By Professor Doom
In the US, most
college courses are now taught by adjuncts: minimally paid “temporary”
professors who will work at the same job for 15 years or more before realizing
they’re being played for suckers.
Now, yes, I know
things are tough all over, and lots of people are struggling to get by on
minimum wage (though
adjuncts actually get paid less than minimum wage, thanks to
quirks in the law). There’s a difference here, and it’s not simply the bias of
someone who works in higher ed.
We’re burying our
kids in debt, in exchange for education. We’re told constantly that no price is
too great for education. We’re told nothing is more valuable than education. And
we’re told this repeatedly from a very young age.
So, yes, it’s a
real problem when we take our academics, who supposedly have all this precious
education…and pay them less than minimum wage. You can’t have it both ways:
either being educated is worth something (so we should pay academics a living
wage), or it’s not (so we shouldn’t charge ridiculous amounts for it).
The UK is steadily
adopting the American method of higher education: low content, high price. It’s
been depressing watching them make all the same mistakes that we made over
here, and, yes, one of those mistakes is the very poor treatment of the
academics:
The takeover of
higher education by an administrative class with no education, and no respect
for education, has, as anyone might guess, been bad for education.
I hated it when I was at a skeezy community
college, being lectured on how to teach by a Dean that had never taught a
course in her life, much less taught mathematics, much less even had a degree
in anything remotely resembling mathematics. And every semester yet another
mandatory meeting where yet another Educationist who’d never taught a course
would lecture all the faculty for a few hours on even more ridiculous methods
of teaching that obviously weren’t going to work…honest, it wasn’t like this when
actual educators had influence over education.
Even more
insulting about it all is admin gets to control the pay. They have a choice:
pay themselves and the faculty, or just pay themselves, and watch the faculty
starve. The latter has basically what’s happened in the US, and is now
happening in the UK. I should point out that not only is this bad for faculty,
it’s also bad for the kids: across the country, our college students are often
going deep into debt to be taught by the cheapest possible faculty admin could
find, and often this is because the faculty are teaching the most worthless
coursework possible (honest, it’s not an accident Gender Studies courses are
taught in huge auditoriums everywhere, while real computer courses are simply
not an option on many campuses).
One friend, employed on three consecutive
one-year teaching contracts in the same department, wasn’t even told that he
hadn’t been shortlisted for interview when the job was advertised again.
It’s not merely
the poor pay and horrid working conditions that are foul, it’s the complete
lack of respect. I had a friend, a Ph.D. in mathematics with publications, show
up the first week of classes asking where his office was. Only then did admin
decide telling him his contract had been cancelled was worth doing…they could
have told him 6 months earlier, but since admin no longer lives like faculty,
the concept was alien to them.
And the UK is now
adopting this sort of treatment policy.
What percentage of your salary can you afford
to spend on trains and extra rent? (One academic household I know has actually
developed a formula to crunch the numbers). But with employment conditions
getting increasingly dire, we now also have somehow to attempt to determine
whether the pay we take home will even equate to the minimum wage.
--minimum wage is what government imposes on
private business, but it exempts itself from such rules.
One of the weird
changes in higher education in the last 20 years is how faculty are no longer
tied to an institution. It used to be that you spent the bulk of your career in
one or two universities (even the ridiculously in-demand Einstein spent most of
his career in two places)…you had a vested interest in making your school
great, in having integrity and working to produce good graduates, because it
reflected well on you, your family, and your future.
Now it’s common
for adjuncts to work at 3 different schools simultaneously, spending as much
time commuting as teaching, each doing 1/3 of a full time job at each school. It
saves admin enough money to afford those 6 and 7 digit salaries the
administrators receive (for all the hard work they put in hiring a bunch of
adjuncts).
Instead of 3
adjuncts working 3 part time jobs at 3 different schools, each place could give
each of them a full time job. Gee, this would save a fortune on gasoline, and
would allow the teachers to spend more time on their families, or in
preparation for their students. Admin sure talks a good talk about the
environment, about family time, and about helping students, but they’re not
going to lift a finger if doing anything about it might cut into feathering
their own nests, after all.
If things get tight on your academic’s
salary of under £15,000, perhaps you can pick up a few bar shifts or freelance
gigs.
--at current exchange rates this is less than $16,000
in US money, and the poverty level here is $20,000…like I said, the UK is
adopting the US higher education system quite thoroughly.
Even though these are “part time”
positions, the teaching loads are quite heavy. This is bad, because in order to
get hired as an academic, you have to have a record of research as well as
teaching…a record you can’t establish if you’re working triple shifts at 3
universities just to get by.
If you can get research done, realize it
counts for nothing in your current job, it just means you might get another
adjunct job down the road.
Academics in the UK are feeling the
squeeze academics in the US felt a decade or two ago:
And this demand for unpaid research is where
the gradual creep of exploitation really starts to rub. We’ve got used to nine-
and 10-month contracts and how they make maternity leave, caring
responsibilities, and mortgages almost impossible; how they effectively exclude
from academia anyone who lacks a middle-class safety net. We’re used to working
many more hours than we’re paid for, at every level, from graduate teaching
assistants like me to the professoriate. We’re getting used to the fact that
research and publications will have to be done late at night and through the
weekend, often without payment.
When I was in graduate school, I was
surrounded by many smart graduate students. Strangely, the smartest ones, the ones
I went to for help, left, often without getting a degree well within their
grasp. They saw what I was too dim to see: higher education was not the good
career choice it was years ago.
The adjunct I’m quoting from (and making
these observations anonymously, of course) is starting to see that what’s
happening in the UK is what smart people saw in the US years ago:
Maybe you would be better just going full-time
at that minimum-wage job instead.
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