Comments on Some Thoughts on the AFT Report

• one overlooked fact
• Posted by New Jersey part timer on December 4, 2008 at 8:10am EST

• I'm not entirely disagreeing with Dean Dad -- he is correct to assert that full timers do much much more than teach classes. For one thing, they devise the classes and programs in place, and having done that, I know how much work it is. The problem the public should be up in arms over is that they pay exactly the same rate for classes taught by supremely well-qualified and carefully vetted faculty, and for those taught by an available warm body that a chair or dean drags in at the last moment. They ought to be furious over this! If 900 freshmen sit in a lecture hall and listen to a teacher, their cost should be considerably less than that of the three graduate students in a seminar -- they are, after all, purchasing a very different product.

• I hope you're wearing flame-retardant underwear!
• Posted by No longer an adjunct on December 4, 2008 at 11:15am EST

• Wow, that was brave. Every word is true, but I bet that won't save you from a good roasting from true believers with no math skills.

  Thank you for having the guts to say that when a college manages to score a truly wonderful adjunct, it's more by luck than by design. The other elephant in the living room that never gets discussed is this: As much as they complain about unfair treatment, adjuncts signed up for this. And they continue to sign up for it semester after semester after semester. They know they will be abused and undercompensated, and yet they return to teach for peanuts every semester, sometimes for decades. I actually sat in a union meeting once where the adjuncts wanted full time facutly and professional staff to vote against a perfectly good contract because it didn't guarantee job security for adjuncts. One part-timer stood up and said, "I have been teaching here part-time for sixteen years, and in all that time I have never had job security." Um...

  The fact is, colleges get away with abusing adjuncts because they can. If adjuncts voted with their feet and pursued other lines of work (such as a full time staff job, which is what I did), the pool of people available at 12:30 on Tuesdays would dry up, and the exploitation would end. These are not undocumented day-laborers with limited options. By definition, adjuncts are well-educated people, and presumably capable of securing some other form of employment.

• entitled to a good living
• Posted by emoze , R&D at Gavilan College on December 4, 2008 at 3:05pm EST

• Many of my Calif community college faculty colleagues simply argue that giving parity & benefits "is just the right thing to do"; as union Prez for 5 recent yrs, my observation is there's a sentiment that adjuncts are entitled to the equivalent of reduced-load full-time employment so they can have a good living whilst enjoying the benefits of reduced obligations and escaping the requirements of tenure; a vocal segment allied with a militant faction of adjuncts suggest the full-time faculty should give up salary in order to accomplish this humanitarian goal, and do not see parity goals as a zero-sum game.

• The corporate solution
• Posted by A full timer on December 4, 2008 at 5:25pm EST

• Dean Dad complains that colleges and universitites don't have the money to improve the full-time/part-time ratio. But he overlooks one avenue of cost cutting made famous by corporate America. If you need to cut costs, then fire a bunch of middle managers. How much money could be freed up by really cutting out the fat in college administrations?

  Of course, the administrators will protest that they work hard and everything they do is essential. That's nonsense. A lot of their time is spent in silly meetings discussing silly ideas that do not affect classroom teaching in any way. It's almost like they don't even know that classroom instruction takes place at colleges.

  Cutting into this fat won't give colleges better full-time/part-time ratios, but it is a place to start.

• Some thoughts on Dean Dad
• Posted by Educator on December 5, 2008 at 5:05am EST

• Oh my. What’s wrong with Dean Dad? He's all upset because someone wrote a report? With BIG numbers in it? For no good reason—at least that he can tell—because no one would want to fix something that isn’t broken if it cost that much.

  Except the numbers are the subsidy the colleges are getting by employing people at substandard wages and little or no institutional support. And there is something broken—service to students.

  Is Dean Dad doing the equivalent of sticking his fingers in his ears and yelling “I can’t hear you”? Because people in administration for the last twenty years are complicit in this problem. They have convinced themselves that saving money (although they’ve spent it elsewhere while hiking tuition through the sky) is more important than providing decent pay and working conditions and making sure students have the best education that colleges can provide. Are we observing denial here?

  And—for heaven’s sake—why should people have full-time salaries? Why shouldn’t higher ed join the race to the bottom in destroying the middle class? After all, administrators can load more and more duties onto the shrinking full-time core and let the adjuncts run off to their two or three other jobs. Why would that bother anyone?

  Oh, and adjuncts, even the ones with PhDs, aren’t as qualified, according to Dean Dad. But heck, let’s stick them into the classrooms teaching our students anyway because there is “no benefit” to changing course. And while he’s at it, good old Dean decides to do a little union bashing. And why not? He’s mad.

  He’s the equivalent of speechless. I wish he had been.

• The Elephant in the Room
• Posted by AdjunctMom on December 5, 2008 at 5:45am EST

• I am all for putting it out there, so let’s do it. What evidence do you have that “the average adjunct is not as qualified as the average new full-timer”? Has there been massive outcry from students who are complaining that their part-time instructors are not giving them their money’s worth? No. The reality is that most students are shocked when they find out that their part-time instructors are paid so little. I have had students tell me that I was the best instructor they ever had – probably because I made the time to help them, even though I wasn’t paid to do it. I have had many students tell me about instructors they thought were terrible – inaccessible, condescending, incomprehensible – and surprise, those instructors are full-timers who have supposedly been “vetted.”
  Why don't we talk about the real elephant in the room: the fact that most deans are dads while most adjuncts are moms. That is surely one of the reasons it is so hard to come up with the money for equal pay for adjuncts.

• Posted by Thane Doss on December 5, 2008 at 12:05pm EST

• A problem I always have about college administrators is that they'd so much rather talk about "productivity gains" and "output" than about learning or the quality of education. Assuming that anything is ever learned or that knowledge ever increases, in a competent educational system, additional knowledge becomes part of the curriculum every year. Some information must be eliminated and other information compressed, and more efficient ways must be found to encode things in learner's minds. This requires a reasonable amount of effort on the part of whomever's teaching the classes, and if it's performed, it results in the only sort of productivity gain that is really meaningful to society. Unfortunately, since this updated and more efficient skills set is likely to be provided to the same number of bodies in seats, Dean Dad is utterly incapable of recognizing it as a productivity gain at all. Those who read international comparisons may have run into commentary in recent years about how foreign universities are catching up to US universities and even surpassing them in an assortment of fields. Administrative mindsets that see productivity purely in terms of numbers of industrial-economy widgets rather than in knowledge-economy terms might have something to do with that.

• Shoot your foot
• Posted by Rebecca , Contract Professor at Too many to list here on December 5, 2008 at 12:35pm EST

• "Instead of full-timers making 6k per course and adjuncts 2k, everybody makes 4k" makes sense, especially since most adjuncts end up doing extra work, keep office hours, and advise students. Honesty demands that all faculty hired are vetted with equal scrutiny. Otherwise, discount courses taught by adjuncts, receiving a lower tuition rate and reduced subsidies for such "unwarranted" courses. I have long argued that colleges commit fraud by not differentiating between courses taught by FT faculty and adjunct faculty. Consumers of education must be told that the product they are purchasing might be delivered by a scorned, underpaid, and insecure agent of compromised ability. They should also know that administrators routinely--and obviously, with high confidence--spend tuition and subsidies on everything else first, before equalizing the quality of the education product or honoring such a democratic rubric as equal pay for equal work.

• Posted by steve on December 5, 2008 at 12:55pm EST

• The administrators who throw their hands up and offer the "look at the numbers - the decision has been made for me" approach are a large part of this problem. Adjunct usage has been a choice as much as it's been a necessity. In good times and bad their numbers have been growing.

• Posted by Unemployed Academic on December 5, 2008 at 1:55pm EST

• I think it's important to distinguish the various shades of bad that color administrations. Dean Dad is an administrator at a community college. That means that he probably isn't wasting his institution's money on superfluous buildings, lavish dorms or disgraceful athletic programs. Instead, the major problem, as I see it, is that he accepts that the state legislature will continue to cut his college's budget AND that it is his job to find a way to make do with less. This is why the figure cited in the report for the sample university seems so preposterous to him -- he can't fathom how this sort of money might be allocated given the current conditions. What he does not seem to realize is that the system has reached the breaking point, the point at which it is impossible to continue to "juke the stats" to hide the lack of results. The system is broken, and no amount of adjusting will allow it to continue to operate. That is what the Crash of 2008 is all about. It's been a gathering storm for at least two decades now.

  Bold resistance is needed to stand up to state legislatures, the dominant parasitic ideology of corporate elites and to make the case to the public that we need to tax the wealthy in the interest of the public good. Unfortunately, the reason most administrators are chosen and succeed is precisely because they possess Dean Dad's mindset. By the same token, the reason most academics, despite sharing governance and/or feeling the brunt of the system's failures directly, do not speak or act against the decline is because we are generally types who will acquiesce to the values of the system. After all, we spend years in graduate school, on the tenure-track and/or trying to land a job clawing our way in. Why would we risk what we have sought for so long by speaking out? Contingency, which is prevalent throughout the American workforce, is the tool elites have used to keep the general populace feeling insecure and helpless (it certainly isn't effective in producing a good "product" in academe -- a well-educated person). It's also the reason that I write anonymously. Hopefully, however, with enough debating, we can reach a consensus of opinion about the state of society that will free administrators and academics to act in ways that they probably prefer to act anyway (Dean Dad clearly wants to be a 'good guy' and not "the enemy.")

• Posted by FormerPart-Time on December 6, 2008 at 5:15am EST

• The more part-time academic laborers (instructors) accept their part-time appointments and keep returning to them, the harder it is for the abuse to end. It takes a lot of courage to finally say "No more" and walk away. I vowed not to accept another part-time teaching appointment about 8 years ago. I walked away. By that time I had about 12 years of teaching experience, 3 teaching awards, a Ph.D (already 3 years old), one publication, about 12 conference presentations, and a very definite feeling that if I kept going back, I would be less and less employable in any full-time TT position. [I guess this is in response to whether the adjuncts/ part-timers are any less qualified... What a malicious libel.]

  I walked away from the teaching front. I took up full-time employment in academia again-- an office job. For the first time in my life, I started seeing a paycheck every two weeks that had 4 digits. I was in my late 30s at the time. I started seeing the other side of academia- the one administrators see. I was working for an administrator who valued my Ph.D., my knowledge, insight, creativity, resourcefulness, knowledge of pedagogy, organization and management skills --all the great qualities so many part-time instrcutors possess that their direct employers do not value or appreciate.

  I worked in that job for several years and was truly a revelation. I learned lessons I needed to learn. One of them was that if there's no supply, the demand may change.

  I have returned to the classroom because I missed the intellectual challenges of teaching --not necessarily the monetary reward. My earnings were reduced. The position I have is not a tenure-track. But it is full-time. I have health benefits and retirement. If my position gets eliminated, I will not teach part-time. I will not feed the system.

  I know that I cannot change the system but I refuse to feed it. This is the least I can do-- aside from opening up the eyes of my students to the wrongs.

• Posted by Rebecca M. Trussell , Decorative Arts Historian on December 6, 2008 at 12:05pm EST

• Instead of full-timers making 6k per course and adjuncts 2k, everybody makes 4k" makes sense, especially since most adjuncts end up doing extra work, keep office hours, and advise students.

  Honesty demands that all faculty hired are vetted with equal scrutiny. Otherwise, discount courses taught by adjuncts, receiving a lower tuition rate and reduced subsidies for such "unwarranted" courses. I have long argued that colleges commit fraud by not differentiating between courses taught by FT faculty and adjunct faculty.

  Consumers of education must be told that the product they are purchasing might be delivered by a scorned, underpaid, and insecure agent of compromised ability. They should also know that administrators routinely--and obviously, with high confidence--spend tuition and subsidies on everything else first, before equalizing the quality of the education product or honoring such a democratic rubric as equal pay for equal work