Comments on Math Geek Mom: Invest in Yourself

• Posted by AdjunctMom on November 17, 2008 at 4:45am EST

• While I disagree with some of your assumptions about why adjuncts get paid so little, I appreciate the obviously professional manner in which you treat your adjunct colleagues. Unfortunately, most of your colleagues in other institutions barely see us as people, much less as professionals in whom it is worth their while to invest.

  I take issue with your first assumption about adjuncts: that they are "not planning to stay long enough for the firm to be able to reap the benefits of their investment." Adjuncts leave because of the atrocious working conditions and poverty-level wages, not because they were planning to spend a few years teaching before moving on to greener pastures. In fact, the vast majority of adjuncts teach because they feel called to it and because they actually WOULD like a full-time career at professional wages. Some adjuncts love teaching so much that they teach at multiple institutions.

  The fact is that adjuncts are paid such shamefully low wages because administrators have figured out that that is where they can save the most money on campus. In other words, administrators (and the faculty who refuse to stand up to them) take advantage of, indeed exploit the tendency of adjuncts to put their vocation to their students above their own self-interest.

  Adjuncts also leave because it soon becomes painfully self-evident that the institutions in which they work have no intention of "investing" in them the way that you apparently do. When TT positions (or even FT NTT positions) do come open, they are rarely given to the long-serving, professionalizing-at-their-own-expense adjuncts. They are given to the newly minted PhDs.

  The majority of the victims of this shameful system are women (most of them mothers). It is not uncommon for many of them to work 2 or 3 other jobs or for their families to need public assistance. I'm frankly surprised that you are so unaware of the depth and pervasiveness of this problem, writing as you are for a blog on mothers in academe.

• And another thing
• Posted by AdjunctMom on November 17, 2008 at 4:45am EST

• One more thing: those of us who are adjuncts and mothers rarely have the time or the money for professional development at our own expense. If we were paid what we deserve, you can bet that we would engage in it. Most of us would love to do so.

• the adjunct track
• Posted by Steve Street , Lecturer at SUNY on November 17, 2008 at 7:00am EST

• Ursuline's apparent concern for its adjuncts sounds exemplary, but I wonder how many schools nationwide share its assumptions and how many who hire adjuncts do so with regard for the adjunct's professional development foremost. More common is for adjuncts to work for years in an institution beneath the ceiling of contingency, with no opportunity for advancement, monetarily or professionally. Schools that employ long-term adjuncts in this way reap the benefits of adjunct faculty's increasing expertise and institutional commitment at perpetual starter-job pay and benefits. Poor adjunct working conditions are such an established norm in the industry that to many employers, adjunct experience is often considered worse than none at all. In that light, this appeal to neophyte adjuncts seems duplicitous: those charged with perpetuating the institution should avoid expending false hopes to those coming in by dressing up temporary, cover-the-section adjunct jobs in the sheep's clothing of an opportunity to gain invaluable professional experience. The author sounds like a chair: with new lines to fill, how closely would she consider incoming resumes with, say, five or six years of adjunct experience, at Ursuline or elsewhere? Dollars to donuts such resumes wouldn't get the attention it took to key this blog.

• math geek mom
• Posted by Pamela on November 17, 2008 at 9:30am EST

• After staying home with my kids for several years, I returned to the work force as a contractor in engineering. My starting wage was approximately what I was paid when I last drew a paycheck. Over the next 3 years, I increased my pay by 50%. This was due to a shell game of working for different manpower agencies for essentially the same employer. My biggest complaint was the type of jobs I got, which were basically the tasks no one else wanted to do. I solved the boredom problem by going to graduate school. Now, with a new PhD and a post doc fellowship, I am learning to write grants and I am looking for a faculty position. I was told that being an adjunct is like being a contractor: the pay stinks, it is a dead end, and you are asked to teach the courses no one else wants.

• Being (Un)Fair to Adjuncts
• Posted by Anna Lee on November 17, 2008 at 10:45am EST

• This article justifies paying people less than a living wage for doing the same job as someone who might earn up to 5 times the same amount for teaching the same course. In other words, it is this kind of spin, that allows the system to persist. This is not capitalism -- but preferentialism. As we go into an economic crisis, I wonder if any people will have the courage to say the system is unfair: adjunct need to be paid equitably. Obviously, a school's being allied with a religious group does not result in a more ethical treatment of people. There is still as sense of us and them. To deny exploitation or to say that exploitation exists for someone else's good is horrific in my book. The solution oddly is capitalism: if you hire someone temporarilly you shaould pay them more than the person who has a guaranteed income and benefits for their working life.

• a few questions
• Posted by VC Vaile, ex-adjunct in NM on November 17, 2008 at 11:55am EST

• A few questions come to mind. Perhaps Math Geek Mom or someone else would be kind enough to answer them:

  1) if "apprenticeship" and investment, then what was graduate school and working as a TA?
  2) when does it end (this side of the grave)?
  3) Then why don't U.S, DOL apprenticeship regulations and certification requirements apply? Even apprentices have rights.

  In a reality based world, calling something apprenticeship or investment does not make it so. That's not a valid calculation.

• Posted by Thane Doss on November 17, 2008 at 7:05pm EST

• If some adjunct should come to Ursuline and teach a few of those small, upper-level classes to get some training, what's the likelihood of that leading to a full-time, tenure-track job at Ursuline? Certainly it'd be a better job to teach information theory to fifteen upper-division students than to teach college algebra to a lecture hall of a few hundred, especially if the adjunct wage is the same, and I wouldn't want to discourage that. But I suspect that the expectation within the university that the adjunct will move on after a few semesters has more to do with the swelling population of adjuncts than a romantic desire on the part of adjuncts to just be movin' on.

  Of course, math is a little different from the fields that employ the largest numbers of adjuncts, as there are simply fewer people with Ph. D.s is math adjuncting about. It's a field where one's likelihood of getting a FTTT job is better than the average among fields.

• Adjuncts in Training?
• Posted by Long Time Adjunct on November 18, 2008 at 6:30am EST

• I have worked as an adjunct for about a dozen institutions. Some provided excellent training, and some provided little or none. But it does not matter. At one of these schools, there have been nearly a dozen full-time openings over the time I have taught there. Only 3 were filled by former adjuncts. A colleague with 16 years in who routinely gets both high student ratings and high ratings on classroom observations has been repeatedly passed over. Possessing a Ph.D. does not seem to make a difference since people with both Ph.D.s and master's degrees have been both hired and passed over without any pattern emerging. We have hired people full-time who have left in a year or two, or who have within the first year or two gone on leave for varying reasons, and one who quit in the middle of a term. Yet, loyal adjuncts who have been with us for years, people who are known to be dependable, are repeatedly passed over for full-time positions. Such is the nature of hiring by committee. Having been an adjunct in many cases is a detriment to getting a full time job. The assumption is that if you were good enough to teach full-time, you would have been hired by now.

• Posted by Math Geek Mom on November 20, 2008 at 10:00am EST

• Thank you for all of the insightful comments to my column last week. I found them interesting, and passed them along to our adminstration. They say that they take this issue seriously and that they would like to work towards a day when we have all full time faculty. However, they realize that is not possible in the current economic climate.