More about adjuncts

Here’s an issue and I wonder if it might skew the data: Adjuncts are very much in competition with one another for courses. This means that adjuncts making toward the higher range may be reluctant to post data for fear of alerting competitors to their decent pay. At some universities, seniority is a factor and a new adjunct couldn’t bump out a senior adjunct. I wonder even there if adjuncts prefer not to advertise simply because the more people involved in an adjunct pool, the more mouths to feed, in a certain respect. (This depends on how adjunct jobs are allocated in a department. But there can be a significant pressure on those who allocate courses to feed all the mouths a little bit and this means fewer courses for others.)

Unionization has a significant effect on adjunct pay, I imagine. At least I hope that is true. It is a shame that more universities didn’t unionize when unions were at their peak strength and the NLRB was not kowtowing to industry and protections weren’t gutted. If there is any chance whatsoever to unionize, I urge adjuncts to consider this route.

This isn’t directly relevant to this post, but I would like to take time to register my utter flabbergastedness on reading the following, from the IHE post: “To scattered applause, she insisted that she would not be able to hire English professors at adjunct wages if there weren’t so many English Ph.D.s glutting the market.”

People applauded that? Is her position really and truly “by being exploitable, you leave me no choice but to exploit you”? (Forget the inaccuracy of the statement as regards Ph.D.s vs. MAs.)

More directly on topic: once this data is compiled, what will the MLA do with it? Censure the institutions that pay a pittance? Does the MLA do censures at all?

These recommendations are impressive. I’m adjuncting now, and if I were making that kind of money, I would be less inclined to entertain frequent homicidal thoughts toward full-time faculty.

Obviously, though, the pressing question this will raise for most administrators and faculty members is: But if we can’t shit all over adjuncts, who can we shit all over?

Hey what is with the anti-Ramen noodle spiel? Ramen noodles are great. I like them with shito sauce, ketchup, and tomato paste. They are an ideal cheap and easy food and you can find them anywhere in the world. They are very popular here which kind of surprised me at first. Making enough money teaching to actually be able to afford to buy Ramen noodles was a huge step up for me.

Michael, your presidency gives me hope.

Substance:

There was a clear implication that college instructors should not be eating Ramen noodles, but more expensive food as if eating cheap food was somehow shameful in itself. I say I will continue to eat Ramen even if I ever do make $40,000 a year.

There was a clear implication that college instructors should not have to eat Ramen noodles.

J. Otto Pohl: “Making enough money teaching to actually be able to afford to buy Ramen noodles was a huge step up for me.”

Oh, what I would have given for not enough money to afford Ramen! I could only look longingly at the empty packages, as I rummaged through the dumpster.

The increasing “adjunctification” of our faculty is of great concern to me as a tenured faculty member for many, many reasons, but most importantly because of the exploitation of adjunct/part time faculty.

But my comment here is just to echo Marc’s question, one that hasn’t come up explicitly yet in the various online and Twitter discussions I’ve been reading recently.

Marc asks if there are studies out there about the very real distinctions between NTT faculty at community colleges vs. universities. While I greatly admire Josh Boldt’s effort to compile information nationally (and have encouraged NTT faculty at my community college to post), in the portion of his post copied here, he makes a generalization that is simply not true at community colleges: “Just in case you’re not familiar with the usual procedure, full-time professors generally teach much less than 10 courses per year. Some teach as few as three.” Tenured full timers at community colleges “do” teach 10 courses a year (or more) in addition to professional development work, and college and community service. Another difference is that, at least at my institution, most NTT faculty do not have a Ph.D., and many do not have an M.A.: as a result, the latter NTT faculty can only teach developmental writing courses. Since we are in a location far from any graduate students, we do not have graduate students teaching on the NTT.

I believe David Laurence at the MLA has some statistics for English/Foreign Language NTT faculty demographics, and Boldt’s project will provide even more information. But as the MLA works toward promoting awareness of and addressing this issue, it would be wise to keep in mind the distinctions between institutions.

“Oh, what I would have given for not enough money to afford Ramen! I could only look longingly at the empty packages, as I rummaged through the dumpster.”

Dumpster? Luxury! Sheer Luxury! Oh how I used to dream of being able to rummage through a dumpster! In my day we had to eat the remains of rancid animals left by the side of the road and we were glad to have it.

There’s at least one adjunct unionization vote underway right now.

christian_h:

I’m in this position now: NNT full time appt. One thing that’s certainly better is that the benefits are automatically better because of the FTE designation (I’m not sure if this is specific to my institution, but I’d think not). Also, I think the pay is often better with FTE appointments, though I’m not sure if this is just a matter of convention (though, in this case, it’s still lower than the MLA recommendations!)

SB @ 1 and Marc @ 2, I think I can answer your questions together. (And they are very good questions.) The NTT labor pool is overwhelmingly a local labor market; only where there are very high concentrations of universities (iow, cities) would adjuncts be competing with each other directly. And as I point out in the OP @ MLA/IHE, it’s not so much a 4-year v. 2-year thing as a PhD v. MA thing: 65.2 percent of non-tenure-track faculty members hold the M.A. as their highest degree — 57.3 percent in four-year institutions, 76.2 percent in two-year institutions.

Which is why it was so distressing to hear people applaud the idea that the supply of PhDs is to blame for the working conditions of NTT faculty. It’s a factor, but not a major one.

ben w @ 3, neither the MLA nor any other disciplinary association does censures — only the AAUP does, because only the AAUP has investigative teams that actually visit campuses and interview people and pore over documents. But we’re hoping that sufficiently comprehensive data will speak for themselves.

Mitchell @ 10, thanks — drop me a line and let’s talk.

And I will not weigh in on the Great Ramen Debate unnoodling before us, except to say that I have six Ramen packets in the pantry (Jamie’s idea). As for Marcel @ 4, you should be aware that we have a saying around here: State College is equally inaccessible from all directions. Our airport has three air carriers flying to three destinations — Philly, Detroit, DC. (In recent years we have lost Pittsburgh, Cincinnati, and Atlanta.) Amtrak does not run here either, and MLA HQ is in NYC, so in two weeks I will be the first MLA president in the history of the association to take the MegaBus to an Executive Council meeting.

Just for the record, I like MegaBus. It is astonishing how much it has changed life around here. Sort of like Ramen noodles, only with WiFi.

Back to serious business: Christian @ 12. I think your suggestion speaks to an important distinction in NTT labor (certainly at Penn State, and we’re not alone). Most of our NTT faculty are “Fixed-Term 1”: they are not paid by the course; they have multi-year contracts; and they accrue seniority up to the rank of “senior lecturer.” A much smaller number are Fixed-Term 2, which corresponds to what we usually think of as “adjuncts” proper — i.e., people hired on one-year contracts. So despite this post’s title, I prefer to speak of faculty off the tenure track as NTT faculty, and argue that they be put on multi-year contracts with rights of due process and roles in institutional governance at the minimum.

And thanks, Tedra — for the vote of confidence, and for posting about Josh Boldt’s crowdsourcing initiative while I while still composing this here post yesterday.

Bérubé: “neither the MLA nor any other disciplinary association does censures”

The APA does censures.

I’m still not joining Facebook

My hero!

On the unionization option: The Labor-Management Relations Act (federal labor law) does not apply to state colleges/universities (2 or 4 year), which are under state labor laws. So you need to know your state labor law.

And the NLRB has fairly consistently ruled that (full-time) faculty in private schools are not covered by the Act (the Yeshiva case), because many of their responsibilities involve “management” duties. I don’t know of a recent case that applies to adjunct faculty in private colleges/universities.

“** Only one of these improbable things is true.”

Pics of the gavel, or we have to assume the worst.

or adjunct jobs will disappear entirely.

Isn’t that sort of the idea?

I don’t agree that full time faculty can’t be included in the union for the union to protect adjuncts. Adjuncts need (because everyone needs) a few things that unions are often (but alas, not always) good at giving people–health care, retirement benefits, job security and a living wage.

The situation of tenured faculty is completely different than that of airline pilots–unless our departments go under, we are guaranteed work. So the adjuncts are not in competition with us for anything whatsoever. Enough full time faculty will have the decency to want to see their colleagues given health care benefits, etc. and out of pure self-interest may want a union to bargain for their benefits and wage increases. Thus, it will be very useful to have a union covering all faculty and staff and anyone not in a management position. Solidarity does work, as long as the state and local and national laws are not actively union-busting. Unfortunately, they often are.

I agree fully that adjuncts are my colleagues but to highlight the absurdity of the current system for a moment compare what an adjunct goes through for their position to what a tenured faculty member goes through. The adjunct may be hired simply because they are the top of a pile of applications or because they are the friend of another adjunct. They may be interviewed by the chair alone, without any input from the rest of the faculty. If adjuncting did not exist, some adjuncts would be employed at professors but many would not. They sometimes have less oversight from the university and fewer professional demands. This idea from the last 20 years of adjunct build-up that they are ‘filling in’ or temporarily ‘pinch hitting’ but, if they continue adjuncting, they didn’t have the chops to go the distance, partly explains faculty attitudes to adjuncts, although it does not justify them.

Service is usually the *only* thing exclusively reserved for the tenure track faculty. (Many adjuncts don’t do research but nothing prevents them from doing it and many adjuncts I know seem to keep their hand in at least a little.)

Most people who become tenured faculty do not enter academia with any sort of awareness they will be doing service. If anything, service is the ‘menial’ part of our job. So is all that crazy scrutiny (the lengthy hiring process, the tenure nightmare) to make sure we are the right folks to be running the undergraduate academic integrity committee or the graduate hiring committee? When you take a step back, it is all very bizarre and irrational.

Thanks Michael for these efforts, and for continuing to fraternize with the masses. It means a lot.

I work in a US university that has both tenure track and non-tenure track faculty covered by the same union. That is California State University. When I started as an adjunct I didn’t have health insurance, but thanks to the union (CFA) I was eventually given health insurance, which I have had for some years, and it came in very useful when I was diagnosed with cancer a few years ago.

For a long time they kept all adjuncts at 85% maximum in order to deny them benefits, but the union managed to bargain the threshold down to 50%. So even if adjuncts are kept below 100% they get benefits, even if they are denied certain other rights that you would get at 100%.

CSU is probably one of the better places to be an adjunct. One of the key things is that there is one union for everybody. The first action from the administration is to divide the employees however they can. Set faculty against staff, set tenure-track against adjuncts.

CSU is not a paradise. Our contract says all full-time faculty, tenured or not, must teach the equivalent of 4 classes per semester. This is a higher load than you would get at many other universities.

CSU is having its difficulties. Our contract has expired and the administration is refusing to negotiate a new one. We came very close to striking a couple of years ago. The university finally agreed at that time to give us a cost-of-living raise, only to renege on the contract later and dare us to do something about it.

It’s not very nice. I really would prefer to spend my time thinking about what I am going to teach the students. But at least I know that the union is working for my interests as well as the interests of tenured faculty.

Andrew @ 32: NFM is programmatically unconcerned to discuss the erosion of tenure; they are not interested in seeing the proportion of tenured positions increased but in improving the conditions of the non-tenurable.

I don’t think this is true. My understanding of the NFM position is that they’d like to see NTT jobs converted to TT where possible — and without tossing the people in those NTT jobs out of work. Where conversion isn’t possible, then greater job security and due process for NTT faculty are the goals (multi-year contracts, role in governance, review and appeals process, etc.).

But next week I’ll follow up on this, not only because it’s critically important but also because I’ve gotten some useful criticism from a long-term NTT faculty member (now retired) from UC-Boulder, where in 2007 the NTT ranks voted for a system of “instructor tenure.”

I can’t help but think again about nationalized healthcare, where at least you would have “benefits”, but they would come from the government. It shouldn’t be tied to a job–that is part of the problem. Perhaps we need to get more active about this point–think of what a relief it would be nationwide to take all those costs off the books in one fell swoop? Instead, we link the pockets of the middle men (and women), who take money to try and prevent care from being given. This is so wrong and could really help this situation.

J. Otto Pohl: ” Actually I have found it is a lot easier to get a long term contract working at an R 1 institution in Africa than to get an interview for an adjunct position for a fourth tier institution in the US. So even though it is actually a better option as far as pay and benefits very few Americans consider emigration to work at foreign universities outside North America and Europe. It simply seems to be an option that most American PhDs think is beyond the pale.”

This calls for a guest post, IMHO.

Does it involve a full investigation and published report, as does AAUP censure, or is it a simple speech act, “I hereby censure thee”? … I understand why Bennington’s on that list, but not the other two—some explanation would be nice.

The minutes for the meeting where the most recent censuring took place haven’t been published yet, but for Houston it was because of a complaint on the part of a philosopher there that his professional rights had been violated in the course of his tenure review. There’s a committee for defense of the professional rights of philosophers that undertakes investigation of these things. (“The Committee bases its judgment and its actions on general principles of the professional rights of scholars and teachers, which have been articulated in the 1940 Statement of Principles on Academic Freedom and Tenure of the American Association of University Professors, pertinent resolutions and statements of the American Philosophical Association, and precedents set by the Committee in previous cases.”)

I can’t tell exactly what being censured involves, though. Censured institutions are listed as such in Jobs for Philosophers and their “questionable employment practices” are noted.

The APA also has a non-discrimination statement and institutes who violate are similarly to be indicated in JFP.

Barry:

Thanks for the recommendation, but being as most CT commentators view me as a troll I am quite sure I will never be invited to do a guest post here. But, I will note that African academics are radically different from the type of people that seem to dominate American academia. There is a much greater cooperative spirit here than seems to prevail in the US.

Barry:

If you think I am a jerk then why would you care about anything I write? You could just ignore me like everybody else outside of Africa. It seems very odd to express interest in a guest post by a jerk. But, I still appreciate the recommendation regardless.

Why would anyone consider Pohl’s comment to be trolling? We expect that educated Africans want to migrate to the US and the UK for better pay, security, and working conditions. Isn’t it noteworthy that, in the experience of one academic, these things can more easily be found in Africa? Hasn’t anyone else noticed that in some respects the US is becoming what used to be known as a third-world country?

Pohl’s comment is not trolling, but Pohl’s tone can be a bit trying. He says everyone ignores him outside of Africa. This is false. I do not live in Africa and I have read his comments at CT, have even visited his blog a few times and left a comment or two there. What he means, of course, is that the American academics who he thinks should be paying attention to his work are ignoring him. That may be the case, but it will not be rectified by his complaining about it on CT comment threads.

55

J. Otto Pohl 02.09.12 at 6:51 pm

” Barry:

If you think I am a jerk then why would you care about anything I write? You could just ignore me like everybody else outside of Africa. It seems very odd to express interest in a guest post by a jerk. But, I still appreciate the recommendation regardless.”

Because on this topic you know something, and that something might be of interest to a nuymber of people.

I support my union but it’s wishful thinking that they can do anything for adjuncts, which they pretty much admit. Deans are free to harrass and subjugate anyone. As a PhD adjunct, I’ve been bumped down to 3 credit hours at 1200/cr hr. I’ve lost health insurance. It’s age discrimination, but who can prove it. Not the union; they filed a grievance on behalf of a professor and he fired her forthwith. “It’s personal now,” he said. So adjuncts are my institution fear the very organization who proports to defend them.

As an adjunct teaching at two schools and maintaining a non-teaching gig, I’ve been burning out for a while now. I do hope that the suggested reforms–or something close to them–come about in time to keep me in academia, because teaching is the best job I’ve ever had, compensation aside. It seems to me that colleges and universities rely on donations from wealthy alumni and corporations. I don’t know a lot about the fundraising side of the business, but I see enough signs around with thermometers and dollar amounts (“Only $125,000 until we reach our goal!”). If you care to know, in 6 years of teaching a full-time course load split between two schools, I haven’t made $125,000 total.

We contact the donors–I don’t know whether donor lists are public or not, but it seems large donations are generally bragged about–and let them know what the score is. Ask them to make their donations contingent on colleges paying living wages for all instructors. Something about this idea seems unethical–even if it were possible–but it would get some attention for the trying.

J. Otto’s ramen comments reminded me strongly of

, which I enjoyed and would recommend.

@64: If anything there has been a substantial backlash against online education. Along similar lines, automated supermarket checkout lines are on the decline. The reason is pretty simple: there are some cases where it’s perceived as highly desirable to have human interaction. Teaching is simply more effective if you’re working with a person than with a web form, for instance. Online schools have very low graduation rates.

This could change, but we’ve had equivalent opportunities for a long time (correspondence courses) and they have never really made a large dent. The adjunct model is more of a concern: basically still using face-t0-face instruction, but with low salaries and poor working conditions. As far as I can tell, this is close to the situation for academics in places like France – professors who teach at universities have pretty low salaries, high course loads, and physical facilities that aren’t that great (outside of the elite ecoles). But the education is essentially free.

Marc – “As far as I can tell, this is close to the situation for academics in places like France – professors who teach at universities have pretty low salaries, high course loads, and physical facilities that aren’t that great (outside of the elite ecoles). But the education is essentially free.”

It’s amazing how often the USA seems to put together the worse parts of various systems. We have a higher education system which is more and more run by professors with ‘pretty low salaries, high course loads, and physical facilities that aren’t that great’, but the students pay out the nose for it.

I’m still puzzled by why adjuncts continue to work as adjuncts instead of trying to branch out into other fields. For the work conditions don’t seem that good, the pay is miserable, and the qualifications adjuncts possess would open doors in many places. (Teaching at the secondary level for example). So why isn’t there a lower floor on adjunct pay because of exit? (This probably applies a lot more to the sciences then humanities, but even so…)

ezra, while we might have too many biochemists, that means some of them should do other things. It’s not clear that the problem with universities is that they are too good at training too many people who solve too many problems, who have nothing to do all day. (Or if that is the problem, it isn’t because there isn’t anything that needs doing)

Further clarification on #72:

1) women constitute 37.6% of full-time faculty in one of the three professorial titles, 53.7% of full-time faculty who are lecturers or instructors.

2) there’s no clear indication whether all of the faculty holding professorial titles are tenure-track. I’d guess that they could include NTT professorial titles (e.g., visiting assistant professor).

3) the data are from all degree-granting postsecondary institutions in the US that grant an associate’s degree or higher and that are eligible to receive Title IV federal financial aid.

4. source is here.

the qualifications adjuncts possess would open doors in many places

FWIW, this doesn’t seem to be encouraged as a primary career path. I rarely hear someone suggest “well, you could always go into industry” without a tone cast over the last word that implies “…and god help you if you do.” Gives one pause before asking for a letter of recommendation for an industry job (not applicable to me personally). There’s also the possibility (also not relevant in my case) that one’s adviser has no industry or business connections to speak of, and adviser connections are everything when seeking a post-Ph.D. job. (After all, who on Earth would blindly hire a Ph.D. despite having no personal familiarity whatsoever with that Ph.D. graduate’s adviser’s work? That’s exactly like hiring someone with a BA from an institution you’ve never heard of.^1^) And there’s always the ‘overqualified’ stamp that mw touches on.

The world is sorely lacking a standardized procedure that would match Ph.D. graduates (or grad students generally) with employers that would like to hire them. When I asked an administrator about attending our university’s semi-annual Job Expo thing, the response I got was the inquiry “Aren’t you a grad student?” I forget the wording of the follow-up question but it was something to the effect of, what, isn’t your adviser giving you that information? (Which, yes, did/does happen to be the case, we talk about it all the time. I was just casually curious about other job opportunities. But still. Apparently any Ph.D. student is supposed to rely exclusively and utterly on their adviser’s suggestions for jobs. Small wonder, in a world that confers prestige on faculty who train students successful in academia, that hunting down and suggesting potential jobs outside academia would receive a low priority.)

A Ph.D. student is, in a way, uniquely stuck. With a BA, you can declare your degree on a job application, and they might ask for transcripts and stuff. The only thing a Ph.D. degree confers, really, is formal university approval of your adviser’s letter of recommendation. After all, other stuff (like published papers) are things you can point to with or without a degree; if an employer wants to know specifically how to interpret your university credential, they know transcripts are relatively useless; the only meaningful way to check ‘how well you did’ is to read your adviser’s letter-of-rec.

^1^I confess to not having known this when choosing advisers, and I lucked out rather mightily, thank the gods. I think there’s a horrible misconception among potential grad students that it’s the school, not the adviser, that future potential employers will care about most. But you’re not getting a Ph.D. from MIT; you’re getting a Ph.D. from Alan Edelman, or Victor Guillemin, or whomever, and those Ph.D. degrees would have hardly anything to do with each other (and would confer nearly zero overlap in employability) despite being authorized and sanctioned by the same institution. You apply places where your adviser knows people that will be able to understand what you’re doing well enough to defend the quality of your work to the hiring committee members; anywhere else, you might as well just have a master’s degree. In another universe, one in which I happened to seek a different adviser, I might’ve sorely and bitterly regretted not having understood this.

This reminds me in some ways of the forever discussion on these topics at Invisible Adjunct years ago. In any event, a couple of thoughts I’d like to share that I see missing from this conversation:

* It is interesting to me that the MLA is taking on this cause– and it is a noble one– when the organization and many of its members doesn’t seem to think very much of composition and rhetoric, which is where most NTT faculty work in English departments. I haven’t been a member of the MLA for some time now, and the organization I most identify with professionally is the Conference for College Composition and Communication (part of NCTE).

* With all due respect, this $6800 figure is ridiculous. I’m a tenured professor at Eastern Michigan, and without going into a lot of details about it, this is close to what I get paid to teach an extra class “in load” here in the summer. And I’m expected to do a heck of a lot more than we expect of our part-time faculty, too. I would agree that $2500 is too little and maybe MLA’s strategy here is to ask for the sky and settle for something more modest, but this just doesn’t seem like a good strategy to me at all. It is also curious to me that the assumption is a 3 course load. Lots and lots and LOTS of people on the tenure-track teach more than 3 courses a term at both community colleges and BA/MA granting institutions.

* It may be true that there isn’t as much of a glut in English PhDs as there once was and I think Bérubé’s percentage of NTT who have an MA seems about right. However, there is definitely a “supply and demand” issue working against NTT. We have many more people interested in teaching courses for us part-time than we have courses to offer, which is why adjunct work–particularly in fields like English– pays poorly. Hey, I don’t make the rules, I’m just telling you what they are.

* The other thing I have to wonder about here: why is it the assumption that it is a “good idea” for someone to stay in a part-time NTT position for a long time, and for someone to adjunct teach as the only way to make a living? I was a part-time teacher after I finished my MFA in 1990 and while I had a “real” job. It was great because it kept me involved in some version of academia and I earned some extra money. That’s what adjunct work should be: part-time for people who are working/doing other things, not a part-time to string together full-time employment.

Now that I seem to be recovering from the malaria I was diagnosed with yesterday, I was very surprised to see that not everybody here thinks I am a troll. I still don’t ever expect anybody here or anywhere else on the internet to ever agree with me on anything, but it is nice to see only Barry has openly state that I am a jerk.

On a serious note from everything written here about adjuncts, working in Africa is a far better deal even if malaria is an unavoidable occupational hazard. My own institution has far more slots for history lecturers than we have applicants. In retrospect I would have applied to every history department in English speaking Africa from 2004-2007 if I had known it was an option. I really do not understand why anybody would rather be an adjunct in the US than a lecturer in Africa. Maybe somebody could explain it to me?

From the current issue (2/23) of the NYRB, p. 36 (Andrew Hacker, “We’re More Unequal Than You Think”):

[The GOP’s] business supporters seek the cheapest possible workforce – domestic, immigrant, or foreign – because bonuses and profits rise when payroll costs are low. If this strategy succeeds, the Americans who are most desparate for jobs will face a future as casual labor. (The college “adjuncts” who are poorly paid to do much of the teaching formerly done by upper-middle-class professors are one white collar harbinger.)

I think you’re overgeneralizing here.

Granted. It’s just that as an applicant to grad school and master’s student I had no idea that that mattered at all and this seems to be generally true of new entrants into the program. It’s certainly true that people get hired at universities who don’t have any faculty that personally know your adviser and their work, but I’m claiming this tends to happen only when the university didn’t have any faculty that personally knew the advisers of the other applicants. (For some definition of tends to that’s sufficiently expansive to accommodate the overgeneralization, and some definition of personally know that emphasizes familiarity with the adviser’s work and career, and willingness to argue on behalf of the advisee because of that familiarity, e.g. that the advisee will ‘fit in’ well and be able to contribute to the department’s various research goals as a colleague. I should also mention that I don’t think there’s really anything wrong with this, it’s just a true thing that bears consideration — dependence on one’s adviser’s recommendation is quite strong in a way that dependence on one’s former boss’s recommendation is generally not.)

** would that be the causation of a GNF from a Soy Bomb???

Way back in my wayback machine, during the mid-70s, my university compensation was $1737 per course per quarter / up to three courses per quarter. If universities around the country are only paying $2500 per course, then the loss in wages is staggeringly abysmmal. Even the $4500 range is not appropriate.

I left a comment at the crowd-sourcing post, and am repeating parts of it here, so sorry if it looks familiar.

In my experience teaching at CCs in a state in the PNW, unionization was good for adjuncts. If we taught 50% or more at any CC for two consecutive semesters (didn’t have to be at the same school) we got health benefits and were let into the retirement plan. Health insurance for as long as we were 50% time at any one campus, retirement no matter how much you taught, once you were in. Adjunct pay had similar placement and steps as FT (less, but 8 years ago I was paid about $3k per trimester course). And, union rules meant that visiting FT faculty were treated as tenure-track, just in case the position opened up, or was continued, to a point where they would normally be coming up for tenure.

The $6800 per semester course seems a bit random to me. As I suggested at the other post, it seems unrealistic. Why? because if an adjunct in Arts & Sciences made that much on my campus for a 4-4 load (FT faculty teach 4-3, because we have a course release for research), they would make almost as much as I do as an associate professor. “Almost” in this case means well under $1000 less. Lots of SLACs like the one I’m at have tiny endowments and lots of debt from trying to upgrade current facilities/expand. The university president makes less than six times what I make; there are probably more higher-level administrators than we need, but none of them make massive amounts.

Don’t get me wrong: I think if there is a consistent need for adjuncts in numbers that justify FT, TT hires, then I think that’s the best way to deal with the situation for everybody. Say the English department regularly needs faculty for 10 sections per semester beyond what the FT faculty can handle — that looks like two FT faculty to me, rather than four to five adjuncts. BUT

I think that adjunct pay should be based on a percentage of FT pay. Perhaps 80% pro rata without benefits, or 60-65% with benefits, because adjuncts don’t have service obligations, and are also seldom prevented from taking courses at other institutions. Also, the suggested wages don’t really take into account cost of living variations. that’s problematic, too. The benefits thing is the hardest part, and another reason we need universal single-payer health insurance. Take that out of the equation, and colleges worry less about an adjunct using “their” benefits while teaching for different institutions.

Steven D. Krause @ 79:

It is interesting to me that the MLA is taking on this cause—and it is a noble one—when the organization and many of its members doesn’t seem to think very much of composition and rhetoric, which is where most NTT faculty work in English departments.

I just don’t know where this comes from. Is there a document somewhere, or a series of statements by MLA staff and/or elected leadership, that suggests that the MLA doesn’t think very much of composition and rhetoric? Because I hear this fairly often from rhet/comp teachers, and after all these years, I still don’t get it. What did the MLA do/not do to earn this rep, and what should it do to get rid of it?

Because as far as I’m concerned — and I know I share this conviction with the rest of the MLA leadership — the working conditions of NTT faculty are of critical importance for higher education regardless of whether those faculty members are teaching composition or Keats.

AOP @ 58, I’ll reply to you in a followup post — the one I’m writing right now.

Agreed, Tom, which is why we’re doing most of this work with the Coalition on the Academic Workforce.