By Professor Doom
I’ve written more
than a few times of horrible treatment of the typical college professor now.
The adjunctification of higher education has been a secret for years, and it’s
long past time that people know that getting a really good education can lead,
not to riches, or to even security, but to sub-minimum wage jobs, even in an
industry, higher education, that is drowning in wealth, thanks to the student
loan scam and the unquestioning support of a gullible public.
A recent article
in The Atlantic highlights
details I’ve pointed out many a time. Let’s go over them again, because only
through the spread of knowledge regarding the great evil being wrought on our
campuses can there be hope for its end.
First, the source
of hope:
In early June,
California labor regulators ruled that a driver for Uber, the app-based car
service, was, in fact, an employee, not an independent contractor, and deserved
back pay.
Higher education
isn’t the only industry that is using “contingent labor” rules to skirt the
employment laws. Across the country, workers in other industries are being
squeezed, and squeezed hard. They’re being reclassified as “independent
contractors.” Because they have to maintain company hours, perform a wide
variety of company duties, and maintain company property with their own money,
these “independent” workers, after trying to reason with company bosses, are
taking their complaints to court…and winning, at least sometimes.
In their
winning lawsuit, for example, the California FedEx drivers complained that the
company shifted hundreds of millions of dollars in costs onto them, from buying
and maintaining their FedEx-branded trucks to following FedEx schedules that
didn’t allow for meal breaks and overtime.
Now,
companies complain that they need to shift these burdens onto their workers
because, hey, doing so lowers overhead costs, and increases profits, providing
an advantage over competitors. All well and good, I suppose, but this makes no
sense in higher education, where there isn’t much in the way of a drive to
increase profit margins. Many institutions are tax-supported, making profits a
low priority.
Nevertheless,
tenure is pretty much dead, and the cliché of the stable professor job is far
removed from the reality of barely-surviving, contingent, adjunct-hood.
That
colleges and universities have turned more and more of their frontline
employees into part-time contractors suggests how far they have drifted from
what they say they are all about (teaching students) to what they are
increasingly all about (conducting research, running sports franchises, or,
among for-profits, delivering shareholder value).
Trying to
survive as an adjunct is murderous. You have no security, and so must adhere to
administrative demands to offer the most ridiculously simple coursework; you
have no influence, as an educator, over anything relating to education. And
it’s really, really, hard to get by this way:
“…Mitch
Tropin, teaches at six different colleges in the D.C. area. Through a
combination of perseverance and good karma, he has been able to align his three
Baltimore schools so he teaches there on the same days, allowing him to
minimize commuting time. He always aims for employment at six schools because,
he says, “You never know when a class will be cancelled or a full-time
professor will bump you at the last minute. Sometimes classes just disappear.”
This guy teaches
at six different schools, all accredited (legitimized) by the same accreditor.
How can the accreditor not be aware of the abusive situation at not one, not
two, not three, four, or five, but six
different schools? These six schools, rather than each hire faculty to teach full time, collude to each hire 6 teachers, and employ each part time. How did accreditation not notice this scheming? The answer is simple: accreditation is a sham, run by the
same people that run those schools, the same people that put faculty into
adjuncthood, denying them jobs for the personal profit of administration.
We’re told time
and again that education is the key to a better life, justifying the ridiculous
expense of higher education. But what’s the payoff for these highly educated
people? Let’s see:
“To say
that these are low-wage jobs is an understatement. Based on data from the
American Community Survey, 31 percent of part-time faculty are living near or
below the federal poverty line. And, according to the UC Berkeley Labor Center,
one in four families of part-time faculty are enrolled in at least one public
assistance program like food stamps and Medicaid or qualify for the Earned
Income Tax Credit.”
These highly educated people get no
befits from these jobs, not even health care:
A recent
study shows that a large portion of universities and colleges limit their
adjuncts’ teaching hours to avoid having to provide the health insurance now required for full-timers under the Affordable
Care Act.
Obamacare
actually leads to people becoming even more impoverished. I can’t emphasize
strongly enough how the lack of integrity amongst our rulers of higher education
is a big factor in what’s happened here. When you consider that our campuses
are very
Left-biased nowadays, and thus should be driving to create that “worker’s
paradise” that is the key Left platform, the hypocrisy here is quite foul…”Liberal
Hypocrisy” is as redundant a phrase as “tiny shrimp,” it seems.
Alyssa
Colton, for example, the subject of an NBC News story earlier this year, was
hired initially as a full-time teacher with benefits at the College of St. Rose
in Albany, New York. The college did not renew her contract four years later,
but after a semester had gone by, it rehired her as a part-time instructor without
health insurance or pension contributions. “I essentially took a pay cut,”
Colton told NBC, “doing the same work for less money and less respect.”
It’s a big
bait-and-switch in higher education. We’re told that we shouldn’t feel pity for
these people because, hey, they should just get another job. This whole
situation has happened slowly. Every year, I get another pay cut, in some form
or another (either a higher health insurance premium that my employer won’t
pay, or I’ll be forced to pay more for the privilege of parking on my campus’
tax free land, or some other fee that I must pay as part of my job), and no pay
raises; it’s takes a decade of this before you realize you’re never getting
ahead, ever, as the carrot of “full time position,” dangling just a little out
of your reach, is moved further away by a chuckling administrator every time
you step forward.
Higher education
at the graduate level has been diluted down so that you can get a degree
qualifying to teach on campus more easily than licensing to teach in the public
school…and none of the schools selling these degrees mention “warning: you can
only get sub-minimum wage paying jobs with this degree.” Instead, these
institutions say “tuition is $20,000 per year, but you can get a great job with
your Education Master’s Degree. We’ll help you fill out the student loan
forms…” Again, integrity would really
help with this sort of thing.
We’re also told
that we have to pay faculty nothing, because keeping costs down keeps tuition down.
Well, we know that sure doesn’t work. It’s a simple enough matter to watch
administrative palace after palace going up on (and off) campus and deduce
where the money is going. Administration sure doesn’t cut corners when it comes
to their own positions:
Even while
keeping funding for instruction relatively flat, universities increased the
number of administrator positions by 60 percent…10 times the rate at which they
added tenured positions.
---the
article doesn’t mention the student base greatly increased while this happened.
Not just the
number of administrators, but their salaries, can only increase:
“[I]n
January 2009, facing $19 million in budget cuts and a hiring freeze, Florida
Atlantic University awarded raises of 10 percent or more to top administrators,
including the school’s president.”
While what’s really going on in our
scams schools of higher education are unknown to the general public,
anyone inside the system can tell something has gone terribly wrong in the
pricing/payment scheme:
One adjunct
teacher, JJ, posting a comment online, calculated his/her pay as an adjunct as
$65 per student per semester, adding up to the princely sum of $2,000, noting
that “each student paid $45,000 in tuition and took about 4 classes a semester.…
I think their parents would be rather upset to learn that only $65 of the
$45,000 went to pay one professor for an entire semester.”
I’m not a big fan
of unions, but for lack of a better solution, I’m willing to accept unions as a
possible solution here. Naturally, the low status of adjuncts means forming a
union is a termination-level penalty (yes, I know corporations do the same thing;
the issue here is higher education gets extra money poured on it because,
supposedly, it’s not about the profit motive). Despite the obstacles, adjuncts
don’t have much choice but to fight:
Tiffany
Kraft, who teaches at four different institutions in the Portland, Oregon, area
says, “What do we have to lose? We’ve been scared into complicity for so long,
but I didn’t go through fourteen years of higher education to be treated like
shit.”
It’s a
shame that simply asking the pompous overlords self-styled titans of
industry leaders of higher education to stop the hypocrisy of paying highly
educated people peanuts while charging students a fortune because education is
so “valuable.” If they had integrity, it would have stopped long since.
Hopefully the
courts can turn things around, but there’s a flaw in that. A class action
lawsuit, with thousands of adjuncts suing an institution, could result in a
court award of tens, even hundreds of millions.
Too bad that if that happens, the school will simply close its doors,
paying nothing to the victims and stranding students with worthless credit
hours…while the people that committed the crime will simply walk free. Can
anyone think of a better solution?
In the meantime,
the immense plundering going on in higher education is becoming ever more known.
While it would be naive to expect the plunderers will ever pay the price for
their misdeeds, the first step is make the crimes public knowledge, and The
Atlantic is at least helping.
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