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    Governor McCheeseHamilton Nolan
    4/21/16 12:38pm

    But where would you get the money to pay these people? Raise already-too-high tuition on the students? Tap the endowment until the principal runs out and then shut the school? I thought adjuncts were supposed to be part-timers who are able to infuse their real-world experience from their actual full-time jobs with the theories incubating in the bubble of acedemia. Has that changed?

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      signofzetaGovernor McCheese
      4/21/16 12:40pm

      Adjuncts are often hired to do the work full time Professors used to do. The biggest jump in college spending is usually in administration. If you were to divert some money from administration to adjunct pay, it would help with the problem a lot.

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      accesscodeGovernor McCheese
      4/21/16 12:40pm

      They could fire the administrative bloat.

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    kamla deviHamilton Nolan
    4/21/16 12:39pm

    BUT BUT BUT...

    SPORTSBALL!?!?!?!

    Seriously, we have to have PRIORITIES HERE. When one tenure line dies, we can pay 3 plucky adjuncts half the pay and none of the benefits we gave to the last guy! That money could be better spent renovating the president’s mansion, or a fresh coat of astroturf on the sportsball field, or having a fancy meal to ask rich people for more sportsball money.

    If they didn’t want to be destitute, then they shouldn’t have studied law, literature, biology, chemistry, anthropology, sociology, women’s studies, art, performance art, history, political science, science, anything not finance/medicine/computers.

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      signofzetakamla devi
      4/21/16 12:43pm

      Sports do serve a real functional purpose for most schools: they draw boosters to the school, and they are a recruitment tool. Most people aren’t picking Alabama or Kentucky because of their rigorous academics.

      Now there are certainly some schools that need to cut the cord on programs that lose them money, but acting like college athletics is the reason schools don’t pay adjuncts isn’t right.

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      Watchu Talkin Bout Williskamla devi
      4/21/16 12:46pm

      I think you really dribbled a home run goal with that punt right there!

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    butcherbakertoiletrymakerHamilton Nolan
    4/21/16 12:39pm

    Oh, boo-hoo. Why don’t these people do something with themselves and go get a REAL JOB?!

    Wait, we’re bashing retail and fast food workers today, aren’t we?

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      Dolemitebutcherbakertoiletrymaker
      4/21/16 12:51pm

      Reminds me of how conservatives say poor people should just bootstrap it and go to college and get degrees for real jobs like doctors and lawyers. So after the recession, millions of people flooded into the law schools and couldn’t find jobs upon graduation.

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      butcherbakertoiletrymakerDolemite
      4/21/16 12:55pm

      They just didn’t want it enough. Losers.

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    Avada Yo MamaHamilton Nolan
    4/21/16 1:02pm

    I thought that the entire purpose of an “adjunct” professor was that the professor was a professional in the field, teaching one class, usually in the evening, so that students could get the perspective of someone working in that field to supplement the academic perspectives of their other professors. In which case, the $2,700/class was understood to be low because the professor was 1) doing this as a sort of favor to the future of his/her profession and 2) the professor got a resume boost from the gig. Are universities hiring fewer professors and renaming the positions "adjunct" to be able to pay less? Or, are there just more people who want to work in academia but cannot find a traditional professor job (because there are so many people competing) and are now trying to cobble together a full time salary out of multiple adjunct jobs? Or is my assumption about the purpose of adjunct professorships incorrect?

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      AnnieBodyAvada Yo Mama
      4/21/16 1:12pm

      A lot of what adjuncts teach are gen-ed courses so who is working in English, Philosophy and History professionally but not as a professor? A lot of them are daytime intro courses, not night courses so again, who can come teach and do all the grading/office hours required to lecture three times a week and grade 100's of students PLUS hold down a regular 9-5? I don’t know much about how it originally worked but the adjuncts I had in undergrad taught intro level courses in the morning.

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      BrooksRobinsonsGloveAvada Yo Mama
      4/21/16 1:16pm

      You have it right. But it is not the narrative that is being pushed here.

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    DidYouReallyRespondToMyComment?Hamilton Nolan
    4/21/16 12:59pm

    I am a full time faculty member at a well run two year technical college. I teach a 5/5 load. I started as an adjunct fifteen years ago, hustled a temporary contract to fill a full time spot on an emergency basis, and then punched my lungs out and got the next full time hire.

    Not surprisingly, students prefer the full time faculty; we’re well paid and not overworked (although we work hard and if you don’t think so give it a try), and have the time to prepare and respond to students. My college just increased adjunct pay substantially and allows them to teach three courses, but it still isn’t enough to live on comfortably. Everyone is unionized, but the original purpose of the part time union (to pressure the Administration to create more full time positions) has turned into scraping for anything they can get. From the students’ perspective (which is arguably the most important), the goal should be to minimize adjuncts based solely on the student experience. That’s not popular to say out loud, and we’re all supposed to congratulate each other and say how adjuncts are just as good, etc., but that’s not what students report.

    If anyone is thinking about teaching college and they’re not likely to get a research job, I’d say forget it now and go into health services of some kind. This would especially be true for the humanities. You might love your dissertation on the religious eroticism of physical deformities in Dicken’s now, but three or four years teaching seven sections of first year composition at three colleges will turn that emotion to dust in your mouth.

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      AnnieBodyDidYouReallyRespondToMyComment?
      4/21/16 1:20pm

      Me too! I’m doing 5/6 this go around but half of those are online or hybrid courses. I started part time and finagled it into a full time position. My husband has to move away (3 hours) to finish his residency and my family is sort of shocked we’re going to try and live apart for awhile. Well, I don’t want to lose this job! I love it and it’s rare as shit and I know it. They’re like “why don’t you teach in a community college there”? Because I lucked the hell out getting this job fulltime and I’m up for department head in a few years when the only other teacher (of 29 years) retires. If I leave, it won’t be here when we move back. I love what I do and it has a fabulous work/life balance for raising my kids and I cannot bring myself to just throw away this position without at least trying to make it work.

      As to your point about adjuncts, yes! Especially for the gen-ed courses students definitely prefer full time professors. You have more time and more support. More time to prepare lectures, more time to work on crafting assignments and quizzes, more time to work on making your course accessible and interesting online, more time to keep up with grading, you can respond to students quicker, more time for professional development and more time to get involved with mentoring students outside of the classroom. Plus students like being able to take the same professor for multiple classes if they like him/her or at least understand that teacher’s expectations and teaching style. It seems like with adjuncts it’s a crap shoot and they constantly rotate in and out with very little training and admin support.

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      DidYouReallyRespondToMyComment?AnnieBody
      4/21/16 1:44pm

      My wife talks about moving and I say “I’m making almost six figures at a sweet job with a pension and full health benefits that I will never be able to get anywhere else and you don’t like cyber-sex.” We also have a “crash the plane, stay with the wreckage” agreement about our marriage, so if she initiates the divorce she gets all the responsibilities and I can walk away.

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    ManchuCandidateHamilton Nolan
    4/21/16 12:34pm

    Yet the pay of university presidents heads upwards thanks to the self licking ice cream cone known as executive compensation consultants.

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      butcherbakertoiletrymakerManchuCandidate
      4/21/16 12:41pm

      “Self-licking”

      If I could do that, I’d never leave my house.

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      Rosie PoseyManchuCandidate
      4/21/16 12:42pm

      Let's not forget the coaches of the sports teams and their million dollar salaries (while student athletes play for free and have their likenesses stolen for video games for which they receive little to no compensation. )

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    potahhhtoHamilton Nolan
    4/21/16 12:55pm

    I just left a grad program that had several tenured profs on leave to write, travel, whatever bullshit they do. So they program head roped in three or four adjunct to take over for them during the year. More hours, more responsibility, not more compensation. Just the honor of being able to update their CV in the hopes that someday they get a FT spot someday.

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      XrdsAlumpotahhhto
      4/21/16 1:19pm

      They’re stuck playing a game of musical chairs, especially since some of those tenured FT spots are now eliminated when the incumbent dies or retires.

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      NYCBritXrdsAlum
      4/21/16 4:17pm

      I was that person - move cross country to a new school every one or two years (not paid for of course). Get promised there’s a tenure-track job at the end of the one or two year contract. Of course that’s a lie and as soon as you’ve finished paying for that cross-country move you are back out looking for a job again. I went from CO to AZ to PA to AZ to VT to MN before I called it quits.

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    XrdsAlumHamilton Nolan
    4/21/16 12:51pm

    The system is already starting to blow up, at least at the non-R1s. If 80% of your classes are taught by underpaid and overworked adjuncts, and the best job a reasonably can hope for is in sales or admin support or sysadmin, why waste the money and opportunity cost on college when there are other options?

    College administrators created this situation for themselves. They locked themselves into a “customer service/career training” model of higher education, only to find that more and more jobs don’t really need employees who spent 4 years getting expensive and magical pieces of paper (and increasingly some of them don’t need employees, at least American ones, at all).

    They’ve internalized it to the point where they treat their adjuncts as if they’re part-timers at Walmart. Then they get fewer students and have to raise tuition and fire instructors, perpetuating the vicious cycle. It’s a variation on the unsustainable larger consumer economy.

    [I have a few relatives who are current or former profs, but they’re all tenured. And elderly. I know a few adjuncts, and they’re under constant financial pressure. I’ll point them to this article if it helps.]

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      areyoukiddingmekidsXrdsAlum
      4/21/16 3:14pm

      the truth is, few people give a shit about quality of education. Gimme my A, or I’ll take my consumer complaining ass to the dean. Parents expect grade inflation for what they are paying.

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      MaLaoshiXrdsAlum
      4/21/16 8:55pm

      My favorite part of this as a professor is being accountable for the failings of students. The pressure to pass people through is very intense, to the point that state funding for higher ed in my state is moving toward “performance based funding,” which means we need to graduate more people than other state universities or lose our share of the pie, which means that every mouthbreather and shitbag who would have earned an F 10-15 years ago will now pass.

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    LongSnakeHamilton Nolan
    4/21/16 12:46pm

    Increasing their salaries will only force university presidents to hire robots to replace them.

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      beatrixkiddoHamilton Nolan
      4/21/16 12:50pm

      I’m not an adjunct but I work in higher ed as department staff and agree that the adjunct situation is totally shameful. I look forward to what they have to tell you- at work their filters are working overtime. Tenure faculty are the only people with the freedom to speak their mind.

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