyone, don’t be like Michael and wait until the last minute to make everyone aware of the survey. Please take it, pass it along… Thanks!

FYI – graduate students, post-docs, and adjunct faculty are unionizing all over the country and it’s a good thing. An industry in which people invest seven years and thousands of dollars in training and 25% of them win job security and $75,000-110,000 a year in salary and 75% of them become contingent laborers paid $25-30k a year is not tenable.

@Steven

Steven, first, $25-30k a year for a lecturer seems fairly low for me. But I do not have any data on this and I am ready to be proven wrong.

In any case, what does it mean “not tenable”? For all I know, applications to graduate schools have actually gone up with the recession, at least in U.S.

And even if one wants to frame it normatively, then I ask: Did anyone force contingent laborers to go into graduate school? No, they were probably very aware that they were engaging in a risky activity, that could turn out good or bad. It is not clear to me that this calls for a reduction of the ex-post, but fully anticipated, wage inequality.

I filled out the survey. In the process I realized how bizarre it is that the Philosophy Dept. at our school is located in the “Social Sciences” division, and while there’s a Humanities Bldg. on campus, there is no Humanities program or division as such (a portent of things to come?).

A couple of years ago we failed in our attempt (I almost said ‘struggle,’ but I think that terms is best reserved for other cases) to unionize . The ideological claptrap about unions that circulated on our campus was something to marvel at…and despair over. Otherwise fairly intelligent folks at my institution understand little (and that meager knowledge is worthy of Fox News) or nothing about the history and role of organized labor, despite a substantial body of literature that exists on the subject. For some of that literature, please see the list I recently compiled available at LaborNet.org: http://www.labornet.org/news/0000/labrlaw.doc

I’m dubious that adjuncts can make $30k a year. In my experience the going rate for adjuncting is around $2000 a course. Even doing a 4/4 and teaching summers, you’d barely make $24k a year. So where are these institutions where someone can make thirty thousand a year doing adjunct teaching?

According to the link, Andrew, Mike Dubson, an adjunct from Boston and author of Ghost in the Classroom, gets paid $2500 per course and teaches six classes a semester. So it’s possible, but incredibly grueling. But given that the median income for a high school graduate is $28,000 a year – earning $30,000 on a PhD when the median for that degree is $74,000 a year is a huge step down.

Chris – the larger point I’m trying to make is that if you’re not making more money than the high school graduate who didn’t have to go tens of thousands of debt to go through undergraduate and graduate education, it’s not worth doing from an economic standpoint.

And while it’s true that some of it has to do with the increasing power of those with access to (especially financial) capital, it also has to do with structural shifts within the academic industry. As late as 1997, tenure and tenure track professors were in the majority in public four-year colleges and universities and there was close to an even split between tenure-track and adjuncts at private four-year colleges and universities. At least in those circumstances, one could assume a decent shot at a tenure-track job, even if one had to adjunct for a few years.

This whole subject is bewildering. Student costs are going up. Where is the money going?

This is, in a nutshell, academe’s version of the Question of Neoliberalism. Tuition has increased at many places by double-digit percentages (the University of California system set some kind of record with a 32 percent increase last year). Declining/withering state support accounts for much of the damage at public institutions, but at privates it’s anybody’s guess. All I know is that while tuitions have skyrocketed, tenure-track faculty have seen annual raises of 1-3 percent annually, and academe has created about three new low-wage contingent jobs for every new tenure-track position. Wherever the money is going, it’s not going to faculty.

Good question, mpowell.

My guess is that a lot more is going into administration, a lot more is going into amenities – the tricky thing here is making a distinction between the growth of administration in areas like student counseling and guidance, mental health services, and the like versus the explosion of mini-hedge funds inside the endowment and investment divisions.

Part of it is health care costs – but that wouldn’t explain why university costs are increasing so much faster than other large institutions. Athletics is a big part of it – coaches are frequently paid multiples of what even the presidents make.

Is it really all going into bloated administrative salaries?

I can’t say for certain anything about general trends, but at my previous job, at a regionally respected but not terribly selective liberal arts college, there was a lot of unplanned growth between 2000-2008, including a something like 40% increase in the size of the undergraduate student body, increasing tuition revenue but also increasing annual operating costs. The breakdown of cost increases (adjusted for inflation) went something like this. Faculty salary costs: 10% increase, non-academic staff salary costs 10% increase, non-salary costs, 15% increase, administration salary costs 75% increase. Now, much of that came in the form of an absolute increase in the volume of administrators, rather than just huge raises. The faculty actually got slightly less ‘contingent’ as some adjuncts were replaced by full time lecturers (but the overall percentage of tenure track faculty declined).

(I should note that this school provided really outstanding health care with no employee contribution for faculty and many full time staff, so the rise of health care costs, rather than actual salary increase, makes up for a good portion of salary cost increase).

@Stephen

“It’s not in people’s interests to acquire expensive education that would otherwise earn them much higher salaries and then not get them, so over time people will try to counter-act that.” Exactly. So, under this premise, many of those who would have previously set out for a career in academia would instead go into other more promising fields (say, the health care industry) and this will re-balance the apparent excess supply of adjunct faculties, which is the responsible of the low salary that they are paid. This happens all the time in a complex economy without the need to micromanage the market. And this is not a straw man. Look at the statements on CAW’s website and it seems clear to me that, had they more power, they would try to transform some of those statements into laws.

@Michael

I realize only now that my points belong more in the comments of other posts on this website where a sympathetic view of graduate students’ unionization was expressed. I was reacting more to this sympathy and only derivatively to the importance of the CAW’s survey, that is the object of this post. Sorry if my comments have led the discussion away from the survey itself.

At California State University, which has a single union representing both tenure-track and non-tenure-track, adjuncts with PhDs are typically paid on the same pay scale as assistant professors. Not that that is a princely salary.

Usually administrations try to separate bargaining with tenure-track and non-tenure-track so they can drive a hard bargain with adjuncts. CSU is one of the few places where tenure-track has supported adjuncts in getting health care and a certain amount of employment security (can’t be arbitrarily replaced by someone at a lower salary level).

In the 1990s adjuncts were typically capped at 80% employment so they would not be eligible to receive health care. Union pressure succeeded in forcing the limit down to the point where most adjuncts receive health care.